Table Of ContentRacial Identities, Genetic Ancestry, and
Health in South America
Racial Identities, Genetic
Ancestry, and Health in
South America
Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay
Edited by
Sahra Gibbon,
Ricardo Ventura Santos , and
Mónica Sans
RACIAL IDENTITIES, GENETIC ANCESTRY, AND HEALTH IN SOUTH AMERICA
Copyright © Sahra Gibbon, Ricardo Ventura Santos, and Mónica Sans, 2011.
Softcoverreprintofthehardcover1stedtion2011
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-29305-6 ISBN 978-1-137-00170-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/ 9 78-1-137-00170-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Racial identities, genetic ancestry, and health in South America :
Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay / edited by Sahra Gibbon,
Ricardo Ventura Santos, and Mónica Sans.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Human population genetics—South America. 2. Genomics—South
America. 3. Anthropology—South America. 4. Medical genetics—South
America. 5. Sociobiology—South America. 6. Ethnology—South America.
I. Gibbon, Sahra. II. Santos, Ricardo Ventura, 1964– III. Sans, Mónica.
GN290.S63R33 2011
304(cid:2)6098—dc23 2011020948
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
F irst edition: November 2011
Contents
List of Figures and Tables v ii
Foreword ix
Michael Montoya and Rayna Rapp
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
Sahra Gibbon, Ricardo Ventura Santos, and Mónica Sans
Part I Interdisciplinary Research and the
Paradox of Racial Identity
1. Anthropology, Race, and the Dilemmas of Identity in
the Age of Genomics: A View from Brazil 19
Ricardo Ventura Santos and Marcos Chor Maio
2. Molecular Vignettes of the Colombian Nation: The Place(s)
of Race and Ethnicity in Networks of Biocapital 41
Carlos Andrés Barragán
3. The Biological Nonexistence versus the Social Existence of
Human Races: Can Science Instruct the Social Ethos? 69
Telma S. Birchal and Sérgio D. J. Pena
Part II Genomics, Genetic Admixture, and
Health in South America: Old and New
Opportunities and Challenges
4. Admixture Mapping and Genetic Technologies:
Perspectives from Latin America 103
Bernardo Bertoni
5. Pharmacogenetics in the Brazilian Population 121
Guilherme Suarez-Kurtz
vi CONTENTS
6. Strong Association of Socioeconomic Status and Genetic
Ancestry in Latinos: Implications for Admixture Studies of
Type 2 Diabetes 137
J. C. Florez et al.
7. Remembering or Forgetting Mendel: Sickle Cell
Anemia and Racial Politics in Brazil 155
Peter Fry
Part III Genetics, History, Nationhood, and Identity
8. Gene Admixture Analysis through Genetic Markers and
Genealogical Data in a Sample from the Buenos Aires
Metropolitan Area 177
Francisco R. Carnese et al.
9. National Identity, Census Data, and Genetics in Uruguay 195
Mónica Sans
10. Forced Disappearance and Suppression of
Identity of Children in Argentina: Experiences in
Genetic Identification 213
Victor B. Penchaszadeh
Notes on Contributors 245
Index 251
Figures and Tables
Figures
0.1 Cartoon “Composição genética (O DNA do povo
brasileiro)” (Genetic composition [the DNA of the
Brazilian population]), by Cau Gomez 2
2 .1 C olombian anthropologist Milciades Chaves Chamorro
(1916–1987), preparing to study in situ blood types
from members of the Chimila community, Ariguaní
River, Magdalena, 1944 52
4.1 Two schemes illustrating (A) the chromosome mosaic
result from a trihybrid admixture process and (B) how
an excess of a parental chromosome segment is
overrepresented in the patient sample after recombination 107
6.1 Histograms of European ancestry proportions in type 2
diabetes participants and controls from Mexico and
Colombia, using 67 AIMs 144
6.2 Distribution of ancestry proportions across strata of
socioeconomic status (SES) in Mexicans and Columbians 146
8.1 Map of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (BAMA) 180
Tables
4.1 Admixture estimation from US Hispanics, Mexico, and
South American urban populations 110
4.2 Prevalence of breast cancer and melanoma in
populations from Europe, America, Africa, and Asia 111
viii FIGURES AND TABLES
4.3 Chromosome regions or genes described in studies
that apply admixture mapping or ancestry association
in African American and Hispanic/Latin
American populations 114
6.1 Demographic characteristics of genotyped samples 140
6.2 Association of non-European ancestry with type 2
diabetes in Latinos 142
6.3 Association of non-European ancestry with type 2
diabetes in Latinos is confounded by socioeconomic status 145
6.4 Association of socioeconomic status and non-European
ancestry with type 2 diabetes is not confounded by BMI 148
8.1 Results of eight censuses of Buenos Aires city, 1778–1887 179
8.2 Mitochondrial DNA of the donors and place of birth of
maternal grandmothers 184
8.3 Types of marriage between the maternal
grandparents of donors 186
Foreword
Michael Montoya and
Rayna Rapp
As North American researchers invited to participate in a conference
on the many biosocial issues raised in Latin American admixture
studies, our curiosity and concern were both amplified and assuaged
by the rich presentations and conversations that unfurled at “Racial
Identities, Genetic Ancestry, and Health in South America” in 2009.
