Blood Diseases in the Backyard: Mexican'indígenas'as a Population of Cognition in the Mid-1960s

摘要

This paper aims to widen the history of blood disease research beyond sickle cell anemia, situating it at the intersection of US racial politics and public health, and international malaria eradication campaigns in the Third World. It focuses on studies of G6PD deficiencies in the Mixtecos of the Mexican Pacific coast, and the Lacandones of the Mayan region in Chiapas. Two medical geneticists, Rubén Lisker and James E. Bowman, developed research projects that engaged these populations, looking for answers to evolutionary, biomedical, and genetics questions. Their practices and the context of knowledge production about these indigenous groups—how they were made objects of inquiry and intervention (Populations of Cognition)—are in full view in both cases.