*STS Circle at Harvard* [image: samuelevansresear/7D21F2C9.gif] * * *Lindsay Smith * *UCLA* * * on
*“Genetics is a study in faith”: the Disappeared of Latin America, science as development, and the fragility of identification* * * Monday, September 26th 12:15-2:00 p.m. 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106 [image: samuelevansresear/7D21F2C9.gif] Lunch is provided if you RSVP. Please RSVP to sts <[email protected]>@hks.harvard.edu<[email protected]>by 5pm Thursday, September 22nd. * * *Abstract:* In the last half of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans were forcibly disappeared as dictatorial leaders waged brutal counter-insurgency wars to stamp out communism on the continent. In the aftermath, scientists became key human rights activists as they remade forensic anthropology and human genetics to document genocide and return the dead and missing to searching families. Based in racial typing, forensics, and genetics these new methods both reinforced and remade human identification by linking biological and technological determinism, surveillance, and spaces of indigenous revival and collective mourning and remembrance. In this paper, I analyze an example of the contradictory and contested politics of human identification: the Latin American Initiative to Identify the Disappeared, a US funded DNA analysis project. Drawing on fieldwork in Guatemala and Argentina, I explore the implications of an international paradigm grounded in DNA databanking as human rights work, development, and security. I suggest that the material and political fragility of identification both supercedes and undermines these goals, creating new configurations of biopower and unexpected spaces of biofallibility. *Biography*: Lindsay Smith is a medical anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Society and Genetics at University of California, Los Angeles. She received her PhD from Harvard University in Social Anthropology in 2008 and was previously a fellow in Science and Human Culture at Northwestern University. Her book manuscript, *Subversive Genes: Making human rights and DNA in Argentina *focuses on the development of forensic genetics as a tool for transitional justice and democracy building. She recently published “Emotional Engagements: Acknowledgement, Advocacy and Direct Action” co-authored with Arthur Kleinman in the edited collection *Emotions in the Field*. As an ethnographic filmmaker, she has made films in collaboration with Argentine human rights groups. Her documentary, *Aparcion con Vida*/ Bring them Back Alive examines the use of DNA in the search for children kidnapped during the Argentine “Dirty War”. She is currently studying the Latin American Initiative to Identify the Disappeared (LIID), a multinational scientific collaboration to use large-scale DNA databanking to identify the Disappeared of Argentina, Guatemala, and Peru. A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/ Follow us on Facebook: STS@Harvard <http://www.facebook.com/HarvardSTS>
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