E. Schwartz-Marin
Explaining the visible and the invisible: ancestry, appearance, race and genetics in Colombia
Schwartz-Marin, E.; Wade, P.
Authors
P. Wade
Abstract
Using data from focus groups conducted in Colombia, we explore how educated lay audiences faced with scenarios about ancestry and genetics draw on widespread and dominant notions of nation, race and belonging in Colombia to ascribe ancestry to collectivities and to themselves as individuals. People from a life sciences background tend to deploy idioms of race and genetics more readily than people from a humanities and race-critical background. When they considered individuals, people tempered or domesticated the more mechanistic explanations about racialized physical appearance, ancestry and genetics that were apparent at the collective level. Ideas of the latency and manifestation of invisible traits were an aspect of this domestication. People ceded ultimate authority to genetic science, but deployed it to work alongside what they already knew. Notions of genetic essentialism co-exist with the strategic use of genetic ancestry in ways that both fix and unfix race. Our data indicate the importance of attending to the different epistemological stances through which people define authoritative knowledge and to the importance of distinguishing the scale of resolution at which the question of diversity is being posed.
Citation
Schwartz-Marin, E., & Wade, P. (2015). Explaining the visible and the invisible: ancestry, appearance, race and genetics in Colombia. Social Studies of Science, 45(6), 886-906. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715621182
| Journal Article Type | Article |
|---|---|
| Online Publication Date | Dec 23, 2015 |
| Publication Date | Dec 1, 2015 |
| Deposit Date | Jan 21, 2016 |
| Publicly Available Date | Jan 21, 2016 |
| Journal | Social Studies of Science |
| Print ISSN | 0306-3127 |
| Electronic ISSN | 1460-3659 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications |
| Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 886-906 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715621182 |
| Keywords | Ancestry, Colombia, DNA tests, Lay knowledge, Physical appearance, Race. |
| Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1394295 |
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Copyright Statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).