Where I Come From: An ANT Perspective

Three years ago, in the Spring of 2014, I was fresh out of college, waiting to hear from graduate schools, and looking for something to do. So, I did what any nerd looking for his next academic fix would do: I enrolled in an online class taught by Bruno Latour that was offered through Sciences Po. It was called “Scientific Humanities.” The class was beautifully designed with all kinds of clever animations and illustrations of concepts. In one of the lessons on Actor Network Theory, we watched a short video called “The TSR II Aircraft Project,” which is essentially an animation of John Law and Michel Callon’s “The Life andDeath of an Aircraft: A Network Analysis of Technical Change.” You can watch the video above.

My dad, the F-111 tech, almost 10 years younger than I am now.

The reason I bring this up is not to demonstrate an elegant example of ANT – though that is a pleasant side effect – but to talk about why genetic technologies matter less to my sense of identity than other things. As the video shows, the General Electric F-111 Aardvark was adopted by the RAF in 1964. Twenty years later, my father – an airman in the United States Air Force who specialized on the F-111 – was stationed at a Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire, a former RAF base that was then the site of the 20^th Tactical Fight Wing. The network of actors above, which brought the F-111 to the UK, represents a portion of the political and historical forces (which may also include different post-World War and Cold War geopolitical contingencies, trade agreements, and military industrial contracts) that brought my 20-year-old parents to the UK in the 1980s. Law and Callon’s analysis helps, in small part, explain how I ended up being born in Oxford in 1985. I don’t even much like ANT, but I feel like a part of that network. In fact, I feel much more connected to the now-retired death machine named for a Sub-Saharan, pig-snouted insectivore than I do to any migratory history that could possibly be revealed in my genetics. Why? It may be as simple as shallowly pointing out that I’ve actually sat in an F-111, but I’ve never been to Scotland. Or maybe it’s knowing that so many things outside my control had to coordinate to put me where I am. It makes me feel connected to a bigger story of global political history in a way that some genetic revelation never could.

The Missing

Reading through To Know Where He Lies by Sarah Wagner, I have been especially intrigued by the different experiences families go through after receiving the news from the DNA tests. Of course, I can't imagine the feeling of losing someone during a situation like Srebrenica--there are a variety of questions about their passing or missing status that go unanswered. From little things--wondering what their last meal was, what clothes they were wearing, etc.--to bigger things--how it happened, when it exactly happen, and so on. It's a haunting idea, and when there is so much uncertainty regarding such a heavy topic, it can be easy to imagine a situation much differently than what may be presented to you as the "truth."

When Wagner mentions that some women refuse to come to terms with the almost-certain death of their son or husband or brother or father through the DNA results, I remember a family story eerily similar to situations like these. My mother and her entire side of the family are from Iran--my Mom came to the U.S. to avoid the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The years leading up to the revolution, though, were politically unstable and resulted in numerous demonstrations. My Great Uncle was avid in politics, and attended many of these demonstrations. One demonstration was particularly violent, though, and he was killed among many other people. My Great Grandmother was horror-struck when he never returned home. A couple weeks later, a photo of the demonstration was in the newspaper--on the ground, dead, among others, was my Great Uncle. Despite photo evidence, though, my Great Grandmother never accepted her son's death. She stayed in the same house her entire life, even as the neighborhood's safety and community changed drastically. For her, it was crucial she remained in the same house in case he were to ever return.

Stories like these are difficult to comprehend at times--how could she not accept his death when she had photo evidence? How could someone not accept a DNA match? And so on. Death is so interwoven with emotions and sociality that it is much more than the "facts." It includes subjectivity and emotion, and "facts" don't include a narrative that encapsulate those who are lost and missing.

