Routledge Handbook of Science, Technology, and Society

Daniel Lee Kleinman, Kelly Moore, Daniel Lee Kleinman, Kelly Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136237157
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique culturelle

Over the last decade or so, the field of science and technology studies (STS) has become an intellectually dynamic interdisciplinary arena. Concepts, methods, and theoretical perspectives are being drawn both from long-established and relatively young disciplines. From its origins in philosophical and political debates about the creation and use of scientific knowledge, STS has become a wide and deep space for the consideration of the place of science and technology in the world, past and present.

The Routledge Handbook of Science, Technology and Society seeks to capture the dynamism and breadth of the field by presenting work that pushes the reader to think about science and technology and their intersections with social life in new ways. The interdisciplinary contributions by international experts in this handbook are organized around six topic areas:

• embodiment
• consuming technoscience
• digitization
• environments
• science as work
• rules and standards

This volume highlights a range of theoretical and empirical approaches to some of the persistent – and new – questions in the field. It will be useful for students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities, including in science and technology studies, history, geography, critical race studies, sociology, communications, women's and gender studies, anthropology, and political science.

Part I

Embodiment

1

The Emergence, Politics, and Marketplace of Native American DNA¹

Kim TallBear

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, AUSTIN

Scientists and the public alike are on the hunt for “Native American DNA.”² Hi-tech genomics labs at universities around the world search for answers to questions about human origins and ancient global migrations. In the glossy world of made-for-television science, celebrity geneticist Spencer Wells travels in jet planes and Land Rovers to far flung deserts and ice fields. Clad in North Face^® gear, he goes in search of indigenous DNA that will provide a window into our collective human past.

Others – housewives, retirees, professionals in their spare time – search for faded faces and long-ago names, proof that their grandmothers’ stories are true, that there are Indians obscured in the dense foliage of the family tree. Some are meticulous researchers, genealogists who want to fill in the blanks in their ancestral histories. They combine DNA testing with online networking to find their “DNA cousins.” Some have romantic visions of documenting that “spiritual connection” they’ve always felt to Native Americans. A few imagine casino pay outs, free housing, education, and healthcare if they can get enrolled in a Native American tribe. Applicants to top-ranked schools have had their genomes surveyed for Native American DNA and other non-European ancestries with the hope of gaining racial favor in competitive admissions processes. Former citizens of Native American tribes ejected for reasons having to do with the financial stakes of membership have sought proof of Native American DNA to help them get back onto tribal rolls (Bolnick et al. 2007, Harmon 2006, Harris 2007, Koerner 2005, Simons 2007, Takeaway Media Productions 2003, Thirteen/WNET 2007, Wolinsky 2006, Marks 2002).

Genetic scientists, family tree researchers, and would-be tribal members – often with little or no lived connection to tribal communities – have needs and perspectives that condition the production and use of Native American DNA knowledge in ways that rarely serve Native American communities themselves. How did it come to be that Native American bodies are expected to serve as sources of biological raw materials extracted to produce knowledge that not only does not benefit them, but may actually harm them by challenging their sovereignty, historical narratives, and identities?

Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars and those in related fields have addressed the co-constitution of racial and ethnic identities with genetic markers – both ancestry markers and those that are biomedically relevant (for example, Fullwiley 2008, Kahn 2006, Montoya 2011, Nash 2003, 2004, Nelson 2008a, 2008b). Such analyses often focus on cultural, social, and economic differences historically of such communities in relation to dominant populations. STS scholars have dealt less so with issues of Native American identity as implicated by genetics, with several notable exceptions (for example, Reardon 2005, Reardon and TallBear 2012, TallBear 2008, 2013). This is no doubt because the Native American racial/ethnic category has the additional aspect of being characterized by the unique government-to-government relationships of tribes with the U.S. state. Like most academic fields STS does not seem particularly cognizant of this aspect of indigenous life in the U.S. On the other hand, Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) is the field in which Native American identity and governance issues are expertly treated. In its U.S. formation, NAIS engages little with the biological and physical sciences. Where it focuses on governance, it emphasizes the law over governance through science. Approaches from both fields are needed to understand the topic at hand. I inhabit both fields.

What is Native American DNA?

