'Indigenous Knowledge in a Postgenomic Landscape: The Politics of Epigenetic Hope and Reparation in Australia' by Megan Warin, Emma Kowal and Maurizio Meloni in (2020) 45(1) Science, Technology, & Human Values 87-111 comments
A history of colonization inflicts psychological, physical, and structural disadvantages that endure across generations. For an increasing number of Indigenous Australians, environmental epigenetics offers an important explanatory framework that links the social past with the biological present, providing a culturally relevant way of understanding the various inter-generational effects of historical trauma. In this paper, we critically examine the strategic uptake of environmental epigenetics by Indigenous researchers and policy advocates. We focus on the relationship between epigenetic processes and Indigenous views of Country and health—views that locate health not in individual bodies but within relational contexts of Indigenous ontologies that embody interconnected environments of kin/animals/matter/ bodies across time and space. This drawing together of Indigenous experience and epigenetic knowledge has strengthened calls for action including state-supported calls for financial reparations. We examine the consequences of this reimagining of disease responsibility in the context of “strategic biological essentialism,” a distinct form of biopolitics that, in this case, incorporates environmental determinism. We conclude that the shaping of the right to protection from biosocial injury is potentially empowering but also has the capacity to conceal forms of governance through claimants’ identification as “damaged,” thus furthering State justification of biopolitical intervention in Indigenous lives.
It is well-documented that Indigenous peoples around the world have con- sistently rejected genetic research for ethical, cultural, and political reasons (Reardon and TallBear 2012; Kowal 2016). Genetic research conducted on “socially identifiable” populations can reinforce essentialist biological con- cepts of race (Foster, Bernsten, and Carter 1998; Tsosie 2007), and Indigenous populations have raised concerns over issues of consent, cultural ownership, the use (and abuse) of DNA and other bodily products, and the many differences between scientific and Indigenous understandings of bod- ies and kinship (Dodson and Williamson 1999; Reardon 2005; TallBear 2007; Garrison 2013; Hook 2009). In Australia, these concerns occur in a historical context where Indigenous people have been the focus of biologi- cal research that supported scientific claims of inferiority, the “doomed race” theory, and, later, policies of assimilation that removed children of “mixed” ancestry from their families (Anderson 2002; Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission [HREOC] 1997; McGregor 1997). Due to this fraught history, Indigenous Australians have, until recently, remained cautious about genetic and genomic research, and so very limited research has been conducted in this population (Kowal 2013).
In sharp contrast to this resistance to genetic research, the recent rise of epigenetics has been embraced by Indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Over the last five to ten years, there has been a remarkable increase in the use of environmental epigenetics1 as an explanatory framework that draws upon the relationship between biological mechanisms and social lives to understand ongoing intergenerational Indi- genous disadvantage and ill-health (Kowal 2016; Kowal and Warin 2018). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians (hereafter Indigenous Australians) remain the least healthy population group in Australia (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2015), and it is well-documented that rapid cultural destruction, coupled with decades of slow violence in the form of government policies and marginalization from mainstream society, is to blame (Atkinson, Nelson, and Atkinson 2010; Boulton 2016).
This paper argues that the uptake of Indigenous epigenetics in Australia points to a “political economy of hope” among those that produce and consume biological knowledge (Rose and Novas 2005; Petersen 2015). In this variation of Rose and Novas’s concept, biology is no longer a blind destiny but mutable, improvable, and potentially reversible. Epigenetics introduces a distinctive pathway to this view of the biological as a hopeful domain open to environmental and structural intervention and manipulation, a pathway that expands the potential sources and mechanisms of intervention in Indigenous people’s lives.
We begin our exploration into this particular bioeconomy of hope with a vignette describing an event where a prominent Indigenous academic used the concept of epigenetics to frame Aboriginal health in an optimistic light (in comparison to the negative framing of “deficit discourse,” Fogarty et al. 2018). This framing is paradigmatic of the collective narrative of hope, co-constituted by Indigenous histories, environmental epigenetics, and health that we examine in this paper.
Following a description of the study, we broaden the argument by describing how the molecular embodiment of colonial oppression provides a biological explanation for the intergenerational transmission of historical trauma. Moreover, we suggest that epigenetics is an appealing conduit for this discourse as it reconfigures singular and bounded concepts of the environment and personhood toward more dynamic and relational models. For many Indigenous people, personhood is not located in individuals but known in relation to other persons, Country, and across time and space. Epigenetics appears to correspond to Indigenous aspirations, to foster legal and human rights, and to reflect Indigenous knowledges. Thus, in the context that we write about, dominant (and counterhegemonic) Indigenous conceptions of personhood align with epigenetics and reinforce each other. As we explore, epigenetics is used in specific ways in the biopolitical economy of hope surrounding Indigenous health discourses. The uncertainty of the science, particularly surrounding the reversibility of epigenetic changes and their transgenerational inheritance, is, however, generally overlooked. The alignment of epigenetics and Indigenous knowledge is therefore provisional, dependent on features of human epigenetic change and inheritance that are not yet clear in the scientific literature.
In the final sections, we question whether the humanitarian usage of epigenetics to reinforce notions of acquired multigenerational bio-injury as a platform for political reparations may give rise to new forms of biole- gitimacy (Fassin 2000, 2009) in which the epigenetic body is used as an historical testimony of colonial violence.
In our argument, we coin the term strategic biological essentialism to understand the biological turn in the representation of Indigenous rights. Strategic essentialism, a term attributed to Spivak, describes the process by which a minority group represents particular qualities as (culturally or biologically) inherent to the group in order to foster claims for social justice and rights. A strategically essentialist claim strategically overlooks the fact that qualities (e.g., connection to land or vulnerability to the state) are not homogenously shared across groups: qualities are represented as inherent in what Spivak ([1985] 1996) describes as “a scrupulously visible political interest” (p. 214). In the case of Indigenous epigenetics, we point to the limitations of strategic biological essentialism. Enacting forms of citizenship through identification with a history of biosocial deprivation may not only lead to intensified biopolitical attention from the State but also consolidate quasi- essentialist notions of specific biological difference among certain popula- tions seen as epigenetically different (e.g., with distinctive methylation profiles as a result of their prolonged exposures to pathogenic environ- ments, Mansfield 2012, 2017; Meloni 2016). In conclusion, we argue that while epigenetics offers a bioeconomy of hope that the effects of settler colonialism can be recognized and reversed, the conjunction of epigenetics and Indigenous knowledges may lead to new forms of biolegitimacy that reproduce essentialisms.
