This article examines some of the difficulties of universalistic science in
situations of deep conflict over global nature, using empirical material pertaining
to ongoing controversies in the context of Japanese whaling practices.
Within global-scale whaling assemblages since the 1970s, science
has become a ‘‘post-sovereign’’ authority, unable to impose any stable definition
of nature on all actors. Instead, across spaces of deep antagonistic
differences, anti- and pro-whalers now ontologically enact a multiplicity of
mutually irreconcilable versions of whales. Empirically, the article attempts
to map out a ‘‘cosmogram’’ of Japanese pro-whaling enactments of abundant
and ‘‘killable’’ whales. Following the political ecology of Bruno Latour,
the global-scale situation is conceptualized as one of cosmopolitics, the politics
of forging a common world across divergences in nature-cultures.