Red Crescents
Race, Genetics, and Sickle Cell Disease in the Middle East
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4175975 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Elise K Burton (0000-0003-1981-930X, University of Cambridge, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 110 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 250-269 |
| Publication date | 2019-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Isis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/703533 |
| OpenAlex | W2918969883 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 62 |
Historical accounts of sickle cell disease tend to emphasize either its theoretical role in catalyzing the field of medical genetics or its clinical and social significance in representing the health-care disparities experienced by African Americans. This essay bridges these narratives by focusing on the discovery of sickle cells in marginalized Arabic-speaking communities of Yemen and Turkey in the 1950s. As in North America, sickle cell research in the Middle East unfolded along the social fractures of race. The essay analyzes how British, Turkish, and Arab geneticists attempted to create evolutionary hypotheses that reconciled historical and sociological boundaries between white and African, Arab and Turk. As the parameters of Turkish and Arab nationalism shifted in the Cold War–era Middle East, so did the favored explanatory narratives for the presence of sickle cells in different communities, which assigned different degrees of importance to African ancestry, socially enforced endogamy, and evolutionary adaptations to malaria
Biology · Endogamy · Ethnic group · Ethnology · Gene · Genealogy · Literature · Middle East · Narrative · Nationalism · Norwegian · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Sociology · Turkish · White (mutation · African history and culture analysis · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Genetics · History · Law · Race, Genetics, and Society
A History of the 'Alawis
Body and Soul
In the blood
Who gave whom hemoglobin S
The Jewish community of Rome
Human heredity after 1945
Scaling up
Making blood ‘Melanesian’
The Invention of the Mizrahim
The social organization of the tribes of the Aden protectorate
The Original Arabs
Amerindians, Europeans, Makiritare, Mestizos, Puerto Rican, and Quechua
Beyond the Cephalic Index
The Sickle-Cell Trait
Blood groups and human groups
The emergence of human population genetics and narratives about the formation of the Brazilian nation (1950-1960)
Race, Racism, and Antiracism
Biocultural citizenship and embodying exceptionalism
Race Relationships
Population Genetics in Israel in the 1950s
Racial Conceptions in the Global South
Man's Haemoglobins, Including the Haemoglobinopathies and Their Investigation
The Sickle-Cell Trait in the Mediterranean Area
Territory, Ancestry and Descent
Old diseases and contemporary crisis. Inherited blood disorders in the Sultanate of Oman
Essential Collaborators
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |