AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
Negotiating Imagined Genetic Communities: Unity and
Diversity in Brazilian Science and Society
Michael Kent, Ricardo Ventura Santos, and Peter Wade
ABSTRACT In this article, we explore the ways in which genetic research reconfigures historically rooted debates
on race and national identity by analyzing the intense debates that have taken place in the past decade in Brazil
around the genetic profile of the nation’s population. Such debates have not only featured a significant variety of
interpretations by different geneticists but also involved the media, policy makers, and social movements. Here we
focus in particular on the ways in which genetic knowledge and the arguments it makes possible have reproduced,
contested, or transformed pre existing narratives about race and national identity in Brazil. A central underlying
tension in these debates is that between unity and diversity—between views that consider the Brazilian population
as a single unit that cannot be differentiated except at the individual level and alternative interpretations that
emphasize the multiplicity of its populations in terms of race, region, and genetic ancestry. [genetics, imagined
communities, Brazil, identity politics]
RESUMEN
En este artı́culo, exploramos las formas en que la investigación genética reconfigura los debates
históricamente arraigados sobre la raza y la identidad nacional, mediante el análisis de los intensos debates que
han tenido lugar en la última década en Brasil alrededor del perfil genético de la población del paı́s. Estos debates
no sólo han contado con la importante variedad de diferentes interpretaciones por los genetistas, sino también han
involucrado los medios de comunicación, los polı́ticos y los movimientos sociales. Aquı́ nos centramos en particular
sobre las formas en que el conocimiento genético, y los argumentos que él facilita, han reproducido, impugnado,
o transformado narrativas preexistentes acerca de la raza y la identidad nacional en Brasil. La tensión central que
subyace en estos debates es la entre la unidad y la diversidad—entre abordajes que consideran la población brasileña
como una sola unidad que no puede ser diferenciada, excepto al nivel individual, y las interpretaciones alternas que
hacen hincapié en la multiplicidad de sus poblaciones en términos de raza, región, y ascendencia genética. [genética,
comunidades imaginadas, Brasil, polı́ticas de la identidad]
I
n 2007, BBC Brazil arranged for genetic ancestry tests
for nine black celebrities that participated in its “AfroBrazilian roots” project, with the objective of raising awareness among the Brazilian population of its partial African
origins. The results, however, caused a major controversy.
Attention focused on sambista Neguinho da Beija-Flor, who
was revealed to have a predominant European ancestry of
67.1 percent.1 One of the most visible symbols of the Brazilian black community, Neguinho emphatically dismissed the
results: “Me, European? A black guy like me! I’m going by
skin color. If I say that I’m 67 percent European, people will
think I’m messing around with them.”2
C 2014 The Authors. American Anthropologist
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 116, No. 4, pp. 736–748, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12142
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and
distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Kent et al. • Negotiating Imagined Genetic Communities
According to geneticist Sérgio Pena, who led the testing,
the results confirmed what his previous research on the genetic ancestry of the Brazilian population had revealed: that
this population is so mixed that there is only a weak correlation between genetic ancestry and skin color and that there
exists no biological basis for the idea of race. Neguinho’s
majority European ancestry received widespread media attention and was used in arguments against affirmative action
policies aimed at the black segment of the population, as scientific evidence of the difficulties of using racial categories
in an inherently mixed—or mestiço—country. Members of
Brazil’s black social movement, however, responded by dismissing the relevance of genetics on the grounds that in Brazil
racial identity and discrimination are based on phenotypic
appearance rather than ancestry. Thus, genetic data became
incorporated into political disputes about the pertinence of
multicultural policies, as well as into wider debates about
the nature of the Brazilian nation and its people (Kent n.d.;
Santos and Maio 2004). Historically, such debates have revolved around the tension between unity and diversity,
pitching views that consider the Brazilian population as a
single, thoroughly mixed entity that cannot be differentiated, except at the individual level, against alternative
interpretations that emphasize the multiplicity of its populations in terms of race, ethnicity, and region (Fry 2005;
Guimarães 1999; Oliven 1996; Telles 2004).
Similar tensions have resurfaced in genetic research
and its appropriation beyond the scientific field. A variety of “imagined genetic communities” (Simpson 2000) have
emerged from research conducted by geneticists at different
laboratories in Brazil, as well as from engagements with their
research by the mass media, social scientists, and political
actors. Alternative approaches have remitted Brazilians to a
unified national identity of mestiços, enabled regional differentiations and race-based identifications, and established
symbolic transnational connections with Africa and Europe.
