Although not an exhaustive sampling, this paper is about two competing kinship systems, the arboreal and the rhizomatic, and the ways in which they structure and are structured by political economy, scientific knowledge, and power.
There are many different kinship imaginaries circulating, but I choose to focus on rhizomatics and arboreal systems for the sake of brevity, and also because of the potency of certain discourse emerging out of the biotechnological debate, and their implications for transforming the way we understand nature and culture to be related.
And so this is a paper about bioscientific origin stories and the vectors of biopower that align themselves along these convoluted narrative transversals. More specifically, this is a paper about trees, roots and rhizomes, and how origins, subjectivity, kinship, unity and diversity, and the relationship between humans and nature are configured, refigured, shaped, and shattered by the competing, although not antithetical discourses of rhizomatics and arborescence.
Learning Change 