Time and politics in the scientific ice age

The two books under review highlight the importance of artificial cold in the modern political and scientific constitutions. These works may well constitute an important contribution to spur a new field of anthropological interest around the domestication of low temperatures in our current political ecology (in its widest sense), exploring its complex entanglements around scientific and cultural aspects, as well as its historical and social dynamics. Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal seem to have successfully melted several fields of social research and shown the utility of theoretically and analytically delving into the consequences of taming coldness, especially when considering its use for the preservation of collections of biological materials. Radin’s socio-historical framework, as deployed in Life on ice, caught the collections of human blood and plasma assembled by anthropologists, biologists and physicians, which led, in Cryopolitics, to the tracing of several still unstated associations connecting scientific, ecological and economical action, relevant in the global political and scientific environments that emerged during the Cold War period.