Interview with Adrian Young, author of “The Myth of the Natural Laboratory”

Adrian Young is a historian of science and the British empire at Denison University. He has a particular interest in the history of knowledge making at the margins of the colonial world. His new book is The Myth of the Natural Laboratory: Science, Empire, and Their Derangements on Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands (University of Hawaii Press, 2025). He was kind enough to answer some questions on the book and much more for this interview.

How did you become interested in this topic? Did you come to it from an interest in Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands? Or exploration? Or science? Or something else?

I first heard about Pitcairn Island in an anthropology class as an undergraduate in the early 2000s. I think it was deployed as some sort of example in human genetics, but I can’t recall quite how. Much later, while doing my PhD in the history of science, I became interested in the ways anthropologists and other field researchers relied on Indigenous subjects, and how those interactions led to the making of truths about human nature. I recalled Pitcairn as a place that saw quite a lot of this work, to the point that the people living there might easily have more experience with fieldwork than most of the researchers who came to study them. At the same time, the island was so heavily mythologized because of its connection to the mutiny on the Bounty. It carried so much weight of expectation and interest and fascination by outsiders, and I wanted to unpack that.

Can you say a little more about where Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands are and who lives there?

If you turn a globe so that Pitcairn Island is at the center, you see around it a perfect hemisphere of blue Pacific Ocean. Pitcairn is roughly 500 km east of Mangareva and 2,000 km west of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Outsiders often call it one of the remotest inhabited places on earth, though remoteness is obviously relative. Home is the center of one’s world, usually. The island has been inhabited by its current community, descendants of mutineers from the British vessel Bounty and their Pacific Islander partners, since 1790.

Though founded in an act of treason, in the early-19th-century Royal Navy visits construed the islanders as deeply religious Anglicans living in a utopia cut off from the world, a re-created Eden. But their observers in London grew worried that they’d run out of food and water—Pitcairn is only about one-by-two miles in size. And so Britain forcibly migrated the entire population to Norfolk Island, which is on the other side of the Pacific, about a thousand miles East of Australia. Norfolk Island was a brutal prison colony. When Britain shut down the prison in the 1850s, the thought was that the Pitcairn Islanders could settle there, where they would re-re-create an earthly Eden. Some of the people backmigrated to Pitcairn, though, and so today there are two communities of Pitcairn descent, with Norfolk Island being by far the larger one. There’s also a big diaspora in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and elsewhere.

The publisher website mentions that the people you write about were some of the “most studied” ever. Can you describe some of the observations or studies? And are there significant differences in how linguists and anthropologists approach people, etc?

They have been pretty intensely studied, mostly because they were “mixed race” and thought to be isolated from the world. The British and Australian governments did a lot of eugenic investigations into their “moral” fitness to rule themselves in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Physical anthropologists, working within the racialist frameworks of the day, measured their skulls and sampled their blood to determine how “racial” traits could be inherited and how races “mixed.” Linguists tape recorded their speech, trying to figure out how new languages formed from the contact of existing ones like Tahitian and English. Geneticists tracked inheritance but also tried to understand admixture between founding communities. So there are some broad similarities—all of these scientists were interested in using isolation and “known” mixture to figure out how to define and understand some core categories like race, language, inheritance, and so on.

Your book uses the concept “epistemic derangement,” what does that mean? Can you explain it a bit?

In researching the history of research on these islands, I noticed something strange. They were meant to be natural laboratories, places where complex problems were supposed to be easier to study. But in actual fact, quite the opposite happened. Researchers came to the islands because they thought they could figure out how categories or mechanisms central to their disciplines worked—but they left wondering if those categories were even stable in the first place. So, for instance, Harry Shapiro was a leading figure in American anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s, and he visited both islands to study how racial traits were inherited; he left wondering how stable race even was as a biological category. Linguists went to the islands from the 1950s in order to see how creole languages form; they came away totally disagreeing about what the boundaries between languages even were. All that was disciplinarily solid melted into air. But why were these “natural laboratories” places of derangement instead of clarity?

The answer is in their long histories as sites of scrutiny. Historians of science often focus on particular researchers, their projects, their expeditions. But if you fix your perspective on the islands over the span of decades and centuries, then what you see is an almost never-ending series of brief visits, one after the other. Even in my own short time on Pitcairn I saw that; the ship that picked me up dropped off a BBC documentarian. On a mundane level, it means that most visits look not unlike tourism and tend to fall into the same patterns of hospitality. Pitcairn Islanders are quite used to hosting people who come to write about them.

But the legacies of those visits pile up. Investigations by governments in the past resulted in forced relocations and losses of political autonomy—especially on Norfolk. Published research spoke to “racial” and eugenic deterioration. Those things were intertwined, and interventions kept accreting. Subsequent research happened in that ongoing context. But, instead of understanding their research within histories of intense contact, most researchers instead kept seeing both islands as untouched laboratories totally separate from the world. The result was “epistemic derangement,” as the distance between the myth of the islands as specially isolated collapsed when faced with the after effects of intense contact, scrutiny, and meddling.

What do you hope this book will accomplish in the world? What impact would you like it to have?

I think scholarly books often aim to affect things in a few different ways, insomuch as scholarly books can affect much at all. Most broadly, I hope it adds to an argument historians, Indigenous studies scholars, and others have been suggesting for a while: that history can really matter for researchers working with human populations—even if it can feel so abstract and distant. It’s a thing I think many scholars know, but there are very concrete ways that context can shape not only the practice of research but intellectual approaches and epistemologies. For historians of science and empire like me, I hope it shows that situating the history of research inside the longue durée can reveal a lot, too. The same can be said for histories of research that “failed.”  I’m perversely more interested in histories of intractable confusion than of “discovery.”

