From Anthropometry to Genomics:Reflections of a Pacific Fieldworker
J S F
As told to Joanna Radin
iUniverse, Inc.
New York Bloomington
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Foreword
Jonathan Friedlaender has devoted much of his professional life to studies of human population variation in Pacific Islanders. His anthropology and pioneering genetics research was conducted largely with what are known as Melanesian peoples on the islands of Bougainville, Malaita, Ontong Java and the Bismarck Archipelago in the Southwestern Pacific. Tis work began in June 1966 when he was a graduate student at Harvard University and it spans more than a forty-year career that continues to the present. His most recent publications draw on fieldwork conducted in north Bougainville, New Britain, New Ireland, and New Hanover during a series of genetics surveys conducted between 1998 and 2003. His collaborator on this memoir of his life and experiences in the Pacific is Joanna Radin, a young but remarkably knowledgeable historian of science currently conducting graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Tese two professionals weave a fascinating fabric of complex texture that incorporates the educational, political, governmental, and research climate of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s with the trials and tribulations of a young researcher and academic trying to make his way in a highly competitive arena. Te book is much more than a series of recollections about one man's life; rather, it is a history of an important era in the development of anthropological genetics and the dramatic transition in this science that took place in the early 1980s.Te book is largely chronological but with some movement forward and backward in time when ideas were being developed. It begins with Friedlaender's youth in North Carolina and the transformation of his intellectual 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 first experiences in an alien field situation were under the umbrella of the Harvard Solomon Islands Project (HSIP) where he worked with a large professional research team. In many ways, working with a team is an excellent means of introduction to socially-, culturally-, and physically-demanding field conditions (similar to my own experience). Later that same year (1966), after gaining some knowledge of the area and its