The politics of genealogical incorporation: ethnic difference, genetic relatedness and national belonging

Abstract

On the 17 th of April 2014 the Irish parliament's Joint Committee of Justice, Defence and Equality published a report calling on the state to officially recognize Irish Travellers as an ethnic group (Houses of the Oireachtas 2014). Their recognition as an indigenous nomadic minority ethnic group has long been recommended by international human rights organizations and is central to Irish Traveller campaigns for Traveller-appropriate public policy in the face of entrenched institutional discrimination especially in relation to housing, policing and education and deeply anti-Traveller attitudes (The Equality Authority 2006; Moore 2012; McVeigh 2007a, 2007b; O'Connell 2006). The recommendation of the report has not been accepted. In November 2015 a Sinn Féin motion in favour of the implementation of the recommendations of the report was undermined by an amendment which edited out the reference to state recognition of Traveller ethnicity (Hughes 2015; O'Halloran 2015).This recommendation and its rejection reflects the ambiguity of the state's approach to the status of Travellers, and, indeed, of what counts as recognition. 1 Resistance to official recognition predominates but policy is more equivocal. The rationale for not formally recognising Traveller ethnicity while funding anti-racism, anti-discrimination, and Traveller welfare and inclusion strategies, is that Travellers are already served by existing legislation. They 'have the same civil and political rights as other citizens under the Constitution' and Irish legislation giving effect to EU and international protections for ethnic minorities 'explicitly protects Travellers.' 2 Since 2006 the Irish census includes the category 'Irish Traveller' as an option to the question 'What is your ethnic or cultural background?'. The inclusion of 'cultural

Next generation sequencing

“…It includes some people and excludes others. It is part of cultural practice, and even the hard facts of genetics do not change this: as "biocultural artefacts" (Abel and Schroeder 2020, p. 200) they are part of "genealogical imaginaries" (Nash 2017) and have a social life (Pálsson 2002).…”

Narrating ethnicity and diversity in Middle Eastern national genome projects

“…Geneticists from these countries, as participants in the international scientific community, have readily marketed their nation’s ethnic diversity as a valuable biomedical resource, while simultaneously restricting the categories through which that diversity can be sampled and interpreted – specifically, as subgroups of a singular (Jewish, Russian, Chinese) nation. The ‘biologistical’ constructions of ethnicity emerging from these contexts therefore characterize a distinct form of ‘genealogical incorporation’ that does not necessarily deny ethnic difference within the nation; however, such difference is envisioned only as branches of a ‘national family tree’ (Fullwiley, 2008; Nash, 2017). In such contexts, the methodological nationalism inherent to much research on human genetics is deeply entangled with a form of postcolonial nationalism that tightly constrains the political significance accorded to ethnic diversity.…”

“…Accordingly, sociologist Mehdi Bozorgmehr (1997) argued that Iranian immigrant ‘sub-populations’ in Los Angeles formed distinct ethnic communities and ‘should not be subsumed under an umbrella Iranian category’ (p. 400). In contrast, the IGP employs just such an umbrella category, effectively reconstituting the Iranian state’s own postcolonial-nationalist approach to the ‘genealogical incorporation’ of these groups into a narrative of shared national ancestry (Nash, 2017).…”

Genealogical Relatedness: Geographies of Shared Descent and Difference

“…This is a concern about how consumers are encouraged to seek the rewards and fulfilment of genealogical knowledge of "deep ancestry" on the basis of the idea of a natural affinity between those who share ancestry. As I have argued elsewhere [27,28], the genetic tests sold by the Genographic Project and other companies are not sold on the basis that they confirm the consumer as part of an undifferentiated global family, since that is already a given. Instead, they offer the consumer a sense of their particular place on a differentiated human family tree and sense of connection to those who also share that ancestry.…”

“…The challenge is also to avoid an emphasis on genealogical interconnection implying that there are diminishing natural grounds for shared identity with increasing genealogical difference. The ideas of the nation as community of shared descent, even if imagined as a complex one, still implies that some groups can be more easily incorporated into the national community than others [28]. A genealogical version of collective identity differentiates between those who are more and less genealogically connected and can imply gradients of "natural" affinity and "natural" belonging.…”