Books by Noah Tamarkin
Duke University Press, 2020
In 1997, M. E. R. Mathivha, an elder of the black Jewish Lemba people of South Africa, announced ... more In 1997, M. E. R. Mathivha, an elder of the black Jewish Lemba people of South Africa, announced to the Lemba Cultural Association that a recent DNA study substantiated their ancestral connections to Jews. Lemba people subsequently leveraged their genetic test results to seek recognition from the post-apartheid government as indigenous Africans with rights to traditional leadership and land, retheorizing genetic ancestry in the process. In Genetic Afterlives, Noah Tamarkin illustrates how Lemba people give their own meanings to the results of DNA tests and employ them to manage competing claims of Jewish ethnic and religious identity, African indigeneity, and South African citizenship. Tamarkin turns away from genetics researchers' results that defined a single story of Lemba peoples' “true” origins and toward Lemba understandings of their own genealogy as multivalent. Guided by Lemba people’s negotiations of their belonging as diasporic Jews, South African citizens, and indigenous Africans, Tamarkin considers new ways to think about belonging that can acknowledge the importance of historical and sacred ties to land without valorizing autochthony, borders, or other technologies of exclusion.
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Papers by Noah Tamarkin
Ordering the Human: The Global Spread of Racial Science, edited by Eram Alam , Dorothy Roberts and Natalie Shibley, 2024
This chapter argues that indigenous DNA is unavoidable in South Africa. Especially for those who ... more This chapter argues that indigenous DNA is unavoidable in South Africa. Especially for those who seek to represent pre-colonial pasts or for those who have systematically and routinely been positioned as themselves embodying or representing those pasts, it isn’t an option to fully disengage from genetic forms of knowing. However, I argue that these reworked genetic engagements and the new genetic knowledge that they produce are not predetermined by geneticists’ intentions, conclusions, or framings. The reworkings of indigenous DNA in practice that I look at in this chapter instead offer a way to understand not just the limits of postapartheid genetics with its racial classificatory hauntings, but also what else genetic knowledge can be and do when it is resituated, recirculated, reimagined, and decentered.
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Law, Practice and Politics of Forensic DNA Profiling: Forensic Genetics and Their Technolegal Worlds, 2023
This chapter excavates how South Africa’s national forensic DNA database was established legislat... more This chapter excavates how South Africa’s national forensic DNA database was established legislatively. It considers parliamentary records that discuss forensic genetics from the late 1990s, when a small database existed but was unregulated, through 2009, when draft legislation was discussed but not adopted, to 2015, when the finalised legislation, passed in 2013, began to be implemented. It aims to account for how legislating forensic genetics intersected with social and political shifts from the 1990s to 2015, with particular attunement to reverberations of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid histories. This chapter argues that the shifting meaning and significance of race in South Africa’s DNA legislation process offers an opening to analyse how race, racialisation and racism articulate to forensic genetics practices more broadly; that racialised logics of policing and securitisation are at the core of forensic DNA databases; and that a significant part of the labour and contingency of forensic DNA databases lies in the reconfiguration and occlusion of race. The chapter is part of the book Law, Practice and Politics of Forensic DNA Profiling: Forensic Genetics and Technolegal Worlds, edited by Victor Toom, Matthias Wienroth, and Amade M'charek.
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This essay is the afterword in the book, Bioinformation:
Worlds and Futures, edited by Silvia Po... more This essay is the afterword in the book, Bioinformation:
Worlds and Futures, edited by Silvia Posocco and EJ Gonzalez-Polledo. This book sets out to define and consolidate the field of bioinformation studies in its transnational and global dimensions, drawing on debates in science and technology studies, anthropology and sociology. It provides situated analyses of bioinformation journeys across domains and spheres of interpretation. As unprecedented amounts of data relating to biological processes and lives are collected, aggregated, traded and exchanged, infrastructural systems and machine learners produce real consequences as they turn indeterminate data into actionable decisions for states, companies, scientific researchers and consumers. Bioinformation accrues multiple values as it transverses multiple registers and domains, and as it is transformed from bodies to becoming a subject of analysis tied to particular social relations, promises, desires and futures. The volume harnesses the anthropological sensibility for situated, fine-grained, ethnographically grounded analysis to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue on the conceptual, political, social and ethical dimensions posed by bioinformation. EJ Gonzalez-Polledo teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. They are the author of Transitioning: Matter, Gender, Thought, and are currently developing research on global open biology movements and global histories of bioinformation.