To understand Native American DNA we must understand not only contemporary genome science practices but also how Native American bodies have been treated historically. Native American bodies, both dead and living, have been sources of bone, and more recently, of blood, saliva, and hair, used to constitute knowledge of human biological and cultural history (Benzvi 2007, Bieder 1986, Reardon and TallBear 2012, Thomas 2000). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American School of Anthropology rose to worldwide prominence through the physical inspection of Native American bones and skulls plucked from battlefields or from recent gravesites by grave-robbers-cum-contract-workers, or scientists. It was certainly distasteful work to scavenge decomposing bodies, and boil them down so bones could be sent more easily to laboratories clean and ready for examination.

But two justifications emerged for the work, justifications that will ring familiar in my analysis of contemporary genetic scientists’ treatment of Native Americans’ DNA. First, the Indians were seen as doomed to vanish before the steam engine of westward expansion. The idea was then and is now that they should be studied before their kind is no more. Second, this sort of research was and is purported to be for the good of knowledge, and knowledge was and is supposed to be for the good of all. Indeed, the notion that “knowledge is power” continues to be used to justify practices that benefit technoscientists and their institutions but with questionable returns to the individuals and communities who actually pay for such knowledge with their bodies or their pocketbooks. Extractive genetics research and profit-making is not of course limited to marginalized Native Americans. Shobita Parthasarathy in Chapter 5 of this volume, “Producing the Consumer of Genetic Testing,” questions the knowledge-is-power narrative that informs Myriad Genetics’ and 23andMe’s marketing of genetic tests to the public as they seek to turn patients into “healthcare consumers.” But the knowledge that companies sell is of questionable use to individuals who do not have relevant scientific expertise, yet who pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for test results that are difficult to interpret, and which are sometimes based on unreplicated scientific studies. Thus we must ask for whom are particular forms of genetic knowledge power (or profit), and at whose expense?

Genetic ancestry

What in technical terms is Native American DNA? In the early 1960s, new biochemical techniques began to be applied to traditional anthropological questions, including the study of ancient human migrations and the biological and cultural relationships between populations. The new subfield of “molecular anthropology” was born, sometimes also called “anthropological genetics” (Marks 2002). Sets of markers or nucleotides in both the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and in chromosomal DNA were observed to appear at different frequencies among different populations. The highest frequencies of so-called Native American markers are observed by scientists in “unadmixed” native populations in North and South America. These markers are the genetic inheritance of “founder populations,” allegedly the first humans to walk in the lands we now call the “Americas.”

The so-called Native American mtDNA lineages A, B, C, D, and X, or Y chromosome lineages M, Q3, or M3 are not simply objective molecular objects. These molecular sequences or “markers” – their patterns, mutations, deletions, and transcriptions that indicate genetic relationships and histories – have not been simply uncovered in human genomes. Native American DNA could not have emerged as an object of scientific research and genealogical desire until individuals and groups emerged as “Native American” in the course of colonial history. Without “settlers” we could not have “Indians” or Native Americans. Instead, we would have many thousands of smaller groups or peoples defined within and according to their own languages, by their own names.

It is the arrival of the settler a half millennia ago, and many subsequent settlements, that frame the search for Native American DNA before it is “too late,” before the genetic signatures of the “founding populations” in the Americas are lost forever in a sea of genetic admixture. “Mixing” is predicated on “purity,” a presumed state of affairs in the colonial pre-contact Americas, which informs the historical constitution of continental spaces and concomitant grouping of humans into “races” – undifferentiated masses of “Native Americans,” “Africans,” “Asians,” and “Indo-Europeans.” This view privileges Europeans’ encounter of humans in the Americas. Standing where they do – almost never identifying as indigenous people themselves – scientists who study Native American migrations desire to know the “origins” of those who were first encountered when European settlers landed on the shores of these continents.

On the order of millennia, anthropological geneticists want to understand which human groups or “populations” are related to which others, and who descended from whom. Where geographically did the ancestors of different human groups migrate from? What were their patterns of geographic migration? When did such migrations occur? In the genomes of the living and the dead, scientists look for molecular sequences – the “genetic signatures” of ancient peoples whom they perceive as original continental populations: Indo-Europeans, Africans, Asians, and Native Americans. Native American DNA, as a (threatened and vanishing) scientific object of study, can help answer what are for these scientists, pressing questions.

In human genome diversity research in anthropology and other fields, origins get operationalized as “molecular origins,” ancestral populations inferred for an individual based on a specific set of genetic markers, a specific set of algorithms for assessing genetic similarity, and a specific set of reference populations (Lee et al. 2009). But each of those constitutive elements operates within a loop of circular reasoning. Pure bio-geographic origins must be assumed in order to constitute the data that supposedly reveals those same origins. Notions of ancestral populations, the ordering and calculating of genetic markers and their associations, and the representation of living groups of individuals as reference populations each require the assumption that there was a moment, a human body, a marker, a population that was a bio-geographical pinpoint of originality. This faith in originality would seem to be at odds with the doctrine of evolution, of change over time, of becoming.

