Genetic Indigenisation in ‘The People of the British Isles’

Abstract

In 2007, Channel 4 screened Face of Britain, a documentary about the genetic mapping of Britain. Face of Britain promised to reveal ‘who we really are’ by tracing genetic links back to ancient Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. This article situates Face of Britain within the wider racial and national politics that it is invariably caught up in, and examines how ‘race’ and racial thinking are reconfigured in ways that are both ‘old’ and ‘new’. Face of Britain constitutes an interesting case study to examine how ideas of indigeneity are produced and naturalised in scientific discourses and practices. Here, indigeneity is mobilised through three sub-narratives: the ‘vanishing indigene’; the promise of facial recognition; and DNA and national relatedness. The analysis reveals how some people of the British Isles are naturalised as indigenous by virtue of their ancestral presence in this land through a combination of genetic and photographic technologies. In short, blood and soil are intertwined, with genes as mediators between ancestors and contemporary inhabitants of Britain. Furthermore, the invisible genetic connection is made visible through the creation of ‘average faces of Britain’, which is considered here as a contemporary version of physiognomy. In conclusion, Face of Britain testifies to the reconfiguration of ‘racial thinking’ in contemporary science, through what ultimately amounts to the genetic indigenisation of white Britons. Consequently, this study lends itself to racialised politics of land claims that resonate with, but are different from, indigenous politics in other contexts, namely with regards to the relationship to whiteness.

Keywords:

• Genetic genealogies
• nation formation
• indigeneity
• racism
• physiognomy
• Britain

Acknowledgements

Early versions of this paper were presented at a number of conferences and invited lectures. I wish to thank those attending for their useful questions and comments. I am also grateful to Maureen McNeil, Richard Tutton and Cynthia Weber, as well as to the journal editors Les Levidow and Kean Birch and three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on drafts of this article.

Notes

EDM 1299, 20 April 2009. Available at: http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=38437 (accessed 24 January 2011).

Question Time is a current affairs debating programme aired on BBC television. The show typically features politicians from at least the three major political parties (Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats) as well as other public figures who answer questions put to them by the audience.

The HGDP proposed to conduct a genetic survey of human populations around the world in order to map global human genetic diversity. The project was to take blood samples of ‘isolated indigenous populations’ who were viewed as highly ‘unadmixed’, that is, whose genetic signature has a low incidence of mixing through interbreeding. The HGDP never got off the ground, hampered as it was by intense controversy. The Genographic Project, for its part, was launched in 2005 by National Geographic and IBM, with funding from the Waitt Family Foundation (Gateway Computers) (TallBear, 2007, p. 412). It has similar aims—to map the genetic diversity of the global human population by taking blood samples from indigenous populations—and is also subject to controversy. It is worth noting that Genographic is led by biologist Spencer Wells, who did his PhD with the founder of the HGDP, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza. Sforza is a member of Genographic's advisory board (The Genographic Project, ‘Frequently Asked Questions → Funding and Partners’. Available at: http://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/faqs_funding.html (accessed 23 November 2010).

Although at the time of printing this article, additional sampling ‘events’ were planned for May and June 2011. See the People of the British Isles website http://www.peopleofthebritishisles.org/ (accessed 19 May 2011).

People of the British Isles website. Available at: http://www.peopleofthebritishisles.org/ (accessed 19 May 2011).

Neil Oliver is a Scottish archaeologist and historian who has featured in a range of television series since 2002. He is best known for heading the series Coast, where he travels around the coasts of Britain and Ireland, exploring archaeological remains, natural history, the landscape and, as his website states, ‘most of all the people of Great Britain and Ireland, past and present’. See http://www.neiloliver.com/home.html (accessed 20 May 2010).

A noteworthy contrast between Face of Britain and Sir Walter's Journey (although there are many overlapping themes and concerns around loss and heritage, etc.) is that the latter struck a democratising tone. Indeed, it was informed by the idea that genetics as opposed to archaeology tells the stories of the working classes, the poor, those who did not own artefacts for future archaeologists to discover. In Sir Walter's Journey, Bodmer clashes with an archaeologist, critiquing the archaeo-centric view of history that genetics is seen to offer an important corrective to. With Neil Oliver fronting Face of Britain, an alliance seems to have been made between genetics and archaeology. Many thanks to Richard Tutton for identifying this difference between the two television productions.

The precursor to the use of blood types to study the geographical movement of populations was Luigi Cavalli-Sforza's study of an Italian community in the 1950s. With the development of technologies allowing the isolation of DNA, genetic anthropologists and population geneticists were able to compare DNA markers between populations. In short, there are two kinds of tests used. First, the tracing of sex-linked lineage through the study of the Y-chromosome, passed on through the paternal lineage (from fathers to sons), and the study of the mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, passed on through the maternal lineage (depending on the accounts, mtDNA is transmitted from mothers to daughters, or from mothers to all their children). The second type of testing is on autosomes, which are chromosomes other than the X or the Y and which are transmitted from both parents. For a summary of the use of genetics in the science of genealogy, see Johnston and Thomas (2003).

See http://www.peopleofthebritishisles.org/ (accessed 19 May 2011).

For example, in television or radio: Sir Walter's Journey (1994) BBC2; Extraordinary Ancestors (2000) Channel 4; The People Detective (2001) BBC2; Blood of the Vikings (2001) BBC1 (with a companion book); Surnames, Genes and Genealogy (2001) BBC Natural History Unit Radio; Motherland: A Genetic Journey (2002) BBC2 and Takeaway Media; Who Do You Think You Are? (2010 and earlier years) BBC2.

My thanks to Cynthia Weber for drawing my attention to this point.

See http://www.wagtv.com/programme/Face-Of-Britain-303.html?filter=type_Series (accessed 17 May 2010).

These were the skeletal remains of a man from the Iron Age, found in a burial pit in Bleadon, Somerset, in 1998, along with the remains of a woman.

To view some ‘faces of Britain’ visit http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/e-h/face.html (accessed 19 May 2011).

The impulse to produce all faces in heterosexual couples is noteworthy. This is not unique to Face of Britain in the sense that many genetic studies of human provenance not only use the heterosexualised kinship model as the means to translate the complexities of new genetics for a wider public, but the heterosexualised, ‘blood-related’ forms of kinship are naturalised and legitimised, in these genetic studies, as the only way to be ‘fully human’ (Nash, 2004, p. 25). Furthermore, the creation of male and female versions of the morphs could be read as ways to secure a gender identity for each ‘face’ which, on its own, may be at risk of being read as gender ambivalent. On one such example of a gender ambivalent morph, see Fortier (2008, pp. 38ff.).

For Galton, composite portraiture was ‘an ideal composition’, the effect of which ‘is to bring into evidence all the traits in which there is agreement, and to leave but a ghost of a trace of individual peculiarities’. He described the composites as ‘pictorial statistics’ and ‘generic pictures of man’ (all cited in Hartley, 2001, pp. 185, 186).

See http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/interviews/interview/698/ (accessed 23 September 2009).

It is interesting to consider Oliver's and McKie's statements here as rehearsing the centuries-old conflicts opposing ‘Celts’ (linked to the Irish and Scottish) to Anglo-Saxons (associated with the English). McKie's remark can be read as implying a colonial claim by Britain to, at the very least, moral property rights in Ireland which obscures Britain's colonial history in Ireland. The complex relationship between Ireland and ‘Britain’ is under erasure in the ways that claims of indigenousness are made in Face of Britain but also in the BNP's listing of Irish, Scots, English and Welsh. Such a list assumes that all are on an equal footing as ‘Britons’ and does not acknowledge the politics of domination that historically position the English as politically, economically and culturally dominant. Oliver, for his part, is playfully staging the Scottish politics of sovereignty, independence and separateness from England by using genetic evidence as evidence of his people's rightful ownership of Scotland—and perhaps of the whole of Britain, because it is unclear where he means when he says ‘this land’ belongs to him.