In the past 20 years, a number of biotechnological practices have emerged around the field known as “human population genetics.” Transnationally framed scientific initiatives such as the Genographic Project or the HapMap Project have sought to identify genetic variation across world populations. Ancient human remains are increasingly subjected to DNA analysis to gain knowledge about human prehistory. Commercial genetic ancestry tests are marketed widely as a way of discovering our personal evolutionary roots. Nation-states have established their own genetic projects to identify molecular-level variation within the national population. A growing number of biobanks are being launched to facilitate the development of what is hoped to become personalized medicine. Pharmaceutical drugs are marketed to particular racialized groups based on the assumption that populations respond differently to pharmaceutical substances. Criminal investigations are using DNA in the hope of identifying the ethnic background of the suspect who left their DNA at the crime scene. These diverse population genetic practices shape human lives and societies on manifold levels, including personal, communal , institutional, economic, national, and transnational spheres of social organization and existence.
What is particularly striking about these biotechnological practices is the multiple ways in which they invoke emotions or become entangled with political questions. For example, the use of forensic DNA analysis and forensic genetic databases in criminal investigation may support a politics of surveillance and fear; commercial genetic ancestry tests may generate powerful emotional experiences of rootedness and exciting discovery; and the genetic analysis of ancient human remains may appear as serving a shared need to trace the footsteps of early humans, and thus as ideologically neutral. How does population genetics yield such a range of biotechnological practices? How can it be mobilized to enact mutually conflicting social, cultural, and epistemic projects? Why does population genetics become integrated so easily into mutually contradictory narratives of belonging, and why tensions between those narratives seldom attract attention?
My book addresses these questions in the context of nonmedical population genetics, that is, population genetic research and practices that seek to understand human evolutionary ancestry. The book focuses on an issue at the heart of nonmedical population genetics: belonging. Population genetics is about establishing connection between modern humans and prehistoric populations. By tracing the inheritance and gradual mutation of ancestral molecular structures—particular mitochondrial or Y-chromosome haplogroups , for example—population genetics seeks to locate geographic sites of origins, foundational moments of prehistoric migration , or events that led to the divergence of human populations. In doing so, population genetics produces roots, ties, and belonging. Furthermore, population genetics is about measuring variation among modern populations. By identifying, for example, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs ; pronounced “snips”)—that is, specific loci in the human genome where people vary—population genetics seeks to place modern human populations within the wider patterns of human evolution. While we all belong to the rest of the natural world through our genetic roots, modern human populations belong differently to specific geographic sites or evolutionary landscapes. Likewise, some populations emerge as more closely connected to one another than others. Seen from this vantage point, population genetics produces temporally and geographically organized webs of belonging. Yet, as the range of practices drawing on population genetics demonstrates, this web of belonging is ontologically multiple in that it is enacted differently (Mol 2002) at various cultural and technoscientific sites.
Population Genetics and Belonging interrogates this organizing ambiguity of population genetic belonging. The book argues that analyzing this ambiguity is pivotal to understanding how population genetics is shaping belonging and our ways of relating to each other. Science studies and critical social studies literature has explored extensively the ways in which population genetic practices may shore up problematic assumptions about racial differences (e.g. Hinterberger 2012; Koenig et al. 2008; Reardon 2005; TallBear 2013; Wailoo et al. 2012; Wald 2006; Whitmarsh and Jones 2010). While some scholars locate conservative politics in societal applications of population genetics, such as the use of forensic DNA in criminal investigation, others have argued that population geneticists’ way of conceptualizing variation through geographically localized populations is in itself inseparable from the idea of distinct, biologically grounded races. These critical analyses have provided analytically insightful and culturally important ways of evaluating the role of population genetics in society, and they inform my discussions throughout the book. However, I approach the connection between population genetics and politics from a somewhat different angle: I highlight the ambivalence of population genetics as a tool for political and cultural projects. Both population genetic research and its societal applications are ontologically blurry and affectively manifold, with the result that population genetics can be invoked to support mutually contradictory political and cultural imaginaries. Indeed, this affective and epistemic ambiguity is precisely why population genetics resonates so widely across culture and society. In the chapters that follow, I trace the ways in which population genetics simultaneously both expands and curtails the ways in which belonging can be imagined and enacted in technoscientific societies.
Situating the Book
Population genetic projects emerged as objects of extensive critical analysis especially in the early years of the new millennium. This scholarly interest arose largely from the public debates in the 1990s surrounding the Human Genome Diversity Project —the “sister project” of the Human Genome Project —that intended to turn the scientific attention from human sameness to variation. Jenny Reardon’s book Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics and Amade M’charek’s book The Human Genome Diversity Project: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice, both published in 2005, were groundbreaking in their detailed explorations of the Human Genome Diversity Project . Reardon and M’charek both interrogate the complex entanglement of population and race in population genetic research on human diversity. While Reardon explores the underlying politics of the Human Genome Diversity Project through public debates, policies, statements, and practices, M’charek investigates how population genetic knowledges are produced in the lab.
In the past few years, when my book was already far along in the process of becoming a book-length manuscript, several new books on population genetics have appeared. Kim TallBear’s Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (2013) examines how population genetics has sought to define Native American genetic ancestry. TallBear evaluates critically the implications of population genetic research and its commercialized applications for Native American communities, emphasizing the incompatibility of the idea of genetic belonging and Native American concepts of belonging . Alondra Nelson’s The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (2016) explores how African Americans have embraced population genetic technologies such as genetic ancestry tests to establish roots in Africa beyond the devastating history of slavery, and how they use those roots to their own personal and communal ends. Focusing on social and communal practices, Nelson’s study makes visible the often-creative ways in which members of communities invoke and appropriate population genetic technologies. Marianne Sommer’s History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules (2016) situates the work of the famous population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza within the history of evolutionary biology in the long twentieth century. Through the metaphor of “history within,” Sommer identifies patterns and shifts between population genetics and earlier scientific approaches to how organisms embody past evolutionary history. Catherine Nash’s Genetic Geographies: The Trouble with Ancestry (2015) interrogates how population genetics has naturalized ideas of racial, national, and sexual difference. Building on cultural geography, Nash analyzes how relatedness is produced through the interplay of ideas of shared and unique ancestry. My book resonates with all of these works, but especially with Nash’s book. Yet our approaches differ in crucial ways. While Nash approaches population genetics through the analytical lens of geographic space, I approach it through the analytical lens of temporality. While space and time are entangled in evolutionary processes (see Oikkonen 2015), the spatial and temporal lenses make visible different aspects of how population genetics is shaping belonging.
Population Genetics and Belonging focuses on processes of change through which population genetics becomes naturalized as an epistemically privileged way of understanding ancestry and kinship in a range of cultural practices. In order to capture such processes, the book seeks to identify gradual shifts, abrupt changes, persistent patterns, as well as underlying continuities in how roots and relatedness are imagined and enacted from the late 1980s until recent years. However, the book is not a history of population genetics. I approach transformations through selected case studies rather than a systematic historical approach. The case studies center on affective, narrative, and technological shifts that have molded cultural ideas and social categories of belonging. In this, Population Genetics and Belonging builds on and develops further the analysis of narrative transformation that I engaged in in my previous book Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives (...