Racial Identities, Genetic Ancestry, and Health in South America: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay edited by Sahra Gibbon, Ricardo Ventura Santos, and Mónica Sans (review)

Although specific to South America, this volume dovetails with other recent publications and symposia on the history of biological anthropology and how it is inextricably linked with the study of modern human population variation and race, on the status of the race concept in the field of biological anthropology, on the political and paradoxical implications for understanding racial identities, and on the relationship between practitioners and their living subjects given these concerns (e.g., Aiello 2012; Edgar and Hunley 2009). This volume is particularly timely, in light of recent advances in genomics, as well as the history, controversies, and ethical concerns of biomedical and genetic research in South America, but will be of import to genomics research everywhere. Given recent attention to these questions, it will come as little surprise to most readers of Human Biology that recent genomic research in South America, specifically in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay, finds that color or physical evaluation is usually a poor predictor of genomic ancestry and that how people self-identify their race or ethnicity does not necessarily reflect their genetic identity.

This volume resulted from a symposium titled “Racial Identities, Genetic Ancestry, and Health in South America,” cosponsored by the Wenner Gren Foundation and the British Academy and organized by the editors of this volume, Sahra Gibbon, Ricardo Ventura Santos, and Mónica Sans. Explicitly biocultural in its approach and scope, the volume has 10 chapters arranged in three different sections, plus an introduction by the editors that specifies how the purposes of the chapters are to understand relationships among new developments in genetics and how they affect understanding of history, identity, and health in South America. While the focus is on South American populations, the implications for how anthropologists, geneticists, and physicians understand “race,” identity, and human biological variation are much more far-reaching. The contributing authors hail from Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, the United States, and the United Kingdom and are specialists in sociology, anthropology, history, genetics, and bioethics. The book’s three sections delve into the prospects and pitfalls of interdisciplinary research and practice and the paradox of identity, new contributions from genomics as they integrate with medicine and health in South America, and the relationships among genetic knowledge, history, and identity from different South American nations. As with most edited volumes, the contributions are extremely diverse, and some authors address the volume’s thematic strands better than other authors, but all of the chapters should be commended for the ways they contend with race, identity, human genetic diversity, and ethnicity.

The strengths of the first section are particularly compelling and revealing of the different perspectives used to understand racial identity genetically, biologically, and culturally and how each of these definitions is not without political ramifications. In chapter 1, Santos and Maio counterpose recent research on the genetic traits of Brazilian populations against how this research has been received and the different positions assumed by various segments of society, such as the black rights activist movement and far right neo-Nazi movement. The authors emphasize that genetic studies show that the current racial categories in Brazil are unstable and ill-defined, which has repercussions for Brazilian notions of identity, selfhood, and social cohesion. Barragán takes up similar themes in chapter 2, except in the Colombian context, but also emphasizing how communities of activism read recent research in genomics of ethnic minorities. The third chapter in this section, by Birchal and Pena, departs slightly from the other two chapters by explicitly addressing the noncorrelation between biological and social race both broadly and in Brazil specifically, as well as how Brazilians should address their perceived differences individually and through haploblocks.

The second section deals explicitly with genomics and health, engaging with how to understand the...