BRAZIL IN CONTEXT
The Brazilian experience with genetic ancestry research is
located in the context of global genomic science, which has
been mapping the genetic diversity of humans worldwide,
with various aims in view. First is the search for genetic
variants related to diseases or to medically significant traits
such as drug metabolization. Relevant variants may be more
frequent among some populations, defined in biogeographical terms (see below). Individuals and groups may want to
know if their genetic ancestry contains elements from that
population. Geneticists seek to link particular biogeographical ancestries to particular genetic variant traits associated
with disorders (Burchard et al. 2005). Also, when comparing a sample of people with a disorder to a normal control
sample in order to locate disease-related genetic variants,
geneticists ensure that the biogeographical ancestry of both
samples is similar to prevent false positive associations due to
“population stratification”—differences between cases and
controls resulting from structural variations in genetic an-
737
cestry rather than from an association with the disorder
(Choudhry et al. 2006). The study of evolutionary and demographic history is a second field in which genetic ancestry is important: particular genetic markers, inherited over
time, can give clues about the movements and interactions
of populations over long and prehistoric periods.3 Third,
ancestry science has spawned “recreational genomics,” usually in the form of direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry tests,
which promise to give buyers information about their personal genetic heritage and origins (Bolnick et al. 2007).4
These genomic techniques involve the concept of biogeographical population: a set of people thought to have
evolved a genetic profile in a given location and transmitted
this to their descendants. A key question is how to define
such populations—given that humans share over 99 percent of their DNA—and whether these populations relate
to modes of social classification, such as ethnic group, race,
nation, region, community, and so forth. Literature in social science has focused in particular on the impact that
genomic science has on the concept of race, perhaps lending
it—whether purposely or inadvertently—a genetic basis
or perhaps transforming or undermining it (Koenig et al.
2008; Pálsson 2007). Genomics does not reproduce late19th-century notions of “racial types” as fixed biosocial units,
radically different and unequal. Genomics talks in terms of
allelic frequencies and clinal distributions (Abu El-Haj 2012;
Rose 2007). However, these are still said by some geneticists to differentiate between “racial or ethnic groups,” with
“biologic implications” (Burchard et al. 2003:1171).
This explicit geneticization of race aside, many social scientists argue that genomic science in the United States effectively lends some kind of genetic meaning to race. Even if the
terminology of biocontinental populations is used (Africans,
Europeans, Amerindians, etc.) or reference is made to specific sample populations (e.g., Yoruba from Ibadan) that are
not meant to be generalized (e.g., to “Africans”), the effect can be to inadvertently biologize categories that look
familiar as racial ones (Bliss 2009, 2012; Fujimura and
Rajagopalan 2011; Fullwiley 2007, 2008; Reardon 2005).
Geneticists themselves are aware of this problem
(Bertoni 2011; International HapMap Consortium 2003).
Other studies suggest that “while the geneticization of ‘race’
and ethnicity may be the basic logic of genetic genealogy
testing,” when lay people in the United States and United
Kingdom engage with such testing, this logic is “not necessarily [the] inexorable outcome” (Nelson 2008:761) because
people combine genetic and cultural facts about their pasts
to create meaningful stories.
However, race is not the only mode of imagined community that genomics can influence. In other cases, genomics
suggests ways of imagining nation, although this may well
entail racialized meanings, given the historical links between
race and nation. One genetic ancestry project created the
image of a British nation that highlighted the mixture resulting from ancient migrations (e.g., of Vikings and AngloSaxons) but also marginalized recent migrations from the
738
American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 4 • December 2014
postcolonies, thus effectively depicting the nation as white
(Nash 2013). In contrast, in Uruguay, genetic data showing
the presence of African and Amerindian ancestry destabilized dominant ideas about the nation as white (Sans 2011).
In other cases, genetics may be used to fuel imagined communities at the level of the nation, as in Iceland (Pálsson and
Rabinow 1999), or at the level of the ethnic community in
relation to the nation-state (Kent 2013), with race hardly
playing a role.
In general, as Benedict Anderson (1991) has argued,
nations are imagined communities that draw on a variety of
repertoires such as a shared language, history and symbols,
religion, race, and fictive kinship ties. These same repertoires may also fuel alternative imaginations that compete
for people’s allegiance. Thus, imagined communities are
diverse, open to contestation, and constantly negotiated.
The Brazilian material contributes various ideas to these
debates. First, we argue that genomics creates a multiplicity of “imagined genetic communities” or nations, with race
playing a varied role. Rather than generating a single mode
of construing the nation and its racial aspects (or lack of
them), geneticists and those who engage with their data produce several different genetic images, with varied political
affordances. It is important to engage with the internal diversity of genomic ancestry research and avoid homogenizing
its effects. The way genomics is mediated through lay people’s engagement with it creates some heterogeneity, but
genomics itself also creates heterogeneous images of race
and nation.
Second, the variety of genetic images of Brazil is distinctive in the way that images of homogenous mixture and
heterogeneous mixture are generated. A good deal of the
literature on genomics and racial identity highlights how
genomics can lend a genetic meaning to specific racialized
identities and connections—for example, in the U.S. case,
people may search out African or Native American links
(Hamilton 2012); the Lemba in Africa focused on Jewish genetic heritage (Abu El-Haj 2012). In addition, in the United
States and United Kingdom, the politics of inclusion has institutionalized the recognition of ethnic and racial difference
in medical research (Epstein 2007; Smart et al. 2008). In
Brazil, we see a more varied picture, as genomic data underpin diverse representations of the nation, bringing race
into and out of focus. Brazil is imagined as various genetic
communities: as homogeneous and raceless; as a country differentiated by regions with very distinctive ancestral mixes;
as rather European; and as connected to Africa. Genomics
participates in long-standing debates about Brazil that have
involved not only ideological and cultural narratives but
also older modes of biological and physical anthropological
investigation into diversity.
These debates have been characterized by a tension between unity and diversity (Santos 2012; Santos et al. 2014).
