Wednesday, May 31, 2023
12:15-1:30 PM
Humanities 1, Room 210
Thursday, June 01, 2023
12:15-1:45 PM
Humanities 1, 210
On Wednesday, May 31 at 12:15pm in Humanities 1, rm. 210, Sawyer Seminar Speaker, Juan Sebastian Gil Riaño, will present on “Stolen Evidence: Indigenous Children and Bio-historical narratives of the Western Hemisphere during the Cold War.”
This talk examines how anthropologists and human biologists used abducted Indigenous children in South America as sources of evidence for a variety of bio-historical research projects during the Cold War. From 1930 to 1970, human scientists studying the Aché — a traditionally nomadic hunter-gatherer group in Paraguay — used evidence derived from measuring, bleeding, and observing children in the service of research projects concerned with reconstructing global human migrations in the Western hemisphere. Through studies of Aché children and families, scientists like the French naturalist Jehan Albert Vellard, the U.S. human geneticist Carleton Gajdusek, and the French structural anthropologists Pierre and Helen Clastres discerned ancient patterns of migration by considering the diffusion of cultural and linguistic traits, the process of genetic drift in populations, and the immunological effects of European conquest. Yet many of the Aché children used in these studies had been abducted and sold as servants to neighboring ranchers. By highlighting the use of stolen Indigenous children as research objects in Cold War human diversity research, my talk uncovers the enduring and violent colonial structures that made this knowledge possible as well as the ethical and legal protocols and forms of Indigenous resistance that emerged in response.
Then, on Thursday, June 01 at 12:15pm in Humanities 1, rm. 210, Dr. Gil Riaño will lead a reading group on “Indigenous Health and Infrastructures of Race.” Both activities will be in-person only.
In the past few decades, biomedical researchers and human biologists have called for more ethical guidelines for conducting fieldwork on Indigenous groups in South America. Included among these proposals is a call for greater “epidemiological surveillance” of remote Indigenous groups with the aim of reducing health disparities. This bioethical concern is driven by an understanding of colonial history, which presumes that without biomedical intervention Indigenous groups inevitably succumb to European diseases upon contact. In this reading group, we will explore how such bioethical narratives are themselves a product of a deep-seated colonial project that Daniel Nemser has called “the Infrastructures of Race.”
Juan Sebastian Gil Riaño is an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania focusing on scientific conceptions of race, culture, and indigeneity in the twentieth century.
The “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” seminar series is supported by the Mellon Foundation, administered by The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz, and presented in partnership with the Science & Justice Research Center. Learn more in this campus news article: UC Santa Cruz receives Mellon Foundation humanities grant to investigate race, biomedicine and on the “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” project website.