Genetics, Race, and Relatedness: Human Mobility and Human Diversity in the Genographic Project

Abstract

The National Geographic Society's Genographic Project to reconstruct the geography of early human migration through analysis of the genetic material of indigenous people features a geographical imagination of human interconnection and diversity and differentiated human mobilities. It combines its central focus on human genetic difference with a simultaneous insistence on the progressive value of its explicitly antiracist message about shared human origins and interconnections. An apparently progressive language of multiculturalism, diversity, global human harmony, and indigenous rights frames reductive versions of relatedness, unreflexive assumptions of scientific authority, and primitivizing accounts of exotic and isolated indigeneity. Through its focus on bio-political geographies of difference, this article provides a productive contribution to critical geographies of race and a scholarly engagement with new genetic geographies of human diversity in academic geography. It is also a starting point for a political–pedagogical project that uses the Genographic Project against itself as a resource for an alternative critical exploration of race and relatedness.

El Proyecto Genográfico de la National Geographic Society [Sociedad Geográfica Nacional] destinado a reconstruir la geografía de la migración humana más antigua por medio del análisis de material genético de pueblos indígenas presenta una imaginación geográfica de la interconexión y diversidad humanas y movilidades humanas diferenciadas. Este enfoque combina su principal interés en la diferencia genética humana con una insistencia simultánea sobre el valor progresivo de su mensaje explícitamente antirracista, en términos de orígenes e interconexiones humanos compartidos. Un lenguaje de multiculturalismo aparentemente progresista, diversidad, armonía global humana y derechos indígenas, enmarcan versiones reductivas de relacionalidad, supuestos irreflexivos de autoridad científica y recuentos primitivistas de indigeneidad exótica y aislada. A través de su énfasis en geografías biopolíticas de la diferencia, este artículo suministra una contribución productiva a las geografías críticas de raza y un compromiso erudito con las nuevas geografías genéticas de la diversidad humana en la geografía académica. Es también un punto de partida para un proyecto político–pedagógico que utiliza el Proyecto Genográfico contra sí mismo a manera de recurso para una exploración crítica alternativa de raza y relacionalidad.

Key Words:

• anti-racism
• diversity
• genetic relatedness
• Genographic Project
• race

关键词:

• 反种族主义
• 多样性
• 遗传相关性
• 基因地理项目

Palabras clave:

• antirracismo
• diversidad
• relacionalidad genética
• Proyecto Genográfico
• raza

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful for the helpful comments of two anonymous referees; Audrey Kobayashi, Caron Lipman, Miles Ogborn, and those who responded to presentations of this article, especially at the School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona; the School of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow; and participants in the Institute of Australian Geographers Cultural Geography Study Group preconference workshop, Cairns 2009.

Notes

1. Those who argue that this will enable improvements in the prevention and treatment of disease through the commercial development of “ethnically” or “racially” targeted drugs are reigniting old controversies about the status and clinical relevance of race (Bamshad et al. 2004; Epstein 2004; Rotimi 2004; Duster 2005; Kahn 2006).

2. The figuring of gender and sexuality within human population genetics and the masculinism evident here deserves a fuller critique. See Nash (forthcoming).

3. Criticisms from indigenous organizations led by the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism (IPCB) immediately followed the project launch in March 2005. The IPCB (2005) submitted a petition against the Project to the National Geographic Society in May 2005 and were active in raising concerns about the Project in the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2006. This has led to the Forum's request that the Genographic Project be immediately suspended and a recommendation that the Human Rights Commission and the World Health Organization investigate the objectives of the Project. In August 2005 the International Indian Treaty Council called for a halt of the Project (Resolution Calling for a Halt to the Genographic Project 2005). In July 2006, after discussions with the Project's representatives that failed to satisfy their concerns, Cultural Survival, an organization promoting indigenous rights, asked the National Geographic Society to suspend the Project and called for a moratorium on the Project (E. L. Lutz 2006a).

4. Wells recounted witnessing “first-hand the passionate discussion” (Wells 2006, 34) surrounding the HGDP as a young geneticist studying under Luca Cavalli-Sforza at Stanford in the 1990s, and considerable efforts are made to avoid similar controversy and distance the Genographic Project from the HGDP. Its Web site stresses the differences between both projects. Nevertheless, there are continuities in terms of those involved—Cavalli-Sforza who proposed the HGDP chairs the Genographic Project's Advisory Board—and in terms of the project's approach.

5. See Genographic Project (2006b). TallBear's (2005) analysis of the launch event demonstrates the ways in which the three men symbolized the Genographic Project's attempt to portray the Project as a “multiculturalist coming together of scientific and indigenous knowledge” even though those indigenous knowledges are ultimately secondary to the Project's search for scientific truth (TallBear 2005, 262).

6. http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/the-human-family-tree-3706/Overview#tab-bios (last acces- sed 1 October 2009).

7. See The Genographic Project Classroom Companion, available at http://www.ngsednet.org/community/resources_view.cfm?community_id = 278&resource_id = 6477 (last accessed 29 October 2009) and the Genographic Project lesson plans available at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/09/g912/genographic1.html (last accessed 29 October 2009).