Bureaucratic Roots: Certificate Governmentality and Multispecies Governance in Korean Ginseng Farming

Speaker: Hyemin Lee, Yale University

Moderator: Victor Seow, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University

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This talk examines the power-shaping capacities of certificates as semiotic technologies (Hull 2012) that (re)fashion and valorize particular cultigens as life forms (Helmreich 2009) within ideological frameworks of safe, ethical, and thus valuable agricultural production. Focusing on organic certification for Korean ginseng (insam), I chart how farmers navigate document-intensive bureaucratic processes to secure official recognition that renders their ginseng plants as “government-certified” organic crops.

Drawing on a close examination of a ten-month certification process undertaken by an experienced ginseng farmer, I present three ethnographic scenes that together trace how the certification intervenes upstream in everyday agricultural practice. Rather than functioning merely as an external audit, certification reshapes how the farmer comes to know his plants, organizes his labor, and narrates his relations with ginseng plants over time. These scenes reveal tensions between relational forms of care grounded in an ethical life with plants and audit-oriented forms of bureaucratic legibility.

 In so doing, I discuss that certificates operate as a form of governmentality (Foucault 1991), extending bureaucratic rationalities into plant metabolism, multispecies relations, and agricultural subjectivities. Through certification, plants become sites where governance is enacted and stabilized. By foregrounding certificate governmentality as a mode of multispecies governance, this talk illuminates how bureaucratic techniques materialize within living systems and (re)organize the ethical and epistemic conditions of ginseng farming itself.

About our speaker: Hyemin Lee is a Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies at Yale University. Drawing on linguistic and medical anthropology, her research examines the ideologies and practices of translation in South Korea’s technoscientific governance over traditional Korean medicine. She approaches this through an ethnographic focus on Korean ginseng, tracing how claims over life forms are produced and made meaningful, and how such claims illuminate shifting geopolitical imaginaries, environmental change, and the imperatives of a science-driven economy.