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History and Anthropology, 2019
This essay considers how residential security and forensic genetics in South Africa open ways to ... more This essay considers how residential security and forensic genetics in South Africa open ways to think about captivity as something that the relatively privileged embrace to delineate a safe inside from a threatening outside. Captivity functions here as a means to entrench privilege and guarantee its protection.
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This essay reviews work produced in predominantly US cultural anthropology publications throughou... more This essay reviews work produced in predominantly US cultural anthropology publications throughout 2017. It asks: What makes an anthropological inquiry timely, what sorts of relationalities command anthropological attention, and to what end? Noting our ongoing methodological commitment to long‐term ethnography alongside increasingly important online forums for reaching broader publics and responding quickly to emerging issues, it expands the range of work surveyed to include some online‐only short essays alongside the larger collection of traditionally published research articles. Characterized by empathic inquiry, frequently drawing on years of ethnographic and personal experience with the places, people, and other entities that we write about, and often attentive to histories at multiple scales, cultural anthropology of this moment, however published, grapples with dark times while it also offers ways of imagining other, better futures and ways of being in relation to others. Two thematic clusters organize this essay: the first considers temporality alongside mobility and sovereignty, and the second considers relationality alongside subjectivity and mediation. Together, all of these concerns—that are both of the moment and long standing—build a varied body of work that grapples with the interrelationalities that constitute power, place, and possibility. I argue that what makes an anthropological inquiry timely is the extent to which it is relationally informed and attuned to care for worlds that we inhabit and imagine, together. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, temporality, mobility, sovereignty, relationality, subjectivity, mediation]
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Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Tehnoscience, 2017
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Like other research on human heredity and biological relationships, Jewish genetics has seen a su... more Like other research on human heredity and biological relationships, Jewish genetics has seen a surge in new research beginning in the 1980s as the larger field of genetics made use of new technologies and methods of analysis. More recently, the availability of whole-genome sequencing following the successful completion of the human genome project has opened new research possibilities as well as new ethical and political questions about the implications of genetic research. Despite this newness, contemporary geneticists and their critics often consider similar questions and controversies such as those raised in pre-1980s studies based on blood groups, and even earlier biometric studies undertaken by 19th- and early-20th-century eugenicists and their critics. Zionist and anti-Zionist politics significantly inform historical and contemporary Jewish genetics literatures, at times explicitly and more often implicitly in the questions that scholars ask, such as the extent to which Jews constitute a biological community, and the extent to which Jews throughout the world can trace their ancestry to the Middle East. The Jewish genetics literature includes genetic studies and book-length overviews written from the perspective of genetic scientists, qualitative studies and critical analyses of the methods and implications of Jewish genetics written by humanities and social sciences scholars, and popular nonfiction accounts of both written by journalists. This article includes work from all of these categories but emphasizes humanities and social sciences research. The work on Jewish genetics produced in the humanities and social sciences draws from the interdisciplinary fields of Jewish cultural studies, comparative ethnic studies, and science and technology studies, as well as from disciplines such as history, anthropology, and sociology. Scholars seeking to speak across humanities and sciences divides have also explored Jewish genetics, especially in the context of race and genomics, biological citizenship, and anthropological questions about ancestry, medicine, and belonging. Whether authors position themselves as scientists or humanists, a common theme emerges in the Jewish genetics literature; much of the work on Jewish genetics examines continuities between contemporary Jewish genetics research and earlier scholarship devoted to the interrelationships among Jewish identity, Jewish biology, and cultural/political ideas about race and ethnicity. It is thus necessary to consider the critical literature on genetics and race more broadly in addition to texts specifically concerned with Jewish genetics and to approach the topic of Jewish genetics from an interdisciplinary and historical point of view.
