Abstract
This essay outlines the changing cultural significance of Indian-origin rhesus macaques as the United States established a national primate “research resources” strategy between 1930 and 1960. During these three decades, researchers in the US imported thousands of Indian rhesus macaques annually from India, both for experimental research on infectious diseases and for the mass production of polio vaccine. Analyzing descriptions of macaque research infrastructure by C.R. Carpenter, Harry Harlow, George Burch, and other key researchers, the essay argues that the US state’s special emphasis on importing Indian-origin rhesus as the main experimental species for US biomedicine was shaped by a number of factors, including researchers’ experiences importing and housing macaques, changing scientific paradigms for understanding humans’ relationships to other primates, US national anxieties about Asian and African decolonization, the polio scare, and the changing geopolitical role of the US following World War II. While researchers initially insisted that science would be best served if rhesus populations were kept in Indian, African, and Caribbean locations thought to resemble their natural habitats, India’s brief ban on rhesus exports, increased demand for polio vaccine, and other strains on the biomedical primate trade shifted state efforts toward establishing indoor captive rhesus stations within the continental US. This shift also resulted in the scientists’ public emphasis on the category “primate” in order to portray rhesus macaques, chimpanzees, and other species of animals used in biomedical research as modern, feeling animals who serve the nation.
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Notes
- 1.
This future-oriented approach to health and security in the rich countries is described by Andrew Lakoff as “global health security,” an assemblage that attempts to insulate wealthy countries from the presumed dangers of disease spread from Europe’s former colonies (Lakoff 2010). A wide array of research on US imperial public health and medicine documents the techniques of US immunitary engineering against imperial frontiers and transnationally constituted disease threats (Merkel 1997; Shah 2001; Stern 2005; Anderson 2006; Wald 2008).
- 2.
- 3.
Animal studies theorists have deployed a critique of the wild/domestic binary (Russell 2002), emphasizing the diversity of human-animal relationships crossing biological and social phenomena. I retain the term “domestication” in order to suggest the ideological linkage of rhesus to the racialized and gendered spaces of nation, family, and home.
- 4.
I draw here on the biopolitical theory of Michel Foucault (1995), who suggested that the eighteenth century saw the rise of a “power over life” or biopower emphasizing the institutional production of “docile bodies” which were evaluated and optimized using medical knowledges. More recently, the interdisciplinary fields of animal studies (Wolfe 2010; Shukin 2009; Wadiwel 2002) and science studies (Rose 2007; Latour 1993) have built on Foucault’s theory in the contexts of transpecies and transgenic forms of contemporary biomedicine and agriculture. The making of “docile bodies” further suggests the implication of biopower in the production of racial power, as race played an important role in understanding which bodies were made fit or docile for national uplift (Foucault 2003; Stoler 1995).
- 5.
Popularized at the height of salvage anthropology in the 1930s, the zoological expedition brought scientists, hunters, zookeepers, taxidermists, and filmmakers to various locations across the colonial world, searching for often elusive prize animals to be studied, hunted, and captured as a spectacle of the power of modern science (Rony 1996, p. 154 and 157–60). As such, the zoological expedition was one method of monetizing imperial power through what Timothy Brennan (2005, p. 101) calls the “economic image-function of the periphery”: the operation of “the idea of the global periphery” as “an economic engine.” In this case, the imperial gaze of the filmmaker, the scientist, and the zoological tourist are all connected to circuits of exchange, primarily founded on the existence of particular animal ranges in Africa and Asia. 5 Committee on the Establishment of a Cardiovascular Primate Colony, National Advisory Heart Council Committee, Meeting Minutes, September 25, 1957, 19, Box 43, Folder “National Advisory Heart Council – Primate Colony, 1957–8,” George E. Burch Papers, National Library of Medicine.
- 6.
Recently, the National Academy of Sciences has called for an end to Indian restrictions, using the growing presence of HIV in India as a justification (Hearn 2003)
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Ahuja, N. (2013). Macaques and Biomedicine: Notes on Decolonization, Polio, and Changing Representations of Indian Rhesus in the United States, 1930–1960. In: Radhakrishna, S., Huffman, M., Sinha, A. (eds) The Macaque Connection. Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects, vol 43. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3967-7_5
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