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Claims of Descent : Race and Science in Contemporary South Africa
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Schramm, Katharina |
| Copyright Year | 2014 |
| Abstract | This paper is concerned with the question of how to ethnographically account for race as a complex knowledge formation and political reality. I focus on South Africa which occupies a special place in global scientific debates on race and human origins – historically as well as presently. From the early twentieth century onwards, paleoanthropology, physical anthropology and genetics were preoccupied with the study of indigenous populations in order to draw general conclusions on human evolution and biological differences (and hierarchies) between groups. These genealogies of knowledge resonate in various ways in contemporary research. At the same time, the bureaucratic and ‘culturally’ defined race classification of apartheid heavily relied on common-sense notions of race and this has contributed to their ongoing persistence. While not fully congruent with each other, these ‘cultural’ and ‘biological’ classification practices are nevertheless closely intertwined. In the post-apartheid society it is therefore not enough to say that race is socially constructed or a mere biological fiction in order to subvert its ongoing political and epistemological power. I argue that we need to rather problematize race itself as a polyvalent phenomenon. In order to do so, I discuss the relationship between epistemic objects (human remains, casts and DNA), classificatory violence and the politics of memory by which different actors perform race, while articulating their claims of descent and political subjectivities in contemporary South Africa. Introduction: the many lives of ‘race’ In recent years there has been a growing debate on the apparent re-emergence of race in scientific discourse and practice. Even if contemporary race is a phenomenon that is not necessarily named (as in crude typological jargon), it nevertheless maintains an uneasy presence that cannot be solely delegated to the realm of the ‘social’ vis-à-vis the ‘biological’. This poses a number of theoretical and methodological challenges to social scientists – summarised in the question of how to account for the slippery character of race that escapes easy definition? How to analyse the coproduction of race as an epistemic object in science V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 2 and politics? Much of the recent literature on this topic has taken medical research or laboratory genetics as its starting point for the discussion of racial or racialised knowledge production (e.g. Fullwiley 2011; M’charek 2005; Montoya 2011; TallBear 2013b). In line with recent scholarship in Science and Technology Studies on epistemic cultures (cf. Jasanoff 2004; Knorr-Cetina 1999) these important studies have helped us to understand the multiple ways in which scientific knowledge about race and human biological diversity is always also ‘cultured knowledge’. Differences are not simply ‘out there’ in nature, but they are granted significance in complex biosocial configurations. However, through this specific focus on laboratory and medical practice, race has largely remained a matter of biology (or biologisation) and less attention has been paid to its other lives, i.e. in terms of memories of oppression and struggles for political recognition. In my paper, I therefore suggest an ethnographic approach which takes these dimensions into account – thereby not taking the meaning of race for granted, but problematising it at the core. Through the notion of ‘troubles of descent’1 I aim to show how race is performed and brought into being as a relational object (M’charek/Schramm/Skinner 2014; Schramm in press/b). This implies that race cannot be pinpointed as ‘residing’ in a body, DNA-marker, group classification, scientific measurement or a practice of self-identification. Rather, it constitutes a polyvalent phenomenon that is assembled from various such elements which in their combination may situationally produce racial effects (cf. M’charek 2013) that resonate with the problematic and oppressive history of the concept. The empirical base for this project comes from ten months of continuous fieldwork in South Africa, where I first started working in 2010. My main interest is in the many overlaps and historical dis/continuities between scientific and public debates on race and human origins in a post-apartheid setting.2 I focus on South Africa as a special ‘site of cognition’ (Anderson 2012; Santos, Lindee, and de Souza 2014) for two reasons. First, and in line with Anderson’s and Santos, Lindee and de Souza’s use of this term, Southern Africa was, and continues to be, a highly significant site for the study of the history of humanity as a whole through physical anthropology and human genetics of indigenous populations who were 1 I borrow the notion of trouble from Donna Haraway’s (2010) catchy phrase ‘staying with the trouble’. It helps me to address and take seriously the multidimensionality and complexity of race and descent. 