Sponsored by the Wenner Gren Foundation and the British Academy,
the excellent organizational work of Sahra Gibbon, Ricardo Ventura
Santos, and Monica Sans brought us together outside the Americas, in
London, and has kept us connected through their fine and multilingual
editorial process that has produced the chapters you are about to read.
T here is no tidy way to reflect upon the complexity and diversity of
issues raised in this important volume. These chapters themselves reflect
the fructuous, and often tense deliberations that were occasioned by the
conference, one of whose aims was to decenter the European and North
American hegemony on the biocultural, bioethical, sociocultural, histori-
cal, and political implications of genomics. However this meeting, like so
many on our side of the Atlantic, also aimed to forward a conversation
across the epistemological divides of the social and biological sciences.
This book, therefore, reflects a consequential and ambitious agenda.
W hen North American researchers really engage the way that social
and biological divides are being reconfigured by our South American
colleagues, it becomes increasingly clear that many of our received, hege-
monic ideas about “race,” “genes,” and “health” are wholly inadequate in
large measure because they are refracted through the race debates in the
United States. Still, the chapters by Monica Sans, Francisco Raúl Carnese,
and Bernardo Bertoni, for instance, were at once troubling and reassur-
ing. They were troubling because each in its own way wholeheartedly
affirmed the science of human genetic variation, an affirmation that in
x FOREWORD
the United States all too often marks a screen for unexamined or overt eli-
sion of the historical legacies of racial conflict and violence, masking how
“admixture” was called into being and continues to evolve. It is apparent,
for example, that the biparental DYS 199 locus and mitochondrial DNA
techniques for characterizing populations deployed by some authors in
this collection advance important technical debates about population
structures in these specific contexts while at the same time addressing
popular and often politically charged ideas about race/color and iden-
tity. We would have preferred that the problematics of haplogrouping, the
ecological fallacy, or the nonconcordance of phenotype with genotype,
nicely highlighted by Telma de Souza Birchal and Sérgio D. J. Pena, had
been included in every chapter. At the same time, we learned a great deal
about how the use of highly specific genomic techniques can be deployed
with far greater nuance than what we too often note in the United States.
Jose C. Flores, for example, points to the regional variations in admixture
and diabetes susceptibility across Latin American countries, showing
that when socioeconomic status is carefully added to the analytic vari-
ables, the impact of genomic ancestry-marker differences is dramatically
reduced. And Bertoni insists on the complexity of epigenetic and regional
environmental factors that make admixture studies partial, at best. Latin
American analysts carry a power sensitivity, a context dependency, and
an explicit recognition of the sociocultural, political, ethical, and his-
torical responsibilities of the genetic sciences, which has much to teach
US-based researchers.
S ome of the chapters may seem at first to reproduce problematic
racialized human difference. Yet they also, in sometimes strikingly
opposite ways, deploy their genomic technologies in deliberate and vis-
ible accordance with the social exigencies of the peoples from whose
bodies their genomic differences were derived. For example, some
suggest, as Guilherme Suarez-Kurtz does, that specific pharmacolo-
gies might be made more population sensitive to underserved groups
with the least expensive but diversity-sensitive biomarker tests; this
is not a matter of genome testing but of population awareness at the
most sophisticated biosocial level. Most importantly, the biogenetically
trained authors’ use of populations almost always appears in carefully
qualified ways such that one rarely forgets that the population labels
used by scientists are historically mediated descriptions, and that the
matrices of biogenetic population difference were not intended to dis-
creetly define groups: when biomarker testing is dense and large num-
bers of subjects are recruited, clinal distributions always appear. This is,
once again, an important perspective, which North American scientists
might ponder to good effect.
