Living dead in the Pacific: Racism, sovereignty, and biopolitics in genetics research involving Taiwan Aborigines and Maori

This dissertation analyzes genetics research on Taiwan Aborigines' alcoholism and attendant news coverage, Taiwan and international news coverage of genetic research on Taiwan as the Polynesian homeland, documentary films on Maori origins, marketing of Taiwan Aborigines' cell lines, and US patents in forensics and gout. It shows how such genetic research generally uses epistemological and ontological violence in the racist articulation of sovereignty and biopolitics. This racialized articulation involves organizing narratives in which genetic researchers constitute themselves as heroic subjects advancing knowledge of human origins and curing disease by rendering of Aborigines as living dead objects of research. Nikolas Rose's optimistic conceptions of "somatic individuals" negotiating with scientists, biotechnology firms, and government institutions in a "political economy of hope" are show to be inapplicable to most research involving Taiwan Aborigines. Rather, scientists render Aborigines as exposed to death and as living connections to the ancient dead. Taiwan Aborigines' genes are narratively organized networks that span transnational science and biotechnology, settler state institutions and Aboriginal peoples. By integrating recent advances in rhetoric and organizational communication, the theoretical framework analyses how epideictic rhetoric provides the value and normative foundations for forensic and deliberative forms of rhetoric in organizing narratives in organizing narratives of genetic research projects and Aboriginal resistance to research abuses can destabilize and discredit research findings. When genes are accepted as fact, a process Bruno Latter calls black boxing; they become important agents imbued with various racialized organizing properties. However, it also analyzes two recent case studies (one Taiwan, another in New Zealand) of relatively successful Aboriginal resistance to research abuses. In both cases, involved Aboriginal peoples organized networks including various combinations of transnational human rights and bioethics discourses, Aboriginal rights discourses, Taiwan Aboriginal rights law, and mass media to destabilize the networks through which scientific researchers were respectively attempting to constitute Kavalan Aboriginal and Maori genes. The dissertation also uncovered conflicts of interest and significant evidence of violations of collective informed consent as mandated under Taiwan law involving 1522 Atayal Aborigines in a recent gout genetic US patent application by one of Taiwan's most prominent researchers on Aboriginal health.