[Sci-tech-public] TOMORROW! Cross-STS | Indigenous Science Studies, Australian Perspectives | April 11th, 4-6pm E51-095

[Gus Zahariadis]

Dear MIT communities,

Please join MIT's graduate program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society for this semester's Cross-STS event!

Thursday April 11th, 4-6pm, E51-095

Deakin University Professor of Anthropology, Emma Kowal, and senior research fellow at Deakin’s Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Timothy Neale, are traveling to the US supported by the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University. Before attending their Harvard engagements, we have the pleasure of hosting them here at MIT! Their talks will be followed by an open audience QA/discussion.

Poster is attached and talk abstracts are posted below!

We hope to see you!

HASTSies, Alex R and Claire W.

Abstracts:

Burning ‘the upside-down’: working with fire on Dja Dja Wurrung country in southeast Australia
Timothy Neale
The use and management of landscape fires has been of vital cultural and ecological importance to Aboriginal peoples across the continent for millennia and, today, fire practices remain highly important to many Aboriginal peoples, a central expression of their co-constitutional relations with ‘country’ (or place) and a meaningful cultural connection to ancestors. In Victoria, in Australia’s fire-prone southeast, many Aboriginal peoples have been excluded from the management of their ancestral territories for almost 200 years, a period during which mining, pastoralism, and other forms of settler despoliation have turned these places into ruins. This situation is beginning to change, in part through the recognition of legal rights and wider conversations about the merits of Aboriginal fire practices and the deficits of the dominant settler fire-industrial complex. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews on Dja Dja Wurrung country, in southeast Australia, this presentation reflects on the recent efforts of Djaara peoples to burn their ‘upside-down’ country with djandak wi (or ‘healthy fire’). These efforts, I argue, do not involve the straightforward restoration of a prior ecological order or set of practices, but rather the hopeful working with remnants to create survivable futures.

A century in the life of an Australian Aboriginal hair sample
Emma Kowal
Making his way home from the 1923 Pan-Pacific Science Congress, British ethnologist Alfred Haddon caught the Trans-Australian Railway from Sydney to meet his ocean liner in Perth. At a short stop at Golden Ridge siding, east of Kalgoorlie, he cut a dreadlock from the head of an unidentified ‘young Aboriginal man’. It contributed to Haddon’s extensive hair collection, the basis of his theory of three races based on hair form. In 1945 it was moved from the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to the newly established Duckworth Laboratory under the directorship of physical anthropologist Jack Trevor, a signatory of the 1951 UNESCO Statement on Race. It stayed there until Danish evolutionary biologist Eske Willerslev obtained it, extracted DNA from it and published the ‘first Aboriginal genome’ in 2011. The landmark paper established a longer history of Aboriginal Australian genetic distinctiveness than any previous research: 70,000 years. In the process of publishing it, Willerslev established a new standard of international ethical practice. Although his university judged he did not have to seek ethics approval because the specimen was ‘archaeological’, he eventually sought and gained approval from an Aboriginal organization that represents the traditional landowners of the region where the hair was snipped. This paper traces the story of this particular piece of human biology from a remote railway siding to Cambridge, Copenhagen and Kalgoorlie. It explores the material entanglement of interwar race science, postwar scientific anti-racism and 21st century postcolonial genomics, showing it is no surprise the ‘first Aboriginal genome’ was derived from a hair sample – a substance that only rarely yields autosomal DNA - and not one of the plentiful frozen blood samples collected and stored in Australian and international institutions from the late 1950s onwards.


[cid:EF104E2B-AE5D-46D8-AACB-77CB342C1A7A at mit.edu]
__________________
Gus Zahariadis
Assistant to the Director
MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society
T: (617) 253-3452
F: (617) 258-8118
http://sts-program.mit.edu/







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