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Genomics, Divination, “Racecraft”

Stephan Palmié, University of Chicago

The Holocaust did happen. Elvis is gone. And Thomas Jefferson

fathered Sally Hemings’ children.

Mary Jefferson as cited in U.S. News and Word Report

4/23/2001

As to who is a Negro in the United States, I have come to the

conclusion after long and careful thought that to be an expert on

that subject the first qualification is to be crazy. Only those who

are able to throw all logic, all reasoning to the winds, can ever

hope to be authorities on that matter.

J. A. Rogers. The World’s Greatest Men of Color.

A few months after my wife and I had moved into an apartment in Takoma, Washington,

D.C. in the summer of 1997, our neighbor, Donald Washington asked us if we had ever

met a white person with the last name Washington. After some hesitation, and somewhat

to our own surprise, we found ourselves answering in the negative. Having anticipated

our reply, our neighbor then began to enlighten us about what he thought was an

incontrovertible fact – viz. that the majority of the Washingtons in the District of

Columbia were black descendants of the first president of the United States. Upon the

end of slavery, they had simply appropriated the name of the man who had denied

legitimacy to the children he had sired with enslaved women, and so not only deprived

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them of the immediate privileges of free birth, but of the lasting ones of presidential

descent as well.

Were one to give credence to my neighbor’s theory1, the more than 350 entries for

the surname Washington in the D.C. phonebook – of which at least two thirds could then

be localized in notionally “black” neighborhoods – would not only bespeak the existence

of a tradition of systematically disqualified knowledge, but (and equally in Foucault’s

sense), testify to the heterogeneity of those fictions which tend to represent themselves as

facts of monolithic origins, and so as legitimations of the privileges derivative thereof. At

the same time, however, this anecdote illustrates a classical anthropological issue that

continues to weigh heavy on the minds of students in anthropological introductory

classes. For it provides a striking demonstration of the fact that the notion of “biological”

(i.e. principally folk-Mendelian, cognatic) descent, common and legally operative as it is

in most Western societies today, represents only one among a multitude of known

cultural mechanisms by which human individuals are recruited into social categories and

collectivities. At least in the case at hand, the so-called principle of hypo-descent, i.e. the

exclusion of individuals with known African (or, perhaps better: “black”) ancestry from

collectivities self-defined as “white”, crucial as it historically was for the formation of

“racial” collectivities in North America, continues to inform the public genealogical

imagination; and it does so by guaranteeing the “unthinkability” of kinship relations

between George Washington and individuals socially classified as “black”. This is, of

course, not just a taxonomic issue. Rather, what we are facing is an instance of those truly

imponderable, indeed axiomatic forms of social “memory loss” which anthropologists

1 Perhaps not surprisingly, Bryant (2004) has recently added certain weight to it. See also www.westfordlegcy.com.

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have long been wont to describe as the results of “structural amnesia” and assign

considerable importance in the reproduction in kinship-based social formations2. For in

contrast to “phenotypically oriented” or situative practices of allocating “racial identities”

(characteristic, as they are said to be for Latin American societies), in the US, the social

phenomenon of “whiteness” (of which “presidentiality” to this day forms a sub-category)

reproduces itself not just in accordance to strictly dichotomous descent ideologies, but

through steady processes of out-defining or dis-enrollment. Hence the common wisdom,

largely valid in the U.S. until to the advent of gestational surrogacy, that a white woman

could give birth to a black child, whereas a black woman could never give birth to a

white one – a cultural fact that all too obviously recalls the ostensibly paradoxical manner

in which members of societies with unilineal kinship systems are apt to banish from their

genealogies people whom we would readily regard as their biological ascendants.

That this is not merely a cognitive, but political problem is easy to demonstrate in

both cases. As Stuckert (1976) has pointed out in an ingenuous statistical extrapolation

from historical records, by the time of the 1970 U.S. census, some 24% of all persons

listed as “white” might reasonably have been presumed to have had African ancestors,

while more than 80% of all “blacks” would have had non-African ancestors. Transformed

into numerical values, this means nothing less than that the overwhelming majority of all

Americans of African ancestry – i.e. about 42 millions at the time – had not been counted

into the black population (which then stood at 22 millions), but classified as white. Put

differently, there were (and surely still are) almost double the number of “white” 2 To pick a famous case, if every Nuer man is potentially the founder of a lineage, and if Nuer lineages are always full of assimilated Dinka, then some mechanism of systematic forgetting (e.g.Evans-Pritchard 1940:199-200) must operate to keep a.) the lineage “system” from atomizing, and b.) merging into what it (notionally) is not. Cf. Barnes (1947), Bohannon (1952), or Turner (1957).

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Americans of African descent as “black” ones (cf. Palmié 2002). The “mark one or more”

option in Census 2000 notwithstanding, this, however, is no less admissible to current

U.S. folk demographics (including those statistical representations to which lay

demographic consciousness tends to react) than it would be for members of, say, a

society with a matrilineal kinship system to grant paternal title or inheritance rights to one

of its members on juridically principled (and so, among other things, structural) grounds.

What speaks for such an interpretation in the case of my neighbor’s theories is

that in the U.S. such – systemically necessary – blind spots or dark zones of genealogical

consciousness can only be illuminated in individual cases, and even then, only by means

of the seemingly extrapolitical authority of scientific expert discourse. As I will argue

below, this moment recalls another time hallowed anthropological theme – viz. the

rationality of divination. For much like the classical oracular systems on ethnographic

record, certain genomically enhanced practices of genealogical identity arbitration in

contemporary American society, particularly the pursuit of what has come to be called

Personalized Genetic Histories (Shriver and Kittles 2004), perform their cultural work by

establishing Wittgensteinian “angles”: propositions, around which doubt can turn, but

which can never be subject to doubt themselves. In the case at hand, such “angles” pivot

on the idea of “racial identity” as an objectively occurring phenomenon whose reality,

history and social conventions notwithstanding, ultimately resides in the realm of the

biotic. In particular, I want to suggest that in establishing such “angles”, genomics, like

divination, give material shape to, and thereby reproduce as social reality, the ideologies

of invisible essences and agencies on which they are based – for example, the notion of

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witchcraft as an embodied, hereditary trait in the Azande case, or, in the case under

discussion, that of race as an embodied, hereditary trait in contemporary U.S. society3.

While the Clinton-Lewinski scandal rocked the nation in the fall of 1998, Donald

Washington’s theories thus found surprising, if indirect, reinforcement in an article in

Nature, a journal not normally suspected of pandering to daily news-interests. There the

pathologist Eugene Foster and a team of researchers reported that comparative analyses

of Y-chromosome polymorphisms had enabled them to establish a relatively plausible

genealogical linkage between the descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s paternal uncle and

the male descendants of Eston Hemings, the youngest son of Jefferson’s slave Sally

Hemings (Foster et al. 1998). This is not the place to rehearse the multiple ironies

uncovered – as well as entailed! – in Foster’s findings. The most glaring ones, however,

bear mentioning. For although Foster and his collaborators managed to effectively

launch a genealogical relation between Fields Jefferson (i.e. the president’s Fb) and Eston

Hemings into the realm of the journalistically plausible, the descendants of Eston

Hemings would seem to have disappeared into the same definitional ciaoscuro that, to

this day, has enabled Thomas Jefferson’s white progeny to monopolize burial rights in

the cemetery of Jefferson’s former plantation Monticello.

For when Eston Hemings was freed along with his brother Madison upon

Jefferson’s death, he moved to Ohio and then Madison, Wisconsin, changed his name to

Eston H. Jefferson, and took on a “white” identity – as did two of his sisters. We know

that Eston’s red-haired son John W. Jefferson was wounded as a Lieutenant Colonel of

the Union troops at Vicksburg (Brody 1976, Murray and Duffy 1998, Stanton and Wright

1999:169), but he and his other siblings were soon to disappear into what white 3 This comparison owes its inspiration to Fields (2001) and Lock (forthcoming).

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Americans would nowadays be inclined to call “the mainstream”. In keeping with the

logic of a peculiarly North American culture of race, his descendants, whom Foster

laboriously tracked down, had not only forgotten their slave ancestry, but – and

necessarily so – their presidential one as well. Not so in the case of the 1400 self-

identified black members of the Thomas Woodson Association, founded in 1978, and

named after Sally Hemings’ oldest son. For while the Thomas Woodson Association had

actively supported Foster’s research, its results severely disappointed their expectations

that had rested on more than a century and a half of intra-familial oral tradition –

providing as they did, incontrovertible evidence for the non-correspondence of the DNA

of their male members and the crucial haplotype of the Jeffersonian Y-chromosome.

Yet what exactly did that mean? What was Foster and associates’ evidence

evidence of? Why the disappointment on the part of both the Woodson Association, and

the Monticello Association, an incorporated group of descendants of Thomas and Martha

Jefferson who likewise, if for different reasons, publicly deplored the outcome of Foster’s

efforts (Chang 1998)? Why the journalistic furor over a bunch of amino acids? What role

might the correspondence (or lack thereof) between seven bi-allelic markers, eleven

microsatelites, and the mini-satellite MSY1 in the DNA samples taken from five

descendants of Jefferson’s paternal uncle, one descendant of Eston Hemings, and five of

Thomas Woodson have possibly played in the decision of the Monticello Association, to

continue to deny members of the Thomas Woodson Association the privilege of burial in

Monticello’s graveyard (Smith 1999, Lord 2001)? How could such genomic data have

motivated, as Staples (2001) implies, Eston Hemings “white” descendant Julia

Westerinen to check the category “black” on the 2000 Census forms? And most

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strikingly, perhaps, in what ways might they have influenced the Bush administration’s

invitation of a Woodson descendant, Mary Jefferson, to the White House’s celebration of

Thomas Jefferson’s 258th birthday (Lord 2001)?

Perhaps expectably, Foster and associates quickly backpedaled. In a letter to the

New York Times on November 9, he wrote that the “genetic findings my collaborators

and I reported […] do not prove that Thomas Jefferson was the father of one of Sally

Hemings’ children. We never made that claim“ (Foster 1998), adding in a rejoinder to his

critics in Nature that while

it is true that men of Randolph Jefferson’s family could have fathered Sally

Hemings’ later children […w]e know from the historical and the DNA data that

Thomas Jefferson can neither be definitively excluded nor solely implicated in the

paternity of illegitimate children with his slave Sally Hemings. When we

embarked upon the study, we knew that the results could not be conclusive, but

we hoped to obtain some objective data that would tilt the weight of evidence in

one direction or another. We think we have provided such data and that the

modest, probabilistic interpretations we have made are tenable at present (Foster

et alii 1999, emphasis mine).

The genie however was out of the bottle. Seeming to cut a bright path through the murky

terrain of a voluminous literature produced by biographers and historical Jefferson

scholars, storehouses of uncollected and unanalyzed public documents relating to what

today must be tens of thousands of bearers of Thomas Jefferson and/or Sally Hemings

genetic material, and the webs spun by family traditions and other insubstantiable forms

of knowing, Foster’s amino acids appeared to prove so much precisely because they

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themselves were the artifacts of a research design that beautifully illustrates David

Schneider’s (1984:111) maxim that “biological kinship is always and everywhere a set of

cultural conceptions”, and Marilyn Strathern’s (1992) more general point that the natural

is always – and everywhere, including in genomic laboratories – a cultural construction.

For what, if anything, might Foster and associates have uncovered, had they not

previously defined their sample universe and variables in accordance to a hypothesis they

derived from the historiographical literature and popular imagination? Probably nothing

of great public interest. For who knows, chances are that another research design might

have unearthed correspondences with the Jeffersonian DNA in male residents of Ulan

Bator, Ibadan or Bogotá (or, given what we know about trans-species genomic

continuities, in mice, fruit flies, or yeast cells). Which proves not only the methodological

point, but also goes to show that discriminatory folk epistemologies – in this case, a US-

style racial will to knowledge – pick up and give diagnostic value to principally opaque

data not just because they issue from discursive locations associated with unquestionable

(in this case: scientific) authority, but because they already fit – and were designed to fit

– into pre-existing “discourses of heritable identities” (Austin Broos 1994). Although the

specific historical origins of such discourses in regimes of slavery and segregation may

have become subject to public disavowal, their knowledge-producing modus operandi

obviously still serves to conjoin new epistemic means with an old epistemic end: that of

arbitrating “racial” identity and difference by recourse to empirical data interpreted as

diagnostic signs of the presence or absence of traits or qualities, thought to constitute

indicators of racial essences, in the bodies of those judged in this fashion (cf. Guillaumin

