Collections d’échantillons biologiques autochtones et cryopolitique de la vie congelée

In the mid-twentieth century, scientists began to collect and freeze blood samples for a range of purposes. This article considers the broader implications of scientific freezing for time and life by drawing on interviews with scientists associated with a large collection of samples collected from I...

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محفوظ في:
التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
الحاوية / القاعدة:URI:https://journals.openedition.org/actesbranly,
المؤلفون الرئيسيون: Kowal, Emma, Radin, Joanna
التنسيق: Article ou chapitre numérique
اللغة:Français
منشور في: Les actes de colloques du musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac 2016
الوصول للمادة أونلاين:Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
الوصف
الملخص:In the mid-twentieth century, scientists began to collect and freeze blood samples for a range of purposes. This article considers the broader implications of scientific freezing for time and life by drawing on interviews with scientists associated with a large collection of samples collected from Indigenous Australians in the 1960s. We first review some key critiques of cryopreservation posed by Indigenous scholars and by science and technology studies. We then propose “cryopolitics” as a concept to express the various political, ethical and temporal conundrums presented by the practice of freezing. We frame cryopolitics as a mode of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics. If biopolitical assemblages make live and let die, cryopolitical ones reveal the dramatic consequences of mundane efforts to make live and not let die. In our case study, we argue that frozen blood vacillates between two cryopolitical states, “latent life” and “incomplete death”.  Samples seen as latent life contain infinite potential and cannot be destroyed; samples understood as incomplete death demand destruction.