Genetic Essentialism

Coming to live in a new country offers the unique opportunity to look at life from a profoundly different vantage-point. So, during my first two years as a scientist in the United States I’ve often found myself reflecting on how societies differ in fundamental ways in their basic orientation toward life. Many experiences and impressions during this time have dramatically increased my awareness how much all bodies of knowledge — about the ways the world works and the way the world, and we ourselves, are — need to be understood as ‘local knowledge systems’. The concept of local knowledge systems has been developed in post-colonial studies of science, and has been applied in assertions that ‘indigenous’, i.e., non-western, and western ways of knowing are both local in the sense that both are culture-dependent and neither has a claim to universality. (1)

From that one could conclude that western science at least functions as a more or less monolithic enterprise. However, although western science as a whole is based on a shared methodology and epistemology, distinct preoccupations of the cultures in different regions of the western world exert powerful influences over the construction of scientific discourses. In the United States, there appears to be a strong need in middle class culture to define oneself through ‘one’s biology’. This ‘biology’ however does not signify the body itself, but a metaphorical, linguistic construction of the self around which many aspects of contemporary life are becoming organized. (2) The central metaphor of one’s biology is one’s genes, and ‘one’s genes’ are seen as the essence of the person. For complex historical, political and cultural reasons, the human genome is increasingly equated with the ‘essence’ of human-ness. Coming from New Zealand, this definition of identity through a genetically oriented ‘biological’ discourse is anything but self-evident, in fact, it seems deeply culturally determined. Within the scope of this paper, I will not attempt to identify what drives the need for this view of the self, but would like to stress the importance of seeking answers to this question. It seems to me to be a central concern in any critique of the contemporary gene cult(ure) in American society. The growth of a biotechnological economy and the promotion of matching societal attitudes are obviously contributing to this phenomenon, but they alone do not explain the deep resonance a genetically defined construction of human-ness appears to invoke in people’s psyches.