Identity Politics and the New Genetics This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Studies of the Biosocial Society General Editor: Catherine Panter-Brick, Professor of Anthropology, University of Durham The Biosocial Society is an international academic society engaged in fostering understanding of human biological and social diversity. It draws its membership from a wide range of academic disciplines, particularly those engaged in ‘boundary disciplines’ at the intersection between the natural and social sciences, such as biocultural anthropology, medical sociology, demography, social medicine, the history of science and bioethics. The aim of this series is to promote interdisciplinary research on how biology and society interact to shape human experience and to serve as advanced texts for undergraduate and postgraduate students. Volume 1 Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics Edited by Peter Wade Volume 2 Health, Risk and Adversity Edited by Catherine Panter-Brick and Agustin Fuentes Volume 3 Substitute Parents: Biological and Social Perspectives on Alloparenting in Human Societies Edited by Gillian Bentley and Ruth Mace Volume 4 Centralizing Fieldwork: Critical Perspectives from Primatology, Biological and Social Anthropology Edited by Jeremy MacClancy and Agustín Fuentes Volume 5 Human Diet and Nutrition in Biocultural Perspective: Past Meets Present Edited by Tina Moffat and Tracy Prowse Volume 6 Identity Politics and the New Genetics Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging Edited by Katharina Schramm, David Skinner and Richard Rottenburg This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Identity Politics and the New Genetics Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging Edited by Katharina Schramm, David Skinner and Richard Rottenburg Berghahn Books New York • Oxford This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. First published in 2012 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2012 Katharina Schramm, David Skinner and Richard Rottenburg Open Access ebook edition published in 2019 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Identity politics and the new genetics : re/creating categories of difference and belonging / edited by Katharina Schramm, David Skinner, and Richard Rottenburg. p. cm. -- (Studies of the biosocial society v.6) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-253-5 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-254-2 (ebook) 1. Human population genetics. 2. Race. 3. DNA. 4. Genomics. 5. Genetic engineering. I. Schramm, Katharina. II. Skinner, David, 1960- III. Rottenburg, Richard. GN289.I34 2011 576.5’8--dc23 2011029419 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-85745-253-5 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-471-1 open access ebook An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books Open Access for the public good. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at knowledgeunlatched.org. This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. license. The terms of the license can be found athttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . For uses beyond those covered in the license contact Berghahn Books. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction. Ideas in Motion: Making Sense of Identity 1 Katharina Schramm, David Skinner and Richard Rottenburg 1. ‘Race’ as a Social Construction in Genetics 30 Andrew Smart, Richard Tutton, Paul Martin and George T.H. Ellison 2. Mobile Identities and Fixed Categories: Forensic DNA and the 53 Politics of Racialized Data David Skinner 3. Race, Kinship and the Ambivalence of Identity 79 Peter Wade 4. Identity, DNA and the State in Post-Dictatorship Argentina 97 Noa Vaisman 5. ‘Do You Have Celtic, Jewish or Germanic Roots?’ Applied Swiss 116 History before and after DNA Marianne Sommer 6. Irish DNA: Making Connections and Making Distinctions in 141 Y-Chromosome Surname Studies Catherine Nash 7. Genomics en Route: Ancestry, Heritage and the Politics of 167 Identity across the Black Atlantic Katharina Schramm 8. Biotechnological Cults of Affliction? Race, Rationality and 193 Enchantment in Personal Genomic Histories Stephan Palmié Notes on Contributors 213 Index 217 This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Acknowledgements n the summer of 2007 some of the authors who are assembled in this volume Imet for a workshop on ‘Race, Ethnicity, Genetics’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. The workshop was organized by Katharina Schramm and generously sponsored by the ‘Asia and Africa in World Reference Systems’ Graduate School (now the ‘Societies and Cultures in Motion’ Graduate School) of the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg as well as by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the Research Group Law, Organization, Science and Technology (LOST) in particular. Our thanks go to these institutional bodies for making our convention possible. The workshop benefited greatly from the contributions of all participants. Special thanks go to Suman Seth and Ina Kerner, who enriched our discussion tremendously but who are not represented here. Michi Knecht and Eliza Slavet joined our conversation for some time as well. Thanks go to Michi Knecht for inviting Katharina Schramm to participate in a conference on ‘Genealogical Practices’, which took place at the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-University Berlin, in December 2007. In March 2008 David Skinner and Katharina Schramm held a workshop at the Justice and Communities Research Unit (JACRU) of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, entitled ‘Genetics, Culture and Ethnic Identity: A Multi-Disciplinary Symposium’. We thank Bronwen Walter and Peter Forster for contributing to this event and to all participants who took part in our discussions there. David Skinner would also like to thank Sahra Gibbon and colleagues for the invitation to participate in the workshop ‘Genetic Admixture and Identity in Latin America’ held at University College London in February 2009. We are very grateful to the ‘Studies of the Biosocial Society’ series editor Catherine Panter-Brick who embraced our project from the very beginning with great enthusiasm. Ann Przyzycki at the Berghahn Books office in New York offered prompt advice whenever the need occurred. Many thanks go to Jos Lammerts who communicated back and forth with our authors and helped us with the tedious job of formatting and indexing the manuscript. The pertinent comments of our two anonymous reviewers encouraged us to sharpen the arguments pursued in this book. We hope that we did justice to them. Katharina Schramm, David Skinner and Richard Rottenburg September 2010 This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction. Ideas in Motion: Making Sense of Identity 1 Katharina Schramm, David Skinner and Richard Rottenburg 1. ‘Race’ as a Social Construction in Genetics 30 Andrew Smart, Richard Tutton, Paul Martin and George T.H. Ellison 2. Mobile Identities and Fixed Categories: Forensic DNA and the 53 Politics of Racialized Data David Skinner 3. Race, Kinship and the Ambivalence of Identity 79 Peter Wade 4. Identity, DNA and the State in Post-Dictatorship Argentina 97 Noa Vaisman 5. ‘Do You Have Celtic, Jewish or Germanic Roots?’ Applied Swiss 116 History before and after DNA Marianne Sommer 6. Irish DNA: Making Connections and Making Distinctions in 141 Y-Chromosome Surname Studies Catherine Nash 7. Genomics en Route: Ancestry, Heritage and the Politics of 167 Identity across the Black Atlantic Katharina Schramm 8. Biotechnological Cults of Affliction? Race, Rationality and 193 Enchantment in Personal Genomic Histories Stephan Palmié Notes on Contributors 213 Index 217 This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. IntroductIon Ideas in Motion Making Sense of Identity Politics and the New Genetics1 Katharina Schramm, David Skinner and Richard Rottenburg ontemporary politics of identity are often marked by a high level of emotional and cpolitical commitment on the part of the actors involved, and they remain a site of continuous contestation. not only are they influenced by various historical ‘presences’, to borrow a phrase from Stuart Hall (1990), or by their respective social, economic or religious intersections, they are also inspired by developments in the life sciences. The sequencing of the human genome has been a decisive step in this direction, propelling old nature/nurture debates into a new terrain. How genetic, environmental and social factors interact in the production of life, in people’s susceptibility to certain diseases or, in a more general sense, in the making of persons and relations has increasingly become an issue of debate.