Speaking of Supposedly Supracultural Science

As April 22 approaches, many of us ready ourselves for the March for Science, a gathering that aims to mirror the post-Inauguration Day Women's March, but with scientists. Can science (or Science) or scientists march for a political cause, or is the cause apolitical by virtue of its opposition to science/Science/scientists? Evolutionary biologist (and pompous misogynist) Jerry Coyne would like to pedantically note "that the only thing that binds scientists together is that they all use the same tools: things like hypothesis-driven experiments, replication of results, and peer review. 'How do you march for something like that?' asks Coyne. 'A march for science itself is just simply a march for the mechanisms that find truth. And who is going to pay attention to that?'"

Ugh, get over yourself, Jer.

Check out the whole story on NPR or read his blog about it on his website.

So what do you all think?

Response: To Know Where He Lies

Sorry for the late post about this week's reading. There were some interesting threads in this book that I could pick up, especially as it relates to our reading and discussion of Latour: Wagner embarks on a Marcus-esque journey ("follow the thing!") to trace the trajectory of human remains, which involves communicating DNA technologies to lay people, in much the same way Latour describes Pasteur selling his technology. Here, however, it seems to breakdown when survivors continue to put more stock in memories and affect than in quantitative statistics. (Who would've imagined?)

Credit: SMBC Comics

Instead of dwelling on this topic, I want to reiterate some of what I was saying today in class about how resources get doled out by wealthy nations, either to save face, or to better sleep at night, or to be saviors of the (white) human race, or to avoid complete political embarrassment. The money and resources it takes to mount a campaign of technology-based identification of human remains are only possible because the science (or Science) is putatively apolitical, supracultural, and a great equalizer. Western European powers must avoid involvement in the Bosnian (and Guatemalan and Rwandan and Syrian) genocide in order to avoid losing face politically; however, once it's over, they can swoop in with their Science because it does nothing to upset the authorities (and their allies) with whom they may want to continue to conduct business, trade, etc. There is a geopolitical angle here that I think Wagner may have missed (or maybe I missed it) that was only possible because Science is considered incapable of dirtying itself in the muck of ethno-religious conflict. (Historians of Lysenkoism would disagree.)

Other Uses of DNA

So all of our class discussions on DNA got me thinking about the different uses of DNA in our modern day society. The most prominent situation that comes to mind are cases in the justice system in which DNA is used to exonerate crimes of the past. Organizations such as the Innocence Project work to overturn wrongful convictions that were made without DNA evidence. According to the website, its mission is “to free the staggering number of innocent people who remain incarcerated, and to bring reform to the system responsible for their unjust imprisonment.”

Not only has DNA become important in overturning wrongful convictions, but if we think about how the justice system is now, DNA has also become an important part of establishing guilt.

However, I found this article (link: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/a-reasonable-doubt/480747/) called “The False Promise of DNA Testing,” which outlines how forensic technique is becoming very common yet is an unreliable source of evidence. For its main example, the article talks about how the Houston Police Department Crime Laboratory technicians have been misinterpreting many of the samples, leading to several false convictions.

These contradicting uses of DNA within the context of the U.S. justice system brings up questions of what the uses of DNA should be and how that should be regulated. 

DNA and Sovereignty

The mysterious death of Kim Jong Nam, Kim, half-brother of Kim Jung-En, is a good example of how DNA technology playing in global politics. Malaysia government says it won't release the body to North Korea without DNA from the Kim family, while Kim Jong Nam's offsprings live in Macau. Here DNA, other than regular forensic findings and other proofs including documents, becomes the only legitimate source of identity. http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/17/asia/kim-jong-nam-murder-questions/  http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/02/23/north-korea-breaks-silence-kim-jong-nam-death-says-probe-full-holes/98290868/http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/kim-jong-nam-murder-malaysia-dpm-zahid-tells-north-korea-to-respect-malaysias

Reading Reflection: Wagner

This week's reading also discusses the use of DNA technology but in a more positive light than last week. Last week we critiqued the use of DNA technology in order to determine one's ancestry, however Wagner presents DNA technology with the purpose of identifying remains as innovative and possibly even a tool with which to support social repair in postwar Bosnia. The ICMP proposed a new wide scale model of DNA testing. This would require them to collect thousands of samples of blood from any live relatives in order to determine a best match for the missing persons. However there were some issues as many members of families were missing which made it hard for ICMP to have the right samples to compare dna to. Even with the advances in DNA technology however many samples remained unmatched. Other methods used to aid in identification included showing family members the possessions and clothes that had been found with the body. Sometimes looking at these possessions or photos of the possessions were the determining factor in identifications. At the end of chapter four, Wagner states that rather than being on opposite sides of objectivity, DNA technology and memory, imagination, and supposition were both necessary tools that had to be used together in order to come to their findings.

