80. Christopher M. Stojanowski and William N. Duncan, “Engaging Bodies in the Public Imagination: Bioarchaeology as Social Science, and Humanities,” American Journal of Human Biology 27, no. 1 (2015): 52, 57.
81. Stojanowski and Duncan, “Engaging Bodies,” 57.
82. Stojanowski and Duncan, “Engaging Bodies,” 51.
83. “Supplementary material,” in Price et al., “Viking Warrior Women?” 21, https://static.cambridge.org/content/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:article:S0003598X18002582/resource/name/S0003598X18002582sup001.pdf.
84. Robb, “Towards a Critical Ötziography,” 112.
85. Melanie Piper, “Real Body, Fake Person: Recontextualizing Celebrity Bodies in Fandom and Film,” Transformative Works and Cultures 20 (2015), https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/664/542.
86. Andreas Gunnarsson, Unleashing Science Popularization: Studies on Science as Popular Culture (Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, 2012), 4.
87. For an overview of academic and popular responses to the “female Viking warrior,” see archaeologist Howard Williams’s blog Archaeodeath, https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com.
88. Hedenstierna-Jonson et al., “Female Viking Warrior,” 855. The authors state that “a female warrior of this importance has never been determined.”
89. Priscilla Wald, “Future Perfect: Grammar, Genes, and Geography,” New Literary History, 31, no. 4 (2000): 681.
90. Jane E. Buikstra and Katelyn L. Bolhofer, “Bioarchaeologists Speak Out: An Introduction,” in Bioarchaeologists Speak Out: Deep Time Perspectives on Contemporary Issues, ed. Jane E. Buikstra (Cham: Springer, 2019), 2.
91. In the second academic article, the researchers invoke “Occam’s razor” (also known as the principle of parsimony) as a rationale for rejecting other interpretations of the individual’s gender and social role, and for accentuating their own preferred interpretation as “the most obvious and logical conclusion.” See Price et al., “Viking Warrior Women?” 192.
92. Persio, “Gender Reveal.”
93. Hjalmar Stolpe, “Ett och annat om Björkö i Mälaren,” Ny Illustrerad Tidning, December 21, 1889.
94. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599; Sheila Jasanoff, “Technologies of Humility,” Nature 450, no. 7166 (2007): 33; Gero, “Honoring Ambiguity.”
7 Ancient DNA and the Politics of Ethnicity in Neo-Nationalist China
Magnus Fiskesjö
The imposition of conventional national, ethnic, or other labels as a way to classify human DNA data inevitably creates a dilemma for ancient DNA (aDNA) studies, for genetics generally, and for our understanding of history. Some scholars have discussed this problem, yet they often leave out the case of China entirely.1 Some have proposed solutions such as the use of geographical terms that do not correspond to—and therefore can avoid getting mixed up with—today’s political entities.2 In 2021, a group of scholars proposed a set of ethics rules for aDNA studies.3 However, they left out the issue of naming, perhaps not fully grasping the dangers involved, given that the manipulation of ethnicities in genetics is often heavily politicized, not least in authoritarian countries like China.
Frequently left out of these discussions around the labeling of populations in aDNA research is the fundamental point that while human biological differences and variations are real, it is we who splice the continuum of human difference and name entities as separate and distinct. This act of naming is a social act carried out in social context, and typically in a situation of power inequality.
While some form of classification for genetic data is necessary, the use of ethnonyms or similar names to categorize genetic clusters often creates the false impression of self-evident “natural” identities that seamlessly coincide with contemporary concepts, such as, for example, “China.”4 This problem is exacerbated today by the powerful trend toward embracing identities as the primary lens through which to see the world. The new nationalisms that grow out of this trend also influence researchers how to frame and narrate their research.
The repertoire of names used in aDNA research often derives from implicit frames of reference that draw on tradition, scholarly practice, and habit. But these names can also be explicitly mandated by authorities that monopolize the power to define social identities. This chapter focuses on contemporary China, where there is a state-mandated framing of identities, policed by government authorities and dictating the image of a “China” that has dominated its region since ancient times. This places heavy, inescapable constraints on how past and present human groups must be named and discussed. These constraints impact significantly on aDNA research, which like all science in China must conform to the nationalist ideas embraced by the current one-party state. These constraints are often not understood or acknowledged in Western accounts of aDNA research in China—such as the ones I cite here—which generally go along with them, and fail to recognize how they frame and constrain the research. My sample size of aDNA research on China is not large, but I believe that when considered in the context of today’s aggressive Chinese nationalism and how it affects our view of the past, these initial findings are suggestive.