The populations and population-specified markers that are identified and studied are informed by the particular cultural understandings of the humans who study them. Native American DNA, sub-Saharan African, European, or East Asian DNAs are constituted as scientific objects by laboratory methods and devices, and also by discourses of race, ethnicity, nation, family and tribe. For and by whom are such categories defined? How have continental-level race categories come to matter? Why do they matter more than the concept of “peoples” that condition indigenous narratives, knowledges, and claims?

An Anishinaabee with too many non-Anishinaabee ancestors won’t count as part of an Anishinaabee “population,” thus bringing a tribal/First Nation category of belonging into conflict with a geneticist’s category. To make things even more complicated, genetic population categories themselves are not even consistently defined. For example, a scientist may draw blood from enrolled members at the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians reservation in North Dakota and call her sample a “Turtle Mountain Chippewa” sample. At the same time, she may have obtained “Sioux” samples from other scientists and physicians who took them at multiple sites (on multiple reservations or in urban Indian Health Service facilities) over the course of many years. In the Turtle Mountain Chippewa instance, we have a “population” circumscribed by a federally-recognized tribal boundary. In the “Sioux” instance, we have a population circumscribed by a broader ethnic designation spanning multiple tribes. Histories of politics inhere in the samples. Politics are also imposed onto the samples by researchers who enforce subsequent requirements for the data – for example, that usable samples come only from subjects who possess a certain number of grandparents from within said population. Thus, the categories favored by scientists are not “objectively true.”

The DNA profile

I stretch the definition of Native American DNA beyond its usual reference to “New World” genetic ancestry, which is traceable through female mtDNA and male Y chromosome lines and through more complex tests that combine multiple markers across the genome to trace ancestry. I include the “DNA profile” or “DNA fingerprint.” This form of DNA analysis is often treated as a standard parentage test and thus used by Native American tribes to verify that applicants are indeed the biological offspring of already enrolled tribal members. As a parentage test, the same form of analysis shows genetic relatedness between parent and child, or other close biological kin. When used to confer citizenship in U.S. tribes and Canadian First Nations, the DNA fingerprint becomes a marker of Native American affiliation.

In order to follow the complex weave created when threads of genome knowledge loop into already densely knit tribal histories and practices of identity-making, one must grasp complex knowledges simultaneously: molecular knowledges and their social histories and practices of tribal citizenship. DNA testing company scientists and marketers do not have a deep historical or practical understanding of the intricacies of tribal enrollment. Nor do they tend to understand the broader historical and political frame circumscribing their work, and precisely how their disciplines have fed from marginalized bodies. Tribal folks know these politics and histories well – we live day in and out with enrollment rules, and we all know about the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). But we do not tend to know the molecular intricacies of DNA tests.

To date, DNA tests used by tribes are simply statements of genetic parentage. Tribal governments make regulatory decisions privileging these tests, instead of or along with other forms of parent-child relationship documentation, such as birth or adoption certificates. Tribes increasingly combine DNA tests with longer-standing citizenship rules that focus largely on tracing one’s genealogy to ancestors named on “base rolls” constructed in previous centuries. Until now, tribal enrollment rules have been articulated largely through the symbolic language of blood. Like many other Americans, we are transitioning in Indian Country away from blood-talk to speaking in terms of what “is coded in our DNA” or our “genetic memory.” But we do it in a very particular social and historical context, one that entangles genetic information in a web of known family relations, reservation histories, and tribal and federal government regulations.

A feminist-indigenous standpoint analysis of Native American DNA

The entangled technical imprecisions and troublesome politics of genetic relatedness techniques are not apparent to most people, thus do little to undermine the authority of genomics on questions of human “origins” and identity, including for Native Americans. In our world of power and resource imbalances, in which the knowledge of some people is made more relevant than others’, genetic markers and populations named and ordered by scientists play key roles in the history that has come to matter. Native American DNA is both supported by and threads back into our social-historical fabric, (re)scripting history and (re)constituting the categories by which we order life, with real material consequences.

This is where feminist epistemology enters the picture. Feminist science studies scholars have called out espe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Science, technology and society
• Part I Embodiment
• Part II Consuming Technoscience
• Part III Digitization
• Part IV Environments
• Part V Technoscience as Work
• Part VI Rules and Standards
• Index