In the 19th century, influenced by contemporary science,
the Brazilian population was conceptualized as consisting
of distinct and incommensurable racial groups, which were
hierarchically ordered, with the white race ranking highest. Mixture was considered a source of degeneration, and
governments promoted policies of “whitening” by stimulating mass immigration of Europeans: whiteness and modernity were seen as linked (Marx 1998; Schwarcz 1993;
Skidmore 1974).5 From the early 20th century, Brazilian
physical anthropologists distanced themselves from such deterministic racial hierarchies, which threatened the Brazilian national character. From the 1930s, especially through
the work of Gilberto Freyre (1946), Brazil’s race mixture was reinterpreted in positive terms, with the hybrid figure of the mestiço becoming central to the construction of a unified national identity, in which extensive mixture had led to a “racial democracy,” symbolized
by syncretic products such as samba (Vianna 1999). This
view has been challenged since the 1950s by social scientists and black movements, who have highlighted profound
racial inequalities that, for some, indicate a society differentiated into white and black segments (Guimarães 1999;
Hasenbalg 1979; Telles 2004). Shaped by the multiculturalist
reforms sweeping Latin America, this approach underwrote
the adoption, since the 1990s, of policies aimed at Brazil’s
black population, including racial quotas for public employment and university access, as well as differentiated health
policies. These policies have, in turn, been contested by
those who argue for universalist and race-blind social policies to address inequality (Fry 2005; Fry et al. 2007; Maio and
Santos 2005). Affirmative action policies are sometimes depicted as based on U.S.-style racial politics, seen as inappropriate to the Brazilian milieu.6 This brief account shows how
race has been backgrounded in relation to a predominant
mixture or foregrounded as important despite mixture.
The Brazilian material shows how genomic research can
suggest multiple imagined communities, with racialized difference figuring in varying ways, rather than simply being
either reinscribed or not. The various approaches all ultimately depend on the notion of separate, original, ancestral
populations of Africans, Europeans, and Amerindians—that
is, biocontinental populations that resemble familiar notions
of race. But in Brazil we see how genomic data, and appropriations of them, play on various possibilities of imagined communities of race, nation, region, and diaspora—possibilities
afforded by the image of mixedness, which always conjugates
similarity and difference in varied ways. Genomics provides
a specific language for thinking through these possibilities
and may allow specific modes of traction—as in the use of
genomic data to deny a “black identity” in Brazil—but it does
not simply reify race. Rather, it engages with the ambiguities
of race and the multiple modes of imagining community that
are characteristic of the Brazilian milieu. In the following
sections, we analyze in depth the different images of the
nation generated with genomic data.7
Kent et al. • Negotiating Imagined Genetic Communities
UNIFYING THE GENETIC NATION: HOMO
BRASILIS AND EQUALLY DIFFERENT
INDIVIDUALS
In April of 2000, amid the quincentennial celebrations of
the Portuguese’s arrival in Brazil, geneticist Sérgio Pena and
colleagues published their “Molecular Portrait of Brazil” in
the popular science magazine Ciência Hoje (Pena et al. 2000).8
Since then, Pena has produced further studies on the genetic
ancestry of Brazilians, and especially on the relative contributions of African, Amerindian, and European roots. He has
also worked in the areas of paternity testing, biomedicine,
pharmacogenomics, and indigenous populations, among
others. Drawing on an influential tradition of genetic research (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994; Lewontin 1972), he has
systematically argued that there exists no biological basis for
the idea of race. To Pena, this point is particularly salient
for the Brazilian population, which is so mixed that it acts
as an excellent exemplar of the impossibility of differentiating between racially defined groups at the genetic level.
From this body of research emerges an image of the Brazilian
population that is unified and mestiço, sometimes implicitly
so, as when Pena addresses questions of pharmacogenomics
and biomedicine (e.g., Suarez-Kurtz et al. 2007), and at
other times explicitly, as when his focus is on the genetic
ancestry of Brazilians (Pena et al. 2009; Pena et al. 2000;
Pena et al. 2011) or when he engages with issues of public
policy, such as affirmative action (Pena and Bortolini 2004)
and differentiated health policies aimed at Brazil’s black population (Pena 2005).
In the first phase of their research, Pena and colleagues
analyzed the genetic ancestry of self-identified white men
from different regions of Brazil. This study deconstructed
the relationship between whiteness and European ancestry in Brazil. National averages revealed that, while paternal lineages found in the Y-chromosome were almost
uniquely European (98 percent), maternal lineages found in
the mitochondrial DNA were evenly distributed: 33 percent
Amerindian, 28 percent African, and 39 percent European.9
Pena and colleagues emphasized this “surprisingly high”
Amerindian and African maternal contribution as evidence
of the mixed nature of white Brazilians (Pena et al. 2000).10
Drawing social implications from this research, they presented genetic knowledge as a potential antidote to racism:
It might be naı̈ve on our part, but if the many white Brazilians
that have Amerindian and African mitochondrial DNA became
aware of this, they would better value the exuberant genetic
diversity of our population, and, who knows, they might construct
a more just and harmonious society in the twenty-first century.
