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Fil: López Beltrán, Carlos. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas; México. López Beltrán, C. (2018). Escenarios de la patologización racial: la anomalía amerindia en una nación enferma. Metatheoria, 8(2), 181-193. Como ha ocurrido en otros escenarios históricos, en esta época post-genómica se vive en México un nuevo episodio de patologización racializada de la población nacional. La idea tradicional de que los grupos mestizos de estas regiones heredaron fragilidades corporales y mentales de sus ancestros amerindios, que ha tenido versiones previas en escenarios teóricos cambiantes, se ha vuelto a articular, se ha vuelto a articular, esta vez afincada en “variantes genéticas amerindias” que supuestamente predisponen a enfermedades metabólicas a sus portadores, y que de ese modo explican las epidemias en curso. Este artículo recorre la historia de esos escenarios de patologización racial, e intenta mostrar la lógica distorsionada (ideologizada) en la que se mueve este nuevo y pernicioso ciclo de patologización racializada de la población mexicana. As in other historical scenes, in recent post genomic times Mexicohas witnessed an episode of racialized pathologization of its populations. The traditional idea that mestizo (racially admixed) groups of the region inherit their bodily and mental frailties from their Amerindian ancestors has had several previous incarnations in different and changing theoretical frames. It has now found a new version rooted in the supposed link between “Amerindian genetic variants” that allegedly predispose the bearers to metabolic diseases, and explain the ongoing epidemics. This paper summarizes the history of the scenes of racial pathologization and shows the ideologically distorted racialist logic within which this recent pathologization of Mexicans is taking place.

This paper explores the relationship between genetic research, nationalism and the construction of collective social identities in Latin America. It makes a comparative analysis of two research endeavours that have sought to establish national genetic profiles, the ‘Genoma Mexicano’ and the ‘Homo Brasilis’, as well as their articulation with wider socio-political ideas and processes. The outcomes and social impacts of these endeavours reveal important similarities: they have reproduced and strengthened the idea of the Mexican and Brazilian nation, incorporating biological elements into debates on social identities; they have placed the unifying figure of the mestizo/mestiço at the heart of national identity constructions, displacing alternative identity categories, such as those based on race. However, having developed in different national contexts, these projects have had distinct scientific and social trajectories, mobilizing the genomic mestizo in relation mainly to health in Mexico while in Brazil, race has been an important arena for genetic knowledge. We show the importance of the nation as a frame for mobilizing genetic data in public policy debates and demonstrate how race comes in and out of focus in different Latin American national contexts of genomic research, while never completely disappearing.

Genetic anthropology studies offer evolutionary and migratory narratives to characterize individuals and human groups based on genetic traits. From the analysis of genetic infor- mation, these studies construct genealogies that connect body characteristics with geogra- phies and stories of origin. In recent years, an international group of researchers worked in a project focusaed on Latin American populations. In this paper, we present the results of our ethnographic work and interviews with participants in this project. Based on this ma- terial, we show that Mexican participants tend to use their physical appearance, typological ideas of human difference, family stories and family names to give meaning to scientific terms such as genetic ancestry. Participants rely on shared visual habits to interpret their own and others’ appearance and to negotiate their belonging to racial, ethnic and family groups.

Los proyectos de antropología genética ofrecen explicar la historia evolutiva y migratoria de los grupos humanos y los individuos con base en sus características genéticas. Suelen dibujar genealogías que se narran en términos genéticos y que vinculan rasgos físicos con geografías e historias de origen. En este artículo presentamos los resultados del trabajo etnográfico y entrevistas realizadas a los participantes de un proyecto de antropología genética enfocado en poblaciones latinoamericanas. Mostramos que los participantes del contexto mexicano recurren a la apariencia, a ideas tipológicas sobre la diferencia humana, historias familiares y los apellidos para dar sentido a términos científicos como ancestría genética. Los participantes ejercitan el hábito visual racial para interpretar su apariencia y negociar su pertenencia a grupos raciales, étnicos y familiares, que son traducidos a términos genéticos en el contexto de estos estudios.

