| Summary: | This thesis examines classification in relation to colonialism and cultural imbalances. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a facility located in Longyearbyen in Norway and houses seeds from most of the countries in the world. The Seed Vault is used in this study as a focal point around which questions of classification and global hierarchies are posed. The thesis entails a section that examines classification and colonialism from a historical point of view. The concept of documentality is also problematised in relation to The Seed Vault and its contents, and some examples of libraries that house similar entities are juxtaposed with the Seed Vault. The thesis uses discourse analysis as derived from Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben in order to examine the contents of the official website of the Seed Vault, which is issued by the Norwegian Government. An initial examination of the texts in relation to concepts developed by Foucault and Agamben led to three overriding themes which divides the analytical part of the thesis into three sections: Governmentality Through Security and Facilitation, The Other and Biopolitics and Safeguarding Seeds. The Seed Portal, which is the cataloguing system for the Vault, is examined in relation to a few of the crops stored (as seeds), but mainly the Linnaean classification system is discussed in regards to the themes of the study. The concepts of zoe and bios, which is bare and politicised life respectively, is applied as a possible method of understanding the seeds or plants in relation to classification.
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