Rosanna Dent, ‘Subject 01: exemplary Indigenous masculinity in Cold War genetics’, British Journal of the History of Science, 53 (3), September 2020

Rosanna Dent’s insightful work draws the history of the social sciences to recast our understanding of masculinities and aggression in the culture of the 1960s. She discusses the research on genetics at a time when popular conceptions of evolution were promoting an image of “natural” human masculinity, which some scholars believed could be identified in indigenous groups still living in tribal communities. A key debate among evolutionary biologists at this time was whether humans have a greater inclination to individual violence or to group cooperation.

She argues that research, focusing on indigenous peoples in Brazil, drove a particular vision of masculine violence: “The arguments which developed out of the research on Apöwẽ and Yanomami warfare promoted an individualistic evolutionary benefit to male aggression,
setting up conditions for sociobiologists to frame violence as innate.”

She goes on to show that this research did real-world harms to the Yanomami, as it was instrumentalised by “Brazilian fazendeiros and politicians in an attempt to block the demarcation of a large unified Yanomami territory.”

Dent explores the persistent tendency in genetics (and popular science) to regard indigenous groups as living exemplars of the deep past, and the use of indigenous people as research subjects to demonstrate evolutionary claims.