Ethnographic Approaches to Race, Genetics

In recent years, there has been a technological advance and commercial boom in genetic technologies and projects, including a renewed scientific interest in the biological status and genetic constitution of race. This article provides an overview of sociological approaches to the study of race and genetics, and argues that these analyses should pay detailed critical attention to laypeople’s engagements with the new genetic technologies. Drawing upon growing bodies of ethnographic literature within anthropology, geography and sociology, this paper unravels the complex and ambivalent ways in which laypeople think about the biological and genetic constitution of racial identities. Two specific bodies of literature are examined. First, the new kinship studies within anthropology that explores laypeople’s engagements with the new reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization. Second, laypeople’s uses of genealogical technologies that claim to trace family ancestries, including racial descent and ethnic origins. Over the last 20 years there has been a technological advance and commercial boom in genetic technologies and projects. These developments include a renewed scientific interest in the biological status and genetic constitution of race. This aspect of genetic research is of interest to sociologists and others working in the field of race and ethnicity studies. The consensus among sociologists is that race is a social construction with no biological foundations. Indeed, to emphasize this point, many sociologists write the term ‘race’ in scare quotes. Yet, sociologists and others continue to document the significance of assumptions and practices founded upon a belief in the existence of race and races. The meaning of race and the ways in which it defines population groups and individuals as ‘self’ and ‘other’ is historically and geographically contingent and so is open to transformation over time and across space (Goldberg 1993). It is precisely the adaptive capacity of the concept of race that allows it to assign to population groups ideas of humanity, similarity and difference. While accepting that the idea of race is historically contingent, there is a general acceptance by sociologists and anthropologists that ideas of racial difference draw upon notions of phenotype, hereditary, nature and culture (see Bulmer and Solomos 1999; Wade 2002 for overviews of the history of race). The 18th and 19th centuries have been identified by scholars as a period of scientific racism, whereby physical differences such as skin colour, hair type and body shape were taken as markers of absolute biological differences giving weight to the idea that one race was biologically superior to other racial groups. After the Second World War, sociologists identified a ‘new racism’ (Barker 1981), whereby cultural differences, such as food, family formation, language, religion and so on were thought to create distinctions between so-called races (Gilroy 1987; Wetherell and Potter 1992). Many writers insist that the idea of racial differentiation, even if expressed in cultural terms, implies a commitment to the idea of biological distinction rooted and fixed in nature (Goldberg 1999). In other words, the post World War language of culture was often mobilised to construct and represent innate properties of groups akin to biological differences (Malik 1996). In short, the social construction of race and racism oscillates between ‘the warring domains of Culture and Nature’