The Nature/Culture of Genetic Facts

Abstract

This review aims to explore the relationship between anthropology and genetics, an intellectual zone that has been occupied in different ways over the past century. One way to think about it is to contrast a classical "anthropological genetics" (Roberts 1965), that is to say, a genetics that presumably informs anthropological issues or questions, with a "genomic anthropology" (Pálsson 2008), that is to say, an anthropology that complements and relativizes modern genomics (on the model of, say, medical anthropology and legal anthropology). 1 This review argues that a principal contribution of anthropology to the study of human heredity lies in the ontology of genetic facts. For anthropology, genetic facts are not natural, with meanings inscribed on them, but are instead natural/cultural: The natural facts have cultural information (values, ideologies, meanings) integrated into them, not layered on them. To understand genetic facts involves confronting their production, which has classically been restricted to questions of methodology but which may be conceptualized more broadly. This review is not intended as a critique of the field of anthropological genetics, but as a reformulation of its central objects of study. I argue for reconceptualizing the ontology of scientific facts in anthropological genetics, not as (value-neutral) biological facts situated in a cultural context, but instead as inherently biocultural facts.

In vino veritas? Indigenous wine and indigenization in Israeli settlements

“…Through the lens of winemaking, it tracks how wine production also mediates a collective indigenous identity and helps to establish a historical imaginary that underpins the modern nation state, and consequently forms part of broader processes which naturalize a Jewish presence. This work, therefore, speaks to conversations in the anthropology of nature and to science and technology studies pertaining to the production of indigenous belonging (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009;Kravel-Tovi 2015;Marks 2013;Seeman 2010;Weiss 2004).…”

Discussing the Biocultural Approach to Race

“…Articles in this journal have repeatedly shown that science educators and students are interested in, feed on, and contribute to theoretical considerations when conveyed at an appropriate level of complexity. There is a wealth of contributions the discussion of which would certainly strengthen and broaden the perspective of this book and would encourage readers to think along these lines on issues such as gender or human sexuality (see, e.g., Fuentes 2012; Goodman and Leatherman 1998;Goodman et al 2003;Marks 2013a;Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997).…”

An informational taxonomy of race-ideation

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