Genomics, divination, “racecraft”

Abstract

The new genomics has begun to play an increasing role in the arbitration of social identities. By facilitating the transcription of older notions that heritable substances determine identity and relatedness into a novel biotic idiom supposedly beyond social maneuver, this molecular–biological knowledge stakes out claims in the domain of the historical. Arguing from the highly publicized case of the genomic “resolution” of the question of Thomas Jefferson's paternity of his slave Sally Hemings's children and from the emergence of commercial personal genomic history services targeting African American consumers, I seek to expose the epistemological and methodological problems inherent in biotechnologically driven “ancestry projects” (however oppositional and empowering they may be in certain cases). I also aim to show how the divinatory logic of applications of genomic technologies of knowledge production to the validation of modes of social identification replicates racial essentialisms such as U.S. ideologies of hypodescent in a manner oddly reminiscent of the “invisible essences” that, according to classic ethnographic descriptions, underlie systems of witchcraft detection.

The Democratic, Anti-Racist Genome? Technoscience at the Limits of Liberalism

“…Some have suggested not an old, but a 'new' or 'flexible' eugenics (Paul, 1995;Taussig et al, 2003). Others set aside the term 'eugenics' altogether to ask whether genomic renderings of human identity might represent something else entirely: divination (Palmié, 2007); conscription (Montoya, 2007); or affiliative self-fashioning (Nelson, 2008). Although guided by this new work, here I am less concerned with deciding what genomic practices of freedom might be, and more with describing the specific problems they poseboth for genome scientists and their subjects.…”

“…HapMap organizers made important first efforts to fight this modern predilection to purify-in this case, science from power (Latour, 1993). However, their efforts faltered as they failed to recognize that the problem human genomics poses is not the liberal one of undue concentration of power, as some recent work has suggested (Palmié, 2007). Thus, their efforts to relinquish power to their subjects through democratizing their practice not only produced no gains (either scientific or democratic), but led to new problems.…”

American Genomics in Barbados: Race, Illness, and Pleasure in the Science of Personalized Medicine

“…On what is peculiarly American about the genomics of race, see Palmié (2007) and Helmreich's (2007) commentary on Palmié. 9. For a recent theorization of the continued significance of 'culture' as an analytic for medical anthropology, see Mattingly (2008).…”

De/geneticizing Caste: Population Genetic Research in South Asia

“…Indeed, population based DNA tests have recently been used in a wide range of studies from those exploring differences to drug response between populations (Fausto-Sterling 2004, Kahn 2004, to research aimed at helping historians in deciphering the history of groups with 'mysterious origins' (Brodwin 2002, Davis 2004, Elliott 2003, Johnston 2003, Parfitt and Egorova 2006. Some scholars are concerned that in light of these studies, differences between populations are increasingly explained in biological rather than sociocultural or political terms (Palmie 2007, Reardon 2005, Skinner 2006), or as Troy Duster (2005) has put it, population genetics has led to a 'biological reinscription of race'. At the same time, Nikolas Rose (2007: 167) hesitates to conclude that we are witnessing the rise of new genetic determinism, suggesting that current debates over race and genomics should be located within the biopolitics of the twenty-first century that 'does not seek to legitimate inequality but to intervene upon its consequences'.…”