Ernesto Schwartz-Marin | University of Exeter (original) (raw)

Papers by Ernesto Schwartz-Marin

Human Remains and Violence

COVID-19 has reinstated the sovereign enclosures of corpse management that mothers of the disappe... more COVID-19 has reinstated the sovereign enclosures of corpse management that mothers of the disappeared had so successfully challenged in the past decade. To explore how moral duties toward the dead are being renegotiated due to COVID-19, this article puts forward the notion of biorecuperation, understood as an individualised form of forensic care for the dead made possible by the recovery of biological material. Public health imperatives that forbid direct contact with corpses due to the pandemic, interrupt the logics of biorecuperation. Our analysis is based on ten years of experience working with families of the disappeared in Mexico, ethnographic research within Mexico’s forensic science system and online interviews conducted with medics and forensic scientists working at the forefront of Mexico City’s pandemic. In the face of increasing risks of viral contagion and death, this article analyses old and new techniques designed to bypass the prohibitions imposed by the state and its...

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

Indigenous psychedelic uses have long been imbricated with colonialism and its afterlives. Amidst... more Indigenous psychedelic uses have long been imbricated with colonialism and its afterlives. Amidst tensions from accelerating investor interest in psychedelics and calls to decolonize research and practices, we argue that the study of psychedelics is troubled by dualisms used in both colonial and decolonial thought: subject and object, self and other, culture and nature, synthetic and natural, the colonizer and the indigenous, the literal and the metaphorical. Feminist and decolonial theory as well as a discussion of metaphor support our argument that the study of psychedelics often lacks critical engagement with these dualisms. A narrow understanding of coloniality hinders far-reaching critiques of contemporary capitalism, including progressive colonization of the life-world and commodification of psychedelic experiences. Fears that decolonization is becoming just a ‘metaphor’ implicitly reaffirm the conceptual power dynamics of colonization. In research on psychedelics, decolonization as a critical metaphor enables reassessing problematic distinctions that shape thinking, material realities, experiences.

El presente texto presenta una visión general del proyecto “Soluciones móviles para la epidemia d... more El presente texto presenta una visión general del proyecto “Soluciones móviles para la epidemia del secuestro en México: más allá de las contramedidas de élite hacia la innovación dirigida por los ciudadanos”. Esta iniciativa ha realizado una indagación hacia la topografía cambiante de la actual epidemia de secuestros en México, examinando varias “soluciones móviles” que han surgido desde la sociedad civil para contrarrestar este flagelo. Los propósitos de este artículo son tres. El primero es el de mostrar cómo es posible desarrollar metodologías de trabajo colaborativas para investigar temas complejos (para este caso el secuestro) en contextos de alta tensión social. El segundo propósito es el de cuestionar hasta qué punto realizar trabajos investigativos basados en el modelo “acción-participación-ciudadanía” puede ser clave para describir, analizar y comprender sociedades en contextos de violencia (México) y/o conflicto armado (Colombia), y sus más predominantes flagelos. Y finalmente, el tercer propósito es el de hacer visible un trabajo investigativo que pueda ayudar a reflexionar sobre cómo abordar el análisis de temas sociales robustos desde las aulas de clase. Es, en otras palabras, empezar a suscitar el debate sobre cuáles pueden ser las mejores metodologías y herramientas para abordar, desde las escuelas y colegios, el estudio de temas sociales de alta sensibilidad política y cultural.

History and Anthropology

Gunung Merapi (Mountain of Fire) is the guardian of a cosmogonicsacred landscape, and one of the ... more Gunung Merapi (Mountain of Fire) is the guardian of a cosmogonicsacred landscape, and one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. Its eruptions are well studied, however, the relationships among ritual, science, protection and grassroots disaster management arising after the 2006 and 2010 eruptions are mostly overlooked. This paper fills this gap in the literature, through qualitative research that explores local perceptions and places respiratory protection in a larger ecology of protective practices during, and after, volcanic crises. In a previous study, 99% of respondents in Yogyakarta used masks to protect from inhaling volcanic ash. In order to understand the respiratory protective practices developed, in the last decade, to cope with Merapi's eruptions, we need to engage with the emergence of the local volunteer-led grassroots monitoring systems. Although these networks were formalised by agencies, they were originally setup in a bottom-up fashion to respond to pyroclastic flows and other life-threatening volcanic hazards. Our research found that they play a key role in the distribution of masks and respiratory health narratives, thus influencing the wide adoption of certain types of respiratory protection. Disaster management agencies, village heads, ritual experts and volunteers participating in these monitoring networks share spiritual signals (dreams) and scientific ones (seismic data, health narratives) and masks as part of their response to volcanic crises. Our findings about these Merapi networks challenge dominant assumptions in the Disaster Risk Reduction literature that tend to equate building resilience with the substitution of problematic 'cultural beliefs' for 'scientific facts'.

Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2016

The article will present the findings of ethnographic research into the Colombian and Mexican for... more The article will present the findings of ethnographic research into the Colombian and Mexican forensic systems, introducing the first citizen-led exhumation project made possible through the cooperation of scholars, forensic specialists and interested citizens in Mexico. The coupling evolution and mutual re-constitution of forensic science will be explored, including new forms of citizenship and nation building projects – all approached as lived experience – in two of Latin America‘s most complex contexts: organised crime and mass death.

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, 2015

Social Studies of Science, 2015

This article explores the relationship between genetic research, nationalism and the construction... more This article explores the relationship between genetic research, nationalism and the construction of collective social identities in Latin America. It makes a comparative analysis of two research projects – the ‘Genoma Mexicano’ and the ‘Homo Brasilis’ – both of which sought to establish national and genetic profiles. Both have reproduced and strengthened the idea of their respective nations of focus, incorporating biological elements into debates on social identities. Also, both have placed the unifying figure of the mestizo/ mestiço at the heart of national identity constructions, and in so doing have displaced alternative identity categories, such as those based on race. However, having been developed in different national contexts, these projects have had distinct scientific and social trajectories: in Mexico, the genomic mestizo is mobilized mainly in relation to health, while in Brazil the key arena is that of race. We show the importance of the nation as a frame for mobilizin...

eLS, 2001

Genetic studies aiming to reconstruct the history of human migrations have made a claim to be abl... more Genetic studies aiming to reconstruct the history of human migrations have made a claim to be able to contribute to the writing of history, with a precision and time depth unavailable to any other discipline. However, recent in-depth ethnographic studies of genetic science have shown that folk knowledge and traditional ways to understand the difference in diverse locales around the world are integral to the way in which genetics produce knowledge of the history of humanity. Precisely because genetic projects are closely linked to sociocultural ideas about the categorisation of identity, race and ethnicity, they have raised a number of controversial cultural and political issues. Although some studies have played a positive role in helping the researched communities to reaffirm their identity, other projects yielded results that contradicted local narratives of origin. Furthermore, such studies are likely to have important sociopolitical consequences for the claims of sovereignty, auto determination and identity of vulnerable communities. Key Concepts Population genetics typically refers to the study of the genetic structure of human groups deemed to share a common history, geography or culture. Haplotype maps are graphic representations of chunks of DNA that are inherited from one generation to the next, and thus are considered to be of importance for medical and anthropological genetic research. Medical population genomics works under the assumption that knowledge about the genetic structure of populations will eventually translate into a more ‘predictive, preventive and personalised medicine’ in which each individual will know about their propensities and resistance to certain diseases. Keywords: population genetics; anthropology; history; identity politics; race; ethnicity; nationalism; ancestry

Social Studies of Science, 2015

This article examines the role that vernacular notions of racialized-regional difference play in ... more This article examines the role that vernacular notions of racialized-regional difference play in the constitution and stabilization of DNA populations in Colombian forensic science, in what we frame as a process of public science. In public science, the imaginations of the scientific world and common-sense public knowledge are integral to the production and circulation of science itself. We explore the origins and circulation of a scientific object – ‘La Tabla’, published in Paredes et al. and used in genetic forensic identification procedures – among genetic research institutes, forensic genetics laboratories and courtrooms in Bogotá. We unveil the double life of this central object of forensic genetics. On the one hand, La Tabla enjoys an indisputable public place in the processing of forensic genetic evidence in Colombia (paternity cases, identification of bodies, etc.). On the other hand, the relations it establishes between ‘race’, geography and genetics are questioned among po...