Another point in the reading that I also found interesting was how the advocacy associations for finding those who were missing used excel sheets to “synthesize data” for each missing person, even those who prior to the war had little more than a birth certificate as evidence of their existence. The creation of this database seemed to help give more reality to each person who was missing by acting as an “ ‘instrument, a tool, a means to an end-- Action’ “.

Week 5 Reflections

Wagner frames the issue of unidentified bodies in Srebrenica as one that is both political and technological. According to Wagner’s sources, no other genocide in history has produced “secondary graves,” in which mass graves were re-excavated and scattered among varied new grave locations. She describes the process as a use of technology meant to be used as an instrument of power and de-humanization. This foreshadows her future arguments surrounding the use of DNA-technology as a political tool in post-war Bosnia.  I’m not sure if I completely buy into Wagner’s characterization of the secondary graves as a technological innovation. Perhaps if it was publicly perceived as such, such as perception would have laid the foundation for technological suspicion that Wagner is implying. I find it easier to believe that in the wake of genocide, it is not so much technology that inspires suspsicion, but institution.

Continuing on, we read that the newly organized Bosian government was deemed too unstable and divided to tackle the issue of body-identification, so the international community stepped in. Wagner argues that although this move seemed apolitical, the making the missing dead “socially significant” had implications towards war culpability and entitlement to reparations.

The physical processes required for obtaining DNA samples are also notable. It was necessary to disrupt grave sites to obtain partial remains, and this was a large undertaking. As a result, the objective of identifying the dead overshadowed social repair.

Wagner does make a point of highlighting the need for technological innovation; she described the pre-DNA identification processes as tedious and often fruitless. Preliminary uses of DNA testing only provided negative results, often only telling family members that a missing person was not their relative.

Then we examine the ICMP-directed series of events that lead to mass use of DNA-identification. ICMP mobilized many people and resources to gather information from the community to fill in many genetic blanks, and therefore were able to map genealogies. Wagner describes in great detail the systematic process of collection, identification, and demarcation that evolved within the laboratory.

Wagner then delves into the lived experience of the process through family-members’ eyes. She comments on the use of memory to preserve individuality and perhaps humanity throughout the DNA-identification process. Furthermore, memories went on to provide data to further the identifying process, representing an entanglement between the science and individual experience.  

In To Know Where He Lies, Sarah Wagner analyzes how DNA identification in post war Bosnia plays a role in not only finding missing bodies of loved ones, but also in the people’s coming to terms with death and in a reconstruction of death as a social structure.

It was interesting how Wagner described the horrific act of commingling and separating the dead bodies of the fallen bodies as a kind of innovation that the Bosnian Serbs patented. It was a new way of further dehumanizing the corpses from their legacies to try to erase them. The decision of the government to use DNA technology to identify all the bodies also made me happy, even though Wagner qualified this move as political and necessary. I thought the push for identification exemplified how significance is a very human concept, and seemingly small things could become meaningful through a human perspective. I always found it hopeful how whenever we find a skeleton, such as in the case of the skeleton found under a parking lot later identified to be an old king, we always scramble to identify it. This idea of identity and a rush to assign significance illuminates, in my opinion, the need for us to give meaning to the dead bodies and to recognize their lives as lived. I was grateful that the government that introduced the DNA technology for identification recognized this need for the families to come to terms with the deaths of their loved ones and accommodated them, even if it was a political move.

