Modern genetics was born at the beginning of the twentieth century with the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of inheritance. By the middle of the century, a series of critical developments revealed the mechanisms of inheritance. Twentieth-century advances in cell research also made it possible to extract, store, and manipulate cellular material outside the host organism, for specific human purposes. What are the implications of human genetics for the study of humans?
From the beginning, anthropology has usually been taught and practised as a two-sided discipline. On the one hand, it has focused on the comparative study of cultures and societies and, on the other hand, it has addressed the human body, its constitution, forms, evolution and change.
Recently, particularly with the development of the new genetics, the visualizing and mapping of genetic material and the emergence of cell technology, this fragmented disciplinary landscape has been radically altered (Goodman et al. 2003). Not only have the labels ‘genetic’, ‘biological’, and ‘genomic’ anthropology entered the scene, competing with that of ‘physical’ anthropology, also the dividing line itself between body and culture, always a little unclear, has been permanently blurred. Introduced in 1992 to capture both the new understandings of life in the wake of the new genetics and associated changes in concepts of belonging and relatedness, the term "’biosociality’ (Rabinow 2007) has turned out to be useful for fleshing out the manifold implications of genetics.
Refiguring life
Anthropologists are exploring the practices of biological laboratories through both archival and ethnographic research, emphasizing their larger implications for the understanding of life. Some have charted the history of practices associated with cellular research, underlining the fact that the ‘natural’ history of life can now be arrested and restarted at will for experimental and practical ends (Landecker 2007); biotechnology not only redefines the ‘biological’, biological material also has been turned into a cultural tool. The key tools of recombinant DNA work are molecules that operate in the environment of the cell, cutting and splicing genetic material. Nature, then, has been cultured and culture has been naturalized.
This biosocial conflation of the natural and the artificial has paved the way for unprecedented innovations, including those of human cloning, genetic engineering, assisted reproduction, genetic testing, and designer babies. Anthropology has contributed extensively to the ethnographic documentation of some of these developments and their impact on understandings and practices relating to parenthood, health, identity, and kinship.
Genetically informed socialities
Intensive genetic research over the past decades has revealed what are usually seen as the biologically encoded instructions necessary for constructing and maintaining a living example of an organism. What people make of this in different contexts is an important ethnographic question. One form of current gene talk assumes that genetic make-up largely accounts for individual development and characteristics. Along with biotechnological advancements, such a gene-centric perspective has led to the escalation of research on the genes assumed to be implicated in human diseases. A related development is that of ‘biobanking’, the assembly of a variety of medical and genetic information on specific populations, for the purpose of advancing the industrial development of medical remedies. Anthropologists have studied several aspects of these developments, particularly their implications for "biopolitics and the construction of genetic citizenship, notions of belonging informed by genetic theory and practice.
While genes play a role in the onset and development of common diseases, a fact underlined by the biomedical industry and current constructions of genetic socialities, gene-centrism is increasingly being challenged, particularly by proponents of developmental systems theory (Lock 2005). In order to understand human development, it seems essential to go beyond the gene; single genes are part of complex interactive and evolving networks of genes, cells, organism and the environment.
Genetic history and human variation
For anthropology the new genetics is not only a site for exploring new socialities and the blurring of the natural and the cultural, it also invites new opportunities in the exploration of human evolution and history, significantly expanding the discipline’s knowledge and raising new questions about where we come from and how we differ from one another and other primates (Marks 2002). While gene centrism has its limits and our genome doesn’t tell us who we are, DNA provides an important avenue into human history, along with the evidence of archaeology, linguistics, and folk narratives, for the simple reason that our genomes contain the signatures of our parents. Genetic studies have redefined the old and highly contested issue of race. By focusing on the properties of genetic markers they have largely removed physical signatures, in particular skin colour, from the scene. Much depends, however, on the ways in which genetic studies demarcate ‘populations’ (Palsson 2007). Some studies seem to reintroduce race on the agenda on genetic terms through circular reasoning about boundaries and sampling. The exploration of genomic differences is necessarily politically and ethically charged.
Some scholars define ‘anthropological genetics’ (in contrast to ‘human genetics’) in terms of its emphasis on small, non-Western populations (Crawford 2007: 79). For many anthropologists, however, this seems a too narrow definition. Anthropologists dealing with genomic issues are not only working in a range of contexts, north and south, also they are playing a variety of roles, within universities, laboratories, public and private agencies, and biomedical companies.
