History of Scientific Research Carried Out On The Sami
The genetic makeup of Sami people has been extensively studied for as long as such research has been in existence, although until recent times, the purpose of this research has mostly been at best ethnocentric, at worst racist and defamatory. Ethnographic photography of the Sami began with the invention of the camera in the 19th century. This continued on into the 1920s and 1930s, when Sami were photographed naked and anatomically measured by scientists, with the help of the local police — sometimes at gunpoint — to collect data that would justify their own racial theories. Thus, there is a degree of distrust by some in the Sami community towards genetic research.
Some examples of racist research are: the Statens Institut for Rasbiologi compulsory sterilization project for Sami women, which continued until 1975, and Sami graves being plundered to provide research materials, of which their remains and artifacts from this period from across Sápmi can still be found in various state collections. In the late 19th century, colonial fascination with Arctic peoples led to human beings exhibited in human zoos. Sami people were exhibited with their traditional lavvu tents, weapons, and sleds, beside a group of reindeer at Tierpark Hagenbeck and other zoos across the globe.
Read more about this topic: Sami Culture, Genetic Studies
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, scientific, research and/or carried:
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.”
—Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)
“There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents, each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)