Please join us on Monday, February 11th:
STS Special Lecture
The Genetic Articulation of Indigeneity
Kimberly Tallbear
University of California, Berkeley
4:00 pm, MIT, E51-095
Abstract:
Through the 19th century, it was generally agreed
that the Indian represented an earlier stage of
human evolution and that his end in the face of
western progress was inevitable. Fast forward to
the 1970s and 1980s and indigenous movement
emerged in force, with many non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and other groups in the U.S.
and abroad organizing under that rubric. Today,
worldwide estimates range from 250 to 600 million
individuals belonging to over 4,000 indigenous
groups. Estimates are based upon particular
understandings of indigeneity that emphasize
historical continuity, ancestral territories,
cultural distinctiveness, economic and cultural
non-dominance, and self-determination as peoples.
As we usually read it, indigeneity depends upon a
particular type of indigenous/settler dichotomy.
Although it has libratory potential in many
places, in others it is contested and problematic
for describing the subjectivities of peoples,
specific colonial histories, race regimes, and
power relations. I have long been interested in
the trade-offs of indigeneity, even for
U.S.-based Native Americans who also operate
within an intergovernmental framework with the
United States. We who identify/are classified as
indigenous do not alone control its meaning. Yet
precisely because indigeneity promises so much to
so many who are disempowered, interrogating it is
no straightforward ethical task. What is at
stakewhat is risked in the production of that
category and its common definitions?
The larger body of my work maps out the world of
Native American DNA as a research object and
life-organizing narrative for scientists,
genealogists, and other consumers of genetic
ancestry tracing technologies. I have come to
interrogate indigeneity as a genetic category,
and do so within a very different ethical
framework, one in which not indigenous peoples,
but scientists and genetic genealogists (mostly
self-identified, racially white, middle-class
individuals) are my research subjects. Using
articulation theory, I describe how indigeneity
is articulated in the service of anthropological
and human genetic diversity research. I examine
the ways in which indigeneity as a concept can
work both for and against indigenous claims.
Debbie Meinbresse
STS Program, MIT
617-452-2390
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