As John Hartigan (2008) has put it, race "is gaining in reality." This article takes stock of a growing corpus of literature on race and the "molecularization" of difference (Duster 2005; Fullwiley 2007), showing how the new genetics has simultaneously reified old categories of race and produced novel configurations of differences (Reardon 2005; M'charek 2008; Nash 2005; Abu El-Haj 2007; Fullwiley 2007; Montoya 2007). Sparked by ongoing genomic research, I contribute to the debate on race as either a biological fact or a social construction (Palmié 2007; Koenig, Lee, and Richardson 2008; Hartigan 2009), rephrasing the problem in terms of fact versus fiction.This allows me to go beyond the binary distinction between the biological and the social, not by claiming that race contains a bit of both solid biology/fact and construction/fiction, but by showing that race is a relational object. The so-called biology of race is an emergent configuration of a variety of relations that go well beyond the somatic body. Looking at race in this way shows that first, the boundary between the "biological" and the "social" is not given or stable but one that is enacted in practices. Second, and in line with this, facts and fictions themselves are not pregiven entities. Depending on the practice considered, a previous fact might become a fiction and vice versa. To be sure, as James Clifford (1986) argues, fiction has lost its connotation of falsehood. Fictions are "partial truths," referring crucially to something both made and made up. Facts and how they are made enjoy ongoing attention in anthropology (of science) and science and technology studies (STS) while fictions are neglected.

ABSTRACT

Given their commitment to practices, science studies have bestowed considerable attention upon objects. We have the boundary object, the standardized package, the network object, the immutable mobile, the fluid object, even a fire object has entered the scene. However, these objects do not provide us with a way of understanding their historicity. They are timeless, motionless pictures rather than things that change over time, and while enacting ‘historical moments’ they do not make visible the histories they contain within them. What kind of object could embody history and make that history visible? Inspired by Michel Serres, I suggest the folded object is a way to attend to the temporality and spatiality of objects. In this article I explore this new object by unravelling the history of a DNA reference sequence. I show how, ever since it was produced in the early 1980s, attempts have been made to filter race out of the sequence. That effort has failed due to what one could call ‘political noise’. Making and remaking the sequence have left traces that cannot be erased.

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