Race and Sameness
Given the troubled history of genetics in the slipstream of the Human Genome Project and the key role that genetics and genomics have since come to play in science and society, a flourishing scholarship has emerged on race and genomics.24 For good reasons, this ever-growing scholarship has focused on questions of difference, how differences are produced in scientific practice, and how genetics might contribute to the production or essentialization of differences. Yet, although differences combined with biology should make us nervous and alert, this focus has also contributed to the assumption that while differences are produced, sameness is a given baseline. Indeed, the emphasis on difference suggests that in the context of race, differences are inherently political. As a consequence, this has led to the curious impression that similarities are apolitical. Due to our nervousness about difference (in relation to race and genomics), the production of sameness, resemblance and equivalence has received little attention in critical analyses. Inspired by the Neanderthal, I want to switch focus from difference to sameness and explore the versions of racialization this helps us to see.
The taken-for-granted nature of sameness in scholarship on race might in fact have deeper, more structural roots. In his seminal book The Invention of Humanity from 2017, historian and political scientist Siep Stuurman shows how modernity and the modern states of justice are based on the sameness of humans as the norm and their equality before the law as its consequence. Stuurman argues that there have historically been three crucial “modalities” that have helped to invent the thing called humanity. The first modality is the acknowledgement of a common humanness, that is, that humans belong to the same species. The second modality is related to the “anthropological turn,” through which cultural differences came to be understood as variation on a common theme, assuming a shared human culture. The third modality is a temporal regime that helped render human civilization as an evolutionary development, in the way that even if some peoples are not there yet—not yet modern—they are assumed to undergo similar development and eventually arrive in modern times.25
Although the three modalities that have helped to establish the paradigm of humanity have been widely shared by different civilizations across the globe, so Stuurman argues, the coupling of equality and sameness became pivotal in the racial order of Europe during the Enlightenment. According to that dictum, to become equal is to become like those who are already equal, that is, the European whites. Enlightenment thus became the obligatory point of passage for becoming equal.
The crux of Stuurman’s point is that sameness has become a normative baseline in the modern equality paradigm. His argument makes clear that becoming equal requires work and entails an ideological take on human relations. But as sameness has become the norm, the process through which this sameness is created has moved to the background and become largely obscured. By contrast, the ways in which difference and deviance are produced has typically attracted attention, alarm, or dismay.
Rather than taking sameness for granted, I focus on how sameness comes about, what it is made to be, and how it effects specific racializations. I demonstrate how different versions of sameness bring about different versions of race.
Time and Temporality
As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, race is entwined with notions of time and temporality. Time and temporality are sources of conflict and have been identified as modes of imperial governance.26 Given the pivotal role granted to the dating of, let’s say, stones, bones, and genes, the Neanderthal provides us with a good case for studying race in relation to time. But rather than taking time as a given natural phenomenon, I want to attend to how time is made and how this affects the ways similarities and differences are enacted.
In her 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing uses the case of the matsutake mushroom to unravel the devastating relation between the capitalist trope of “development” and ecological degradation and the production of precarity.27 She urges us to move beyond progressive narratives toward multiple temporalities. By way of the matsutake, the mushroom that thrives on forests disturbed by human chemicals, she invites us to attend to modes of unintentional life and to develop the art of living on a damaged planet. Rather than looking ahead and imagining a future of progress or looking back in time toward moments supposed to be less advanced, Lowenhaupt Tsing suggests that we “look around.”28 Moreover, she suggests that we develop an art of noticing and a taste for curiosity. In this way Lowenhaupt Tsing offers an interesting suggestion to reconfigure our relations with other species, a way, perhaps, of moving us beyond a single story—a phenomenon that is unfortunately so prevalent in science.
To illuminate the question of race, time, and the Neandertal, I further draw on the work of the French philosopher and mathematician Michel Serres. Serres contrasts his approach of time to what he calls classical, or linear, time. Linear time is typically connected with modernity and progress, something that is central to scientific practice. Serres calls this the time of the line: a time that can be cumulative, continuous, or interrupted, yet always remains linear. In Serres’s universe, however, time is topological. It assumes different shapes, lines, folds, circularities, and is therefore heterogeneous. Serres states that time does not flow, but percolates, as through a sieve. As he puts it, “it passes and it doesn’t pass.”29 It flows in turbulent and more chaotic ways. This is because time is not a natural given. It is an effect of relations between entities.
To make this more tangible, consider the German artist Gunter Demnig’s art project Stolpersteine, “stumbling stones.” Made of brass and bearing the name, date of birth, date of deportation, and death date of individual victims of Nazi Germany, these memorials are to be found in many European cities. They are typically placed on the sidewalk, in front of the last residence of the named victim.
