Victor McKusick's Fieldwork with the Old Order Amish

21 Pages·2017·1.55 MB·English

by  Susan M. Lindee

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Department of History and Sociology of Science
Departmental Papers (HSS)
(HSS)
2003
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Susan M. Lindee
University of Pennsylvannia, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/hss_papers
Part of the Genetics and Genomics Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Commons, and the Science and Technology Studies Commons
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Lindee, M.S. (2003). Provenance and Pedigree: Victor McKusick's Fieldwork with the Old Order Amish. In
Goodman, A.H., Heath, D., & Lindee, M.S. (Eds.), Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science
beyond the Two-Culture Divide, pp. 41-57. Berkeley: University of California Press.
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/hss_papers/27
For more information, please contact [email protected].
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Provenance is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the record of the "ultimate derivation and
passage of an item through its various owners." The term is most commonly used to describe the history
or pedigree of a painting—who has owned it, its value at various stages—but it also has a meaning in
silviculture, in which it refers explicitly to genetic stock. Provenance, for forestry professionals, is the
record of where a seed was taken and of a character of the "mother trees." In this essay I explore
provenance in both sense, as a textual record of the origins of a given object (in this case a blood or
tissue sample) and as a record of genetic stock. I focus on fieldwork, which creates a record of origins
that can certify the authenticity and reliability of a particular pedigree, which then can acquire status as a
form of scientific evidence.
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Genetics and Genomics | History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Science and Technology Studies
This book chapter is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/hss_papers/27