"La categoría colonial del mestizo fue un recurso ideológico, formador de la identidad nacional en la posrevolución mexicana. El eje indio-mestizo sirvió para organizar las interacciones étnicas y las políticas del estado. Médicos y antropólogos reforzaron esta taxonomía dual en estudios de poblaciones humanas, produciendo con marcadores biomédicos y descripciones diferenciadas del indio y del mestizo. Las descripciones genómicas han contribuido tanto a la construcción de una noción cientificista del mestizo arraigada en porcentajes de ancestría india, europea y africana, como al surgimiento de dos objetos tecnocientíficos que llamamos el mestizo molecular y el mestizo bioinformático. Aquí describimos las interacciones entre las encarnaciones ideológicas y científicas del mestizo.Palabras clave: mestizaje; biomedicina; México; genética de poblaciones; genómica"

This article provides a comparison between genomic medicine and forensic genetics in Mexico, in light of recent depictions of the nation as a ‘ país de gordos’ (country of the fat) and a ‘ país de muertos’ (country of the dead). We examine the continuities and ruptures in the public image of genetics in these two areas of attention, health and security, focusing especially on how the relevant publics of genetic science are assembled in each case. Publics of biomedical and forensic genetics are assembled through processes of recruitment and interpellation, in ways that modulate current theorizations of co-production. The comparison also provides a vista onto discussions regarding the involvement of genetics in regimes of governance and citizenship and about the relationship between the state and biopower in a context of perceived health crisis and war-like violence.

The articles in this issue highlight contributions that studies of Latin America can make to wider debates about the effects of genomic science on public ideas about race and nation. We argue that current ideas about the power of genomics to transfigure and transform existing ways of thinking about human diversity are often overstated. If a range of social contexts are examined, the effects are uneven. Our data show that genomic knowledge can unsettle and reinforce ideas of nation and race; it can be both banal and highly politicized. In this introduction, we outline concepts of genetic knowledge in society; theories of genetics, nation and race; approaches to public understandings of science; and the Latin American contexts of transnational ideas of nation and race.

The noun “heredity”, in its biological sense, first circulated in France during the 1830s. During that century, heredity was linked to the pessimistic notion of degeneration, the control of which became a tool for the academic and political projects of French physicians to be included in those of the Nation. Something similar occurred in Mexico. After two generations of late 19th and early 20th centuries physicians, which incorporated the manipulation of heredity into their projects and questioned, just as their French colleagues, consanguineous marriages, medical supervision of every union –consanguineous or not– became compulsory within the civil marriage regulations, coinciding with the institutionalization of the Mexican eugenic movement. Even if they had moved from Europe to Mexico, notions of heredity, degeneration, consanguinity and eugenics were adjusted and justified according to the local situation and prevailing values of the Mexican society.//El sustantivo “herencia” en su sentido biológico comenzó a circular en Francia en la década de los años treinta del siglo XIX. En ese mismo siglo la herencia fue vinculada a la pesimista noción de degeneración y el control sobre la misma se convirtió en una herramienta de los médicos franceses para incluir sus proyectos académicos y políticos en los de la nación francesa. En México sucedió una cosa similar. Después de dos generaciones distinguibles de médicos de finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX que incorporaron a sus proyectos la manipulación de la herencia en el mismo tenor que había tenido en Francia y en las que se cuestionaron los matrimonios consanguíneos, se instaló como parte de las leyes que rigen al matrimonio civil la necesidad de la vigilancia médica de todas las uniones, y no sólo las de este tipo. Esto ocurrió justo en el momento en el que movimiento eugenésico mexicano se institucionalizó. A pesar de haberse trasladado desde Europa a la sociedad mexicana, las nociones de herencia, degeneración, consanguinidad y eugenesia fueron amoldadas y justificadas a los valores y situaciones locales.