1995)4. i.e, "science" 4 For unless intended as self-validating tautological exercises in what Bourdieu (1977)

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Whichever other conclusions one may thus be inclined to draw from Foster’s

findings, and quite apart from the immediate political relevance of such constructions of

“racial knowledge” at the time5, what interests me here is not just the ease with which

once called the investigating subject’s transference onto the object of investigation of his or her relation to it, such diagnostics cannot well – but often do! – proceed by e.g. comparing subjects pre-assigned to “racial” groups in order to then prove their difference. Obviously, once we take this route we can easily prove that “white men” can’t jump or play the blues (or similar such nonsense) for “genetic” reasons. In either case, we might do well to heed Macbeth’s (1997:62) injunctions regarding the construction of “units” of genetic (or other) comparisons: “Despite their probable knowledge of genoclines,” she writes,

human biologists are themselves members of society and socialized into discussing the socially defined ethnic groups as units. Once described as a unit, means and variances of biological variables in any ethic group can be compared with, and shown to be statistically different from, those in any other ethnic group or in the majority population. Many of these characteristics will be multifactorial and a few may have no genetic component at all, and yet, unless worded carefully, the human biologist may add to the concept that the ethnic group is not only biologically different, but a genetically discrete population.

5 In the fall of 1998, the political significance of Foster et alii (1998) was, of course, hard to overlook. As a Washington Post journalist rightly remarked (Murray 1998), the commentary of Eric Lander and Joseph Ellis (1998) printed in the same issue of Nature as Foster’s findings could hardly be classified as disinterested natural science:

Politically, the Thomas Jefferson verdict is likely to figure in upcoming impeachment hearings on William Jefferson Clinton’s sexual indiscretions, in which DNA testing has also played a role. The parallels are hardly perfect, but some are striking. Both “improper” relationships involved women about 28 years younger – although there is a world of difference between a slave and master at the close of the eighteenth century, and a White House intern and a marred man at the end of the twentieth. Both presidents seem to have engaged in politically reckless conduct; in Jefferson’s case, father Eston six years after allegations appeared in the national press. And both offered evasive denials of the charges. In 1805 the Massachusetts legislature staged a mock impeachment of Jefferson, citing several grievances including the accusations about Sally Hemings. Jefferson acknowledged one charge propositioning a married woman in his youth), but asserted that all the others wee false. Otherwise he remained silent, leaving denials to political supporters and family. Nor did the scandals affect Jefferson’s popularity. He won the 104 elections by a landslide, and his abiding position was that his private life was nobody else’s business, and should have no bearing on his public reputation.

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principally meaningless microbiological data were translated into weighty “social facts”,

but the manner in which they simultaneously transformed into the key elements of a form

of historical revisionism based on essentially extrahistorical – in fact, antihistorical –

forms of knowledge production. Consider the following remarks by Denver Post writer

Diane Carman (1998) who gleefully implied that the task to uncover “wie es eigentlich

gewesen” (how it really was) Leopold von Ranke famously assigned the historical

profession would soon be taken over by sturdier forms of epistemic practice. “One

discovery that historians ignore at their peril”, she wrote under the headline “Truth,

justice, and DNA” amidst the media spectacle unleashed by Foster’s study in the fall of

1998,

Is the scientific breakthrough by Francis Harry Compton Crick and James D.

Watson in 1953 to identify the molecular structure of genes. By unlocking this

storehouse of information, they not only changed history for the future, they have

made it possible to change the past. They have allowed us to seek truth even after

centuries have elapsed. And they made a whole passel of effete scholars look like

complete bozos.

Whatever half-baked theories and useless subjectivisms social scientists may be

mongering for reasons one can only guess at, according to Carman there is hope that truth

will eventually be revealed to us – by genomic sequencing and other robust

microbiological means. And indeed, there is increasing evidence for just that. Think for

example about the stir caused by the discovery (Thomas et alii. 2001) that the Lemba, an

ethnographically little known ethnic group in northeastern South Africa whose members Given such historical precedent, Landers and Ellis seemed to imply, it would be absurd if the molecular-genetic analysis of a sperm-stain (and not the “will of the people”) were to prove decisive in the up-coming impeachment proceedings against Clinton.

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had “always” believed (much like scores of other African social formations with access

to the colonial literature on them) to be related to the biblical Jews, actually “bore” what

has become known as the “Cohen modal haplotype” (cf. Azoulay 2003)6. Or consider the

somewhat less well-publicized, but equally remarkable studies by Alves Silva et al.

(2000) on “The Ancestry of Brazilian mtDNA Lineages” and Carvalho-Silva et al. (2001)

on “The Phylogeography of Brazilian Y-Chromosome Lineages” which essentially

replicated, in genomic language, and thereby ratified in the form of carbon molecule

distributions, the founding myths of the ideology of “Brazilian racial democracy”. For lo

and behold, what Gilberto Freyre once called “miscibilidade”, and defined as a

historically long-standing, and eminently pre-adaptive proclivity on the part of male

Portuguese colonizers not to spurn opportunities for having sex with “racially alien”

women under their domination, shows up in their mtDNA and Y-Chromosome analyses

as well. Good for the Lemba, perhaps (cf. Parfitt 2003)7. But probably bad for the

racialized subjects of a lasting internal – as well as international (cf. Bourdieu and

Wacquant 1999) – ideological consensus about the merits of Brazil’s “racism in the

6 Of course, as Marks (2001: 370) notes in regards to the original discovery of the “Cohen modal haplotype”, there is no telling what might have resulted had that study’s research design not been based on an ingenuous correlation between the Book of Exodus and the kind of isonymic first principle logic that led Skorecki et al (1997) to disregard the fact that “[i]n the absence of information on the distribution of Y chromosome haplotypes of a sample of Horowitzes or Steinbergs” any inference from genetic data shared by their sample of self-designated Hebrew priests (many of whom, of course, were Cohens or Cohns) must be dubious. 7 Brodwin (2002:325), however, certainly has a point when he asks what might happen if they were to press for Israeli citizenship and the right to “return” on the basis of their “genomically verified” Jewish descent.

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absence of corporate races”, as Roger Lancaster (1992) once characterized the situation

in the (largely analogous) Nicaraguan case8.

Yet what is it that makes a person say, a Cohen, a Limba, or someone with burial

rights in Monticello if not historically mutable patterns of recruitment into social

categories and groups of variable inclusiveness? Clearly, excepting “situations where

common socioeconomic factors have so insulted the biology of development and daily

existence [of specific groups] as to cause convergence” (Keita 2001) between genomic

patterns and socially recognized group boundaries, what makes a person “black” or

“white” in the U.S. – but maybe not in Brazil or Nicaragua – a Limba or a publicly

acknowledged descendant of Thomas Jefferson, simply cannot be predicted from a

person’s biological endowment, however defined. It is the product of the thoroughly

conventional, and eminently changeable rules of recognition by which societies

selectively allocate their members to specific subject positions. In some instances such

rules are based on considerations pertaining to genealogical conceits, however arbitrary

these may appear from a biologist’s point of view (think of unilineal kinship systems, or

marriage to commoners among European nobility). In many others they simply recur to

socially routinized perceptual markers – be their diagnostic value grounded in

(genotypically entirely underdetermined) appearances, or simply a set of culturally

overdetermined performative capacities and acquired dispositions.

8 Compare Sheriff (2001) on the truly tragic nature of the “silences” with which the victims of such ideological constructions confront their own predicament. For historical background on the issues at hand see e.g. Viotti da Costa (1985), Skidmore (1990), Borges (1993), and Needell (1995). Another recent case concerns the genomically mediated expulsion from the Seminole Nation of a good number of the so-called Seminole Freedmen or black Seminole (descendants of slaves who took side with the Seminole in their wars against the U.S.). See Johnson (2003) and Elliot and Brodwin (2005).

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Part of the trouble here is that already in their research design studies such as the

ones cited above tend to define their units of analysis by mapping population concepts

capable of e.g. allowing biologists to genomically distinguish regional sub-species of

drosophilia, onto what, in the case of human collectivities, are the self-naming, self-

delimiting artifacts of culture and political maneuver (Ardener 1989, cf. Keita 2001,

Bamshad et al. 2003, Gannett 2003, 2004, Duster 2005). More often than not, the result is

sheer nonsense on logical grounds, or what Kahn (2003) calls instances of “statistical

mischief”. As Duster (2003:265, emphasis mine) notes apropos the former case, from a

strictly genomic point of view,

It is possible to make arbitrary groupings of populations (geographic, linguistic,

self-identified by faith, identified by others by physiognomy, etc.) and still find

statistically significant allelic variations between those groupings. For example,

we could examine all the people in Chicago, and all those in Los Angeles, and

find statistically significant differences in allele frequency at some loci. Of course,

at many loci, even at most loci, we would not find statistically significant

differences. When researchers claim to be able to assign people to groups based

on allele frequency at a certain number of loci, they have chosen loci that show

differences between the groups they are trying to distinguish”.

Much as in the case of Marx’s famous criticism of Darwin for “recogniz[ing] among

beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening of

new markets, inventions, and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’” (FIND CITE), here

the discovery of natural forms in the social, is pre-structured by antecedent projection of

social forms onto the natural. Of course, much of what one might say in regards to this

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would be contingent on whether one countenances the epistemological possibility of

accessing a “realm of nature” free of discursive entanglements, or other man-made

encumbrances. Yet even were we to bracket this rather fundamental question, the sheer

possibility that practices of genomic knowledge production could, in principle, very well

authorize such otherwise counterintuitive entities as “biologically identifiable”

Chicagoans or Los Angelinos – entities that on a moment’s reflection reveal themslfs as

the products of elementary category mistakes – should give us reason to ask about the

nature of the collective representations they generate and endow, in the public

imagination, with uncanny degrees of legitimacy and truth value. Why, in short, do the

models of “biosociality” (Rabinow 1996) genomics appears to place at our disposal seem

so good to think and – possibly – act upon?

The answer I would like to venture in the remainder of this essay is simple, and it

hinges on the proposition, defensible as it seems to me in light of the above, that genomic

forms of identity arbitration, ultimately partake of the ethnographically well-known logic

of systems of divination that, in disclosing the “hidden” agencies and essences that

appear to shape particular social arrangements and events, stabilize and reproduce the

cultural order which throws up the question such oracular systems purport to answer in

the first place. Obviously, like all divinatory systems, genomic practices of knowledge

production can easily engender happy tautologies – as when e.g. Cohen genes are found

in a population whose members already self-identify with “priestly descent” or think they

are a lost tribe of Israel to begin with9. Nor should it be overly puzzling that historians

9 One could, perhaps, write this off as the unfortunate result of research designs currently still forced to rely on biologically underdetermined units of analysis which further research will bring into sharper focus. Yet apart from the fact that in the initial planning stage of the ill-fated Human Genome Diversity Project, a (biologically perfectly rational)

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have, by and large, not protested the way in which geneticists are replicating their

findings by methodologically as well as epistemologically dubious (let alone ethically

troubling) interpolations of the ontolog(ies) of post-1950s biological population genetics

into the realm of human sociality. For much genomic research proceeds from

assumptions it culls from ostensibly “unscientific” constructions of the past (including

historians’ writings), and eventually restates them in the form of tabulations of allele-

frequencies – thereby oddly lending “scientific” legitimacy to what everyone (or at least

some people) had already been arguing before10. More contentious cases, however, are

not hard to imagine. Although it may still be too early to tell, the impact of the rapidly

multiplying, web-based commercial purveyors of “personalized genetic histories”

(PGH’s) targeting African Americans in the U.S. may well result in substantive

controversy between consumer of such products and scholars aiming to preserve their

public authority in the face of microbiological forms of historical revisionism applauded

by journalists, and avidly consumed in the U.S. by an increasingly broader, increasingly

web-based, public. The question here, or so I would argue, is not at all whether or not pattern of random sampling along a simple geographical grid was rejected in favor of DNA sampling among named human social groups (Lock 1997, Marks 2001), what is taking shape not just in genetic research labs, but e.g. in FBI or NIH databases are genomic “identity profiles” produced by an unholy alliance between sophisticated microbiological methods, and a naïve, if not willful, neglect of the fundamental distinctions obtaining between natural and social kinds, and an equally complacent obliviousness regarding the moral implications of such forms of parameter collapse – such as the ample feedback loops beginning to open up between genomically mediated arbitrations of “identity” and patterns of identification with, recruitment into, and exclusion from named human collectivities that long antedated the advent of molecular genetics. 10 It is, of course, none of my business, but if I were George Reid Andrews, I would think that some public remarks about the way Fejerman et al. (2005) transformed his fine study (Andrews 1980) of the ideological factors responsible for the “disappearance” of Buenos Aires’ Afro-Argentines into a set of biological “facts” would be in order.

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such genomic revisionisms are open to falsification (a classical, if blatantly mistaken,

criterium for distinguishing between “science” and “non-scientific” modes of knowledge

production). It is how the knowledge so produced figures into processes of social

reproduction. And in that regard it is rapidly becoming clear that historians and other

social scientists may already have altogether missed the boat.

Since the late 1990s, commercial PGH services have been widely hailed in the

press as a key to unlock the African past of contemporary U.S. African Americans, and

hence an important resource for undoing the psychological and social damage done to

them through the obliteration, through slavery and its aftermath of racist oppression, of

the kind of genealogical linkages to extra-American ancestral origins so important for any

group aiming to place itself within the U.S. national narrative, and reclaim its dignity as a

distinct and distinguishable contributor to what is nowadays termed “American

Diversity” (e.g. Goldberg 2000, Kristof 2003, Joiner 2003, Franklin 2004, Karkabi 2005,

Harmon 2005, Hamilton 2005, Glanton 2005). Now whether these journalistic claims

hold water remains a fascinating, but to my knowledge, so far unexplored, ethnographic

question11. Nonetheless, given the current interest in “identity” and “heritage” as scarce

and potent symbolic resources in the politics of recognition often held to characterize

patterns of “multicultural” sociality in liberal western societies (e.g. Handler 1994, Hall

1997, Harrison 1999, 2002, 2003, Brubaker and Cooper 2000, Essed and Goldberg 2002,

Comaroff and Comaroff 2003), it is surprising that, so far, anthropologists have largely

seemed to steer clear of addressing the epistemological and political implications of what

11 That TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey has happily discovered her Zulu roots by genomic means does not tell us much about the motivation or expectations of the majority of consumers of such services.

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Brodwin (2002:327) aptly calls “African American ancestry projects” enabled through

commercial PGH services12.

One of the clearest statements to date, of some of the problems involved, comes

from the Nigerian-born geneticist Charles Rotimi (2003) based at Howard University’s

National Human Genome Center. Predictably, methodological concerns figure high on

Rotimi’s list for why African Americans should exercise caution when aiming to ground

their contemporary sense of self and social relations in the kinds of services provided by

commercial DNA labs. Yet for Rotimi, the conundrum that “the nature or appearance of

genetic clustering (grouping) of people is a function of how populations are sampled, of

how criteria for boundaries between clusters are set, and of the level of resolution used”,

or the well-established fact “that African populations have more genetic variation

between them (estimates are as high as 95%) than when Africans are compared to other

peoples who migrated out of Africa thousands of years ago (estimates are as low as 3%)”

(Rotimi 2003:153-54) are merely the tip of an iceberg of unexamined presuppositions

about the possibility of bringing units of genetic analysis into concordance with units of

human social identification. For apart from the fact that relatively safe levels of analytical

scale and resolution may not generate much public interest (ultimately we all are

Africans, though only some of us continue to reside on the continent), the closer the

focus, the more non-biological factors begin to overwhelm the models population

genetics are capable of generating. This, in Rotimi’s view, not only pertains to the

dubious nature of establishing genomic profiles for named African demographic entities

whose patterns of self-identification are the result of recent geo-political events. It also 12 Apart from Brodwin’s own contributions (Brodwin 2002 and Elliot and Brodwin 2005), the only other article explicitly focusing on this issue is Banton (2005).

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concerns the existence of a plethora of mechanisms of recruitment into named social

collectivities that have nothing to do with genetic relatedness (cf. Keita 2001, Gannett

2004). While no one would thus aim to come up with the idea of establishing Ancestry

Informative Markers (AIMs) for populations generated by the naturalization laws of even

only modern micro-states (think of Lichtenstein, Tonga, or Antigua), the maps of

contemporary DNA-data bases for Africa are full of ill-sampled entities (aka “aboriginal

populations” or even “tribes”) that have long been know not only not to be bounded by

“natural barriers to interbreeding”, but to have liberally assimilated genetically unrelated

personnel through mechanisms such as exogamous marriage, initiation or enslavement.

Yet it is not only that deeply flawed conceptions of units of analysis mar genomic

ancestry searches from the get go. For Rotimi, the models of identification and belonging

created by such means are similarly problematic. Indeed, to anyone familiar with the

historical and ethnographic literature on the Yoruba, his conclusion that “[i]t cannot

really be said that a Diasporan African with genetic affinity to the Yoruba [of today] is

more ‘Yoruba’ than, for example, Suzanne Wenger, an Austrian Anthropologist who is

also Chief Priestess of the Oshun Goddess, the keeper of the Beaded Comb in Yoruba

land” (Rotimi 2003:156) will probably not seem overly far-fetched. Note here that Rotimi

does not deny “Africanity” to “Diasporan Africans” (nor “Austrianness to Suzanne

Wenger, for that matter). What he worries about is collapsing the very real complexities

of history and social maneuver into the spurious transparencies afforded by statistical

notions of “genetic affinity”. This, however, would seem to be precisely he kind of

“cultural work” PHG analyses are geared to perform.

19

Despite the caution proponents of commercial PGH services display in their

publications directed towards scholarly audiences (e.g. Kittles and Royal 2003, Shriver

and Kittles 2004), what is available on the web would thus seem to support Rotimi’s

(ibid.) plea “to avoid cosmetic and euphoric linkages that may prove, in the long run, to

be unsatisfactory for everyone involved”. The explanations of the genetic findings for in

a sample “African DNA Ancestry Report” posted on the Santa Fe-based DNA Consulting

corporation’s website www.dnaconsulting.com (February 3, 2005) may serve to

exemplify this point. There the prospective consumer – who presumably has flipped over

the technical details of the genetic analysis – will get the following explanation:

L-Haplogroups

The subject’s likely haplotype L2 is associated with the so-called Bantu

expansion fom West and Central sub-Saharan Africa east and south, dated 2,000-

4,000 years ago […]. Between the 15th and the 19th centuries C.E., the Atlantic

slave trade resulted in the forced movement of approximately 13 million people

from Africa, mainly to the Americas. Only approximately 11 million survived the

passage, and many more died in the early years of captivity. Many of these slaves

were traded to the West African Cape Verde ports of embarkation through

Portuguese and Arab middlemen and came from as far east as the Horn of Africa

and as far south as Angola. Among the African tribal groups, all Bantu-speaking,

in which L2 is common are: Hausa, Kanuri, Fulfe [sic], Songhai, Malunjin

(Angola), Yoruba, Senegalese, Serer and Wolof […]”

20

This fanciful condensation of garbled African historical geography and ethnolinguistics13

is followed by a section entitled “About the Bantu” culled, in its entirety, from the 1911

(!) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and eventually leads to the following

“Conclusion”:

The subject’s mother descends from an L2 African female who lived in West

Africa between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago, and whose descendants joined the

Bantu culture. Possibly, one of her female-linked descendants was a slave traded

to the Spanish or Portuguese colonies in America from Sierra Leone in the 17th-

19th century. A SNP test and sequencing of HVS2 would provide more

information on the subject’s particular sub-group of L2 and its geographic origins

in Africa before the Bantu expansion.”

Yet what in the world might it mean to be related to someone who lived 20,000 to 30,000

years ago (let alone “before the Bantu expansion” – whatever that phrase may be taken to

mean)? Even though one would have to reckon with what geneticists call “lineage

convergence” in the increasingly distant past, given that (biologically speaking)

ascendants multiply exponentially, the propositional value of a statement such as “I am

related to this particular African woman” might be of the order of statements such as

“The Queen of England and I share a distant ancestor” – a proposition that is, after all,

true for every human being on this planet, including me, Sally Hemings, Thomas 13 All other problems aside, the list of “tribal groups” not only includes units of highly different scale and orders of salience (e.g. “Senegambians”, “Serer”, “Wolof” – where the latter might be interpreted as subordinate members of a class of “Senegambian tribal units”), but also curiously does not feature a single unit – excepting perhaps the mysterious “Melunjin (Angola)” – whom linguists would regard as speakers of a (contemporary) Bantu language. On the nonchalance with which geneticists are wont to lump oftentimes entirely incommensurable and generally ill-conceived African “populations” under regional, ethnic, or linguistic rubrics (with oftentimes patently colonialist pedigrees) see McEachern (2000).

21

Jefferson, and my former neighbor Donald Washington. But ascendants and the

relationships we construct to – and through! – them, are, of course, not biological, but

cultural facts.

What is problematic here is thus not that facile applications of genomic

technologies might come to underwrite historically spurious strategies of self-

enracination and identity management. All forms of ancestry tracing do – if only because

they inevitably operate in highly selective fashions (for who could – let alone might want

to – base his or her sense of contemporary selfhood on any but a semantically marked

minimal set of the thousands of ancestors on acquires once reckoning beyond the fourth

of fifth generation?). Recurring once more to the travails of students in the anthropology

introductory lecture on kinship and descent, the crucial issue here is not just that

genealogies are always and everywhere cultural contrivances, but that – and no matter

how much they, at times, may approximate what biologists might be inclined to tell us

about the “natural facts” of sexual reproduction – they always and everywhere are, or at

least can be made to perform the work of, political charters as well: and what better case

to adduce to illustrate this basic anthropological fact than the case of North American

“races” which, for the longest time and despite all common sense regarding historically

documentable mating patterns, have demographically behaved as if they constituted

mutually exclusive corporate groups that reproduce themselves by simply dis-enrolling

individuals with conceptually inconvenient ascendants from their membership rosters.

Hence the utility of genomically enhanced projections of alternative – even

oppositional – descent lines capable of occasional subversions of the reigning

genealogical consensus by e.g. bringing “blackness” and “presidential descent” into

22

spectacular alignment. More importantly perhaps, such pronouncements enable “ancestry

projects” promising to fill the void created by the condition of ultimative social de-

racination – the brutal “anti-kinship” (Meillassoux 1991) of slavery – that to this day

casts its shadows on the narratives of collective origin U.S. public culture tends to

prescribe for people recruited (by birth, appearance, or, more recently individual choice)

into that nation’s “black minority”. No doubt, surmounting (by whatever means) the

oppressive conceit of genealogical erasure rationalized as having been effected by

enslavement and the slave trade constitutes a political act – a fact that became amply

evident in the aftermath of the airing of the TV mini-series based on Alex Hailey’s

bestselling novel Roots in the late 1970s. Nonetheless, given North American common

sense conceptions of race and relatedness, PGH service providers would seem to have

little to offer, in this respect, that substantially improves upon what e.g. adherents of the

American Yoruba Movement call “roots readings” – oracular ceremonies performed to

discover African ancestries occluded by slavery (cf. Clarke 2004)14. Based in the

notionally infallible authority of the Ifá-oracle15, though open to mistaken or interested

interpretations on the part of the oracle’s human manipulators, “roots readings” are

perhaps the closest functional equivalent to PGH’s – except that while genomic ancestry

searches displace the source of divinatory authority downwards from the social towards

the realm of the biotic, “roots readings” do so by upward allocation toward the realm of 14 On the American Yoruba Movement more generally see Hunt (1979), Omari (1991), Palmié (1995) and Brown (2003). Probably because its core, the African Kingdom of Oyotunji Village near Sheldon, South Carolina, is currently experiencing an interregnum (its founder Oba Osejeman Adefunmi Adelabu I died in early 2005), its current web-site no longer features advertisements for “roots readings” by internet or phone. My thanks go to Stefania Capone for confirming my thoughts on this issue. 15 A divinatory system of Yoruba-origin, but derived in this instance, at least in part, from Cuban sources.

23

the divine thereby depriving their users of much of the legitimacy that the American

public tends to invest in forms of knowledge production that manage to sail under the

label of “science” (even when they concern matters such as “intelligent design”). But

credibility, public or other, is hardly the issue here. If all ancestry is ultimately a cultural

contrivance, and all genealogies “cooked” in one way or the other, why should it even

matter?