[Pena et al. 2000:25]
They deployed genetics as a means to imagine the kind
of “deep horizontal comradeship” that Anderson (1991:7)
defined as lying at the heart of national identity constructions. Locating such horizontal ties between white and other
Brazilians in their genetic constitution—which, according
to Pena (2008), offers more reliable knowledge than superficial appearances—gave these ties symbolically greater
739
depth. While such arguments merely suggested the existence
of a genetic community consisting of the entire nation, its
delineation soon became explicit with the coining of the
term Homo Brasilis, the title of Pena’s edited book on the
Brazilian population (Pena 2002).11
The next step in the construction of a national imagined genetic community was the definition of the Brazilian
population as a collective of 190 million undifferentiated individuals. Research published in 2003 was aimed at a more
general deracialization of the Brazilian population by analyzing the autosomal DNA—the recombinant part of the
genome, which is particularly suited to revealing levels of
admixture—of samples collected among individuals classified variously by researchers as black, intermediate, and
white or self-classified as branco (white). This study revealed
significant overlaps between the census categories: while
variation in African ancestry between individuals within
each category was considerable, such variation between categories was relatively small. The authors concluded that in
Brazil physical appearance has only a weak correlation—if
any at all—with genomic ancestry (Parra et al. 2003:177).
With such data, Pena has argued repeatedly that
the only way of dealing scientifically with the genetic variability
of Brazilians is individually, as singular and unique human beings
in their mosaic genomes and in their life histories. [Pena and
Birchal 2006:19]
For Pena, Brazilians should be classified, simultaneously, as
an undifferentiated mestiço population—the Homo Brasilis—
and as a collection of individuals that are “equally different”
(Pena 2009).
Since 2006, Pena’s research has also deconstructed
the association between black phenotypic appearance and
African ancestry, analyzing various Brazilian populations
with a new panel of 40 genetic markers that he designed for
calculating an individual’s relative proportions of African,
European, and Amerindian genetic ancestry. In academic
publications, Pena and coauthors have emphasized the admixed character of Brazil’s black population by highlighting the predominance of European ancestry (80%) among
individuals self-classified using the census category pardo
(brown), as well as the lower-than-expected proportions
of African ancestry (40–50%) among those categorized as
preto (black, also a census category) (Pena et al. 2009;
Pena et al. 2011). The Afro-Brazilian Roots project discussed in the introduction has been particularly important
in this respect.
Finally, Pena’s most recent research has focused on
deconstructing regional differentiation within Brazil. Using samples from four macroregions (North, Northeast,
Southeast, and South), Pena and colleagues concluded that
“the genomic ancestry of individuals from different geographical regions of Brazil is more uniform than expected”
(Pena et al. 2011:1). This effacement of regional differences is important for the construction of a national and
unified genetic community because both in social identity
740
American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 4 • December 2014
constructions in Brazil and in other genetic research (see below), the idea of region figures as one of the most important
factors of internal differentiation.12
Pena’s research has attracted considerable attention
beyond the scientific field. He has played an active role
in the public dissemination of his research by publishing in social science journals (Pena 2005; Pena and
Bortolini 2004) and popular scientific magazines and Internet fora (Pena et al. 2000), as well as by writing a number
of short books in nonacademic language (Pena 2008, 2009)
and making frequent media appearances.13 In such fora, he
has denounced the notion of race, comparing it to earlier
beliefs in witchcraft and taking on the mission to “un-invent”
race. This has led Pena to become involved in political debates about race-based public policies aimed at Brazil’s black
population, mostly in the areas of health and education. He
gained considerable public visibility through his participation in the debate on racial quotas. In 2010, Pena offered an
expert opinion during the public hearings of the Supreme
Court on the constitutionality of racial quotas for university
access, contributing to arguments against such policies by
reaffirming his views on the inexistence of race. According
to him, science
plays an important role in instructing the social sphere by showing “what is not” . . . The scientific fact of the inexistence of
“races” must be assimilated by society . . . this consciousness
meets the utopian wish of a non-racialist, “colourblind” society,
where the singularity of the individual is valued and celebrated.
[Pena and Birchal 2006:13, 20]
Pena has articulated genetic and social interpretations of the
Brazilian population, affirming the relevance of genetic data
for the construction of the Brazilian imagined community.
The heated political debate on affirmative action
provided the main vehicle for the dissemination of Pena’s
research beyond the scientific field. Genetic data have
been deployed in this debate as part of arguments that
question the pertinence of using racial categories for
differentiated public policies, claiming such categories have
no scientific foundation. The results of Pena’s research have
figured prominently in the antiquota manifesto launched
in 2008 (Daher et al. 2008) and the legal action presented
to the Supreme Court arguing that racial quotas are
unconstitutional (Kaufmann 2009:27–37), and they have
also been drawn upon by social scientists who question
the efficacy of racial quotas (Fry 2005; Fry et al. 2007;
Maio and Santos 2005). Dozens of media features have
used Pena’s research as evidence of the inexistence of race
and of the inherently mestiço character of all Brazilians. As
one columnist of the Folha de São Paulo newspaper claimed,
the “Molecular Portrait” offered “scientific proof of what
Gilberto Freyre formulated in sociological terms” (Elio Gaspari, as quoted in Santos and Maio 2004:351), reconfirming
long-term interpretations of Brazilian society related to the
idea of racial democracy.14 The media and opponents of
affirmative action have also used genetics—in particular
the predominantly European ancestry of Neguinho da
Beija-Flor—to undermine the identity strategies of the
black movement. Genetics has been used to embed the black
population firmly within an imagined Brazilian community
of undifferentiated mestiço individuals. Explicit articulations have been established between genetic ancestry and
racial classification, with the former overruling the latter.
