Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore genetic contributions to disparities in health
Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore genetic contributions to disparities in health
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DOI：
10.1017/s0021932005000921
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发表时间：
2006-01-01
影响因子：
1.5
通讯作者：
Ellison, GTH
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Outram, SM;Ellison, GTH
对19种遗传学杂志的编辑人员进行了深入的定性访谈，重点阐述了使种族/族裔成为遗传变量所需的方法和概念机制，从而形成了利用种族/族裔来探索遗传差异的人类学见解。因此，这些分析探讨了在人类学和相关人文科学持续批评种族/族裔类别的社会结构、结构相关性和有限的遗传有效性的背景下，种族/族裔如何以及为什么被用于遗传研究。这些分析表明，这些批评未能吸引遗传学家的参与，以及遗传学家如何使用一系列本质上是文化的装置来保护和区分他们将种族/族裔作为遗传结构的使用与作为社会科学资源的使用。鉴于人类学的多学科、生物社会性质及其人种学方法论的文化视野，人类学非常适合探索科学与社会、自然科学与社会科学学科的文化分离。人类学对使用种族/族裔来探索健康差异的见解表明，超越对先天差异的遗传解释，可能会受益于对自然科学和社会科学如何倾向于使种族/族裔的选择性因素变得至关重要的更公正的批评。本文以艾滋病毒/艾滋病为例，论证了使用种族/民族作为分析变量是如何破坏公共健康的，这既是作为遗传差异的先天遗传差异的密码，也是用来识别感染和感染他人风险更大的“核心群体”。显然，生物简化论的倾向会将许多生物医学问题置于公共卫生干预措施的范围之外，而社会文化本质化则往往使不健康行为以及不健康行为更为普遍的社区蒙受耻辱。
Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore genetic contributions to disparities in health were developed using in-depth qualitative interviews with editorial staff from nineteen genetics journals, focusing on the methodological and conceptual mechanisms required to make race/ethnicity a genetic variable. As such, these analyses explore how and why race/ethnicity comes to be used in the context of genetic research, set against the background of continuing critiques from anthropology and related human sciences that focus on the social construction, structural correlates and limited genetic validity of racial/ethnic categories. The analyses demonstrate how these critiques have failed to engage geneticists, and how geneticists use a range of essentially cultural devices to protect and separate their use of race/ethnicity as a genetic construct from its use as a societal and social science resource. Given its multidisciplinary, biosocial nature and the cultural gaze of its ethnographic methodologies, anthropology is well placed to explore the cultural separation of science and society, and of natural and social science disciplines. Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore disparities in health suggest that moving beyond genetic explanations of innate difference might benefit from a more even-handed critique of how both the natural and social sciences tend to essentialize selective elements of race/ethnicity. Drawing on the example of HIV/AIDS, this paper demonstrates how public health has been undermined by the use of race/ethnicity as an analytical variable, both as a cipher for innate genetic differences in susceptibility and response to treatment, and in its use to identify 'core groups' at greater risk of becoming infected and infecting others. Clearly, a tendency for biological reductionism can place many biomedical issues beyond the scope of public health interventions, while socio-cultural essentialization has tended to stigmatize,unhealthy behaviours' and the communities where these are more prevalent.