Explaining the visible and the invisible: Public knowledge of genetics, ancestry, physical appearance and race in Colombia

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.

Enactments of Race in the UK’s Blood Stem Cell Inventory

“…Significant work has been undertaken in trying to explain why it is that race sometimes feels like it is present in a context without being explicitly referred to (Wade, 2014;Schwartz-Marín and Wade, 2015). This literature suggests that the language of race is not simply being semantically sidestepped because of its historical and political baggage.…”

“…(Data analyst at adult donor registry) Tellingly, with reference to the vernacular slippage between different terms, this interviewee uses both the explicit language of race ('racial indicators') and ethnicity. Following Wade (2015), both terms here invoke the same racial logic of biological difference embedded in ideas of generational transmission. According to this data analyst, a person might struggle to 'know' their ethnicity 'in genetic ways'.…”

Colombian forensic genetics as a form of public science: The role of race, nation and common sense in the stabilization of DNA populations

“…purity) can be made. (This was also a common theme in the public focus groups we conducted in Bogotá and Medellín; see Schwartz-Marín and Wade, 2015 .) In a focus group at the INMLyCF (18 February 2012), participants made reference to the way in which violence and human displacement have accelerated mestizaje in the already very mixed landscape of Colombia: The two great migrations: the first one between 1948 and 1950, called the time of violence, marked by the fight between the Liberals and the Conservatives for political power, well, that made many people move from their original places; on top of the cultural, ancestral admixture, add this layer of displacement.…”

“…Strategies that draw on both history and appearance are a common tactic in lay engagement with genetic science in Colombia (see Schwartz-Marín and Wade, 2015 ). With respect to population genetics, we have shown that the forensic laboratory is another space in which we can think of interactions between public domains and genetic science ( Lévy-LeBlond, 1992 ).…”

Genomic research, publics and experts in Latin America: Nation, race and body

“…As in Mexico, our Colombia team carried out focus groups and interviews with a range of people – mostly but not only university students – to assess whether geneticization of thinking about race and nation was taking place ( Schwartz-Marín and Wade, 2015 ). Especially among students in the life sciences – and also among policemen and forensic specialists – there was a clear tendency to see Colombia as a country marked by the ‘regionalization of race’ and the ‘regionalization of genes’, to borrow terms used by geneticist Emilio Yunis Turbay (2009 : 19); there was little problem in seeing region in biologizing terms.…”