The blood that remains: card collections from the colonial anthropological missions

Abstract

In this paper I discuss the history of colonial collections through a focus on the social life of a set of blood group cards held by Portuguese institutions since the 1950s. Between the 1940s and 1960s, a series of anthropological field expeditions were organized by the Portuguese Overseas Science Research Board to the then Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia. A large number of samples of indigenous blood were collected on blood group paper cards in the course of these campaigns. The cards were then stored in Portugal and used for racial serological studies until the 1980s. Thereafter, the collection survived various institutional deaths. Throughout its post-colonial existence in Portuguese institutions, the cards seem to have moved ambivalently between a condition of valued asset and one of obsolete material. And yet they revealed a resilient capacity to mediate conceptions of historical time. Thus the essay asks what it might mean to approach these collections as colonial ‘chronotope’ – devices for connecting space and time – and how and why they endured through various ends, culminating as a genetically contaminated museum object. This essay explores the historicity of colonial collections by tracing the social life of a set of blood group cards currently held in a Portuguese museum institution. I draw on archival records, ethnographic encounters and interviews to analyse how these collections mediate relationships between the past, present and future of colonial empire, * Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal. Email: [email protected]. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the How Collections End workshop in Cambridge in 2017 and at the FOLK conference in Oslo in 2018. I thank the organizers and the participants for comments and remarks on the earlier version. Research for this essay was funded by FCT, Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Portugal (grant reference PTDC/HAR-HIS/28577/2017). I am grateful to Luís Souto de Miranda, Helena Moreira, Vítor Rosado Marques and Maria Cristina Neto for generously sharing their knowledge, memories and experiences; to Rita Poloni and Cláudia Castelo for sharing research materials; to Ana Canas, director of the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, and staff archivists, especially João Santos and Catarina Mateus, for support in accessing the documents of the anthropological missions; and to Susana Garcia, Marta Lourenço and Catarina Teixeira for research access to the collections of the National Museum of Natural History and Science. Ana Rita Amaral, Pedro Cardim, Claúdia Castelo, Marta Lourenço, Vítor Rosado Marques, Ricardo Moreira and the editors of the special issue, Jenny Bangham, Emma Kowal and Boris Jardine, read earlier versions and provided insightful comments and corrections. Thanks finally to the anonymous reviewers of BJHS Themes for their important comments. All remaining imperfections are my responsibility. All translations from Portuguese into English are mine. This research has benefited from the use of the infrastructure of PRISC (Portuguese Research Infrastructure of Scientific Collections). BJHS: Themes 4: 29–53, 2019. © British Society for the History of Science 2019. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work. doi:10.1017/bjt.2019.1 First published online 25 July 2019 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2019.1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universidade de Lisboa, on 10 Dec 2019 at 16:20:56, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at anthropological sciences and the lives of their human keepers and users. To ask ‘how collections end’ is to ask also how collections endure, and how they fail to endure. Collections can reach an end, I hypothesize here, when they cease to give flesh to, or cease to become agents of, forms and conceptions of historical time. Thus conceived, scientific collections – including collections that encapsulate histories of colonialism and racialism – can reveal considerable resilience. In recent years, interest in the problem of historicity/ies has increased in history and anthropology. Historians of science and medicine are calling attention to how biomaterials obtained in the colonial era articulate time in different ways and forms: in associated archival documentation, in technologies of cryopreservation, in narratives of colonial violence and repatriation, or in distinct ethical regimes and varied (and sometimes conflicting) scientific and indigenous post-colonial reuses.1 Signalling the ‘question of temporality’, Emma Kowal, Joanna Radin and Jenny Reardon have called attention to the unintended ‘mutating temporalities’ of collections, associated with scientific practices and freezing technologies.2 These anthropological and science-studies concerns relate (although not always explicitly) to reflections on the persistence of imperial formations in colonial studies. In this field, a critical history of imperial ‘legacies’, or a ‘reflexive anthropology’ of the ‘modes of presence of the [colonial] past’, is also gaining traction.3 Engaging with the notion of ruin, for instance, Ann Laura Stoler prompted scholars to address the durability of imperial and racial regimes by turning attention to ‘what remains ... to the material and social afterlife of structures, sensibilities, and things’, and the ways people ‘live with’ the vestiges that colonial empires have left behind.4 This article extends this scholarship to propose a way of seeing a trace of Portuguese imperial science – approximately 16,000 dry samples of indigenous blood on paper cards collected during field expeditions in the 1950s – as a colonial ‘chronotope’.5 In the humanities and social sciences the term ‘chronotope’ was first given wider application as a metaphor for time–space connectedness by literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin.6 Although the term was used originally in the study of literary phenomena, it can be 1 Compare, for example, Ricardo Roque, ‘Stories, skulls, and colonial collections’, Configurations (2011) 19, pp. 1–23; Jenny Bangham, ‘Blood, paper and total human genetic diversity’, Limn (2016) 6, at https:// limn.it/blood-paper-and-total-human-genetic-diversity, accessed 2 February 2018; Joanna Radin, Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017; Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal (eds.), Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017; Radin and Kowal, ‘Indigenous blood and ethical regimes in the United States and Australia since the 1960s’, American Ethnologist (2015) 42(4), pp. 749–765. 2 Emma Kowal, Joanna Radin and Jenny Reardon, ‘Indigenous body parts, mutating temporalities, and the half-lives of postcolonial technoscience’, Social Studies of Science (2013), 43(4), pp. 465–483. See also Amade M’charek, ‘Race, time and folded objects: the HeLa error?’, Theory, Culture and Society (2014) 31, 6, pp. 29–56. 3 Benoît de l’Estoile, ‘The past as it lives now: an anthropology of colonial legacies’, Social Anthropology (2008) 16, pp. 267–279, 279. 4 Ann L. Stoler, ‘Imperial debris: reflections on ruins and ruination’, Cultural Anthropology (2008) 23(2), pp. 191–219, 194. See also Stoler,Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 5 This number is an estimate based on preliminary information provided to the author by the Lisbon Museum of Natural History and Science. 6 Bakhtin’s original notion was adapted from physics. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel’, in Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 84–258. 30 Ricardo Roque https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2019.1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universidade de Lisboa, on 10 Dec 2019 at 16:20:56, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at more widely explored as a metaphor for approaching time and space as a ‘concrete whole’; here time is a fusion that ‘thickens, takes on flesh’ in material space and material objects.7 My formulation of the colonial chronotope emphasizes this fusion zone between narrative and materiality. I conceptualize the notion of the colonial chronotope as a plastic configuration of pasts, presents and futures of empire, race, science and coloniality that takes material existence in the form of ‘scientific collections’. Thus conceived, colonial chronotopes constitute forms of temporality that exist in collections and in the people, institutions and imaginaries with which they become associated. Human actions and understandings shape these processes. But so too does the materiality of the collections. Hence a collection’s colonial chronotope is not simply a function of the narratives, inscriptions, sensibilities and social relations that act on the materials, and to which the latter are connected over time. The materials that constitute the collections also act upon their spatiotemporal arrangements, and may co-produce their own chronotopes. My history of the blood group cards is the story of collections that persisted whilst undergoing critical endings and changes in their associated temporal imaginaries and agencies – including in the materiality of the records themselves. I argue that the persistence of these collections is entailed in the persistence of a plastic and multiple colonial chronotope. Here, I regard the card collections as intrinsically chronotopic agents charged with concepti