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Collecting Human Subjects: Ethics and the Archive in the History of Science and the Historical Life Sciences
Author(s) -
Radin Joanna
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
curator: the museum journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.312
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 2151-6952
pISSN - 0011-3069
DOI - 10.1111/cura.12065
Subject(s) - indigenous , modernity , anthropology , biological anthropology , history , history of science , environmental ethics , sociology , art history , epistemology , philosophy , ecology , biology
Anthropological collectors have long engaged in “salvage”—the attempt to metaphorically freeze those artifacts, traditions, and languages in danger of disappearing. Beginning in the 1960s, in an effort to establish global baselines of biological variation, biological anthropologists and human geneticists emphasized the importance of salvaging blood samples from Indigenous peoples whose survival they considered to be endangered by the corrosive forces of modernity. This paper focuses on the collection practices of Jonathan Friedlaender, who was a Ph.D. student in biological anthropology at Harvard when he took his first blood samples in 1966. Eventually, Friedlaender began to salvage materials from his own career, assembling an archive that would ultimately be deposited at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. The archive would become part of a “collection of anthropologists,” out of which current and future historians might seek to make sense of the collections they made of other people.