Clearly, these stones are made to commemorate the victims. They do so, however, by producing time. Imagine you are going about your everyday business, going to buy your groceries, but stumble over such a stone. You might look down, read the information, and immediately, the street, the house adjacent to the stone changes. At such a moment, time gets made. From an event more than eighty years ago, it becomes a “now.” From being a line, time gets crumpled and an event from the past gets “folded” in the here and now.30 Here, in front of your eyes, things happened, and your imagination enfolds. This is an example of the art of noticing, in Lowenhaupt Tsing’s words, and simultaneously an example of the multiplicity of time that Serres alerts us to. Time passes (linearity) and does not pass (crumpling and folding). Just like the history of the Holocaust is not left behind but materialized in postwar European cities, the history of race science in general has also sedimented in varieties of practice in science and society. For example, in laboratory practice, data and samples collected in colonial times (like biometric measurements and skulls) are still relevant, and not just in the field of physical anthropology.31 Although it would be wrong to state that current laboratory practice is racist, these collections, data, and methods might in specific situations (e.g., in combination with specific questions) help mobilize former practices and reintroduce and produce “race.”
Let us now return to the time of the Neanderthals in order to analyze time, race, and sameness.
Time and Race
In recent years, it seems that research on the Neanderthal has developed a certain art of noticing, to evoke Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Rather than reducing the Neanderthals in place and time, it seems that both the kind of questions that are being asked and the technologies available to examine the artifacts are producing a more complex picture than the popular one, in which the Neanderthal is cast as the simple and brutish other “us.”32 We are now learning that Neanderthals not only had large brains but were also capable of complex cognition, such as copying of technology; they had a language that allowed them to perform complex tasks; they produced art, music, jewelry, and personal ornamentation, indicating a symbolic life and taste for aesthetics; they produced interesting artistic configurations that raise questions about possibilities of rituals and in any case index the ability for complex social organization.33 Increasingly, the perspective in research and social representations emphasizes not so much the differences between modern humans and Neanderthals as the similarities. They are like us. “They were very similar in many respects,” as paleontologist Katerina Harvati explains in the documentary First Peoples.34
I am both intrigued and troubled by the emphasis on sameness. It makes me wonder about the normativity of sameness and how sameness comes about.35 In what follows, I attend to one specific example—a postcard—and analyze how proximities and distances are made. As I will show, this postcard is instructive of the ways knowledge about the Neanderthals is homed in, comfortably placed within dominant imaginations, to become part of a racial politics.36
Werde Teil der Menschenfamilie
“Werde Teil der Menschenfamilie” (Become part of the human family) is a nicely inclusive invitation to this postcard on the website of the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany (figure 5.4).
Figure 5.4
“Werde Teil der Menschenfamilie.” Image/postcard on the website of the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany.
What we are looking at is a picture representing modern and not-so-modern humans at the Neanderthal Museum. The postcard is in my view a “folded object.”37 It is a time machine, where a heterogeneity of time is ordered in counterintuitive ways, producing proximities and distances. But let us first appreciate the impression and have a closer look at the figures represented. The card displays a familiar scene, evocative of a bourgeois moment. People are gathered in what looks like a casual library. In comfortable Chesterfields one can ponder nature and enjoy its wonders, read a book, or sip from a glass. Importantly, we have a gathering of a diversity of people, a family—the human family, we are made to think. The atmosphere is relaxed. A child is playing chess with a young woman. An interestingly diverse man, not too dark and not too light-skinned, is put centerstage, staring at us in a more or less self-contained way, as if he is in the know about what our common future is. Various other figures are nicely displayed. The scene seems to capture a spare moment in the day, a moment of casually being together before moving on to the dining room to enjoy a nice meal.
This postcard, which I received from friends who visited the museum, has been hanging in my office for three years. I have been stared at by these figures and I have been staring back at them. My eyes have been drawn between the center and the flanking regions, between the idealized diversity man-of-the-future in the center, Mr. 4% to the left, and the Turkana boy from Kenya and a stone-age man from Jebal Irhoud in Morocco on the right.38 Moving my eyes from left to right and back again, I have not been able to overlook a racial-typological impression, as if we see evolution in action from the right to the left, arriving at the CEO-like Mr. 4%.
Let us consider the different figures. We see a collection of modern humans, consisting of four women, two men, and a young boy. We have three representatives of Neanderthals: there is Mr. 4%, a young Neanderthal girl called Kina, and a Neanderthal man in the center (who could easily pass for a traditional shepherd) called Mr. N. But we also have a version of Lucy (Australopithecus) down left, as well as the figures mentioned above to the upper right: the Homo erectus Turkana boy, and the oldest Homo sapiens sapiens, the Stone Age man from Jebal Irhoud. The image thus condenses a time span from 3.2 million years ago (Lucy) to our own time. Yet all figures seem to be present in the now. The folding of evolutionary time is here produced by the very realistic rendering of these ancient hominids. To be sure, if they would have been represented as skeletons, this radical folding of time would not have been as effective, and a distance would have been produced between us and them.