Retorting to a European barrage of seemingly offensive, defamatory statements that imputed inferior physiological characteristics to human beings from the Americas, Creole (Criollo) physicians and ...

This paper's main contention is that some basically methodological developments in science which are apparently distant and unrelated can be seen as part of a sequential story. Focusing on general inferential and epistemological matters, the paper links occurrences separated by both in time and space, by formal and representational issues rather than social or disciplinary links. It focuses on a few limited aspects of several cognitive practices in medical and biological contexts separated by geography, disciplines and decades, but connected by long term transdisciplinary representational and inferential structures and constraints. The paper intends to show a given set of knowledge claims based on organizing statistically empirical data can be seen to have been underpinned by a previous, more familiar, and probably more natural, narrative handling of similar evidence. To achieve that this paper moves from medicine in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth century in England among gentleman naturalists, following its subject: the shift from narrative depiction of hereditary transmission of physical peculiarities to posterior statistical articulations of the same phenomena. Some early defenders of heredity as an important (if not the most important) causal presence in the understanding of life adopted singular narratives, in the form of case stories from medical and natural history traditions, to flesh out a special kind of causality peculiar to heredity. This work tries to reconstruct historically the rationale that drove the use of such narratives. It then shows that when this rationale was methodologically challenged, its basic narrative and probabilistic underpinings were transferred to the statistical quantificational tools that took their place.

This paper argues that our modern concept of biological heredity was first clearly introduced in a theoretical and practical setting by the generation of French physicians that were active between 1810 and 1830. It describes how from a traditional focus on hereditary transmission of disease, influential French medical men like Esquirol, Fodéré, Piorry, Lévy, moved towards considering heredity a central concept for the conception of the human bodily frame, and its set of physical and moral dispositions. The notion of heredity as a natural force, with a wide ranging capabilities of transmitting differentially both fundamental and accidental characters was generalized by that generation of physicians with the help of contemporary naturalists and physiologists. By 1830 the term hérédité was widespread, and it shared the explanatory and semantic qualities of traditional medical concepts like constitution and temperament. An analysis is given of the main developments that led to the conception of biological (including human) bodies as consisting of a layered, hierarchical organization of characters, differentially affected by the law of conservation (Heredity) and change (Inneity, Variation). The mid-century work of the French physician Prosper Lucas, Traité Philosophique et Physiologique de L' Hérédité Naturelle, is shown to be the culmination of the efforts of several generations of French physicians towards having a feasible, complexly structured notion of how heredity works.

Este artículo intenta delimitar el espacio conceptual en el que se concibió la transmisión hereditaria de peculiaridades físicas y morales durante el siglo XVIII europeo. El terreno de lo hereditario en ese periodo estaba vinculado a la comunicación, de padres a hijos, de componentes accidentales del cuerpo, que podían de algún modo transmitirse usando las vías de la reproducción biológica. Al mismo tiempo, todo lo que tenía que ver con la reproducción de los rasgos esenciales del cuerpo estaba, conceptualmente, fuera del alcance de la noción de lo hereditario. Las diferentes teorías dieciochescas de la reproducción asumieron esta dicotomía, que representaba una frontera interna para la noción de herencia. El predominio en el mismo periodo del esquema galénico de las cosas naturales y las cosas no naturales permite una exploración complementaria de la frontera externa para la transmisión hereditaria. La posibilidad de que el cuerpo (la constitución, el temperamento) pudiera transformarse por influencias externas, y que estos cambios en ciertas circunstancias pudieran a su vez comunicarse a la descendencia, definió la negociación de esta segunda frontera.

