In this article, we analyze how genetic genealogy reshapes popular notions of historical identity, as it facilitates a genetically informed understanding of ethnicity and ancestry. Drawing on interviews with Swedish, British and American individuals who have employed genetic ancestry tests (GATs) to prove ancestral connections to Vikings, we explore how the desire to "be a Viking" is articulated through a convergence of pre-existing discourses around Vikings and DNA. By combining signs from genetic science and popular depictions of Vikings, our interviewees create a new discourse of geneticized Viking identity. In this new discourse, socio-historically constructed ideas about Vikings are naturalized as the innate qualities of individuals who possess a certain genetic composition. Images of "the Viking" once created for political, cultural or commercial purposes are revived in new embodied forms and can start to circulate in new social contexts, where they, by association, appear to be confirmed by genetical science.
If most academic debates surrounding the recent boom of ancient DNA (aDNA) so far have concerned conflicting research epistemologies, this article is a call for taking aspects of media and communication more seriously. Analyzing the fates of two recent research papers on Viking Age Scandinavia, we show how aDNA research is communicated, narrated and infused with meaning in the public sphere, particularly in relation to popular narratives and political debates. We observe significant interlacing of scientific, political and media discourses in and around the papers, and conclude that archaeogenetics is a highly mediatized scientific field.
Drawing on 81 original letters written by an executive member of staff at UNESCO’s Secretariat 1946–1947, this article aims to deneutralize the work of individual scholars and intellectuals in the officially neutral and invisible Secretariat, and situate the foundational work of UNESCO in the reality of post-war Paris. Olov R. T. Janse, a Swedish-born archaeologist who had worked in Europe, French Indochina and for US intelligence services, worked six months at the UNESCO Secretariat, from November 1946 to May 1947. The letters he sent home to his wife Ronny abound with details and information about his work and life, in and around the UNESCO Secretariat. They outline connections with pre-Second World War cosmopolitan networks and colonial structures, against a background of harsh human reality in post-war Paris, and thus situate UNESCO’s foundation at the point of intersection between pre-war nostalgia and post-war dreams of a peaceful future.
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