Pena’s scientific research and political views have become incorporated within a wider contemporary current in
Brazilian society that emphasizes and values mixture, against
a competing tendency toward the production of differentiated racial identifications. The media and other critics of
race-based quotas have deployed genetics for the construction of an imagined genetic community that is national, unified, and firmly recentered around the figure of the mestiço,
which previously had been backgrounded in multiculturalist
discourse.
However, this is far from the only genetic image of
the Brazilian population that has circulated in the scientific
field and social debates. Other geneticists, black movement
activists, and media appropriations of Pena’s own most recent research have offered other interpretations of Brazil’s
imagined genetic communities.
DIVERSIFYING THE NATION: ALTERNATIVE
GENETIC COMMUNITIES IN SCIENTIFIC
RESEARCH
Alternative images of the Brazilian population emerge from
genetic research conducted in some of Brazil’s most wellestablished laboratories: Federal University of Rio Grande
do Sul (UFRGS), in the southern city of Porto Alegre, and
the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), in the Amazonian
town of Belém. This research presented two challenges to
Pena’s approach.
In the first place, research at the UFRGS reestablished a
correlation between phenotypic appearance and genetic ancestry by arguing for a close connection between the population of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, whiteness, and European ancestry. The UFRGS group challenges a basic premise
put forward by Pena and colleagues (Parra et al. 2003), according to which there is a dissociation between color or
race categories and actual appearance in Brazil. The 19th
and early 20th centuries witnessed the large-scale European
migration to Rio Grande do Sul. Consequently, whiteness
and European descent play a central role in contemporary
social constructions of regional identity (Oliven 1996).
This conception of regional identity is reflected in the
work of medical geneticists of the UFRGS, in particular,
those involved in “association studies” aiming to identify
genetic variants associated with specific diseases. As noted
earlier, such studies compare diagnosed cases and healthy
controls, which need to be matched in terms of ancestry. The
assumption that all populations in Brazil are mixed—widely
held in the global genetic field and reinforced by Pena’s
publications—has presented UFRGS researchers with significant obstacles during the peer-review process of scientific journals and in terms of establishing international
Kent et al. • Negotiating Imagined Genetic Communities
collaborations: the validity of their results has been frequently contested on the grounds of likely population stratification due to admixture. In response, they have argued
for the equivalence between cases and controls through discourses and practices that construct their studied populations
as homogenously European and that minimize the possibility
of significant admixture.
Their research has sampled individuals classified by the
geneticists as “white” on the basis of their phenotype. UFRGS
medical geneticists have systematically defined the state’s
population as being “European” (Zembrzuski et al. 2006)
or “of European descent” (Polina et al. 2009). They have
claimed that the southern Brazilian population is an exception to the general pattern of high levels of mixture established by Pena’s research (Zembrzuski et al. 2006:822–823)
and affirmed that there is an “absence of population stratification in this region” (Kohlrausch et al. 2008:1435). Thus,
“white” samples have been used as a proxy for European
populations and been made to represent the population
of Rio Grande do Sul—or southern Brazil—as a whole.
While such arguments are mostly restricted to populations
of southern Brazil, another UFRGS study on HIV susceptibility affirmed the existence of a correlation between phenotypical whiteness and European ancestry for Brazil as a
whole (Vargas et al. 2006:324). Geneticists at the UFRGS
have challenged Pena’s claim about the low correlation between phenotypic appearance and genetic ancestry, arguing
that, depending on the samples and genetic markers used
in the analysis, such a correlation can be quite strong (Vargas et al. 2006).
In the second place, studies of regional differentiation
have generated images of the Brazilian population that diverge significantly from Pena’s claim about the inexistence
of relevant intermediary genetic categories between the national and individual levels. Such studies reveal considerable
variation in the process of admixture that has occurred in
Brazil, resulting in clearly differentiated regional populations.
At the UFRGS, Maria Cátira Bortolini has coordinated
research on the genetic profile of the Gaúchos of Rio Grande
do Sul, the cowboys of the rural grasslands. They are
a symbol for the state’s particular ethnic identity, which
places strong emphasis on differences from the rest of Brazil
(Oliven 1996). According to Bortolini, her own strong regional identity was one of her main motivations for conducting this research (Kent and Santos 2014:115). At the genetic
level, the Gaúchos revealed an idiosyncratic constellation of
ancestral contributions that differentiates them from the rest
of the Brazilian population. These include a remarkably high
proportion (52%) of Amerindian ancestry on the maternal
side, which in addition is traceable to the extinct Charrua—
the main indigenous group in the region at the time of colonization, which had its origins in the southern Cone, rather
than in the Amazon. Also, the Gaúchos’ paternal genetic
heritage showed greater proximity to Spaniards than to the
Portuguese who colonized Brazil (Marrero et al. 2007). The
741
research on the Gaúchos has both drawn on and reconfirmed
conventional social interpretations of regional identity. In
consequence, this research has received considerable media
coverage in Rio Grande do Sul, with results being picked up
by regionalist movements (Kent and Santos 2014). While
Bortolini has mapped the genetic ancestry profiles of other
populations and regions within the state of Rio Grande do
Sul, she has avoided generalizations, even when prompted
during an interview by one of us: “I would present [Rio
Grande do Sul] as a number of macro-regions from a genetic
perspective . . . It’s a heterogeneous population, in a large
geographic area, with different profiles . . . generalizations
are difficult” (interview, October 21, 2010).
