ICS Seminar Series - Emma Kowal

Date: Thursday 29 September 2016
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EE.G.36, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus

Emma Kowal

(Deakin University)

Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity in Australia

Abstract

One Canberra night in 2009, an Aboriginal poet was haunted by a dead comparative anatomist who cut through her body with a scalpel. This paper takes a leap of faith to consider this not as a freak event but as a reflection of the general condition of scientific research involving Indigenous people in postcolonial Australia, and perhaps in other places. Kevin Hetherington's (2004) analysis of the first and second burial of animate and inanimate objects argues that interrupting a second burial can lead to haunting. Through interwoven stories of the collection, storage and use of the bones and blood of Indigenous people, I explore how aspects of twentieth century scientific collection and the bodily fragments it left behind are variously haunted.

Inspired by and contributing to postcolonial science and technology studies, I trace the haunting effects of biological samples collected in the past and persisting in the present - biology that haunts – in order to bring the absent past to bear on present biological research – to haunt biology. I present a comparative postcolonial history that spans from the collection of bones from what was thought to be a dying race in the early twentieth century, to the role of the 'serological disciplines' (principally human biology) in the founding of Indigenous studies in the 1960s, Indigenous resistance to the Human Genome Diversity Project in the 1990s, the repatriation of blood samples to groups in the Americas since 2000, and Indigenous-led efforts in the present to use old blood samples for genomic research, including to provenance unprovenanced bones. The Aboriginal poet experienced her haunting as a call to arms from the spirits of those whose bones had not yet returned home. I ask whether old blood samples are similarly haunted, and how this would impact the current efforts of Indigenous people to repurpose them for their own technoscientific ends.

Biography 

Emma Kowal is Professor of Anthropology in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, and Deputy Director of the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics at the Australian National University. She is a cultural anthropologist who has previously worked as a medical doctor and public health researcher in Indigenous health settings. Her research interests include Indigenous-state relations and settler colonialism, racism and anti-racism, science and genomics. She is the author of Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia (Berghahn, 2015).