Before I discuss China and the consequences of the new Chinese nationalism for archaeology and aDNA studies in this region, a few general observations should be made that are relevant to aDNA studies more broadly. One consequence of the act of naming is the implication that the named phenomena possess a coherence and stability. This can mask both their complexity, their change over time, and their process of formation. We end up assuming that all phenomena are fixed with a core essence, and we may even assume that only that which can be precisely measured, delineated, and identified is real at all.5
The Denisovans, first identified in Russia and recently confirmed as having lived in East and Southeast Asia, provide a powerful example of how the act of naming ancient people can mislead us badly and make us forget the process through which they are created. The Denisovans, hominids related to both Neanderthals and modern humans, were given their name after the Siberian site of their discovery, the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains. A few bones and teeth provided recoverable genetic material, which first enabled their identification and classification as a species separate from other relatives. The species was recently confirmed by aDNA from another skeletal fragment, as well as from soil samples from a cave on Chinese territory.6 Further discoveries of Denisovan-like DNA in present-day people in Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and elsewhere have suggested an underlying, yet unmapped, history of interaction with Homo sapiens comparable to our drawn-out interaction with the Neanderthals, who similarly “live on” inside us.7
Many scientists know that these discoveries mask a story of evolutionary change that is more complex and extensive than we are yet able to understand. From the moment the Denisovans were named and their story was told by science writers, however, they came to be understood in society at large as a single, coherent group of people, wandering from Central Asia all the way to Island Southeast Asia, an “elusive bunch” moving in to sleep with the natives.8 Scientists may be clear that we have limited knowledge, and know only that between Siberia, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea exchanges of genetic material occurred over many tens of thousands of years. However, an image emerges, not of complex patterns of change, but of groups of people packing their bags to move across the landscape.
This is an example of how modern-day concepts of people as ethnicities shape our understanding of the distant past, even though ethnicity as such may not even be salient or relevant for the times when the Denisovans lived. We can be sure, however, that they did not call themselves Denisovans—just as the ancient inhabitants of what is today China did not think of themselves as living in China, regardless of what today’s rulers of China would like us to think.
The Origins of China’s New “Genetic” Nationalism
China’s recent turn toward an aggressive new—and increasingly genetically defined—nationalism is the latest chapter in a long struggle over the identity of China the nation and the Chinese people after the fall of the last empire. To understand the place of aDNA in current Chinese nationalism, it is necessary to recap this history.
As a political entity, China can be traced back to the second millennium BCE, to the early Bronze Age kingdoms in what is today northern China that were based on agriculture, mining, and war. These kingdoms were overcome by the first large conquest empire in the third century BCE, which created a structure that has been resuscitated again and again over the last two millennia. This suggests a continuity that is partly due to the continuing survival of the written language of the Bronze Age and imperial classics, deployed even when “alien” or “barbarian” dynasties came in to take over and revive the empire.9
Until 1912, China was, in other words, not a nation but a conquest empire. It claimed to rule the world, “all under heaven.” The key tenets of imperial ideology were not about race or ethnicity. Instead, non-Chinese were regarded as inferior barbarians who would all eventually submit to Chinese rule.10 After Republican Chinese revolutionaries overthrew the last dynasty in 1911–1912, they grappled with how China could become a modern unified nation-state like Japan and the countries of Europe, which all claimed a majority ethnicity coinciding with the state: the nation-state.11 For many Chinese intellectuals, China now became a “race-nation,”12 in which the older imperial idea of innate civilizational superiority was merged with European-derived notions of a superior “race” in charge—the “Chinese race.”13 Some Chinese nationalist intellectuals (including the most famous Republican, Sun Yat-sen) advocated turning the empire into a pure, unified state without recognition for the diverse peoples that inhabited it.14 They also touted the Yellow Emperor, a late-nineteenth century invention, as an ancestor of the Han Chinese. The Han “group,” which today counts as the dominant ethnic group in China, was actually invented in its present form only in the late nineteenth century, as part of the nationalist drive that copied ideas about ethnicity and modern ethnopolitics from Japan and Europe. In the 1950s, the “Han Chinese” label was designed to comprise over 90 percent of the population, despite the huge internal differences—including linguistic ones.15 Most international geneticists and others don’t know this history, and habitually go along with the Chinese fiction that the Han Chinese is an ancient people existing in its present form since ancient times, and now claimed to be “the world’s largest ethnic group.”16
The Chinese communists promised in the 1930s that if they came to power, each of the peoples conquered by the past empires would be allowed to separate from China to form independent countries. This included Tibet, the Uyghurs in “Xinjiang” (China’s “New Frontier” in Central Asia, conquered in the eighteenth century) and other peoples. But when they got into power in 1949, the Communists reneged on the promise, instead introducing a Soviet-inspired model with nominal autonomy for “ethnic minorities” (shaoshu minzu). These groups were, in reality, subjected to Han Chinese rule and heavy-handed cultural assimilation, in obvious continuity with the empire, but now with a nationalist dimension.17