A similar kind of regional imagination was also at play in
research conducted since the 1980s on the genetic ancestry of
the Amazonian population by Sidney Santos, João Guerreiro,
and colleagues at the UFPA. Defining the Amazon as a “microcosm” (Santos et al. 1999), their studies revealed ancestry
constellations and dynamics of admixture that differentiate
the region’s population from that of Brazil as a whole. In
particular, it consists of mixed urban and rural populations,
which are characterized by a significantly higher percentage
of Amerindian ancestry than other Brazilian populations; an
important number of isolated indigenous populations revealing little or no signs of admixture; and rural quilombo
(maroon) communities that, in spite of being admixed, have
conserved relatively high levels of African ancestry (up to
74%; see Santos et al. 1999:188). Finally, geneticists of the
UFPA have represented the Amazonian population as the
sum of these main components rather than attempting an
overall synthesis (Santos et al. 1999). From this research,
the Amazonian population emerges as a differentiated and
internally diverse imagined genetic community.
More recently, Sidney Santos has expanded his research
to include the Brazilian population as a whole, building
a collection of samples from the majority of Brazilian
states and developing his own panel of genetic ancestry
markers (Santos et al. 2010). Regional differentiation
continues to be a recurrent theme in his work. In a recent
publication, Santos and colleagues affirmed that “the modern
Brazilian population is genetically very diverse and . . .
heterogeneous when considering the 5 main geopolitical
regions” (Palha et al. 2012).15 As they repeatedly affirmed
during interviews, the North is characterized by its high
proportion of Amerindian ancestry, the Northeast by the
African genetic contribution, and the South predominantly
by European ancestry.16 The Southeast region, in turn,
presents a more equal balance of the three main ancestries.
From this research emerges an image of Brazil as constituted
by a number of genetically differentiated regions.
Santos’s and Bortolini’s research on particular regional
configurations entails different ways of thinking about
Brazil. First, they establish internal heterogeneity as a key
characteristic of not only the Brazilian population as a whole
but also of the populations of the Amazon and Rio Grande
do Sul. According to Bortolini, while generalizations such as
742
American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 4 • December 2014
those proposed by Pena are useful in genetic research, they
are simplifications that conceal significant underlying variety
and particularities. They are not absolute, incontestable
images of the Brazilian genetic community but, rather, a
result of the level of geographical resolution chosen in the
analysis. Second, they conceptualize genetic admixture as
a process producing—rather than effacing—differences
between populations. Santos and Bortolini coincided in
attributing the existence of pronounced regionalized genetic
distinctions to variations in historical patterns of mixture.
Key factors that they mentioned include different histories
of colonization and immigration, the degrees of mixture
between different populations, and the dynamics of internal
migration between the various parts of Brazil.
Both sets of research discussed in this section raise alternatives to Pena’s image of the Brazilian population by
re-establishing internal plurality, diverse populations (in the
plural), and heterogeneous regions, with plurality being
parsed in significant measure in terms of ancestries that have
racialized connotations. These approaches chime with Pena’s
in their emphasis on mixture, but they play another variation
on the tension between similarity and difference, bringing
traces of the foundational ancestral populations closer to the
surface of contemporary Brazil.
GENETICS AND THE BLACK MOVEMENT:
ALTERNATIVES TO THE GENERIC MESTIÇO
Since publication of the “Molecular Portrait” in 2000, members of Brazil’s black movement have been highly critical
of Pena’s research. However, rather than questioning its
content, they have focused on its political uses and effects.
From their perspective, by offering scientific support to the
ideology of racial democracy and to arguments against affirmative action, this research bolstered political strategies
aimed at maintaining a status quo of racial inequality (Kent
n.d.; Santos and Maio 2004). The black movement’s main
critique was that genetic data and the arguments they sustained were irrelevant to the debate on race and affirmative
action, for two interrelated reasons.17 First, in Brazil race is
not a biological reality but, rather, a social construct based
on factors such as skin color, distinctive cultural practices,
and shared historical experiences of racism and exclusion.
Second—as vividly expressed in the frequently recurring
trope that “the police do not ask for a DNA test to know
who is black”—racial classification and social inequalities
in Brazil are based on appearance rather than ancestry or
genotype. This separation between social and biological dimensions of race has been a central element in the black
movement’s strategy to keep genetics outside the debate on
differentiated, race-based policies (Kent n.d.). The conceptual negotiations taking place in this instance are not about the
content of imagined genetic communities but, rather, about
whether genetics has any legitimate place at all in the ways
in which Brazil and (the different segments of) its population
are imagined. This view prevailed in the political debate on
affirmative action: in 2012, Brazil’s Supreme Court ratified
racial quotas unanimously, arguing that it was necessary to
“remove the biological concept of race” from the discussion
but that quotas were justified because “racism persists as a
social phenomenon” (Lewandowski 2012:19–20).
