Colombian forensic genetics as a form of public science: The role of race, nation and common sense in the stabilization of DNA populations (original) (raw)
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Forensic civism: articulating science, DNA and kinship in contemporary Mexico and Colombia
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.
nombre no es XX. " Throughout Guatemala, on postcards, calendars, bookmarks, and posters, the dead are speaking. Fifteen years after the signing of the peace accords, and thirty years after the burned earth campaign, where the military slaughtered 200,000 people to stamp out the manufactured threat of a Marxist takeover of the Guatemalan highlands, the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) launched a public awareness campaign about the violence of the past. Rendered liminal, between voice and void, Los Desaparecidos make claims on the present: " My name is not XX. Your DNA can identify me. " Linking an ethical claim about personhood—I have a right to a name, even in death—and a practical intervention based in cutting-edge methods in forensic genetics, the FAFG exhorted the public to participate in their growing DNA databank. In this paper, I trace the development and use of forensic genetics in post-conflict Guatemala and Argentina to elucidate contemporary formations of life and death that fuse scientific legibility with political transition and memorialization. Through a close attention to the material practice of DNA identification in post-conflict settings, I complicate the understanding of these technologies as primarily concerned with knowledge production, truth, and surveillance. Instead, I highlight the affective and sacred dimensions of genetic practice. Although racialization and genetic essentialism remain important features, forensic practices have, at the same time, been imbued with an ethic of care through social movements, solidarity practices, and family-based organizing. I argue that through laboratory practices of purification and a scientific methodology of kinship as praxis, forensic science can be understood to occupy an important ritual role in post-conflict Latin America: the social and political care of the disappeared.
Genetic syncretism: Latin American forensics and global indigenous organizing
Biosocieties, 2021
In the 1970s, Latin America became a global laboratory for military interventions, the cultivation of terror, and ideological and economic transformation. In response, family groups and young scientists forged a new activist forensics focused on human rights, victim-centered justice, and state accountability, inaugurating new forms of forensic practice. We examine how this new form of forensic practice centered in forensic genetics has led to a critical engagement with Indigeneity both within and outside the lab. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with human rights activists and forensic scientists in Argentina, Guatemala and Mexico, this paper examines the relationship between forensic genetics, Indigenous organizing, and human rights practice. We offer the concept of 'genetic syncretism' to attend to spaces where multiple and competing beliefs about genetics, justice, and Indigenous identity are worked out through (1) coming together in care, (2) incorporation, and (3) ritual. Helping to unpack the uneasy and incomplete alliance of Indigenous interests and forensic genetic practice in Latin American, genetic syncretism offers a theoretical lens that is attentive to how differentials of power embedded in colonial logics and scientific practice are brokered through the coming together of seemingly incompatible beliefs and practices.
Genomic research, publics and experts in Latin America: Nation, race and body
The articles in this issue highlight contributions that studies of Latin America can make to wider debates about the effects of genomic science on public ideas about race and nation. We argue that current ideas about the power of genomics to transfigure and transform existing ways of thinking about human diversity are often overstated. If a range of social contexts are examined, the effects are uneven. Our data show that genomic knowledge can unsettle and reinforce ideas of nation and race; it can be both banal and highly politicized. In this introduction, we outline concepts of genetic knowledge in society; theories of genetics, nation and race; approaches to public understandings of science; and the Latin American contexts of transnational ideas of nation and race.
Biosocieties, 2020
Forensic DNA practice is about identification, about establishing the identity of an individual, usually a suspect, a perpetrator or a victim. Yet in order to establish this identity, the individual has to be placed in the context of a population. The contributions in this special issue zoom in on this relation between the individual and the population. Our aim is to attend closely to the kind of work that forensic genetics is made to do; the kind of (legal, political, societal) infrastructures necessary for that work; and the ways it necessarily orders social relations, producing effects of proximity and distance between collectives, while apparently dealing only with the individual. Race-as a particular and highly charged kind of collective category-is a central concern in this special issue and focusing on the tension between the individual and the collective helps us to broaden its scope and view the different kinds of politics at stake when it becomes entwined in the work of forensic technologies. In this introduction to the special issue 'Doing the Individual and the Collective in Forensic Genetics: Governance, Race and Restitution' we will first elaborate the relation between the individual and the population in the context of forensic genetics, and address how 'the population' changed from being a problem for DNA evidence in the early nineties to become a category of value for present-day applications. We will explicate the ways in which the valuing of population comes with a resurgence of race through the controversial UK case of the Night Stalker. We will then address other collectives that are valued and mobilised in forensic genetic research, arguing that this is part and parcel of forensic DNA being not solely an identification tool but also increasingly a tool to generate leads during the criminal investigation. Finally as forensic genetic methods and technologies have nowadays travelled to disparate fields we will briefly address its role in migration and border management regimes and the dual processes of control of migrants and restitution through family reunification.
Social Studies of Science, 2015
This article provides a comparison between genomic medicine and forensic genetics in Mexico, in light of recent depictions of the nation as a ‘ país de gordos’ (country of the fat) and a ‘ país de muertos’ (country of the dead). We examine the continuities and ruptures in the public image of genetics in these two areas of attention, health and security, focusing especially on how the relevant publics of genetic science are assembled in each case. Publics of biomedical and forensic genetics are assembled through processes of recruitment and interpellation, in ways that modulate current theorizations of co-production. The comparison also provides a vista onto discussions regarding the involvement of genetics in regimes of governance and citizenship and about the relationship between the state and biopower in a context of perceived health crisis and war-like violence.
In this paper 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 inoperative in everyday scientific and regulatory practice.