Indigenous Knowledge in a Postgenomic Landscape

The Politics of Epigenetic Hope and Reparation in Australia

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5337334
AutoresM Warin (0000-0001-8766-1087, The University of Adelaide, autor de correspondencia), E Kowal (0000-0003-3866-3224, Deakin University), Massimo Meloni (0000-0003-2570-3872, Deakin University), Maurizio Meloni
Año2020
Volumen45
Número1
Páginas87-111
Fecha de publicación2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaScience Technology & Human Values (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0162-2439 • E-ISSN: 1552-8251
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0162243919831077
OpenAlexW2917791718
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas40
Referencias citadas62

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 intergenerational 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

Biopower · Biosocial theory · Covert · Essentialism · Ethics in Clinical Research · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Race, Genetics, and Society