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Copyright

Marianne Sommer

Published On

2024-07-30

Page Range

pp. 215–234

Language

  • English

Print Length

20 pages

16. The History, Geography, and Politics of Human Genes

  • Marianne Sommer (author)
Chapter of: The Diagrammatics of ‘Race’: Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020(pp. 215–234)
From the 1960s, human population geneticists aimed at revealing the original human population relations, and they favored genetic data from Indigenous, supposedly isolated human groups. Some of the labels used in the resulting tree diagrams were a legacy of the racial and colonial anthropology treated in the preceding parts. But the young human population genetics was very different from the racial typology of old, and the notion of pure races or race in general was often emphatically rejected. Nonetheless, the tree continued to organize human diversity into clearly demarcated groups. In Chapter 16, misreadings and misuses of population-genetic diagrams in the service of racist science will thus again come under scrutiny.

Contributors

Marianne Sommer

(author)
Chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at University of Lucerne

Marianne Sommer holds the chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Prior to that, she has held postdoctoral positions and professorships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Pennsylvania State University, the ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, and has been a guest at many institutions, including Stanford University. For her research in the history of earth, life, and human sciences, encompassing processes of narration, visualization, and exhibition, she has received the Swiss National Latsis Prize. Her monograph History Within (published with The University of Chicago Press in 2016) engages with the science, politics, and culture related to reconstructions of human evolutionary histories; it traces the generation and circulation of such knowledge from the late nineteenth century to the present, including through venues like the museum, the zoo, literature, or the web. Among her monographs are also Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland (published with Harvard University Press in 2007) and Evolutionäre Anthropologie (published with Junius in 2015). Bones and Ochre tells the scientific and cultural history of paleoanthropology and to a lesser degree archeology through the ‘biography’ of the most likely first fossil human skeleton discovered in 1823. Evolutionäre Anthropologie is an introduction to the history of evolutionary anthropology for scholars, students, and the interested public.