Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Isolating Life
A common conceit is that the boundaries of life itself are increasingly
porous under the conditions of late capitalism, as biomedicine, organ
transplantation, or genetic manipulation realigns life around an array of
newly discrete deployments. Whereas scholarship has tended to focus on
the relationships enabled by these shifts in science and technology, the
rise of isolation over roughly the same time period suggests an alternative
regime of biopolitics predicated on the inverse, or managing a form of life
defined by the refusal of relation.
This process—in which the category of isolation evacuates and stands
in for Ayoreo humanity to an ever greater degree—is mirrored in the
techniques and concerns of genetic science. Outsiders like the Nobel lau-
reate D. Carleton Gajdusek have long been fascinated by Ayoreo blood,
not least because they imagined it to be the empirical evidence for a
natural, human difference.
48
Ascriptions of isolation have oriented the
study of Ayoreo biology since geneticist Francisco Salzano discovered
a set of “unusual blood genetic characteristics” in the Ayoreo samples
collected by Gajdusek in 1963.
49
As part of a well-documented research
agenda first developed with James Neel in the 1950s, Salzano and his
colleagues analyzed biological material from groups they believed most
closely approximated prior stages of human evolution, targeting espe-
cially those they deemed most isolated, genetically diverse, and “pre-
civilized,” including the Yanomamo.
50
An attributed state of isolation
was already generating its scientific validation ex post facto. Perez-Diez
and Salzano thus describe their work on the Ayoreo as furnishing “data
from one of the few remaining relatively unacculturated South American
Indian tribes.”
51
Much of this research was funded by the US Atomic En-
ergy Commission, as elucidating the full range of pure genetic structures
was considered necessary for understanding possible mutational damage
caused by radiation.
Building on Gajdusek's dark legacy, isolation remains a technique by
which scientists visualize, interpret, and evaluate the biological contents
of Ayoreo being. In a recent set of papers based on Ayoreo blood samples
collected in the 1960s and 1970s, scientists have concluded that the Ay-
oreo are “genetically peculiar” in two ways. First, they are defined by
a relatively low rate of heterozygosity, or genetic variation within the
group. Second, they are described as outliers that represent a maximum
expression of genetic difference relative to other Indigenous groups in
