2014/04/01 by Joanna Radin
Arts and Humanities · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #History of Science and Medicine #Race, Genetics, and Society
paper · doi:10.1111/cura.12065
crossref issued 2014/04/01 · crossref published 2014/04/01 · crossref published-print 2014/04/01 · openalex publication_date 2014/04/01 · crossref published-online 2014/04/19 · crossref created 2014/04/20 · crossref deposited 2023/09/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31 · crossref indexed 2026/07/31
Abstract 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.