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DNA and cultures of remembrance: Anthropological genetics, biohistories and biosocialities

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Abstract

The article engages current human population genetic research or anthropological genetics with an emphasis on its popular forms. A general discussion of the production of biohistories on the basis of DNA analyses is elaborated by focusing on what I call the Genographic network: the Genographic Project and the associated genetic ancestry companies as well as book and film productions. In order to gain an understanding of the specificity of what is also referred to as genetic history, the development of notions such as a genetic heritage, the gene as historical document, and the DNA as archive of history are briefly treated, before approaching the recent commercializations and medializations of group-specific and personalized genetic history and identity. It is here that the challenge of joining history and DNA becomes most evident: on the one hand, the genetic knowledge is presented as particularly authentic and accurate on the basis of its epistemic objects and quantitative and technological approaches. On the other hand, in order for biohistorical identities and socialities to form, the knowledge needs to be rendered in a narrative, esthetically appealing way. This also points to differences vis-à-vis medical genomics in that neither anthropological genetics, nor the biosocialities it facilitates, are oriented towards hope for future health solutions. In offering supposedly purely anthropological knowledge about who we are and where we come from, anthropological genetics is part of backward-looking socialities. It is part of cultures of remembrance.

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Notes

  1. On the concept of the genetic citizen, see Heath et al (2004).

  2. The literature on ‘memory’, and on particular national, regional, religious and ethnic practices of remembering and forgetting (certain events), is considerable. Historiographical and systematic overviews are provided by Olick and Robbins (1998), Erll (2005), Assmann (2006), and Roediger and Wertsch (2008).

  3. See Markowitsch, 2002, pp. 56, 184; Welzer, 2002, p. 175; for an overview of the scientific concepts of ‘memory’ see Roediger et al, 2007; for similarities between individual and collective memory see also Poole (2008).

  4. For an engagement with applied history in this sense, see Hardtwig and Schug (2009).

  5. See, for example, Squier (2008).

  6. All of these are regular topics in Nature reviews genetics. For a particularly revealing treatment see Bolnick (2008).

  7. The expression ‘personalized genetic histories’ has been introduced by Mark Shriver and Rick Kittles, both geneticists and associated with a genetic ancestry tracing company (Shriver and Kittles, 2004).

  8. For a recent interdisciplinary study carried out in Rio de Janeiro on the mutual impacts of genetic information and self-perception with regard to skin color and race, see Santos et al (2009).

  9. These foci are: North America (Theodore Schurr, University of Pennsylvania), South America (Fabricio R. Santos, University of Minas Gerais, Brasilien), Europe (Jaume Bertranpetit and David Comas, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, and Lluis Quintana-Murci, Pasteur Institute, Paris), the Middle East and North Africa (Pierre A. Zalloua, American University of Beirut, Libanon), sub-Saharan Africa (Himla Soodyall, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa), India (Ramasamy Pitchappan, Madurai Kamaraj University), the former Soviet Union and Central Asia (Elena Balanovska, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences), East Asia (Li Jin, Fudan University Shanghai), Australia and New Zealand (Robert John Mitchell, La Trobe University), and Alan Cooper, University of Adelaide, for fossil DNA. The aim is to collect 10 000 samples per region until the year 2010.

  10. See Nash (2007) on the Genographic Project; Reardon (2007) on the HapMap Project.

  11. See genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/index.html, accessed 11 May 2009.

  12. However, the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism remains skeptical. The question of who can give what kind of consent has not been settled. Neither is it clear what the standards of ‘informed’ are and how they can be guaranteed. Also, the fear that genetic history might undermine privileges associated with ‘aboriginality’ remains. And there have been mistakes. In the case of Alaska, the Genographic Project has failed to gain the approval of the Alaska Area Institutional Review Board and had to return samples and suspend the project (Reardon, forthcoming).

