The substance that empowers? DNA in South Asia

Abstract

Drawing on two ethnographic examples of the sociocultural aspects of populations genetic research in India, the article explores in what ways tests aimed at assessing ‘genetic differences’ between populations can be viewed as enabling or disempowering for individuals, communities or nations subjected to such tests. The first builds on a response to DNA research demonstrated by the leaders of the Jewish Bene Ephraim community of Andhra Pradesh, a Dalit group who in the late 1980s declared their descent from the Lost Tribes of Israel. The second focuses on the Indian Genome Variation Consortium, a research network established in India in 2003 with the aim of mapping the country's human genetic diversity. Building upon Prainsack and Toom's theoretical concept of situated dis/empowerment, I suggest that in both case studies empowering and disempowering elements of DNA testing appear to co-constitute and co-produce each other, as they both reinforce reductionist accounts of human sociality and serve as rhetorical tools for social and political liberation.

Keywords:

• population genetics
• India
• Dalits
• Bene Ephraim
• genomic sovereignty

Acknowledgements

Parts of this article were presented at the international conference on Biohistories: DNA and bones in cultures of remembrance (Zurich, October 2010). I would like to thank the audiences for their feedback, and I am particularly grateful to Marianne Sommer and Gesine Kruger for their in-depth discussion of this material. I am also very grateful to the staff of Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and particularly to Veronika Lipphardt for hosting me at the Institute at the time when I was finishing this article. My work on the Bene Ephraim was funded by the Rothschild Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, my research on population genetics in India was funded by the Nuffield Foundation and I am very grateful for this support. I also wish to thank Deepa Reddy, Jacob Copeman and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Notes

1 For a wider discussion of the history of the Lost Tribes tradition, see Ben-Dor Benite (2009). For an analysis of other communities who embraced Lost Tribes descent, see Parfitt (2002) and Parfitt and Trevisan Semi (2002).

2 For a fairly detailed source of scientific papers and mass media articles on this research, see http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/abstracts.html.

3 For a discussion of the mass media representations of genetics, see for instance, Parfitt and Egorova (2006).

4 My research among the Bene Ephraim was funded by the Rothschild Foundation and by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Ref. AH/G010463/1). The project employed Dr Shahid Perwez as a Postdoctoral Research Associate.

5 For research on the Madiga see Still (2007). For research on the Bene Ephraim, see Egorova and Perwez (2010, 2012).

6 Sadok Yacobi (personal communication, 30 December 2009).

7 For research on the Bene Israel and the relationship between their Jewish and Indian heritage, see, for instance, Isenberg (1988) and Weil (1994).

8 I borrow this phrase from Petryna (2009).

9 www.igvdb.res.in (accessed July 25, 2012).

10 SNP (abbreviation pronounced as snip) is a variation in DNA sequence, which occurs when a single nucleotide (A, T, C or G) in the genome differs.

11 CNVs – alterations of the DNA of a genome which happens when the cell has an abnormal number of copies of one or more DNA sections.

12 www.igvdb.res.in (accessed July 25, 2012).

13 CROs are organizations involved in the management and administration of clinical trials. CROs emerged as a new institution to mitigate for the organizational complexity of clinical trials (Sundar Rajan 2010, 57).

14 For a sociocultural analysis of the concept of genomic sovereignty, see Benjamin (2009).

15 For a discussion of the shift from Christian anti-Semitism to racial anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth Europe, which, in its turn, led to the emergence of ‘race science’ in the Zionist discourse, see Efron (1994) and Weikart (2006).

16 For a detailed discussion, see Egorova and Perwez (2013).

17 In discussing the rhetorical dimension of DNA research I draw inspiration from the culture rhetoric theory (see Carrithers 2009).

18 I am grateful to Deepa Reddy for bringing this point to my attention.