However, one issue that arose that I found important was that some of the families or family members did not understand what DNA was, or did not accept the verdicts of the DNA technology. This stood out to me because of how, to these families, foreign technologies did not offer any help for closure, and showed the limitations of technologies if they do not have any authority in the culture that they are displaced into. To some, explaining that small fragments of molecules in their bodies were what encoded for their entire body may seem as mystical as myths. This highlights that no matter how hard scientists may try to force closure and healing, those things ultimately happen internally, in the community or individually.

Overall I thought that this reading was an important foil to other readings that we’ve had in the class. For example, in “How Medicine Constructs its Objects” Good asserted that medical students learn to dehumanize their patients into anatomical bodies, but this reading contrasted that with the idea that the DNA identification that was used in Bosnia served to reassign social significance to the corpses. It showed that technology can manifest in many forms, but it is always important to analyze its impact on the communities in which it is utilized.

Wagner || 02/23

In the third and fourth chapters of Wagner's book, information about how technology was deployed and what was necessary for its effectiveness was detailed. The technology wasn't inherently productive/helpful, because the result would have simply been a series of numbers, not a person or full identification. In thinking about the social necessity of technologies, I was thinking about how media technology wouldn't be necessarily innovative if people weren't around to consume or utilize it. Is this social component simply varying in degree in the essence of tech? What I mean by that is, is sociality essential for the effective deployment of technology? Can technology be technology without other people around? If an electron was fired in a particle physics lab, and no one was around to critique the study, did the tech work 'effectively'? I don't know if that made sense, I probably got the science wrong.

Moving on, the piece spoke of how DNA identification technology as necessary in order to endow a body with political and social subjectivity, I thought that was interesting in how DNA as an "essence of life" can function in line with bio/necropolitics, and how its engaging in the 'revival' of political subjectivity in these bodies.

"She had accepted officially what emotionally and rationally she denied: her son's death." (118)

That piece sort of drove the necropolitics home for me, while the mother could not exactly conceptualize her son's death, she can see how the official decree carried power which validated (or invalidated?) his existence.

Reading reflections, Feb. 23rd

Last week we read about how DNA tests are not the perfect ways to identify one’s ancestors. This week, the chapters of To Know Where He Lies discuss how DNA tests helped the relatives of the victims in the Srebrenica massacre identify those victims. During the Bosnian War, the execution of the Bosnians and the “innovative” treatment of their dead bodies were extremely disastrous and dehumanizing. The postwar efforts of identifying the missing individuals served to rebuild the community by making these individuals socially significant rather than ignored. DNA technology not only provided strong evidence for or against identifications but also accelerated the identification process by the computerized process of genetic profile matching.

The author noted that DNA tests were considered to be presenting facts and evidence for the challenging identification process and transcending politics, hyperbole and myths. She gave an example of the apolitical and unbiased quality of the tests, where the individual identities of the victims were removed and the victims were represented by barcodes instead so that political factors could be eliminated from the tests. Meanwhile, it is clear that the DNA tests had political implications. The adoption of the DNA tests depended on the participation of different political forces, including the Bosnian state, international organizations as well as local experts. The test results also played political roles. The author cited the actor network theory of Latour, and also mentioned the idea of an object-oriented democracy, in which the presentation of facts and evidence, which relies on science and technology, plays a crucial role in influencing the public. In the case of identifying the missing individuals in the Srebrenica massacre, the DNA tests were of interests to not only humanitarians but also Bosniak nationalists, since the tests could serve as further evidence of the war crime.

Wagner and Becoming

I've been thinking a bit about the STS field map we received a few weeks back in class - where to locate Wagner, what theories, if any, did she use, etc. She cites Foucault, of course, and uses Latour in a few areas, but the works she draws most heavily on from him is an art exhibition which asks "What would an object-oriented democracy look like?" In keeping with ANT, but further afield from laboratory studies.

Coincidentally, when searching "Wagner" in my OneNote, I found I'd already read a short piece by her. In "Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming," Biehl and Locke engage anthropologists in a dialogue about how ethnography might incorporate Deleuze's concept of becoming. As they define it (and it's as good a definition as there is out there), becoming is:

"those individual and collective struggles to come to terms with events and intolerable conditions and to shake loose, to whatever degree possible, from determinants and definitions—“to grow both young and old [in them] at once” (Deleuze 1995:170; 2001). In becoming, as Deleuze saw it, one can achieve an ultimate existential stage in which life is simply immanent and open to new relations—camaraderie—and trajectories. Becoming is not a part of history, he wrote: “History amounts only to the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to ‘become,’ that is, to create something new” (Deleuze 1995:171)."

Citing Wagner, Biehl and Locke explain that in post-war Bosnia:

Here, who one was before the war (what one believed and whom one loved) no longer has value amid new economies and forms of governance—but persists, all the same, in hopes and frustrations. And here, lived experience continually escapes the social categories—competing ethnic and/or victim identities—that dominate the public sphere (Bougarel, Helms, and Duijzings 2007). In such a context—and many others—of routinized urgency and crisis, the human sciences are challenged to respect and incorporate, without reduction, the angst, uncertainty, and the passion for the possible that life holds through and beyond technical assessments. Perhaps this task is what ethnography does best.

I like Wagner's response, in part because although I've always liked Deleuze's idea of becoming, I've found it difficult to integrate into my own life and more difficult still not only to explain to others but to use in any meaningful way. I think Deleuze had always meant it as more of a personal philosophy, so to incorporate it into anthropology, a field which seeks to interpret personal philosophies, implies a "reading" of something that may not be there. As Wagner writes:

There is a refreshing optimism in what [Biehl and Locke] ask us to study—that amid the decay of Vita and the anxiety of Sarajevo (and beside the graves of Bosnia’s missing) lie countless moments of social interaction and expression that challenge assumptions about the limitations of life. But the question of how lingers, and my own concern is that the desire to craft a new anthropology might have the unwanted, unintended affect of eclipsing the very voices and lives we wish to open up to deeper understanding, at least among the field of policy makers and practitioners.

I haven't yet finished Wagner's text, but what strikes me is her insistence on listening (or, loaded term, "giving voice") when her text seems to be so absent from this. There are no extensive transcripts or quotes, very few individuals up the point that we've read. So while I've read attentively, I've found that much of Wagner writes feels repetitive, painting broad brushstrokes of ideas without the immersive nature and centrality of voices that makes ethnography so great. We know what DNA means to her, but I'm not sure I've fully grasped what it means to Bosnians. I hope that changes.

Deus ex machina or not? Use of DNA-based technology in discovering “nestali”

In these two chapters, Wagner explores the development of the identification technology embedded in the particular social context, intertwined with nation-state building, ethnical conflicts, and global humanitarianism. She successfully destroys my previous understanding of the DNA identification technology as deus ex machina in terms of its incompatibility with previous forensic methods, instead, Wagner expands the scope of using the technology, turning the lab-based practice of technology into a complicated process involved with interpersonal exchange, or the bureaucracy when comes to collect and identity data. From “innovation of violence” that physically altered nestali’s belongings, to represent all the needed information in a specific language for lab analyzing, the use of DNA technology was closely attached to themes from the gigantic state building project and governmentality, to minor issues that could be really private and personal. In that sense, the DNA identification process is absolutely not Deus ex machina.

Meanwhile, when comes to evaluate the meaning of memories in the identification project. The DNA technology, as well as the ritual atmosphere created around it, make the technology deus ex machina to both family members and technology practitioners. Unlike former forensic methods and antemortem investigations, the DNA technology is so empowered that it is the final answer, although Wagner shows how inseparable these methods are.

The use of DNA in unveiling the history of absence in Srebrenica could put an end to relentless thoughts of family members and release them from mental probation on the one hand, while create endless, haunted memories. Who are the people benefit from using this technology, maybe the bureaucrats, maybe NATO, maybe the scientists,  not sure about those did suffer from the massacre.