SUMMARY. — This paper describes and analyses the discussions on the subject of hereditary disease that took place between 1748 and 1800 among French physicians. Two essay competitions which set prizes for dissertations on the hereditary transmission of disease (Dijon, 1748; Paris, 1788-1790) prompted several writers to try and specify the peculiarities of hereditary causes. The publication of a sceptical essay written for the first competition by Antoine Louis was a major cause of concern for medics wishing to preserve hereditary influence as a valid etiological category. Louis' analytical denial of even the possibility of the existence of an hereditary cause led both the judges and the best medical writers who took part in the Paris competition to force the situation towards the establishment of clear criteria for isolating the hereditary cause from other pathological influences. The transition from a humoralist to a solidist view of the human constitution (body) provided the frame within which the different criteria for heredity were discussed. The prize essays of the Paris competition shared the position that hereditary influence was characterized by a latent, prédisposant kind of causation, which could produce some well known phenomena like atavism (or regression) and homochrony. The solidist causes were thought by most to be better candidates for that role. These developments turned out to be crucial for the emergence and strength of 19th century French (and European) hereditarianism, in medicine and other fields., RÉSUMÉ. — Le présent article décrit et analyse les discussions qu'avaient les médecins français entre 1748 et 1800 au sujet des maladies héréditaires. Deux sujets sur la transmission héréditaire des maladies furent mis au concours (Dijon, 1748 ; Paris, 1788-1790). Ils incitèrent plusieurs auteurs à chercher à préciser les particularités des causes héréditaires. La publication d'un essai critique écrit pour le premier concours par Antoine Louis constitua un défi pour les médecins qui voulaient conserver la notion d'influence héréditaire comme catégorie étiologique pertinente. Le refus de Louis d'admettre même la possibilité de l'existence d'une cause héréditaire conduisit à la fois les juges et les meilleurs concurrents prenant part au concours de Paris à exiger l'établissement de critères clairs pour isoler la cause héréditaire des autres influences pathologiques. Le passage d'un point de vue humoriste à un point de vue solidiste de la constitution humaine (le corps) a fourni le cadre à l'intérieur duquel les différents critères de la notion d'hérédité furent discutés. Les essais primés lors du concours parisien partageaient l'idée que l'influence héréditaire est caractérisée par une causalité latente du genre prédisposant, qui peut provoquer des phénomènes connus tels que l'atavisme (ou régression) et l'homochronie. On pensait que les causes solidistes remplissaient mieux ce rôle. Ces développements se sont avérés cruciaux pour l'émergence et la force de l'héréditarisme français (et européen) au XIXe siècle, en médecine comme dans d'autres domaines., Lopez Beltran Carlos. « Les maladies héréditaires » : 18th century disputes in France/Les maladies héréditaires : controverses au XVIIIe siècle en France. In: Revue d'histoire des sciences, tome 48, n°3, 1995. Les sciences de la vie au Siècle des Lumières. /In memoriam Roselyne Rey pp. 307-350.

This paper aims to give a causal account of the privileged status of genes in the theory of natural selection. Adding to the arguments that Dawkins (1976, 1982) and Kitcher & Sterelny (1989) have given for a distinction between the role of genes as units of natural selection, and that of other structures and properties from higher levels of organization, it criticizes the hierarchical view of a multiplicity of units for its lack of awareness of a basic causal assymetry between the genic and other levels. Being located at what one might call a Weismannian vertex, genes, it is argued, neatly articulate the two different dimensions of probabilistic causality, the token causality and the type causality. They do not have the passive (book-keeping) role some authors want to give them but are causally (probabilistically) responsible both for the recurrence of features from generation to generation, and for the presence of similar genes in future gene-pools. Heritability, it is also argued, when properly understood, can be seen as the biological property that captures this dual causal role of genes.