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The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011
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Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, 2013
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Other Writing by Noah Tamarkin
The Conversation, 2024
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Announcements by Noah Tamarkin
We would like to invite you to our upcoming ir/relevance of race seminar on Thursday June 22. We ... more We would like to invite you to our upcoming ir/relevance of race seminar on Thursday June 22. We are very happy to welcome Noah Temarkin who will give a lecture titled:
Race, Belonging, and Knowledge Production After DNA
Date: Thursday, June 22
Time: 15:30-17:00
Place: Room B2.08, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, Amsterdam. See maps https://goo.gl/maps/by5mi
Abstract
This paper asks: how do participants in genetic ancestry research remake the meaning of DNA when they repurpose their data to speak less to researcher’s questions and more to their own? It examines how Lemba South Africans used both the fact of their participation in genetic studies that imagined them as "black Jews" and the studies' published results as evidence in their claims on the South African state. It argues that geneticists’ research intentions and interpretations of data are only the beginning of the meaning of genetic ancestry. It considers former research subjects as primary producers of genetic knowledge through their interpretations of their own genetic data, and it develops the concept “genetic afterlives” to theorize this knowledge production. By tracing how Lemba people invoked DNA to mediate their relationship to Jewish diaspora and African indigeneity, this paper suggests that these genetic afterlives can spark a rethinking of what constitutes genetic knowledge, who produces it, and for what reasons.
About the lecturer
Noah Tamarkin is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University and a research associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. He received his PhD in Anthropology with a parenthetical notation in Feminist Studies from University of California Santa Cruz in 2011. He was the inaugural predoctoral fellow in African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College and has also held a postdoctoral fellowship at University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum. His book manuscript in progress, Genetic Afterlives: Evidencing Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa, examines the politics of race, religion, and recognition among Lemba South Africans leading up to and in the aftermath of their participation in genetic tests that aimed to demonstrate their links to Jews. His new research, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Ohio State University’s Criminal Justice Research Center, examines the introduction and implementation of legislation to expand South Africa’s national criminal DNA database. This project considers the social, cultural, and political implications of genomics as it emerges as a global technology of governance and as a form of postcolonial development. His articles include “Religion as Race, Recognition as Democracy: Lemba ‘Black Jews’ In South Africa,” published in 2011 in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and “Genetic Diaspora: Producing Knowledge of Genes and Jews in Rural South Africa,” published in 2014 in Cultural Anthropology, reprinted in Déjá Lu in 2016, and recipient of the 2015 American Anthropological Association General Anthropology Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship. His research has also appeared in The Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies and Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies and is forthcoming in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.
About the seminar series
In this seminar series the relevance and irrelevance of race is being discussed as an object and concept of research in order to explore ways to talk about race without naturalizing differences. The series goes beyond a standard definition of race, one that is allegedly relevant everywhere, and situates race in specific practices of research. In addition the series gives room to the various different versions of race that can be found in the European context and explores when and how populations, religions, and cultures become naturalized and racialized. Scholars from different (inter)disciplinary fields (such as genetics, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, history, political sciences, science and technology studies) are invited to address the issue of race through a paper presentation. The seminar is held every six weeks at the University of Amsterdam. Webpage Seminar Series: http://bit.ly/VKg6tt
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Science and Innovation Studies in South Africa by Noah Tamarkin
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2017
A selection of contributions curated and introduced by Kristina Lyons with Juno Salazar Parreñas... more A selection of contributions curated and introduced by Kristina Lyons with Juno Salazar Parreñas and Noah Tamarin, providing critical perspectives on decolonization, decoloniality and science studies.
“Engagements with Decolonization and Decoloniality in and at the Interfaces of STS” includes contributions by the following scholars.
Lesley Green on “Thinking Decoloniality with Perlemoen”
Kristina Marie Lyons on “On the Situated Politics of Analytic Symmetry”
Tania Pérez-Bustos on “A Word of Caution toward Homogenous Appropriations of Decolonial Thinking In STS”
Juno Salazar Parreñas on “Orangutan Rehabilitation as an Experimental Project of Decolonization”
Banu Subramaniam on “Recolonizing India: Troubling the Anticolonial, Decolonial, Postcolonial”
Noah Tamarin on “Genetic Ancestry and Decolonizing Possibilities”
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Books by Noah Tamarkin
Papers by Noah Tamarkin
Worlds and Futures, edited by Silvia Posocco and EJ Gonzalez-Polledo. This book sets out to define and consolidate the field of bioinformation studies in its transnational and global dimensions, drawing on debates in science and technology studies, anthropology and sociology. It provides situated analyses of bioinformation journeys across domains and spheres of interpretation. As unprecedented amounts of data relating to biological processes and lives are collected, aggregated, traded and exchanged, infrastructural systems and machine learners produce real consequences as they turn indeterminate data into actionable decisions for states, companies, scientific researchers and consumers. Bioinformation accrues multiple values as it transverses multiple registers and domains, and as it is transformed from bodies to becoming a subject of analysis tied to particular social relations, promises, desires and futures. The volume harnesses the anthropological sensibility for situated, fine-grained, ethnographically grounded analysis to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue on the conceptual, political, social and ethical dimensions posed by bioinformation. EJ Gonzalez-Polledo teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. They are the author of Transitioning: Matter, Gender, Thought, and are currently developing research on global open biology movements and global histories of bioinformation.
