Identity Politics and the New Genetics

Racial and ethnic categories have appeared in recent scientific work in novel ways and in relation to a variety of disciplines: medicine, forensics, population genetics and also developments in popular genealogy. Once again, biology is foregrounded in the discussion of human identity. Of particular importance is the preoccupation with origins and personal discovery and the increasing use of racial and ethnic categories in social policy. This new genetic knowledge, expressed in technology and practice, has the potential to disrupt how race and ethnicity are debated, managed and lived. As such, this volume investigates the ways in which existing social categories are both maintained and transformed at the intersection of the natural (sciences) and the cultural (politics). The contributors include medical researchers, anthropologists, historians of science and sociologists of race relations; together, they explore the new and challenging landscape where biology becomes the stuff of identity.

Katharina Schramm is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg and Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Her publications include African Homecoming: Pan-African Ideology and Contested Heritage (2010) and  Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission (co-editor, 2009).

David Skinner is Reader in Sociology at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. His publications on the politics of race and science include ‘Racialised Futures: Biologism and the Changing Politics of Identity’ in Social Studies of Science (2006); and ‘Groundhog Day? The Strange Case of Sociology, Science and Race’ in Sociology (2007).

Richard Rottenburg holds a chair in Social Anthropology at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg and is Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He has written and edited books on the Sudan, economic anthropology, the transcultural production of objectivity and theorizing postneoliberal governance. Among these is Far-Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid (2009).