dests

LOST Seminar
Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung
Advokatenweg 36, 06114 Halle/Saale
July 7 2010
Im kolloquium der LOST gruppe am MPI in Halle wird Amade M’charek aus Amsterdam am 7.7. um 18.00 ihr Paper „The HeLa Error: On the aeLsthetics of wholeness and the materiality of race“ vorstellen und diskutieren. Interessierte sind herzlich willkommen!
Abstract:
The paper is about the politics and routines of race in genetics. The context of this paper is the omnipresence of research on genetic diversity and the reintroduction of racial categories in the field. The object of this paper is a mundane laboratory technology, a DNA reference sequence. The concern of this paper is the persistent notion that normativity and politics are exclusively articulated by human actors. I here wish to present a case in which these are articulated in technology. Race is therefore part of routines and practices where nothing strange seems to be going on. Race is therefore - by consequence - not merely a matter of deliberation. Race, I will argue, is an absent-present (these are the words of John Law 2002) as an effect of technologies and practices that cannot be left behind.
The DNA reference sequence seems tiny (invisible for the bare eye) and trivial (part of every day routine), yet its history is too big to present in one paper. I will therefore present three short but related stories. Stories that somehow account for this history. I have chosen an art metaphor to present them, namely a triptych.
As we move along the panels of the triptych a story about the absent-presence of race in science will enfold.  I will argue that the desire of geneticists to produce a reference sequence that represents nature as it is, contributes to the naturalization of the sequence and to the back-grounding of race. However, given that the sequence is made somewhere and in a specific time, a minor flaw - present in the end-result - functions as political noise, reminding us of its complex racial history.