But of course it does. And since this is so, what is genuinely troubling about the

explosion of a market in PGH-services geared toward African American ancestry projects

is that two of the major technologies involved – mtDNA and NRY Chromosome tracing

– not just construct curiously “unilinear” forms of relatedness, but, once taken on their

own, reproduce the forms of structural amnesia that long underwrote the operation of the

principle of “hypo-descent” in North American patterns of racial exclusion. For they not

only allow for, but actually invite patterns of racial profiling along upwardly constricting

– rather than branching – lines of descent, which population geneticists, in a terminology

that ought to particularly irk social anthropologists, are wont to call “lineages”16. In other

words, the consumer choice between mtDNA and NRY Chromosome tracing (each tend

to be offered separately) ironically tends to provide justification for further naturalizing

the conceit of excusive racial membership that my neighbor Donald Washington’s

theories about why the name Washington is not distributed in a pattern of (racially)

random isonymy aimed to expose as fictitious. What is worse, they do so not because

they could not, in principle “prove” the contrary – as Foster and Associates’s research 16 Worse yet, African Ancestry Inc., the PGH company run by the trained biologist Rick Kittles thus issues Certificates of Ancestry based on what Kittles is content to call MatriClanTM and PatriClanTM analyses (see the website of www.AfricanAncestry.com). Fortunately, totemic animal ancestors defining the boundaries of human social groups have not yet been found by genomic means – so far, at least.

24

amply demonstrated. Rather, such is the case because they partake of, and

biotechnologically reinforce, a peculiarly all-American racial volonté de savior that tends

to predefine structurally necessary forms of genealogical amnesia – so that even in the

face of better knowledge, present social arrangements would seem to suggest that “black”

people ought to have “black” ancestors, and “white” people “white” ones. Of course,

there are no a priori reason whatsoever why self-identified African Americans ought to

identify with those of their forebears socially classified as “white” (or, at least, any more

reason than self-identified Caucasians might have for remembering socially “black”

forebears). Indeed, morally cogent arguments might be ventured for why the former

might want to refrain from choosing to engage in such patterns of identification. But

there is also no reason why commercial genomic service providers, let along academic

geneticists, should translate the complex histories and social arrangements from which

such social choices likely spring into the language of (per definitionem) absolute and

seemingly transparent biological “realities”17.

Here we have, it seems, the high-tech equivalent to that particular mode of

circular reasoning Karen Fields (2001) has described as characteristic of the cultural

moment she – in a particularly apt turn of phrase – calls “racecraft”. Fields is concerned

with the question of the rationality of belief in the reality of “race”, and in an ingenuous

theoretical move she pulls in E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) famous defense of the

rationality of Zande witchcraft beliefs. I cannot engage here Field’s arguments about a 17 For just as we have no clue as to how much “African ancestry” might be found in the genetic make-up of self-identified “Caucasians” (not that we could reasonably determine any cut-off point at which individual genomic patterns would cease to carry “African signatures”!), so it is hard to say at which point self-identified African-Americans may be too genetically “admixed” to be useful as, for example research subjects in clinical studies aiming to control for “race”.

25

philosophical double standard that readily concedes the irrationality “race” beliefs in the

U.S., but fudges the issue when it comes to propositions concerning mystical agents in

the ethnographic world. Still, what I think is eminently pertinent to the issues under

discussion in this essay is the function of DNA testing as a divinatory practice designed

to visualize and give materiality by evidentiary proxy to entities whose ontological

characteristics include the crucial feature of invisibility (Lock forthcoming). For no less

than the famous hereditary organic substance hidden in the belly of otherwise seemingly

ordinary, and indeed entirely unsuspecting Zande condemning them to (however

unwitting) nefariousness, the subcutaneous “biological facts” that are made visible in

personal and collective genomic profiles (however constructed) can assign their bearers

to specific, and potentially highly pernicious identitary positions18. Moreover, just like in

everyday practice the Zande can live with, i.e. conveniently disregard, the idea that since

the witchcraft substance is heritable, all members of the clan of a detected witch ought to

be regarded as witches, so do early twentyfirst century Americans not normally worry

about the potential “biotic alterity” of people whom they routinely interact with on the

presumption of shared “racial identity”. In fact, such convenient disregard is once more

structurally necessary in order for such “moral artifacts” (Fields 1985) as “witchcraft” or

“race” to remain operative in daily social practice (including the routine operation of

18 This moment has received particular attention in regards to the political and ethical problem posed in the construction of “populations at risk” through predictive genetics – see, among many others, Kenea (1994), Rabinow (1996), Davison (1996), Lock (1997, forthcoming), Greely (1998), Finkler (2000), Goodman (2000), Schwartz (2001), Bestard (2004). Since heritable disorders such as the sickling trait or Tay-Sachs disease had become conceptually linked to populations presumed to be “racially distinct” long before the advent of genomics (cf. Wailoo 2003), the multiplication of genetic risk factors may well lead to a situation where imputations of “biotic otherness” to individuals “at risk” (e.g. by employers, or insurance companies) will induce group formation on the part of those so singled out (cf. Rabinow 1996:102)

26

what Kuhn called “normal science”19). For just like it would make no sense to propose

that given the rate of witchcraft detection Evans-Pritchard observed in Zandeland in the

1920s, all male Zande must (if not then, at least nowadays) routinely regard each other as

witches, so the recognition of the continuous, clinal nature of all human biological

difference (including the embodied differences on which gender identities are notionally

based, cf. Epstein 2004) ought to make individual distinctions based on ideas of

biological race (or sex for that matter) appear eminently absurd.

This, as we know, is not the case. And not just because hurricane Katrina revealed

that in contemporary America misfortune strikes in patterns that are all but “racially”

random, or because – as it turned out – the pharmacogenetic “science” behind the FDA’s

recent approval of BiDil’s as the first-ever “race specific drug” was geared more towards

salvaging an expiring patent than towards changing the epidemiological incidence of

hypertenson or congestive heart failure in American society (Kahn 2003, 2005, Duster

2005, Jones and Goodman 2005). Such instances, involving as they do, forms of

voluntarism detectable in overtly “racially inflected” policies arguably only represent

excess performances generated by a far more insidious logic. In fact, one might say that

they obscure rather than illuminate the workings of a process driven not by individual or

collective decisions that one might readily identify as informed by “racist” considerations

or objectives, but that is perpetuated through the force of structurally ingrained doxa

concerning the racialized nature of American sociality that, since they define the

19 A point well made by Tapper (1995) and Wailoo (1996) in regards to the truly heroic resistance to reason exhibited by North American clinicians and epidemiologists in the history of the diagnostics of sickle cell anemia, a disease long held to be indicative not just of a hemopathological disorder, but of “blackness” as well.

27

conditions of possibility for social praxis, effectively represent imponderables to most

actors involved even if they, themselves, may not believe in the “reality of race”.