Para tener una visión regional del estado de desarrollo de la sistemática en América Latina durante las últimas tres décadas, se presentan los resultados del análisis cienciométrico de 11185 documentos publicados entre 1976 y 2006 en 411 revistas de la región, obtenidos de la base de datos Periódica. Se describe el estado actual de la disciplina en el área, se exponen análisis detallados sobre los artículos, países, principales líneas de estudios, grupos taxonómicos, temas, formato, tipo de documento, contenido, idioma y se contextualiza la información. La producción especializada sobre sistemática publicada en las revistas locales fue notable y se mantuvo estable a partir de los 80, centrándose principalmente en México, Brasil y Argentina. Los contenidos fueron publicados en español primariamente y en forma de artículos. Versaron especialmente sobre taxonomía descriptiva y se relacionaron con la ecología, anatomía, histología y biología acuática. Los grupos más representados fueron los insectos y las angiospermas. Se concluye haciendo una llamada a la necesidad urgente de sistematizar la literatura de sistemática sobre taxones latinoamericanos. In order to have a regional vision of the development of systematics in Latin America during the last three decades, the results of a scientometric analysis based on 11185 documents on this theme published in 411 journals from 1976 to 2006 and obtained from the Periodica data base are presented. The current state of the discipline in the region is described, a detailed analysis about the articles, countries, main lines of study, taxonomic groups, topics, format, type of document, content and language is carried out, and the information is contextualized. The specialized production on systematics produced and published in local journals was notable and remained stable after the 80’s, mainly in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. The contents have been published primarily in Spanish and mainly in the form of articles. They dealt mostly with descriptive taxonomy and were related to ecology, anatomy, histology and aquatic biology. The most represented groups were insects and angiosperms. A call is made for the urgent need of systematizing the literature about Latin American taxa. Para ter uma visão regional do estado de desenvolvimento da sistemática na América Latina durante as últimas três décadas, se apresentam os resultados da análise cienciométrica, de 1976 a 2006, baseada em 11.185 documentos publicados sobre o tema em 411 revistas publicadas na região, obtidos da base de dados Periódica. Descreve-se o estado atual da disciplina na área, se expõe análises detalhadas sobre os artigos, países, principais linhas de estudos, grupos taxonômicos, temas, formato, tipo de documento, conteúdo, idioma e se contextualiza a informação. A produção especializada sobre sistemática publicada nas revistas locais foi notável e se manteve estável a partir dos anos 80, centrando-se principalmente no México, Brasil e Argentina. Os conteúdos foram publicados em espanhol primariamente e em forma de artigos. Versaram especialmente sobre taxonomia descritiva e se relacionaram com a ecologia, anatomia, histologia e biologia aquática. Os grupos mais representados foram os insetos e as angiospermas. Conclui-se com uma chamada de atenção para a necessidade urgente de sistematizar toda a literatura sobre sistemática dos táxons latino-americanos.

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Genomics, Race Mixture, and Nation in Latin America / Peter Wade, Carlos Lopez Beltran, Eduardo Restrepo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos Part I. History and Context 1. From Degeneration to Meeting Point: Historical Views on Race, Mixture, and the Biological Diversity of the Brazilian Population / Ricardo Ventura Santos, Michael Kent, and Verlan Valle Gaspar Neto 2. Nation and Difference in the Genetic Imagination of Colombia / Eduardo Restrepo, Ernesto Schwartz-Marin, and Roosbelinda Cadenas 3. Negotiating the Mexican Mestizo: On the Possibility of a National Genomics / Carlos Lopez Beltran, Vivette Garcia Deister, and Mariana Rios Sandoval Part II. Laboratory Case Studies 4. "The Charrua Are Alive": The Genetic Resurrection of an Extinct Indigenous Population in Southern Brazil / Michael Kent and Ricardo Ventura Santos 5. The Travels of Humans, Categories, and Other Genetic Products: A Case Study of the Practice of Population Genetics in Colombia / Maria Fernanda Olarte Sierra and Adriana Diaz del Castillo H. 6. Laboratory Life of the Mexican Mestizo / Vivette Garcia Deister 7. Social Categories and Laboratory Practices in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico: A Comparative Overview / Peter Wade, Vivette Garcia Deister, Michael Kent, and Maria Fernanda Olarte Sierra Conclusion: Race, Multiculturalism, and Genomics in Latin America / Peter Wade Appendix Methods and Contexts References Contributors Index