Rapporteur Notes for 2/24/2017

Dr. Song told us about the peer review for our lab ethnography which will be double blind—so you won’t know who you’re editing and s/he won’t know who’s editing hers/his. Peer reviews will be due by March 8^th. The final draft and a cover letter discussing what changes you made (or chose not to make) based on your peer review will due March 24^th.

We started off our discussion on three different types of DNA testing:

One is looking mainly at mitochondrial DNA and focusing on the maternal lineage. Another is looking at the paternal lineage, and also looking at SNPs and how mutations have arisen in DNA. An issue we talked about with both of these was that both look only at a tiny portion of the DNA and provide no information about a vast majority of your heritage. The third type of DNA testing is looking at autosomal DNA, which provides much more information about your ancestors. What’s interesting about these genetic ancestry tests is that you’re only looking at the very small part of your DNA that varies, not the huge parts that don’t, thereby ignoring that we have a lot in common with daisies and carrots.

A problem with these genetic tests is that they pick present day groups of people from various countries to identify with but they don’t take into account gene flow, migration, etc, which makes them potentially very inaccurate. Dr. Song also shared how she had been trying to restructure her family tree, using old genealogies and old family bible. However, there were many missing members as well due to erasure of females in records; the main thing they marked from the woman is only her family name, so the women are very insignificant in Chinese lineage. Also, parents don’t even remember their mother’s names or their grandfathers’ names, making it even harder to map out family trees accurately.

Some reasons to do DNA testing include trying to find the missing links and their stories in our ancestries, especially when they were displaced from their homeland through slavery or other colonial displacements. It could also be used for health purposes, to see how at risk you are for certain diseases based on genetic mutations. One person also brought up that there is a strong desire in people to be categorized in some sort of way: Buzzfeed, Myers briggs tests, etc. (It’s also interesting to see how that plays out in non-US countries, because of how the US is more displaced than other countries so there may be more interest in US than in other countries) This also sparked a discussion on how this is emphasized in US schools and how people often make assumptions about people’s ethnicities. Also, it illuminated how white is the default and seen as belonging in the US through how people don’t care about where you’re from if you’re white—how Irish immigrants became unquestioned and “white” in history, white being the norm and default. Another reason is of course what we discussed last week with Native American DNA to gain membership to tribes.

However, some issues with these DNA tests are the dangers of consumer directed tests, and selling family history that may not be accurate. There is also the ethical issue of companies selling the information from DNA tests without informing their users.

We then moved to talking about the reading for the week, starting off with background about DNA fingerprinting based on RFLPs, which was discovered by Alec Jeffreys in 1985. With this technology, if two samples are different lengths, they could not have come from the same person, but if they have the same length, they COULD have come from the same person. This was used to rule out people in fingerprint testing in crime scenes. This led to the first case of using DNA testing in criminal proceedings in the pitchfork double rape-murder investigation in 1983 and 1986. In this case, the police took semen samples from the bodies and was looking for matches. They screened like 5000 people who donated their saliva or blood but didn’t find them, then finally found the culprit as someone who didn’t volunteer to be screened. There was also the OJ Simpson trial, where Simpson was charged with murder of his ex-wife and her friend. Because it was a highly publicized trial, it really introduced DNA testing to the public, and also showed the limitations and mistakes and mishandling that happens in DNA testing since Simpson eventually acquitted due to the mishandling of the police and investigators of the DNA in the crime scene.

That technology was very different in cases of missing persons, since you don’t have the beginning sample or know who they’re related to. So in this case the DNA profile, which measures the match of DNA samples at 6 different loci, begins the search. This is what was used in Bosnia.

To start, Dr. Song began with a short overview of Sarah Wagner’s background in writing To Know Where He Lies. She was an associate professor of anthropology at George Washington University and originally got a PhD in classics. She then got interested in anthropology when she did peace corps in Hungary and worked in Bosnia. She got a degree in refugee/immigrant studies, then studied anthropology at Harvard. She originally wanted to work on displacement and reconstruction of buildings and resettlement, but when she went to Bosnia, she saw that a lot of the houses were reinhabited by their former families, but they seemed to be on pause, because of the loss of their family members in the war.

Before the war in Bosnia, there were six different countries under the leadership of a federation, but nationalist groups caused tensions and tried to declare independence. This led to the war in bosnia in 1992 between three main groups: Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks. The Bosniak-serb army drove others out, and had concentration camps in Trnopolje, omarska, and keraterm. There was violent persecution. Also the UN was supposed to be protecting that area, but they failed in that regard. Right now, these groups are divided into two different units, the Bosnian Serb republic and Muslim Croat federation, but there is still some conflict. Side note: St. Louis was chosen as a good place for refugee populations, so there is a large Bosnian population—over 50,000 bosnians, more than in any other city.

We also had a short discussion on what ethnography is. Ethnography: an argument, an intervention into a conversation that is already going on, refers to the product AND the process.

Some important terms from the readings were missing, recognition, and identity. Maya thought it was interesting how Wagner spoke about identity and identification as the same thing, and contested that. In Chapter 3, Wagner talks about the aspects of technology being integral for restructuring of the government. Maya also mentioned the gender aspects of it: it was mainly men who were gone because of the war. We had a discussion on how or whether DNA testing technology further erases the person making them barcodes and then rehumanizes them when they are given back to the family. They might have been trying to remove ethnicity and bias in these processes of barcoding and then restoring them to the families. Also there were some questions as to who wanted this type of repair, whether it was due to a push from the international community, because of their failures to protect that community, and to try to show that they helped repair in a quantitative way. However, this repair can be emotionally damaging further to the community. We also asked whether missing was used as in physical location or missing as in the uncertainty of their deaths or how they spent their last moments. One person also complained about a lack of Wagner’s address of what the community wants and what they’re looking for in reparation as opposed to the international communities’ wants. It was also interesting how the packaging of the bodies were described by Wagner as making them less smelly and making it cleaner making it seem like it’s being organized, bringing order to the community, but it may not actually be that simple.

Overall the main question we had was why did the Bosnian community use this technology in order to get their narratives heard? DNA technology was being inserted into this community by outside forces to get to the “truth” but why was it accepted as opposed to fortune telling and other methods that existed in the community?