Indigenous body parts, mutating temporalities, and the half-lives of postcolonial technoscience

Abstract

Biological samples collected from indigenous communities from the mid-20th century for scientific study and preserved in freezers of the Global North have been at the center of a number of controversies. This essay explores why the problem of indigenous biospecimens has returned to critical attention frequently over the past two decades, and why and how Science and Technology Studies should attend to this problem. We propose that mutation -the variously advantageous, deleterious, or neutral mechanism of biological change -can provide a conceptual and analogical resource for reckoning with unexpected problems created by the persistence of frozen indigenous biospecimens. Mutations transcend dichotomies of premodern/modern, pro-science/antiscience, and north/south, inviting us to focus on entanglements and interdependencies. Freezing biospecimens induces mutations in indigenous populations, in the scientists who collected and stored such specimens, and in the specimens themselves. The jumbling of timescales introduced by practices of freezing generates new ethical problems: problems that become ever more acute as the supposed immortality of frozen samples meets the mortality of the scientists who maintain them. More broadly, we propose that an 'abductive' approach to Science and Technology Article 466 Social Studies of Science 43(4)Studies theories of co-production can direct attention to the work of temporality in the ongoing alignment of social and technical orders. Attending to the unfolding and mutating vital legacies of indigenous body parts, collected in one time and place and reused in others, reveals the enduring colonial dimensions of scientific practice in our global age and demonstrates new openings for ethical action. Finally, we outline the articles in this special issue and their respective 'mutations' to postcolonial Science and Technology Studies, a field that, like genome science, is racked with ethical and temporal dilemmas of reckoning for the past in the present.

Toxic Space and Time: Slow Violence, Necropolitics, and Petrochemical Pollution

“…Social scientists have highlighted how toxic substances can also be attritional in the way they incrementally deposit damage in human bodies, sometimes over entire lifetimes (Auyero and Swistun 2009), even passing biological injury to future generations (Kowal et al 2013). The way toxicants are slowly secreted allows such accumulations of pollution to be ubiquitous yet unrecognized, accruing harm over time yet also making it more difficult to epidemiologically and geographically locate blame.…”

Project REENCONTRO: ethical aspects of genetic identification in families separated by the compulsory isolation of leprosy patients in Brazil

“…Just as elsewhere in the Americas, indigenous peoples have questioned the ethics of blood samples collected as much as 50 years earlier (Santos and Maio 2004;Kowal et al 2013), and researchers are thinking through the various social, scientific, and ethical problems involved. However, the particular way the INAGEMP team introduced the DNA test for family ties has helped to avoid the sort of touchy ethical issues that plague other forms of genetic research.…”

Time, DNA and documents in family reckonings

“…A recent article on "Indigenous DNA" (Kowal et al 2013), discussing the cryopreservation of body tissues -the freezing and thawing of blood samples used in scientific research-, carries still further the analysis of mediating influences that affect the impact of genetic knowledge. Far from treating DNA as some sort of a temporal entity, the authors argue that the meaning of this "co-produced" artifact mutates over time.…”