ABSTRACT
In this chapter is described what it means, in metagenomics, to be pragmatic, how it is learnt and how it determines specific ethical and political attitudes. Then, it is illustrated how the pragmatic approach manifests itself in the lived experience and sensibilities of researchers and how this stands in tension with the logic by which they create categorisations from their data. The objective is to get the unspoken politics in the lab’s epistemic practices to emerge. The chapter leads to a reflection on the similarities and differences in the attitudes of metagenomics and anthropology researchers, concluding that a convergence could be productive for both, in different ways.