But the picture does more, if we would consider that “things could have been otherwise.”39 Let us first consider Lucy and the Turkana boy by comparing and contrasting the reconstruction of them here with the ones at the Musée National de Préhistoire in Les Eyzies.
Figure 5.5
Lucy as depicted at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann (left) and at the Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies (right).
There is visibly something going on here. Although the reconstructions of Lucy and the Turkana boy are based on the same bones/artifacts, they differ in an obvious way. To be sure, the forensic artists who produce such reconstructions have to work with the material that they have. And such reconstructions are artistic expressions of sorts. But they are still based on the same models of the bones/artifacts found and the same state of knowledge about early hominids. The reconstructions at both the Neanderthal Museum and the Musée National de Préhistoire in Les Eyzies depict Lucy and the Turkana boy as more or less naked, yet the differences between the reconstructions are stark. Whereas the Neanderthal Museum seems to emphasize their wildness and difference, the Museum of Prehistory seems to invite the viewer to consider both the similarities and differences between modern humans and the depicted figures. At the Neanderthal Museum, Lucy is rendered an apelike figure and the otherness of the Turkana boy, a very dark-skinned bundle of muscles, cannot be overlooked. Moreover, both are placed outside in the “wilderness,” as if to underline their wildness. Juxtaposed with the coarse and vulgar depictions of the Neanderthal Museum, the matter-of-fact-ness of the representations in Les Eyzies is striking. In addition, both Lucy and Turkana Boy are depicted as if posing for a camera. A representation familiar, everyday, and modern in its gestures, yet it presents the “wrong” subjects. It thus mocks and dramatizes, just like a reversed minstrel figure, and so racializes the differences. Lucy and the Turkana Boy are not just wild, but also humanity’s other. Finally, and contributing to their racialization, is the sexualization of these depictions at the Neanderthal Museum. Lucy is displaying her body to the viewer. Similarly, the Turkana Boy is sexualized by his very pose, as if presenting his nakedness. By contrast, the Lucy at the Museum of Prehistory seems totally indifferent to the viewer; she is self-contained and not in need of our appreciation, whereas the Turkana Boy, whose private parts are covered, is standing in a highly commonplace way.
Figure 5.6
Turkana boy as depicted at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann (left) and at the Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies (right).
Comparing and contrasting the reconstructions at the Neanderthal Museum and the Museum of Prehistory help articulate their normativity, not only in terms of racial representation, where skin color is a strong signifier, but also in terms of gender. The sexualization of Lucy and the Turkana Boy at the Neanderthal Museum contributes to their further racialization and othering. This familiar mode of racialization through othering helps us see the politics of such reconstructions. As Paul Gilroy reminds us, however, this mode of seeing and recognizing difference is historically situated. “Seeing race,” Gilroy argues, takes a specifically trained human “sensorium” attuned to the recognition of racial types and kinds.40
In what follows, I analyze racialization not as an effect of difference through “otherness” but of sameness through “us-ness.” Returning to the family picture postcard at the Neanderthal Museum and considering time in relation to sameness, we can observe an interesting configuration that underscores the racial character of this depiction. In this scene, Lucy becomes almost a pet. Even as a pet, however she is drawn into the human family, domesticated and made part of the family. The same happens in the postcard to the Neanderthals, whose similarities with modern humans are underlined by their clothing and gestures, such as the human hand touching the Neanderthal man who has a stick.
However, this proximity stands in a stark contrast to the Turkana Boy and the Stone Age man of Mount Irhoun. They both seem to be set apart from the human family. Their nakedness does not fit the bourgeois ambiance. Their representations give way to typical visualizations of the black male body.41 In addition, the juxtaposition between their splendid nakedness and the erotic pose of the Turkana Boy spills over and sexualizes the body of the Stone Age man and makes him more naked than he actually is. So even though this man is in fact our closest ancestor, he oscillates between Homo erectus and our stereotypes about blackness, thus ending up outside the “human family” of the postcard. While Lucy and the Neanderthals are homed in to successfully become part of this family, our closest ancestor is pushed outside it and made part of a different collective.42
Through these relations of proximity and distance, time is reconfigured in novel ways, here crumbled, there stretched out, contributing to what is considered same or different. Both collectives—the family of “us-ness” as well as of “other-ness”—become racialized in this depiction. However, the specificities of the collectives matter, since their sameness differs radically, and so does the associated configuration of race. First, the version of sameness that is related to the other is fairly unspecific. It is a category in which people are lumped together, and one in which the phenotype and the body play crucial roles. These markers turn them into “phenotypic others,” a category that, based on bodily markers of difference, can assume anything that is not-us or can be radically reduced.43 By contrast, sameness as a version of us-ness is an open and generous category which makes space for individuality—as was the case with Mr. 4%—but also for family, as well as for belonging to a specific cultural place. Each member belongs to the family and the place but cannot be reduced to any of these. Thus, although this version of sameness is racialized, the members of this collective retain their individuality and with it the possibility of being “in time” instead of “out of time.”
