Dr. Jessica Hardin Lecture: Opportunity by Design: Natural Experiments, Prevention, and the Metabolic Ordering of Polynesia

As part of the James R. Bindon Lectures on Biocultural Anthropology and Health, Dr. Jessica Hardin from Rochester Institute of Technology will be giving a talk called "Opportunity by Design: Natural Experiments, Prevention, and the Metabolic Ordering of Polynesia."

This talk traces how Samoa came to be constituted as a privileged site of metabolic knowledge. It opens with a clinical photograph—a severed hand rendered as data—to show how Pacific bodies were historically detached from kinship, labor, and care and reassembled as evidence for anticipatory science. Drawing on epidemiological and global health archives from the mid-twentieth century onward, I argue that colonial imaginaries of isolation and racial difference cast Polynesia as a “natural laboratory” for obesity and diabetes. Metabolic research not only documented disease but actively produced future risk, legitimizing regimes of measurement, surveillance, and behavioral intervention in place of sustained care. I show how prevention emerged as the moral successor to earlier evolutionary explanations, reproducing racialized temporal hierarchies that frame Pacific lives as perpetually on the brink of complication. In doing so, the talk situates Samoa within a longer history of anticipatory governance that continues to shape how metabolic illness is known, managed, and imagined in the Pacific today.

Read this way, the talk opens a dialogue across anthropological traditions to consider how research infrastructures carry forward inherited assumptions that quietly shape what counts as knowledge and care. Attending to these inheritances, I suggest, is one step toward doing metabolic research that matters more carefully—and more consequentially—for Pacific communities.