  13. As genealogical DNA tests mostly concern what are taken to be non-functional regions of the genome, they generally do not provide medical information. However, they may do so by correlation, as in the case of the lack of certain DNA Y chromosome Segment (DYS) markers that are considered to correlate with infertility or the correlation between mtDNA haplogroup H and protection from sepsis. Thus, medical predispositions and genetic disorders might become increasingly correlated with genealogical (mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal) lineages, and the turn towards genome-wide (and full mtDNA) analyses in both genealogical and medical tests will further entangle medical and historical information. Most importantly, in admixture mapping, disease and ancestry are explicitly linked in that populations who are assumed to have ‘admixed’ recently enough are analyzed for portions of the genome with significant linkage disequilibrium that are informative of ancestry (ancestry informative markers) and associated with disease susceptibilities. Ancestry informative markers are also used in commercial ancestry tracing purportedly determining a customer's different biogeographical ancestries in percentages. These autosomal (concerning the recombining and partially functional nuclear DNA) tests are for example said to provide percentages of sub-Saharan African, European/Near Eastern, East Asian and Native American ancestry (see DNA Print Genomics). The company 23andMe, besides medical information, offers all available ancestry tests, including the analysis of ‘half a million locations’ on the autosomes.

  14. For an overview of existing companies, see Greely, 2007.

  15. See www.ibdna.com/regions/UK/EN/?page=recreationalgenetics, accessed 11 May 2009.

  16. See www.africandna.com/history.aspx, accessed 27 November 2008.

  17. The ensuing discussion of iGenea is informed by an open interview and email communication between the company manager and the author, and by the analyses of websites, web-blogs and discussion forums, as well as by participation in the database-based genetic kinship service.

  18. See www.igenea.ch/index.php?c=48, accessed 27 November 2008.

  19. For a discussion of historical cultures along the lines of a political, cognitive and esthetic dimension, see Rüsen, 1994a, 1994b (pp. 211–258).

  20. See www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/; www.nationalgeographic.de/php/entdecken/genographic/genographic_index.htm; www-03.ibm.com/industries/healthcare/genographic/us/index.html; www.familytreedna.com/ftdna_genographic.html. The National Geographic-housed website alone means potential access to the 285 million National Geographic readers as well as to the consumers of the National Geographic Society's TV channel, home-made movies, DVDs, inhouse-published books and so on.

  21. Wells's documentary The Journey of Man: The Story of the Human Species was first broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) (January 2003), but National Geographic: The Human Family Tree (2009) and additional films in progress will be distributed directly via the National-Geographic channel. The first documentary followed the book: Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (Princeton 2002).

  22. See, for example, My time in history blog! (for example, www.kracke.org/blog/?p=59, accessed 28 November 2008) and the iGenea-Forum (for example, www.igenea.ch/index.php?content=132&st=1, accessed 28 November 2008).

  23. See www.kracke.org/blog/?p=47#comments, accessed 28 November 2008. Benedict Anderson emphasizes the importance of a shared language for the formation of imagined communities: ‘Through that language, encountered at mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed’ (Anderson, 2006, (1983), p. 154).

  24. This is most wonderfully accomplished by the geneticist Bryan Sykes, who owns the UK-based genetic ancestry company, Oxford Ancestors, the services of which he provides with seemingly irresistible stories in his popular books (Sommer, 2008b; Sommer, forthcoming).

  25. See www.igenea.com/index.php?c=04, accessed 14 May 2010; see, for example, also iGenea-Forum ‘Vikings’, www.igenea.ch/index.php?content=132&st=147, accessed 20 October 2008.

  26. Message posted by iGenea to the online-forum ‘Ex-Jugoslawien/Mazedonien/Serbien/Kroatien/Albanien/Montenegro/Bosnien’ on 15 February 2008, see www.igenea.ch/index.php?content=132&st=25, accessed 27 November 2008, my translation.

  27. Through the iGenea service, ‘the ex-Mister Switzerland Renzo’ Blumenthal, this essence of ‘Swissness’, has been given a Scottish ancestry (eleventh und twelfth century). Blumenthal easily accepts this new identity, posing in a kilt with bagpipes and all, even though he embodies the myth of the Helvetians as a people of peasants and herders who have acquired their hardy character in a rough life in the mountainous country – Blumenthal speaks the old language of Rhaeto-Romanic still found in parts of his alpine home region, the Grisons (Vella im Val Lumnezia), where he lives with his cows of the Swiss Brown breed (Bieler, 2007, pp. 6–9).

  28. On the importance of history for the national self-affirmation of younger nations in Africa, Asia, and Europe; see, for example, Schörken (1995, p. 107 on the Republic of Macedonia). The news about the genetic history of present-day Macedonians appeared on several nationalist websites and programs.

  29. See www.igenea.ch/index.php?content=21, accessed 14 May 2010.

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Sommer, M. DNA and cultures of remembrance: Anthropological genetics, biohistories and biosocialities. BioSocieties 5, 366–390 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2010.19

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