Conclusion
Philosopher of science Joyce Havstad has coined the term “sensational science” to describe ancient DNA research. Sensational science is a “science which empirically speculates, to the public’s delight and entertainment, about scintillating topics such as when humans evolved, where we came from, and who else we were having sex with during our early hominin history.”44 Ancient DNA research is consequently, and as I have shown in this chapter, an affective field, one that invites a wide audience to project different kinds of aspirations, feelings, and vested ideas.45
In this text, I have attended to ancient DNA in the lab, but also outside of it, to analyze how it affects representations of the Neanderthal. A lot can be said—and has been said—about what Anna Källén and colleagues have addressed as the “aDNA revolution.” In their analysis, the story of this revolution comes with “a sense of direction and inevitability of the way forward.”46 It is this propensity that tends to contribute to the modernist single story in which diverse histories and experience are subsumed. On the pages above, I have examined how “the danger of a single story” of evolution, a story that comes with a specific rendering of time and temporality, feeds into knowledge produced in the field of aDNA. I have argued that the fact that Neanderthals have contributed parts of their DNA to modern humans through interbreeding has led to a novel racialization of the Neanderthal.
By now, we know that Neanderthal genes are shared not only in Europe and Asia, but also among African populations.47 Yet, the powerful and single story about European-Neanderthal lineage has remained dominant. Its effect is a whitewashing of the Neanderthal. This is a politics in which the Neanderthal genes become the ultimate markers of European-ness.48 In the analysis of the postcard (which is more than a postcard), “Become part of the human family,” we have zoomed in on who is made part of this human family and how. I have shown that it is helpful in this case not to analyze race through the common register of difference, but rather to zoom in on sameness.
Attending to the material details of racial politics and focusing on the way time gets made and how it produces proximities and distances, and thereby different collectives, I have shown how a racialized collective of “us-ness” gets produced. Crucially, sameness in relation to “us-ness” leaves ample space for differences within, space for individuality, while sameness based on “other-ness” reduces the collective of the other to one or a limited set of markers. Whereas modernist narratives, including those of science and of science museums, are firmly committed to a linear rendering of time, the case analyzed here shows a comingling of time. It demonstrates the importance of focusing on time and its politics in relation to race. And it underscores the significance of the whitewashing of the Neanderthal in current racial politics in Europe.
Notes
1. I would like to thank the organizers of the symposium “Code Narrative History: Critical Perspectives on Ancient DNA” in Stockholm, where a version of this chapter was delivered as a keynote address. I also thank the participants of this symposium for their comments and suggestions. I am grateful to the organizers, especially Daniel Strand, in their capacity as editors of this volume, for their feedback on various drafts of this chapter. The chapter has also benefitted from the feedback and suggestions by two anonymous reviewers. The analyses presented here are the result of collaborations with members of the RaceFaceID team, whom I thank for thinking together hard about this wild object called race. Finally, I thank the European Research Council for supporting my research through an ERC Consolidator Grant (FP7–617451-RaceFaceID-Race Matter: On the Absent Presence of Race in Forensic Identification).
2. Mr. 4% has, of course, received his name from the discovery that some contemporary human individuals have up to 4% Neanderthal DNA.
3. For a beautiful and important analysis of the racialization of the Neanderthal, the production of a racial type and a racial portrait, as depicted in the reconstructions of Egon von Eickstedt in Vienna, and of how these reconstructions in the 1920s shaped the popular imagination of race and its origins in prehistory, see Paul H. Lambers, Margit Berne, and Katrin Kremmler, “From Anatomy to Palaeo-Raciology: Two Neanderthal Reconstructions at the NHMW 1924/25,” Annalen des Naturhistorischen Museums in Wien: Serie A für Mineralogie und Petrographie, Geologie und Paläontologie, Anthropologie und Prähistorie 123 (April 2022): 33–64. For a discussion of the portrayal of the Neanderthal by Boule and Kupta, see Marianne Sommer, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Neanderthal as Image and ‘Distortion’ in Early 20th-Century French Science and Press,” Social Studies of Science 36, no. 2 (200: 207–2406).
4. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Ted Talk, July 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story#t-1796.
5. Here I am particularly referring to evolutionary theory and the ordering of species (and different kind of people) along the line of evolution.
6. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 244.
7. Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
8. I spent half a year at Pääbo’s lab as an anthropologist of science, where I conducted a laboratory ethnography focusing on human genetic diversity. See Amade M’charek, The Human Genome Diversity Project: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
