Abstract
This is a review essay of two books published in 2021 on the history of human heredity-genetics/genomics investigations—in the Middle East. Both books are structured comparatively. Both books grapple with the many uses of biology in nationalizing projects in the Middle East and the unavoidable tension between these particularizing projects and the scientific claim of biology to universality. Furthermore, both grapple with issues of classifications of humans and their uses in biology: the presumably biological human classifications of race, ethnos, and ancestry, and the properly sociocultural ones, such as historical-traditional, by language, by religion. Combined, the two books offer a keen gaze on the complex entwinement of genetics and nationalism in the Middle East from WWI to the present.
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Notes
It would be futile to offer references here. From historical studies to genocide studies.
There are truly innumerable publications on various stages and facets; I suggest here a non-representative concise sample of the controversy relating mostly to the UNESCO declarations of the early 1950s and their estimated impact on the use of”race” category: Barkan (1992), Farber (2016), Gannett (2001), Gayon (2003), Meloni (2016), Mueller-Wille (2010), Provine (1986), Reardon (2005), Schaffer (2008) and Stepan (1982).
E.g. a partial and succinct mention of a complex example: In Turkey foremost Turkish geneticist Aksoy found that the group harboring rare hemoglobin variants was of the Alawite minority (who lived also in Syria and Lebanon), marginalized by the Turkish state of the 1950s as non-Arab. Thus Aksoy invented a term ‘eti-turk’ to suit a vision of supra-ethnic Turk nationality. This finding occurred amidst the theoretical and empirical controversy whether the primary and original source of such cells, which presumably were then diffused through migrations, was to be located in Africa or in India or perhaps elsewhere in the Arabic Middle East. Conflicting local, national, ideological, scientific interests and their resulting group classifications were not compatible with the theoretical interest of European geneticists in attributing origin/ localization/ ethnic classifications.
E.g. Trevor Pearce in his recent book (2020) tried to get around such dilemmas by paying attention to individuals within”cohorts”, a methodological device which gathers individuals through the criteria of their sharing commonalities of experiential, historical, conceptual association.
No mention here of R. Falk 2017 critical narrative version.
This is historically one of the consequences of the struggles during the first two centuries A.D. between the rising Christian communities and their proselytizing among the Jewish communities. Thus, the efforts by the latter to mark the boundaries of affiliation. E.g. Shaye J. D. Cohen (1999), and more recently Ophir & Rosen-Zvi (2018).
An analysis which could help is, e.g., that offered by Stepan and Gilman in their classical essay discussing the options open then to those who championed science but were racialized by it.
As updated in 2021. Somehow even the Wikipedia item on Qatar is one of the longest, most detailed and updated that I have seen of new small states in the Middle East.
Qatar Genome Programme, Qatar Biobank, and Sidra Medicine.
References
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