Nonetheless, segments of Brazil’s black movement have
also engaged positively with genetic research, in ways that
engender imagined genetic communities significantly different from the homogeneous community of mestiço Brazilians
emerging from Pena’s research. Such engagements have
been related to political strategies that promoted the
development of differentiated health policies aimed at the
black segment of the country’s population. The final report
of the “Health of the Black Population” seminar sponsored
by the Ministry of Health in 1996—in which activists of the
black movement had a significant presence—claimed that
“the black Brazilian population reveals a genetic specificity
that distinguishes it from any other part of the world”
(Hamann and Tauil 2001:9). This translated into increased
vulnerability to particular diseases. Being the most common
hereditary disease in Brazil (Hamann and Tauil 2001:14),
sickle cell anemia has received most attention, becoming
a bandwagon of the political campaign for differentiated
health policies.
This disease has been used in efforts to establish close
associations among black phenotype, genetic heritage, and
health outcomes. While some segments of the black movement conceptualized such connections as exclusive—by
defining sickle cell anemia unequivocally as a “doença de negros” (black people’s disease)—activists involved in the various sickle cell anemia associations founded since the 1990s
tended to view the connection as predominant. In their
everyday work, these activists encountered significant numbers of patients of white phenotype, a fact they attributed
to the process of admixture in Brazil. In their experience,
the prevailing stigma of being a doença de negros meant
that sickle cell anemia had been systematically neglected
by policy makers. Redefining it as potentially affecting all
Brazilians was important in order to increase the legitimacy
of policies focusing on this disease (Kikuchi 2003). The latter
interpretation prevailed in the section on sickle cell anemia
written by geneticist Marco Zago in the Ministry of Health’s
“handbook of the most important diseases that prevail, for
ethnic reasons, among the Brazilian Afro-descendent population” (Hamann and Tauil 2001:13–36). According to Zago,
while in Brazil the disease is predominantly found among
negros and pardos—of whom between 5 and 10 percent are
heterozygous carriers, depending on region—it also occurs
among brancos (Hamann and Tauil 2001:15). By attempting to establish a significant association between phenotypic
appearance and genetic ancestry in the case of black people,
black activists imagined this segment of the population as a
differentiated genetic community within Brazil. However,
even such partial claims of a connection between sickle cell
anemia and a population conceptualized in racial terms have
been strongly criticized by Pena (2009:57–68), who defined sickle cell anemia as a “geographic disease” instead, and
Kent et al. • Negotiating Imagined Genetic Communities
by social scientists who warned of the risks of reproducing
racial stigmas and divisions (Fry 2005:273–300).18 Eventually, the Ministry of Health developed policies focused on
the diagnosis and treatment of sickle cell anemia, but they
adopted a universalist approach rather than targeting the
black population.19
Black activists have deployed genetic data in additional
ways. As the names of the different genetic variants—or
haplotypes—associated with sickle cell anemia refer to
the broader geographic or linguistic regions of Africa
where they originated—Bantu (comprising, among other
countries, Angola and Mozambique), Benin, Senegal, and
Cameroon—they have been used as ancestry markers in
genetic research (Cardoso and Farias Guerreiro 2006).
Berenice Kikuchi, president of the Sickle Cell Anaemia
Association of the state of São Paulo, has deployed these
haplotype names to promote processes of identity formation
among the patients and relatives that her association assists as
part of courses designed to help them cope with the disease.
Her aim was to stimulate the development of differentiated
identities—Bantu, for example—rooted in the African continent. This echoes the interest among some black activists
in Brazil—and in the United States, where this tendency is
more pronounced (Nelson 2008)—to use genetics to establish direct connections with areas of Africa. Such approaches
reveal efforts to constitute an imagined supranational genetic
community consisting of black Brazilians and Africans.
However, Kikuchi also used the disease’s association
with African origins as a means to create awareness of mixed
origins among participants who identified as white. As she
explained during an interview, at the end of the courses
“these [patients] weren’t able to affirm themselves as white
anymore. So it’s really interesting, this re-reading of history
that sickle cell anaemia permits” (interview, July 22, 2012).
Thus, in a social context in which the ideal of whitening still
holds strong currency, genetics offered the potential to redefine white Brazilians and to include them within a mestiço
imagined community. Thus, the ways in which members of
the black movement have engaged with genetics have been
quite diverse, resulting in a variety of imagined communities. Some of these have been more aligned with Pena’s
image of a mixed national community, while others have
raised alternatives aligned with black and African diasporic
identities.
BRAZIPEANS: EUROPEAN DESCENT AND THE
CHALLENGE TO DIVERSITY
A third source of alternative images of the Brazilian community based on genetic research consists—ironically—of
mass media interpretations of recent research by Pena and
colleagues. Published in 2011, this study analyzed samples
collected in four macroregions of Brazil among individuals
that self-identified as white, brown, and black. In addition
to claiming a relative homogeneity of genetic profiles between regions, as discussed earlier, the study affirmed a predominance of European ancestry throughout Brazil, ranging
743
from population averages of 61 percent in the Northeast to
78 percent in the South (Pena et al. 2011:5). The authors
emphasized that in all regions the category “preto” revealed
African genetic ancestry of less than 50 percent, with the exception of a sample from the southern state of Santa Catarina
(2011:3). In their interpretation, this was due to the policies
of whitening that promoted massive European immigration
in the 19th and 20th centuries, thereby effacing previously
existing regional differences (2011:1).