Developments in genetics have attracted considerable interest from medical sociology over the las... more Developments in genetics have attracted considerable interest from medical sociology over the last decade, partly because of the funding offered to examine the social implications of major scientific programs like the Human Genome Project (HGP). However, genetics also raises fundamental questions for medical sociology. Some are well established��the construction of disease, the experience of illness, and the nature of professional work��but others are new, concerning the nature of genetic knowledge, its implications for human ...

New Genetics and Society, 2013

ABSTRACT

Identity in the Information Society, 2010

This paper explores the intersections between national identity and the production of medical/pop... more This paper explores the intersections between national identity and the production of medical/population genomics in Mexico. The ongoing efforts to construct a Haplotype Map of Mexican genetic diversity offers a unique opportunity to illustrate and analyze the exchange between the historic-political narratives of nationalism, and the material culture of genomic science. Haplotypes are central actants in the search for medically significant SNP's (single nucleotide polymorphisms), as well as powerful entities involved in the delimitation of ancestry, temporality and variability (www.hapmap.org). By following the circulation of Haplotypes, light is shed on the alignments and discordances between sociohistorical and bio-molecular mappings. The analysis is centred on the comparison between the genomic construction of time and ethnicity in the laboratory (through participant observation), and on the public mobilisation of a "Mexican Genome" and its wider political implications. Even though both: the scientific practice and the public discourse on medical/population genomics are traversed by notions of "admixture", there are important distinctions to be made. In the public realm, the nationalist post-revolutionary ideas of Jose Vasconcelos, as expressed in his Cosmic Race (1925), still hold sway in the social imaginary. In contrast, admixture is treated as a complex, relative and probabilistic notion in laboratory practices. I argue that the relation between medical/population genomics and national identity is better understood as a process of re-articulation (Fullwiley Social Studies of Science 38:695, 2008), rather than coproduction (Reardon 2005) of social and natural orders. The evolving process of re-articulation conceals the novelty of medical/population genomics, aligning scientific facts in order to fit the temporal and ethnic grids of

Sociology, 2013

In this article two case studies are compared, Mexico and Colombia, in which the protection of ‘g... more In this article two case studies are compared, Mexico and Colombia, in which the protection of ‘genetic identities’ has generated political and legal systems designed to avoid the unlawful appropriation of biological material and/or DNA in Latin America. The very idea that genetic patrimonies belong to nation-states or ethno-racial groups – framed as genomic sovereignty or the protection of a disappearing indigenous genetic heritage – is the product of a genetically reified understanding of human diversity, which we identify as ‘biocoloniality’. By exploring the common tropes and imaginations with which biocoloniality has been articulated, we argue that governance mechanisms built around ‘genetic identities’ are ineffective in addressing the unequal power relations inherent in contemporary scientific and regulatory practice.

Abstract:This paper recovers a vignette of a type of citizenship formed around the duties of rela... more Abstract:This paper recovers a vignette of a type of citizenship formed around the duties of relatives of disappeared persons in Mexico. It focuses on the men, women and children from Mexico and other countries who have disappeared and are possibly dead, waiting to be found in mortuaries and clandestine mass graves that are yet to be identified.

Historiographies of Science

Athenea Digital. Revista de pensamiento e investigación social

La tragedia de Antígona ha sido apropiada estética y políticamente por artistas y activistas en M... more La tragedia de Antígona ha sido apropiada estética y políticamente por artistas y activistas en México para discutir la búsqueda de personas desaparecidas. Refexionando sobre las relaciones entre la futilidad, las tecnologías forenses y la noción de un sujeto político-victima, este ensayo aborda las historias de las familias e individuos que constituyeron el órgano de gobierno del proyecto 'Ciencia Forense Ciudadana'. Este proyecto diseñó la primera base de datos forense de ADN creada y administrada por familiares de desaparecidos en México. Esta investigación es producto de años de trabajo etnográfco y de investigación participativa realizada en la Ciudad de México. A través de este acercamiento teórico/metodológico, argumentamos que es sólo cuando las tecnologías forenses no están gobernadas por principios de efciencia, lógicas del mercado o pericia exclusiva, que se pueden transgredir los viejos tropos del humanitarismo forense, y por lo tanto abrir nuevas relaciones entre ciencia, justicia y verdad.

