Genetic Nature/Culture (review)

This volume originated in a Wenner-Glen Foundation international symposium devoted to the theme of the inseparability of genetic, environmental, and culture analysis in anthropology. Each of the fourteen essays argues in one way or another that genetics plays some role in virtually any human social behavior, even though that behavior cannot be simply reduced to a genetic based level of analysis. Although many of the topics covered are of primary interest to what we might have labeled earlier as physical anthropology, sociologists will also find many of these essays enlightening. They all demonstrate the multiple layered analysis that should be the hallmark of all good social science after the recent revolutions in genetics. To claim, as so many sociologists do, that there is some kind of definitive barrier between nature and culture for the human species is to make sociology more and more marginal both to our co-disciplines, and to the wider intellectual enterprise of our contemporary world. The four essays on race provide an excellent summary of research concerning this most troublesome of issues. Joan Fujimura's fascinating paper on genome scientists as sociocultural entrepreneurs uses Japanese scientists as an enlightening mirror for the possibilities and problems in this area. Many cultural sociologists will be interested in the paper on technologies of the self, flexible eugenics, and the Little People of America (LPA). After reading Jonathan Marks paper "98% Chimpanzee and 35% Daffodil", no one will be able to read that too-often-quoted statistic without smiling and thinking twice about how easily materials from genetics can be reshaped in social discourse. It is a pleasure to see this kind of inter-disciplinary volume appearing in anthropology. Perhaps it will not be too long before the same kind of work becomes a more regular part of sociology.