The new official “truth” was that the modern nation China had always existed its current, modern size.18 Moreover, the Communist regime insisted that despite the distinctive non-Chinese languages and cultures of the non-Han ethnic minorities, they too had always been part of a single, mysteriously united, Chinese ethnicity (Zhonghua minzu). In this “Chinese super-nation,” the Han were counted as the dominant faction, and all peoples present on today’s map of China were seen as having always been destined to merge into this entity, guided in this “development” by the innately superior Han.19
When this idea was fashioned from the 1950s onward, it could still only be vaguely justified in terms of genealogy, history, and archaeology. Genetics could not yet be used to prove such links or serve as a tool of Chinese statecraft, as it is today. Instead, so-called ethnohistorians stepped up to reread the Chinese classics in order to show how all the various peoples named there really corresponded to modern-day ethnicities (which find their meaning in contributing to the formation of China).20
When modern archaeology came to China in the early twentieth century, Chinese archaeologists continued the quest to reconfirm the classics and assemble a new revised story of an autochthonous Chinese civilization.21 But excavations yielded voluminous discoveries of previously unknown and nameless prehistoric people who had lived across the East Asian mainland during Neolithic times. At first, this presented a difficult challenge for the orthodox conception of China. Where had these peoples come from? However, by the mid-twentieth century, Chinese archaeologists synthesized a new national (pre)history according to which autochthonous Neolithic peoples across East Asia all merged into the ethnically Han Chinese nation.22 Preferably, the “Chinese” even formed a distinct branch of human evolution—an effort to avoid the idea that the Chinese, like everyone else, might be descendants of migrants from Africa.23
Even more important, however, is the glorification of the “rejuvenated” nation and the past empires, which now dominates official discourse in China.24 This stands in direct conflict with earlier communist ideas about inequality, exploitation, and class struggle. The solution has been to drop class struggle and focus on the glory of China.
Needless to say, the whole theory of an Ur-Chinese race-nation that expanded and swallowed up others because of its superior virtue, embodied by the emperors, is false and misleading. When the Chinese ethnohistorians and archaeologists interpreted the movement of named ethnic groups on their map as proof of the real migrations of peoples, they ignored the fact that the history they traced was not one of migrations, but mostly of the Chinese empires expanding by force and conquering others. What the empire actually did was to recycle its set of names for the barbarians of each cardinal direction and shift the labels to new, yet-to-be conquered peoples.25 This is one of the most striking examples anywhere of how human populations and the ethnic labels imposed on them are not the same thing—and this despite the long-standing Chinese obsession with the “rectification of names,” that is, uniting the name and the reality it supposedly refers to.26
Enter the New Genetics
The modern-era Chinese nationalist longing for national purity and unity was adopted by the Communist Party leaders in the 2010s.27 In 2017, the long-running project of assimilating the non-Chinese—inherited from the empire’s ideology of civilization—was aggressively accelerated with the forced assimilation of the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region, a wide-ranging campaign with atrocities that already meets the definition of genocide.28
This genocide, which today very much frames the current practice of genetics, archaeology, and other sciences in China, is carried out by the full machinery of the Chinese state, which combines and uses new technologies for a surveillance program unprecedented in history. This includes AI-driven face recognition, records of the iris, voice, gait, blood type and fingerprints, the massive collection of DNA from the entire population, as well as QR-coding homes and tracking phones.29 The collected information is being used to detain massive numbers of people in camps and forced-labor factories, while children are confiscated in the hundreds of thousands and cut off from their family and culture.30 Also, large numbers of Uyghur women have been sterilized by force.31
How is the genetic information used and how does it relate to the state’s orthodox version of Chinese identity? One obvious use is the immediate practical use of racial profiling of Uyghurs and other Central Asian people in order to identify and classify them, so they can be targeted with coercive and destructive measures.
The Chinese government has never explicitly stated precisely what other purposes the accumulation of the massive data-banks of genomic information will serve. Even so, the gathering of DNA is also increasingly done on people in the Han Chinese majority in a compulsory or semimandatory manner on a mass scale across China. The collecting of DNA now intentionally targets ordinary citizens’ patrilineal connections, traced over several generations, by harvesting male Y-chromosome genetic data, which is then incorporated into the world’s largest database of such information.32 While the ultimate purpose remains unclear, it may mirror the goals apparently pursued by the regime in the areas inhabited by ethnic minorities: to accurately delineate, catalog, and identify individuals over time, with a certain time depth, so as to be able to manipulate or eliminate undesirable units of the broader population.