Population Studies Issues
Convener: Dena S. Davis
Collaborators: Melissa Barber, Petrice Brown Atwood Gaines,
Mary Quinn Griffin, Sharona Hoffman, Eric Juengst, Patricia
Marshall, Stephen Post, Georgia Wiesner, and Shlomit Zuckeman
Under the leadership of Dena S. Davis, this research group
involves anthropologists, legal scholars, philosophers,
and religious studies scholars with clinical geneticists, human
geneticists, and health behavior researchers in interdisciplinary
examinations of the issues of personal and group identity that
arise in population-based genetic research.
The group uses the interpretive methods of the humanities,
law, and cultural anthropology to reflect on the descriptive
information gathered by the Family Studies and Community Studies research groups. The
results will be related to the cultural, religious, and political
traditions regarding personal and group identity of the populations
under study.
As an initial pilot study, they focused on three
American populations,
whose identities are defined in different ways but whose experience
of genetic research is nevertheless significantly influenced
by their identity perceptions: African Americans; Ashkenazi
Jews; American elderly.
Research Questions:
1. What roles do genetic factors play in the cultural construction
of group and individual identities for African Americans, Jews,
and the American elderly.
2. How does the enterprise of genetic research (in the questions
it chooses to ask, the results it reports, and the mediation
of those results in public discourse) contribute to or challenge
those cultural constructions?
Rationale:
How we relate to our genetic identities is our choice (an expression
of our autonomy), but many societal forces influence that choice.
African Americans, Ashkenazi Jews, and the American elderly
are rich examples of how the interplay between genetic information
and personal identity is influenced by our societal context,
although for different reasons. For example, a person of mixed
ancestry who discovers that she has sickle cell trait may come
to identify more with the African-American part of her heritage
because of the way her ancestry affects her future. At the same
time, community-based public health campaigns, such as Tay-Sachs
screening programs, may draw her and her Jewish husband into
close engagement with Jewish institutions, even if they both
lack a strong religious identity. Further, while the burden
of social prejudice may encourage her to convert to Judaism
to allow herself and her children to legitimately "pass"
as Jewish, law and public policy may set up certain benefits
to claiming an African-American racial identity, such as access
to minority training funds. Finally, the discovery of a personal
vulnerability to age-associated health problems such as Alzheimer
disease may precipitate a person's re-identification as someone
entering old age, because of the roles in which we cast the
elderly in our society.
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