Identity politics and the new genetics : re/creating categories of difference and belonging / edited by Katharina Schramm, David Skinner and Richard Rottenburg.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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"Race" as a social construction in genetics -- Mobile identities and fixed categories : forensic DNA and the politics of racialized data -- Race, kinship and the ambivalence of identity -- Identity, DNA and the state in post-dictatorship Argentina -- "Do you have Celtic, Jewish or Germanic roots?" Applied Swiss history before and after DNA -- Irish DNA : making connections and making distinctions in Y-chromosome surname studies -- Genomics en route : ancestry, heritage and the politics of identity across the Black Atlantic -- Biotechnological cults of affliction? Race, rationality and enchantment in personal genomic histories.

Racial and ethnic categories have appeared in recent scientific work in novel ways and in relation to a variety of disciplines: medicine, forensics, population genetics and also developments in popular genealogy. Once again, biology is foregrounded in the discussion of human identity. Of particular importance is the preoccupation with origins and personal discovery and the increasing use of racial and ethnic categories in social policy. This new genetic knowledge, expressed in technology and practice, has the potential to disrupt how race and ethnicity are debated, managed and lived. As such, this volume investigates the ways in which existing social categories are both maintained and transformed at the intersection of the natural (sciences) and the cultural (politics). The contributors include medical researchers, anthropologists, historians of science and sociologists of race relations; together, they explore the new and challenging landscape where biology becomes the stuff of identity.

English.

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