Taxonomy is the effort to systematically classify and categorize any entity. In the sciences, it is mostly attached to the name of Carl Linnæus (although he was neither the first nor the last to propose equivalent systems), who devised the currently adopted taxonomic scheme, called binomial nomenclature, that assigns a unique pair of latinate words to any and every species, with the intention to describe, order and render accessible living beings.

This «objectification» is a process that transforms knowledge, human ways of being, non-human ways of being and everything that exists in our ecological environment into «objects-to-be-instrumentalized», with the purpose of extracting and exploiting them for self-benefit, disregarding the destructive consequences that such activity  may have on other beings, human or non-human.

Under the blanket of scientific objectivity, the binomial nomenclature (or scientific naming system) developed by Linnaeus was built with Latin as its backbone. This decision allowed, for the first time, to be able to precisely talk about any specific plant or animal, overcoming variations of names for a single species, and more importantly, it allowed for the first time to discuss any singular species across languages.
This naming system was one of the first universalist approaches to talk about the ever increasing amount of products and information that international trade and colonies made available. The Linnaean system implicitly carried the scientific ethos that everything that could be spoken about, could be discovered, analyzed, and understood.

The binomial nomenclature contextualized the naming of living beings as a neutral, academic endeavour: «If you do not know the name of things,» he wrote in Philosophica Botanica, «the knowledge of them is lost, too.» The plants and animals that came under his scrutiny were not so much being named for the first time as scientifically renamed and culturally recoded, that is, translated in the fullest sense of the word. In other words, this act of naming was a sanitizing method executed in a double move: first, it made plants and animals graspable and communicatable among European readers, and second, the universal naming convention rendered every species in a platonic vacuum, eliminating the geographic origin of its objects of study.

Following the ideas of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson,* a thinker from the Mississauga Nishnaabeg indigenous community in Canada, a first move to understand intellectual, cognitive or epistemic «extractivism» can be made. It  implies a mentality in which every object, technology or idea produced by indigenous cultures that was deemed useful is extracted and assimilated into the culture of the settlers without regard for the people and the knowledge that created it.

This «epistemic extractivism» plunders ideas (be them scientific, environmental or else) from indigenous communities, removing them from the contexts in which they were produced in order to depoliticize and resignify  them, from a western-centric logic.

The pillage is made by excluding the peoples that create these «objects», technologies or knowledges, from the circuits of symbolic and economic capital. With this procedure, their ideas, «objects» and technologies are extracted from them, to the benefit of others, leaving them in absolute misery. Besides being plundered from their resources and destroyed in their environment by «economic extractivism», they are equally plundered from their knowledges and technologies by «epistemic extractivism».

* These notes are based on this interview by Naomi Klein to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.