Rearticulating the "primitive": The sea women and the emergence of trans-pacific physiology

The Japanese and Korean sea women (Ama in Japanese and Haenyeo in Korean), female free-divers who make their living by harvesting shellfish and seaweed, have recently been spotlighted as examples of indigenous peoples that embody the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Focusing on the role of science in this envisioning, this paper explores how Japanese imperial research on the physiology of the woman divers was revitalized in the form of a trans-pacific scientific collaboration after World War II. In the prewar period, Gito Terooka (1889-1966) studied the Japanese diving women as "primitive∗ industrial laborers from the perspective of German labor physiology (Arbeitsphysiologie). Hermann Rahn (1912-1990) at the University of Buffalo, New York, revamped Terouka s prewar research as part of his environmental physiology and created a research network, albeit a selective one, among US, Japanese, and South Korean physiologists in the postwar period. Examining the network-making process led by the founding scholar in environmental physiology through the 1965 symposium on the Ama of Japan, this paper will reveal that a shift in understanding of the "primitive" in the Cold War context renewed scientific interest in the diving women and played a central role in the formation of the trans-pacific network. © 2021 History of Science Society of Japan. All rights reserved.