2 I approached this complex subject through different scales (Fortun 2009) and sites. My main research took place in Cape Town, where I worked with heritage authorities, physical anthropologists, museum professionals, geneticists and members of so-called descendant communities. I also undertook a number of field trips to Johannesburg, the South African hub of population genomics, where I had the chance to get many insights into concrete laboratory practices and sampling strategies. V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 3 classified as ‘Other’.3 This importance can be traced back to the early days of race science, where human remains of so-called ‘Bushmen’ and ‘Hottentots’ 4 were circulated through a global trading network that connected European and colonial scientific institutions, including the emerging South African ones. In the prevailing evolutionist logic, living and dead ‘Bushmen/Hottentots’, defined through an arbitrary mix of life-style and physical appearance, represented the earliest (read ‘least developed’) stages of humankind. After the Second World War, the race-paradigm in physical anthropology with its specific associations of hierarchical difference and morphological fixity began to give way to an interest in population diversity, adaptation and ecology in the new physical anthropology (cf. Haraway 1988) – and huntergatherer groups like the San played a major role in this shifting interest (cf. Lee 1979). Eminent South African scientists such as Philip Tobias, thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize, and Trefor Jenkins, an early pioneer of population genetics, also continued to advocate and conduct research in the Kalahari, mainly in Botswana and what was then South West Africa, today’s Namibia (cf. Tobias 1975; Jenkins et al. 1971). Under the chairmanship of the Kalahari Research Committee, 21 interdisciplinary expeditions were mounted to study Bushmen/San populations under the broad labels of human variability and genetic affinities within and between groups. And today, once again, genomic research that takes an interest in human origins and migration history focuses largely on Khoisan groups and their descendants whose mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal haplogroups appear to be closest to the root, the common ancestor of humankind (cf. Tishkoff et al. 2009, Schuster et al. 2010, Schlebusch et al. 2012). This interest is so profound that one geneticist told me ironically “there must be a shop in Smitsdrift where you can buy genetic samples!” (interview 30.05.2014). Yet there is also a second reason why South Africa can be considered as a special site of cognition for the discussion of race and the troubles of descent. This has to do with the history of South African apartheid and the ways in which it has shaped people’s common 3 Of course, South Africa is also the site of major hominid finds in paleoanthropology (‘Taung Child’; ‘Mrs Ples’; ‘Littlefoot’ and most recently ‘Austalopithecus Sediba’). Racial anthropology and the early paleoanthropology were closely related (cf. Dubow 1995). Today the disciplines of biological anthropology, paleoanthropology and molecular genetics converge in the sciences of human origins. For reasons of limited space, I mostly leave out the discussion about the ‘Cradle of Humankind’ here, even though it forms an important part of claims of descent in twenty-first century South Africa (see Bystrom 2009). 4 Nomenclature is complicated and problematic. The derogatory colonial terminology for indigenous inhabitants of the land was ‘Bushmen’ (for various groups of hunter-gatherers) and ‘Hottentots’ (for Khoekhoe pastoralists). Due to their closely entangled histories, languages etc. the joint identity label today is KhoeSan or Khoisan. San is the most common (self-)ascription for hunter-gatherer groups in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana and their descendants. However, the term ‘Bushman’ is also still widespread, especially in the discourse of so-called Khoisan revivalism. In contrast, ‘Hottentot’ or the Afrikaans equivalent ‘Hotnot’ has clearly remained an insult. V IE N N A W O R K IN G P A P E R S IN E TH N O G R A P H Y SCHRAMM: CLAIMS OF DESCENT 4 understandings of race, their claims of descent and their relationship to past and present scientific practices. Many authors (e.g. Breckenridge in press; Morris 2012; Posel 2001) have argued that the racial classification of apartheid was based on a bureaucratic and cultural model and therefore disconnected from the scientific debates on race as a biological fact or fiction. While I agree to their call for historical specificity and differentiation, I argue that in order to understand the ongoing trouble with race it is important to bring these dimensions together. I will do so by looking at the difficult relationship between human remains, DNA and the contemporary self-identifications of so-called descendant communities through the lens of what I call classificatory violence. I |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://ksa.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/i_ksa/PDFs/Vienna_Working_Papers_in_Ethnography/vwpe03.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
