Tabula Raza - (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century) by Duana Fullwiley (Paperback)

About the Book

"Duana Fullwiley has penned an intimate chronicle of laboratory life in the genomic age. She presents many of the influential scientists at the forefront of genetics who have redefined how we practice medicine and law and understand ancestry in an era of big data and waning privacy. Exceedingly relatable and human, the scientists in these pages often struggle for visibility, teeter on the tightrope of inclusion, and work tirelessly to imprint the future. As they actively imagine a more equal and just world, they often find themselves ensnared in reproducing timeworn conceits of race and racism that can seed the same health disparities they hope to resolve. Nothing dynamic can live for long as a blank slate, an innocent tabula rasa. But how the blank slate of the once-raceless human genome became one of racial differences, in various forms of what Fullwiley calls the tabula raza, has a very specific and familiar history-one that has cycled through the ages in unexpected ways"--

Book Synopsis

Duana Fullwiley has penned an intimate chronicle of laboratory life in the genomic age. She presents many of the influential scientists at the forefront of genetics who have redefined how we practice medicine and law and understand ancestry in an era of big data and waning privacy. Exceedingly relatable and human, the scientists in these pages often struggle for visibility, teeter on the tightrope of inclusion, and work tirelessly to imprint the future. As they actively imagine a more equal and just world, they often find themselves ensnared in reproducing timeworn conceits of race and racism that can seed the same health disparities they hope to resolve.

Nothing dynamic can live for long as a blank slate, an innocent tabula rasa. But how the blank slate of the once-raceless human genome became one of racial differences, in various forms of what Fullwiley calls the tabula raza, has a very specific and familiar history--one that has cycled through the ages in unexpected ways.

From the Back Cover

"Tabula Raza is an engaging and evocative ethnographic narrative interlacing genomics research, racism and race, peoples and practitioners, ideas and ideologies about ancestry, and a range of actual and assumed health-genome relations. Duana Fullwiley deftly immerses the reader in the experiential details of genetic analyses, develops substantive scholarly arguments about the topic, and connects the reader--personally and viscerally--to the cast of collaborators who populate the text."--Agustín Fuentes, author of The Creative Spark

"Set in the shadow of what Hortense Spillers called an 'American grammar' of race, Fullwiley brilliantly and bravely probes the racial paradoxes that scientists of diverse backgrounds find themselves trapped within as they claim to be able to genetically trace African, Indigenous, and other lineaments of American ancestry in order to undo the structures of American racism. This is a must-read not only for those interested in the new genetic sciences but for all who are trying to understand the eternal return of the tabula raza that drives differential racial outcomes in medicine and racial bias in policing."--Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of Geontologies

"In the beginning there was delight at the universally shared potential of the human genome. Then came the human beings who applied meaning and money to the landscape of our common inheritance. Tabula Raza offers a brilliant history of how lab leaders spoke a haze of nearly indelible social expectations into being. In translating the chemistry of wordless polynucleotide chains, these mortal architects of the genomic landscape used habits of raced language and gendered hierarchy to rationalize familiar but insidious processes of knowledge production."--Patricia J. Williams, author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights

Review Quotes

"Tabula Raza invites reflection on the multifarious and sometimes troubling uses to which scholarship can be put."-- "ARLViews"

"Fullwiley's examination is expansive in scope as it maintains the level of detail necessary to draw connections from cells to cultures, from haplotypes to history, and from DNA to disparate impacts observed in history and society. This text is stunning in its range as it assesses both the causes and consequences, past and present, of racialized knowledge construction in the genomic sciences. . . . What Fullwiley has provided for us is certainly a landmark contribution to the social studies of science, medical anthropology, and to the public understanding of the sociopolitical, racialized context of genetic scientific production."-- "Journal of Behavioral Sciences"

About the Author

Duana Fullwiley is an anthropologist of science and medicine at Stanford University. She is the author of the award-winning book The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa.