From Anthropometry to Genomics:Reﬂections of a Paciﬁc Fieldworker

Jonathan Scott Friedlaender

As   J R

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Bloomington

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Foreword

Jonathan Friedlaender has devoted much of his professionallife to studies of human population variation in Pacific Islanders.His anthropology and pioneering genetics research was conductedlargely with what are known as Melanesian peoples on the islands of Bougainville, Malaita, Ontong Java and the Bismarck Archipelagoin the Southwestern Pacific. Tis work began in June 1966 whenhe was a graduate student at Harvard University and it spans morethan a forty-year career that continues to the present. His most recentpublications draw on fieldwork conducted in north Bougainville, New Britain, New Ireland, and New Hanover during a series of geneticssurveys conducted between 1998 and 2003. His collaborator on thismemoir of his life and experiences in the Pacific is Joanna Radin, ayoung but remarkably knowledgeable historian of science currently conducting graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Tesetwo professionals weave a fascinating fabric of complex texture thatincorporates the educational, political, governmental, and researchclimate of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s with the trials and tribulationsof a young researcher and academic trying to make his way in a highly competitive arena. Te book is much more than a series of recollectionsabout one man's life; rather, it is a history of an important era in thedevelopment of anthropological genetics and the dramatic transitionin this science that took place in the early 1980s.Te book is largely chronological but with some movement forwardand backward in time when ideas were being developed. It begins withFriedlaender's youth in North Carolina and the transformation of hisintellectual life when he attended Phillips Exeter Academy and, later,Harvard College. He came from a family in which the pursuit of learning was not only encouraged but was also supported educationally. His firstexperiences in an alien field situation were under the umbrella of theHarvard Solomon Islands Project (HSIP) where he worked with a largeprofessional research team. In many ways, working with a team is anexcellent means of introduction to socially-, culturally-, and physically-demanding field conditions (similar to my own experience). Later thatsame year (1966), after gaining some knowledge of the area and its