As a result, and oftentimes against better knowledge population geneticists,

medical researchers and clinicians, demographers, state agencies of various sorts, and

hosts of private enterprises actively produce the forms of “structural amnesia” which

underwrite the operation of “racecraft” in American life. They do so by e.g. setting up

clearly demarcated discontinuous “racial” population series for control in medical and

other research, or by using Census data to design actuary tables, apportion school

districts, or administer affirmative action funds, to name just a few domains to which a

handful of “races” (and “pseudo races” such as Hispanics) are stubbornly endemic20. That

many of those who routinely use “racial data” may sincerely deplore the pernicious

effects of racial discrimination, and indeed may perceive their efforts as directed towards

the amelioration or even undoing of persistent social inequalities based in racial

discrimination does nothing to change that fundamental fact. This is so because the

context in which they operate systematically forces them to disregard that race – like

witchcraft, kinship class, or indeed capital – is not a thing, but a social relation. Just as no

investment banker or stock broker who wants to stay in business will belatedly join Marx

20 See e.g. Caldwell and Popenoe 1995, Schwartz 2001, Kaplan and Bennett 2003, and Pearce et alii 2004 for critiques, by medical practitioners, of what Schwartz calls “racial profiling” in medical research and practice. One of the more interesting examples of this type of literature comes from a forensic anthropologist who asks “if races don’t exist, why are forensic anthropologists so good at identifying them?”. His answer is as honest as it is astounding: when identifying skeletal or other human remains in the context of e.g. missing person searches, the use of “race labels” in their description of unidentified human remains “is not a vindication of the traditional notion that there are four human races, rather it is a prediction, based upon skeletal morphology, that a particular label would have been assigned to an individual when that individual was alive” (Sauer 1992:110).

28

in exposing the erroneous nature of the assumption that “value” is a substantial quality

inherent to commodities, so is the conceit of “race” indispensable to anyone who aims to

make a difference in the fields of, say, American public policy, health care, education, or

law enforcement. Even the best intentioned anti-racists (or strategic essentialists, for that

matter) may, thus, find themselves unwittingly joining the likes of those notorious police

officers positioned along the New Jersey Turnpike, whose racist ill-will in stopping and

searching motorists they considered “non-white” produced a good deal of “falsely race

positive” crime statistics before the scandal about what came to be known as “driving

while black” eventually broke (Harris 1999).

That is so because once essentializing vocabularies of anthropological difference

– such as those provided by idioms of “race” or “witchcraft” – have come to structure and

semantically saturate everyday life worlds to a degree that the “effects” of “race” (or

“witchcraft”) become experienced as differentials in the chance of being caught walking

underneath collapsing termite-infested granaries, getting laid off from work, incarcerated,

accidentally shot in the course of a nearby drug-raid, having your neighborhood flooded,

prematurely dying of prostate cancer, or, indeed, congestive heart disease due to

hypertension (and so forth), the search for alternate, perhaps multifactorial, perhaps

historicizing explanations may no longer be a particularly attractive, or even only

reasonable choice21. Putting the matter in the bluntest of terms, given that “race” not only

21 As Kahn (2005:656) puts it apropos the blatantly market driven science behind the FDA’s consent to re-label a drug (whose patent was expiring) “race-specific”, “BiDil […] is part of a much larger dynamic of reification in which the purported reality of race as genetic is used to obscure the social reality of racism” and, or so I would add, make money in the process of doing so (cf. Duster 2005). There is a larger, and politically highly incendiary, question that looms in this regard – viz. why forms of knowledge production associated e.g. with what became known in African American communities in the 1980s as “The Plan” (to exterminate black people by launching crack-cocaine,

29

will not, but literally cannot, “go away” on account of its embeddedness in what Edwin

Ardener (1989) might have called the “world structure” of American society, neither the

victims of its operation, nor those concerned with undoing its pernicious effects can have

much of a stake in abandoning the belief in its existence22. If anything, the geneticization

of “race” with which I have been concerned here, will in all likelihood only provide an

alternative (if powerful) ideological technos for dehistoricizing and obscuring the social

relations that “race” conceals. And it will do so by systematically removing such

attributes as witchcraft substances or individually embodied racial biology from the realm

of contestable social construction – not by relegating it to the shady realms of mystical

forces (where one might argue it belongs), but to that ever changing cultural contrivance

we tend to call “nature”. As in the case of kinship, with which – as the Jefferson-Hemings

issue amply illustrated – “racecraft” closely articulates “nature” will simply change its

shape. If, as David Schneider (1980:23) once wrote, Americans define kinship in

accordance to biogenetic relationships, and if “kinship is whatever the biogenetic

relationship is”, then it is clear that “[i]f science discover new facts about biogenetic

relationships, then that is what kinship is and was all along, although it may not have

been known at the time”. The same, or so it seems, would hold for “race”.

spreading AIDS, or introducing anti-fertility drugs into their food), Afrocentric “Melanin” theories, or explanations of the incidence of hypertension among black Americans as a result of “genetic bottlenecks” generated by the slave trade tend to be disqualified as conspiracy theories, crackpot science, or blatant ideology (e.g. Fine and Turner 2001, Ortiz de Montellano 1993, Curtin 1992, Kaufman and Hall 2003). It should be clear here that I endorse neither position. The unanswered question – and it again seems to be an ethnographic one – is why one type of answer to the question “why did the granary collapse at the moment x was walking underneath it?” tends to be publicly discarded in favor of another one. 22 Or at least the belief that others believe in its existence, as Žižek (1997) has noted in a somewhat different context.

30

It would, of course, be grossly insufficient to reduce racial domination to a mere

category mistake – however socially pervasive, and, indeed “structurally necessary” for

the maintenance and reproduction of specific social arrangements such a mistake may be.

Yet by the same token, unless we realize that “race” may be conceptually indispensable

to the maintenance of an ideology positing that society is (or at any rate should) represent

the sum of choices freely made by unequally endowed but otherwise unencumbered

individuals in the marketplace – as indispensable, in fact, as the concept of “witchcraft”

may have been to Evans-Pritchard’s Zande – we will delude ourselves in treating racism

as a “tragic flaw” or irrational “historical residue” marring the project of a democratic

society of free and equal individuals where poor Rodney King’s question “why can’t we

all get along?” would and could have no (racial) meaning, and where my former

neighbor’s question “have you ever met a white person named Washington” would make

no sense at all.

31

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