Hastings Center Report

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Maya Sabatello and Paul Appelbaum explore the assump... more In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Maya Sabatello and Paul Appelbaum explore the assumptions about community embedded in the U.S. Precision Medicine Initiative, which aims to recruit donor-partners who reflect the United States&amp;amp;amp;#39; racial and ethnic diversity. As Sabatello and Appelbaum discuss, the initiative is like other national biobanking efforts in bringing to life an imagined genetic community in need of critical attention, and given the public-private forms of partnership at the heart of the PMI, such efforts could become avenues to deepen existing inequalities rather than to alleviate them. The notion of justice has underwritten debates about genomic medicine, informed consent, citizenship, benefit sharing, and profit making since the first national biobanking project emerged at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In a paradigmatic case, the creation, by an Icelandic company, of the deCODE genomic biobank opened up fierce debates about the proper relationship between public good and private gain and became the first global example of the economic and political implications that imagined genetic communities could have in our shared future. In Mexico, in 2001, the Icelandic case fueled a policy agenda to deal with global health justice and the prospects of a future market-based colonialism predicated on the intimate knowledge of DNA.

Athenea Digital. Revista de pensamiento e investigación social, Mar 6, 2018

Human Remains and Violence

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

History and Anthropology

Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2016

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, 2015

Social Studies of Science, 2015

eLS, 2001

Social Studies of Science, 2015

New Genetics and Society, 2013

ABSTRACT

Identity in the Information Society, 2010

Sociology, 2013

Historiographies of Science

Athenea Digital. Revista de pensamiento e investigación social

Hastings Center Report

Athenea Digital. Revista de pensamiento e investigación social, Mar 6, 2018

Revista Educación y Cultura, Jun 15, 2019

Los propósitos de este artículo son tres. El primero es el de mostrar cómo es posible desarrollar metodologías de trabajo colaborativas para investigar temas complejos (para este caso el secuestro) en contextos de alta tensión social. El segundo propósito es el de cuestionar hasta qué punto realizar trabajos investigativos basados en el modelo “acción-participación-ciudadanía” puede ser clave para describir, analizar y comprender sociedades en contextos de violencia (México) y/o conflicto armado (Colombia), y sus más predominantes flagelos. Y finalmente, el tercer propósito es el de hacer visible un trabajo investigativo que pueda ayudar a reflexionar sobre cómo
abordar el análisis de temas sociales robustos desde las aulas de clase.

Es, en otras palabras, empezar a suscitar el debate sobre cuáles pueden ser las mejores metodologías y herramientas para abordar, desde las escuelas y colegios, el estudio de temas sociales de alta sensibilidad política y cultural.

History and Anthropology, 2022

Gunung Merapi (Mountain of Fire) is the guardian of a cosmogonic-sacred landscape, and one of the... more Gunung Merapi (Mountain of Fire) is the guardian of a cosmogonic-sacred landscape, and one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. Its eruptions are well studied, however, the relationships among ritual, science, protection and grassroots disaster management arising after the 2006 and 2010 eruptions are mostly overlooked. This paper fills this gap in the literature, through qualitative research that explores local perceptions and places respiratory protection in a larger ecology of protective practices during, and after, volcanic crises. In a previous study, 99% of respondents in Yogyakarta used masks to protect from inhaling volcanic ash. In order to understand the respiratory protective practices developed, in the last decade, to cope with Merapi’s eruptions, we need to engage with the emergence of the local volunteer-led grassroots monitoring systems. Although these networks were formalised by agencies, they were originally set-up in a bottom-up fashion to respond to pyroclastic flows and other life-threatening volcanic hazards. Our research found that they play a key role in the distribution of masks and respiratory health narratives, thus influencing the wide adoption of certain types of respiratory protection. Disaster management agencies, village heads, ritual experts and volunteers participating in these monitoring networks share spiritual signals (dreams) and scientific ones (seismic data, health narratives) and masks as part of their response to volcanic crises. Our findings about these Merapi networks challenge dominant assumptions in the Disaster Risk Reduction literature that tend to equate building resilience with the substitution of problematic ‘cultural beliefs’ for ‘scientific facts’.