I would say that most Americans don’t really know very much about the Pacific and its people. How do you explain to people the history and significance of Pacific islands? What do you think is missing from our sense of the world when we don’t really consider places like Pitcairn?

Given the expropriative history of American colonialism in the Pacific and its continuation into the present, I think we should know and understand something about the places the US has so profoundly impacted. But the Pacific, a sea of islands that covers half the globe, has a profound significance of its own irrespective of whether Americans like me write or read about it.

Pitcairn, though, never really had a choice about being considered. Large numbers of outsiders considered it from the moment the community was “rediscovered” by outsiders (Americans, as it happens) in 1808, and Pitcairn and Norfolk Islanders’ lives have been forever shaped by that consideration. I think I can say, without hyperbole, that they’re among the most considered people ever to have lived, on a per-capita basis.  It sounds so meta, but I think it’s worth understanding the forms and histories of consideration itself.

Your book looks at how these islands were perceived as “natural experiments” or “natural laboratories.” The Enlightenment era was also obsessed with the “state of nature.” Why do you think people, then and later, are so interested in some kind of “natural laboratory?” The topic of feral children is different, but it’s related in the sense of people wondering about totally “natural” human development. I’m sure you’ve pondered this obsession many times over the years.

I have! And you’re right: the Enlightenment was obsessed with states of nature, refining and reinventing the idea of humans as natural beings. The Enlightenment was also obsessed with the boundaries and gradients between “civilization” and “savagery,” between the natural and the social, working to understand in scientific terms the distance between those supposed categories. The philosophes tried to map that distance in both time and space. The European metropole was often cast as the “present,” while places like Pacific islands became the “past.” For a certain kind of emerging thinking, if you wanted to get at natural humanity you needed to strip away the social and technological edifices created by progress and get back to human bedrock. So traveling to societies beyond Europe became understood as a kind of time travel. That worked even if you wanted, like Diderot, to critique Europe. The intellectual enterprise relied on distance and separateness.

Laboratories also rely on distance and separateness, and can leverage that distance to their advantage. In the second half of the 19th century, scientists made labs places where small pieces of nature could be made visible, convincing, and powerful—and soon laboratories became the most prestigious sites of knowledge production. Field scientists began to look for ways to make the wider world, so unruly in its complexity, laboratory-like. These aren’t my observations, this is me citing chapter and verse in the history of science from Bruno Latour and Robert Kohler. But these observations ring true on Pitcairn. The anthropologist Harry Shapiro, who I mentioned, wrote in his diary after his first day on the island in 1935 that he longed for the controllable jars of fruit flies he’d studied in the genetics lab. He’d always been told that Pitcairn would be a perfect laboratory of genetics, but when he arrived he found only messy human entanglements.

It seems like so much of knowledge production for this region has ended up saying as much or more about the observers than the observed. So, if people do want to know more about a place like Pitcairn, where should they go for information? Do you have sources you recommend? Or an approach to learning about distant places that you recommend?

I worry that sometimes folks outside of disciplines like postcolonial studies or science studies see critiques of knowledge and think one of two things: either knowledge production is so hopelessly corrupted by power and positionality that we can’t actually know anything; or, reflexivity and metacritique are just so much navel-gazing that get in the way of actually learning anything. I really understand those concerns. But for Pitcairn, as for most places, knowing how we know things really does help us to get to richer understandings. And in the case of Pitcairn, there’s a bunch of scholars who have produced thoughtful work lately. Pauline Reynolds is a Norfolk Islander who has written terrific material on the histories of tapa cloths, some of which left the islands and ended up in museums and collections around the world. Tillman Nechtman wrote a great book about Joshua Hill, an eccentric adventurer who usurped power on Pitcairn in the 1830s. Sebastian Jablonski is writing terrific work on the ways Americans imagined Pitcairn in the 19th century. There are many more folks I could and should mention. I think what makes their work so good is that they do attend to the ways knowledge and power were threaded together on those islands.

As for approaches to learning, on the research side: I think often of a linguist who worked on Norfolk Island in the middle of the 20th century, Elwyn Flint, who made quite a lot of tape recordings of the language. He discovered that his presence in the room resulted in interviewees constantly shifting back into English. But the more he left Norfolk Islanders to decide how to record their own language, the better the results. Sometimes it was best if he started the tape recorder and left the room entirely. It’s really hard for academics and researchers to imagine leaving the room. One of the hangovers of the Enlightenment is the imperious belief that we academics have the right and obligation to study literally everyone and everything in whatever way we think best. It’s hard to let go of that.

What are your thoughts on Islands and Beaches by Greg Dening?

Thanks for this question—I’m glad my book made you think of Dening’s! I read Islands and Beaches early in my PhD, and it really informed the way I write and think. It offered me a vision of how a writer could be reflexive and critical and humane all at the same time. I came to the Pitcairn/Norfolk project in part because I read Islands and Beaches and then Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language. Certainly there are some ways in which Pacific history and Pacific studies have continued to move on in the last decades, but those continue to be rightly influential books. Where I might depart from Dening is in wondering how much and in what ways we can cross “beaches,” the boundaries where cultures meet. I wonder that both for historical figures who crossed boundaries, and for historians like me, who write about them. Dening wrote that his principal ambition was “to enter the believing selves” of the people about whom he wrote. I don’t know that I can actually get there, but there’s a lot to be gained in trying. And I think there’s a lot to be gained, too, in studying and staying with the messiness of trying to understand.