Other Writing by Noah Tamarkin
Announcements by Noah Tamarkin
Race, Belonging, and Knowledge Production After DNA
Date: Thursday, June 22
Time: 15:30-17:00
Place: Room B2.08, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, Amsterdam. See maps https://goo.gl/maps/by5mi
Abstract
This paper asks: how do participants in genetic ancestry research remake the meaning of DNA when they repurpose their data to speak less to researcher’s questions and more to their own? It examines how Lemba South Africans used both the fact of their participation in genetic studies that imagined them as "black Jews" and the studies' published results as evidence in their claims on the South African state. It argues that geneticists’ research intentions and interpretations of data are only the beginning of the meaning of genetic ancestry. It considers former research subjects as primary producers of genetic knowledge through their interpretations of their own genetic data, and it develops the concept “genetic afterlives” to theorize this knowledge production. By tracing how Lemba people invoked DNA to mediate their relationship to Jewish diaspora and African indigeneity, this paper suggests that these genetic afterlives can spark a rethinking of what constitutes genetic knowledge, who produces it, and for what reasons.
About the lecturer
Noah Tamarkin is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University and a research associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. He received his PhD in Anthropology with a parenthetical notation in Feminist Studies from University of California Santa Cruz in 2011. He was the inaugural predoctoral fellow in African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College and has also held a postdoctoral fellowship at University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum. His book manuscript in progress, Genetic Afterlives: Evidencing Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa, examines the politics of race, religion, and recognition among Lemba South Africans leading up to and in the aftermath of their participation in genetic tests that aimed to demonstrate their links to Jews. His new research, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Ohio State University’s Criminal Justice Research Center, examines the introduction and implementation of legislation to expand South Africa’s national criminal DNA database. This project considers the social, cultural, and political implications of genomics as it emerges as a global technology of governance and as a form of postcolonial development. His articles include “Religion as Race, Recognition as Democracy: Lemba ‘Black Jews’ In South Africa,” published in 2011 in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and “Genetic Diaspora: Producing Knowledge of Genes and Jews in Rural South Africa,” published in 2014 in Cultural Anthropology, reprinted in Déjá Lu in 2016, and recipient of the 2015 American Anthropological Association General Anthropology Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship. His research has also appeared in The Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies and Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies and is forthcoming in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.
About the seminar series
In this seminar series the relevance and irrelevance of race is being discussed as an object and concept of research in order to explore ways to talk about race without naturalizing differences. The series goes beyond a standard definition of race, one that is allegedly relevant everywhere, and situates race in specific practices of research. In addition the series gives room to the various different versions of race that can be found in the European context and explores when and how populations, religions, and cultures become naturalized and racialized. Scholars from different (inter)disciplinary fields (such as genetics, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, history, political sciences, science and technology studies) are invited to address the issue of race through a paper presentation. The seminar is held every six weeks at the University of Amsterdam. Webpage Seminar Series: http://bit.ly/VKg6tt
Science and Innovation Studies in South Africa by Noah Tamarkin
“Engagements with Decolonization and Decoloniality in and at the Interfaces of STS” includes contributions by the following scholars.
