Radin, J. and Kowal, E. (2015) Indigenous blood and ethical regimes in the United States and Australia since the 1960s. American Ethnologist 42(4): 749-765 (original) (raw)
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Indigenous Blood and Ethical Regimes in the United States and Australia Since the 1960s
Blood samples collected from members of indigenous communities in the mid-20th century by scientists interested in human variation remain frozen today in institutional repositories around the world. This article focuses on two such collections—one established and maintained in the United States and the other in Australia. Through historical and ethnographic analysis, we show how scientific knowledge about the human species and ethical knowledge about human experimentation are coproduced differently in each national context over time. Through a series of vignettes, we trace the attempts of scientists and indigenous people to assemble and reassemble blood samples, ethical regimes, human biological knowledge, and personhood. In including ourselves—a U.S. historian of science and an Australian anthropologist—in the narrative, we show how humanistic and social scientific analysis contributes to ongoing efforts to maintain indigenous samples.
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In the mid-twentieth century, scientists began to collect and freeze blood samples for a range of purposes. This article considers the broader implications of scientific freezing for time and life by drawing on interviews with scientists associated with a large collection of samples collected from Indigenous Australians in the 1960s. We first review some key critiques of cryopreservation posed by Indigenous scholars and by science and technology studies. We then propose " cryopolitics " as a concept to express the various political, ethical and temporal conundrums presented by the practice of freezing. We frame cryopolitics as a mode of Michel Foucault's biopolitics. If biopolitical assemblages make live and let die, cryopolitical ones reveal the dramatic consequences of mundane efforts to make live and not let die. In our case study, we argue that frozen blood vacillates between two cryopolitical states, " latent life " and " incomplete death ". Samples seen as latent life contain infinite potential and cannot be destroyed; samples understood as incomplete death demand destruction.
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The blood that remains: card collections from the Colonial Anthropological Missions
BJHS Themes, 2019
In this paper I discuss the history of colonial collections through a focus on the social life of a set of blood group cards held by Portuguese institutions since the 1950s. Between the 1940s and 1960s, a series of anthropological field expeditions were organized by the Portuguese Overseas Science Research Board to the then Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia. A large number of samples of indigenous blood were collected on blood group paper cards in the course of these campaigns. The cards were then stored in Portugal and used for racial serological studies until the 1980s. Thereafter, the collection survived various institutional deaths. Throughout its post-colonial existence in Portuguese institutions, the cards seem to have moved ambivalently between a condition of valued asset and one of obsolete material. And yet they revealed a resilient capacity to mediate conceptions of historical time. Thus the essay asks what it might mean to approach these collections as colonial 'chronotope'-devices for connecting space and time-and how and why they endured through various ends, culminating as a genetically contaminated museum object.
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