Rethinking Reductionism, or, the Transformative Work of Making the Same

Abstract

Plant-based drug discovery has long served as an iconic instance of both the power and the folly of scientific reductionism: this is a project, after all, that seeks to turn complex indigenous therapeutic practices into isolated molecules, to be scaled-up, and set into mass circulation. This arena has, for good reason, served as an example of the economic and epistemological violences enacted in forms of ‘recognition’ or ‘translation’ that treat scientific idioms and industrial value as the arbiters of truth and value. But here, I ask whether we are giving too much away, in analytic terms, when we take reductionism for granted. In this essay, I draw on my ethnographic research in Mexico, as well as broader philosophical debates, to suggest critical resources that might allow us to do something other than restage the familiar, infelicitous encounter between ‘embedded’, relational indigenous knowledges and isolating, abstracting, reductionist science. Here, I consider pharmaceutical research and development as a process that works less by reducing than by proliferating materials: in particular, by producing and recontextualising chemical compounds as simultaneously the same, and not the same. This formula has a strong place in pharmaceutical chemistry, and it resonates somewhat surprisingly in domains ranging from transnational drug regulation, to marketing strategies for generic drugs in Mexico, to debates within the philosophy of chemistry about the nature of chemical entities themselves. These conversations offer conceptual resources for rethinking reduction(ism), itself one of the key operators in charged projects of recognising and translating knowledge.