Lesley Green on “Thinking Decoloniality with Perlemoen”
Kristina Marie Lyons on “On the Situated Politics of Analytic Symmetry”
Tania Pérez-Bustos on “A Word of Caution toward Homogenous Appropriations of Decolonial Thinking In STS”
Juno Salazar Parreñas on “Orangutan Rehabilitation as an Experimental Project of Decolonization”
Banu Subramaniam on “Recolonizing India: Troubling the Anticolonial, Decolonial, Postcolonial”
Noah Tamarin on “Genetic Ancestry and Decolonizing Possibilities”
Worlds and Futures, edited by Silvia Posocco and EJ Gonzalez-Polledo. This book sets out to define and consolidate the field of bioinformation studies in its transnational and global dimensions, drawing on debates in science and technology studies, anthropology and sociology. It provides situated analyses of bioinformation journeys across domains and spheres of interpretation. As unprecedented amounts of data relating to biological processes and lives are collected, aggregated, traded and exchanged, infrastructural systems and machine learners produce real consequences as they turn indeterminate data into actionable decisions for states, companies, scientific researchers and consumers. Bioinformation accrues multiple values as it transverses multiple registers and domains, and as it is transformed from bodies to becoming a subject of analysis tied to particular social relations, promises, desires and futures. The volume harnesses the anthropological sensibility for situated, fine-grained, ethnographically grounded analysis to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue on the conceptual, political, social and ethical dimensions posed by bioinformation. EJ Gonzalez-Polledo teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. They are the author of Transitioning: Matter, Gender, Thought, and are currently developing research on global open biology movements and global histories of bioinformation.
Race, Belonging, and Knowledge Production After DNA
Date: Thursday, June 22
Time: 15:30-17:00
Place: Room B2.08, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, Amsterdam. See maps https://goo.gl/maps/by5mi
Abstract
This paper asks: how do participants in genetic ancestry research remake the meaning of DNA when they repurpose their data to speak less to researcher’s questions and more to their own? It examines how Lemba South Africans used both the fact of their participation in genetic studies that imagined them as "black Jews" and the studies' published results as evidence in their claims on the South African state. It argues that geneticists’ research intentions and interpretations of data are only the beginning of the meaning of genetic ancestry. It considers former research subjects as primary producers of genetic knowledge through their interpretations of their own genetic data, and it develops the concept “genetic afterlives” to theorize this knowledge production. By tracing how Lemba people invoked DNA to mediate their relationship to Jewish diaspora and African indigeneity, this paper suggests that these genetic afterlives can spark a rethinking of what constitutes genetic knowledge, who produces it, and for what reasons.
About the lecturer
Noah Tamarkin is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University and a research associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. He received his PhD in Anthropology with a parenthetical notation in Feminist Studies from University of California Santa Cruz in 2011. He was the inaugural predoctoral fellow in African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College and has also held a postdoctoral fellowship at University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum. His book manuscript in progress, Genetic Afterlives: Evidencing Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa, examines the politics of race, religion, and recognition among Lemba South Africans leading up to and in the aftermath of their participation in genetic tests that aimed to demonstrate their links to Jews. His new research, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Ohio State University’s Criminal Justice Research Center, examines the introduction and implementation of legislation to expand South Africa’s national criminal DNA database. This project considers the social, cultural, and political implications of genomics as it emerges as a global technology of governance and as a form of postcolonial development. His articles include “Religion as Race, Recognition as Democracy: Lemba ‘Black Jews’ In South Africa,” published in 2011 in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and “Genetic Diaspora: Producing Knowledge of Genes and Jews in Rural South Africa,” published in 2014 in Cultural Anthropology, reprinted in Déjá Lu in 2016, and recipient of the 2015 American Anthropological Association General Anthropology Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship. His research has also appeared in The Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies and Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies and is forthcoming in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.
About the seminar series
In this seminar series the relevance and irrelevance of race is being discussed as an object and concept of research in order to explore ways to talk about race without naturalizing differences. The series goes beyond a standard definition of race, one that is allegedly relevant everywhere, and situates race in specific practices of research. In addition the series gives room to the various different versions of race that can be found in the European context and explores when and how populations, religions, and cultures become naturalized and racialized. Scholars from different (inter)disciplinary fields (such as genetics, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, history, political sciences, science and technology studies) are invited to address the issue of race through a paper presentation. The seminar is held every six weeks at the University of Amsterdam. Webpage Seminar Series: http://bit.ly/VKg6tt
“Engagements with Decolonization and Decoloniality in and at the Interfaces of STS” includes contributions by the following scholars.
Lesley Green on “Thinking Decoloniality with Perlemoen”
Kristina Marie Lyons on “On the Situated Politics of Analytic Symmetry”
Tania Pérez-Bustos on “A Word of Caution toward Homogenous Appropriations of Decolonial Thinking In STS”
Juno Salazar Parreñas on “Orangutan Rehabilitation as an Experimental Project of Decolonization”
Banu Subramaniam on “Recolonizing India: Troubling the Anticolonial, Decolonial, Postcolonial”
Noah Tamarin on “Genetic Ancestry and Decolonizing Possibilities”