Metascience (2009) 18:413415 DOI 10.

1007/s11016-009-9293-7

Springer 2009

REVIEW

REIMAGINING BIOLOGY: THE VIEW FROM PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Sandra Bamford, Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reections on Life and Biotechnology. Berkeley, University of California Press. 2007. Pp xiv+230. US$21.95PB.

By Warwick H. Anderson In 1962, the anthropologist John Barnes noted that kinship in highland Papua and New Guinea is not just a matter of genealogical reckoning; rather, one might accrue kin through social recognition, a process he called cumulative patriliation. Even before David Schneider explained how kinship in the United States is culturally constructed, families in New Guinea could challenge assumptions of biological relatedness. Now, Sandra Bamford has cleverly used her ethnographic researches among the Kamea people, in the mountainous parts of Gulf Province in Papua New Guinea, to expose and challenge the underpinnings of modern biomedicine and biotechnology. She adroitly employs Kamea concepts of identity and social relatedness as destabilizing devices (p. 12), often to striking effect, shaking some of the biological foundations of contemporary Western medicine and technology. In this densely argued though intellectually rewarding book, Bamford, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto, uses her New Guinea observations to dissect biological assumptions in Western debates about genetically modied crops, reproductive technologies, foetal rights and abuse, and stem-cell research and cloning. A concluding chapter briey examines the human genome diversity project and claims of ownership of indigenous genetic resources, sketching with a broad brush this emerging form of biological imperialism (p. 167). In general, each chapter begins and ends with vivid accounts of recent developments in bioscience and

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biotechnology, mostly based on secondary sources, though creatively recongured. In between, Bamford takes us painstakingly though the intricacies of Kamea social life and culture, effectively juxtaposing the central Kamea and marginal Westerners (whether scientists, doctors, or patients). Although Biology Unmoored is framed as science and technology studies, the reader must be prepared to appreciate long sections of complex and richly textured ethnography. Evidently, Bamford is writing as much for anthropologists of Melanesia as for social critics of science. With each example, Bamford reiterates her main point: much of Western medicine and technology, and the social and political contention entailed, is predicated on a biological understanding of relatedness, yet other visions of personal identity and social relations are available. The Kamea, she argues, do not ground relationships in physiological reproduction; rather their social imagination encompasses the organic world with promiscuous, non-genealogical generosity and grace. Recognition of kinship thus derives from social and environmental emplacement, not histories of sexual reproduction. Western concerns about crossing species boundaries, which surface in controversy over genetically modied crops, would make little sense to Kamea. For them, Bamford writes, human reproductive potential is directly tied to other species rather than being dened in contradistinction to them (p. 27, emphasis in original). Similarly, the exaggerated biological idiom of disputes over reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation would puzzle Kamea, who are more concerned with making kin through sociality than assigning biological relations. Accusations of foetal abuse and demands for foetal rights also would sound strange to a people who regard children as conjoined with their mother, in a sort of plural personhood, until initiation of menarche. Kamea might also nd odd the Western concern that human cloning seeks to replicate identities and relationships, since that is exactly what they want to do through elaborate mortuary rituals. Unlike many other New Guinea groups, Kamea hope to achieve the continuous production of an identity through these practices, not by individual social reproduction. The chapter on emerging biological imperialism is a disappointing addition to the book. In briey considering the human genome diversity project and the patenting of a Hagahai cell line, Bamford claims that biology is coming to determine what it means to be a

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people. In effect, the search for genetic resources naturalises persons and their environment, altering the grounds on which identities and relationships might be framed. While Bamford has a point, some attention to the history of biological research in Papua New Guinea would have strengthened her argument immeasurably. The rich archives of the Institute of Medical Research in Goroka still sadly neglected by most historians of science reveal how the Kamea and other Anga peoples became caught up during the 1960s in the International Biological Programme, and contain les not only on the Hagahai controversy, but more pertinently on the attempts of Cavalli-Sforza and Neel to acquire Anga blood for their early genetic studies. Unfortunately, Bamford missed this opportunity to supply some local historical depth and nuance to her argument. Strictly speaking, Biology Unmoored cannot be considered as anthropology of science, since the science here is not the subject of ethnographic investigation. Nor does Bamford engage extensively with historical and sociological studies of science and technology. Rather, she has fashioned a provocative set of comparisons between the social world of the Kamea and what is, in a sense, common knowledge of developments in biotechnology and biomedicine. For generations, anthropologists have avoided such comparative projects, fearing the juxtaposition of typologies and the reication of dualisms. While Biology Unmoored does not entirely escape such pitfalls, its ashes of destabilisation of the common knowledge and hidden assumptions of bioscience provide us with ample compensation. For most of the twentieth century, Pacic anthropology was central to debate on what it means to be human, yet studies of the region have until recently exerted little impact on science and technology scholarship. As Bamford suggests in this seminal work, Pacic anthropology and history may yet shed new light on the biological construction of humans and others. Department of History and Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine University of Sydney Australia