This is a repeat, but it's a very interesting episode of All in the Mind - an intriguing look into the area of psychological anthropology. How much can we learn from a brain?
Here is a bit of the transcript:Disembodied brains, culture and science: Indigenous lives under gaze (Part 1 of 2)
Listen Now - 20122008 |Download Audio - 20122008
The incredible saga of Ishi, California's last 'wild' Indian, is the stuff of American folklore. It's also the quest for a lost brain, taken from Ishi's tuberculosis ravaged body at death—only to be rediscovered and repatriated 80 years later. And next week—a young Maori scientist working with post-mortem brain tissue is breaking new ground, to keep her lab life 'culturally safe'.
Original broadcast: 26 April 2008.
Guests
Orin Starn
Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Duke University
Northern Carolina
USA
http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/CA/ostarnMelanie Cheung
Tauira o Mate Roro
PhD Student
Pharmacology Department
Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences
University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.health.auckland.ac.nz/neurosci-net/research_Neural%20Repair.phpFurther Information
Ishi, the Last Yahi - a documentary film
Excerpts of the promotional trailer for the film: Ishi, the Last Yahi, were used in this broadcast. More information about the film can be found at the web address below. With thanks to filmmaker and new media producer Jed Riffe and colleagues of Jed Riffe Films.Natasha Mitchell's blog post for this program
Contribute, discuss, comment on the All in the Mind blogOrin Starn's website about Ishi
Includes a recording of Ishi as featured on the CD - Ishi: The Last Yahi (published by Wild Sanctuary Music), alongwith archival photos of Ishi and the repatriation of his remains, and other information.Smithsonian Museum, Repatriation Office , Department of Anthropology
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Resources about Ishi, compiled by the University of California San Francisco.
Brains in Vats, Bottles and Banks: The Strange Life of the Disembodied Brain.
Program broadcast on All in the Mind, ABC Radio National, 2004.
A strange and philosophical trip into science fiction and medical ethics. What is the life of a brain without a body? Popular culture has long toyed with the spectacle of the brain in a vat, and the question of whether our cerebral self could exist outside of our bodies. From body-snatching to the rise of the modern brain bank, and Britain's macabre organ retention scandal - join Natasha Mitchell and historian and philosopher of science, Dr Cathy Gere, for an out of body experienceObituary - Alfred Louis Kroeber 1976-1960
Penned by Julian H. Steward.Publications
Title: Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian
Author: Orin Starn
Publisher: W.W Norton and Company, 2004.
ISBN: 0-393-05133-1Title: Ishi's Brain
Author: Nancy Rockafellar and Orin Starn
Publisher: Current Anthropology, Volume 40, Number 4, August-October 1999
URL: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ca/currentTitle: Ishi's Brain, Ishi's Ashes: Anthropology and Genocide
Author: Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Publisher: Anthropology Today, Vol 17, No. 1 (Feb 2001), pp 12-18
URL: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ca/currentTitle: Ishi's Brain, Ishi's Ashes: The Complex Issues of Repatriation : A Response to N. Scheper-Hughes, 17(1)
Author: Alexandra K. Kenny, Thomas Killion, Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Publisher: Anthropology Today, Vol 18, No 2. (April 2002), pp 25-27
URL: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ca/currentTitle: Ishi: The Last of His Tribe.
Author: Theodora Kroeber
Publisher: Parnassus Press, Berkeley, California 1964.Title: A Compromise between Science and Sentiment: A Report on Ishi's Treatment at the University of California, 1911-1916
Author: Nancy Rockafellar, Director of the UCSF Campus Oral History Program
Publisher: Preliminary report to UCSF Vice Chancellor, Submitted February 17, 1999
URL: http://www.ucsf.edu/~history/ishi.htmlTitle: The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology
Author: Nancy Sheper-Hughes
Publisher: Current Anthropology, Vol 36, No. 3 (June 1995), pp 409-440
URL: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ca/currentPresenter
Natasha Mitchell
Orin Starn: Ishi died in 1916 of tuberculosis, as you say. Ishi had made it quite clear—and he did speak some English by 1916—that he did not want his body to be dissected, that he didn't want any of his body parts pickled and studied by scientists...
Natasha Mitchell: I mean from a native American perspective why would that especially be the case?
Orin Starn: Ishi's people, the Yahi, believed that it was dangerous both for the living and the dead for the body of dead people to be handled very much after they died. The body should be buried as quickly as possible, in some ways parallel to Muslim traditions of burial, and that that would allow the body's spirit to get on to the next world and that this would also be less dangerous for the living, for those that were left behind. So the practice of autopsy, of putting a body out on a table and cutting it open and taking out the body parts, would have been anathema to Ishi.
Natasha Mitchell: So how was it that in fact an autopsy came to happen on Ishi's body?
Orin Starn: Alfred Kroeber was away in New York when Ishi died. What appears to have been the case is that another acquaintance of Ishi's, a doctor named Saxton Pope was very interested in Ishi and very much wanted to dissect Ishi to learn—as Pope once put it, to learn everything about him. Pope felt that it was his duty as a scientist to record just how much Ishi's lungs weighed and what the bone structure of his body was. And so because Kroeber was away and an autopsy was conducted...
Natasha Mitchell: Ironic though isn't it because Saxon Pope actually was observed to be a very good friend of Ishi, they did archery together, they were mates.
Orin Starn: That's right, Pope and Ishi spent lots of time together shooting bows and arrows, going off on hunting expeditions. And I think with Pope too there was he mourned and grieved for Ishi—during this time Kroeber who was in New York gets wind of the fact that an autopsy may be conducted—and Kroeber again is a very Victorian restrained man emotionally in most ways, but he writes a very angry telegram where he says 'If anybody talks about conducting an autopsy of Ishi in the interests of science then say for me that science can go to hell'. But it does no good and an autopsy is conducted on the body.
Natasha Mitchell: And what happened to Ishi's remains?
Orin Starn: Well this was the big mystery. We knew that the autopsy had been conducted and we knew that at least part of Ishi's body had been cremated and that his ashes had been put in an Indian pot that was then brought to a cemetery just south of San Francisco. But the mystery was whether the brain had also been cremated or whether something else had happened to the brain; whether perhaps it had been put in a jar and preserved or what exactly had happened to it.
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