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This article explores the shared histories of blood groups, racial conceptions, and linguistics in the late twentieth-century Portuguese colonial science of anthropobiology in Oceania. It follows the work of making indigenous languages that went along with the work of making blood groups in a late form of colonial anthropology. It focuses on the case of the Timor Anthropological Mission (Missao Antropologica de Timor), a series of field expeditions to the then-Portuguese colony of East Timor sponsored by the Portuguese Overseas Research Board (Junta de Investigacoes do Ultramar) between 1953 and 1974. A striking aspect of these expeditions was their simultaneous attachment to blood collecting and language categories in theory, in the field, and, subsequently, in processes of analysis, classification, and mapping. The article examines why and how, through a sequence of ontological transactions, linguistics blended with laboratory practices, theories of racial ethnogeny, and the blood samples themselves. I also intend to reflect on this case study as one example of how languages could be used to make biologized natures in twentieth-century racial sciences.

Both within a scientific field and society at large, scientists and research institutions compete for resources (money, time, personnel) as well as for influence and reputation. On the other hand, competition often takes place within cooperative structures – a lab, an institution or collaborative network – where materials, information or results are shared. Scientists also produce competing interpretations or explanations of phenomena, criticizing other approaches for being no so much wrong as inadequate – a situation that might be described as epistemic competition. Furthermore, we can speak of epistemic collaboration when different approaches are seen as complementing each other. Competition and cooperation thus seem to be always intertwined and their interaction generates the changing dynamic of scientific disciplines. Models, material or conceptual, as well as images often play central roles in the social structures or material infrastructures in which scientists compete and collaborate. They often result from collaborative efforts, either because their production requires specialists from different fields, or because they are designed to collect information from different researchers or even fields of research. Especially in situations of epistemic competition, where researchers have to convince third parties of the value of their approach over that of other groups, images or models in their evidential rhetoric play an important role. But also other representational devices or infrastructures such as nomenclatures, databases or journals shape the interaction of scientists. With respect to such structures we can speak of models for exchange between scientists. Meant to enable cooperation, debates surrounding their design reveal competing approaches to communication and interaction. This workshop brings together different case studies from the perspectives of the history, philosophy and social studies of science. While much progress has been made in recent years, Models of Cooperation and Competition in the Sciences, workshop, ICI Berlin, 12 December 2014