The mass media in Brazil picked up the potential of this
study to redefine the Brazilian population as European. Two
days after the article’s publication, its results were featured
on the front page of the Globo newspaper, with the headline
“A More European Country.” The article’s subtitle affirmed
that “the genetics of Brazilians reveals less black and Indian
ancestry.” It was accompanied by a graph: a triangle in
which the average ancestry of four macroregions was placed
in relation to African, Amerindian, and European poles,
with the latter on top. Next to the graph, “Brasipeus”—or
“Brazipeans” in English—was written. This “Europeanization” of Brazil was attributed to the influx of European
immigrants in the 19th century (Globo 2011b). That day’s
editorial established a direct connection with the debate
on affirmative action, stating that this research provided
“irrefutable information” that the process of mixture placed
an “insurmountable obstacle to the execution of racialist
policies.” It affirmed that “now it is science that proves the
inexistence of the ‘Afro-Brazilian’” (Globo 2011a).
Pena’s study featured in other important media in a
similar way. In a sensationalist representation of the study’s
results, an article in the national newspaper Folha de São
Paulo affirmed that the “DNA of negros and pardos is 60%
to 80% European.”20 The article incorrectly projected the
results for the Brazilian population as a whole onto its black
and brown segments, thus taking the deconstruction of black
identity well beyond the limits imposed by Pena’s research.
Finally, the Folha piece was reproduced on the website of
Veja magazine, under the title: “Mama Africa, No Way! It’s
Really Mama Europe!”21
These articles’ deployment of genetic data shows
several differences from the media’s earlier engagements
with Pena’s research. In the first place, they redefined the
Brazilian population from being generically mixed to being
essentially European. Second, they constructed arguments
against affirmative action that were no longer based on this
generalized mixture of the Brazilian population but, rather,
on the “inexistence” of any Afro-Brazilians that could be their
beneficiaries. Finally, by speaking of low levels of “black”
ancestry, the Globo article conflated racial identification and
genetic ancestry. It not only claimed that Afro-Brazilians do
not exist from a genetic perspective but also suggested that
self-defined black Brazilians cannot be considered black.
Instead, the Brazilian population was imagined as thoroughly
European, resulting from the policies of whitening. The
article used Pena’s research not so much to undermine the
idea of race but, rather, to speak precisely about the racial
744
American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 4 • December 2014
makeup of the country’s population, privileging a particular
white–European racial heritage.
CONCLUSIONS
Many different imagined genetic communities have emerged
from genetic research and its social appropriations in the
past decades in Brazil. The unified national community
of mestiço Brazilians emerging from Pena and colleagues’
research has been most visible both in the scientific field
and in social debates. Alternative approaches, however,
have enabled the regional differentiation of Amazonians and
Gaúchos; have generated racialized identifications as whites,
blacks, or “Brazipeans”; and have established transnational
connections between Africa and its diasporic descendants.
At times geneticists have actively imagined such communities, as in Pena’s “Molecular Portrait” and Bortolini’s
Gaúcho project; often, however, such communities have
emerged implicitly out of data generated by research
designed with different objectives or out of engagements
with genetics by nonscientists. Imagined genetic communities have articulated with existing images of the Brazilian
population, the nation, race, and regions, themselves
formed by complex interactions between scientists and
nonscientists. As in social interpretations of identity, there
is an underlying tension in genetic interpretations between
views of the Brazilian population as unified and other
approaches that multiply its internal diversity. This variety
of imaginative routes is enabled by the fact that different
sets of genetic data—generated by research using distinct
samples and technologies—offer different possibilities for
the construction of communities. Connections have been
established between genetic ancestry and social identity in
ways that are far from straightforward, resulting both in essentializations and deconstructions of established identities.
As such, genetics has served, on the one hand, to connect
white and other Brazilians to a community of Europeans and
to include black people in a transatlantic African imagined
community. On the other hand, it has been used to strip the
same whites and blacks of their differentiated characteristics
and to embed them in a generic community of Brazilian
mestiços.
Different imagined genetic communities have sustained
different kinds of political arguments. In social debates and
the media, alignments have been established between genetic
data and competing ideologies and political projects such as
racial democracy, multiculturalism, and whitening, the latter rearticulated as a process of Europeanization. Pena’s
individualizing, antiracialist approach, for example, has revealed a particular fit with the idea of racial democracy and
its focus on mixture and a continuum from the whitest to
the blackest individual. The idea of a differentiated black
community has been contested in the media on the basis of
the pervasive genetic mixture of the Brazilian population and
its supposed European genetic essence.
This Brazilian material highlights how genomics and
engagement with it can take multiple forms. When genetic
data circulate in a context in which racial mixture is key to
the imagined community, we see how the data can bring race
both into and out of focus, while it does not vanish entirely,
providing nuance to debates about the relationship between
genomics and race, which tend to focus on whether genomics
transforms race into something new or simply biologizes it.
Our data also address the question of the “geneticization”
of society. Public debates in Brazil have revolved not only
around the character of genetic communities but also around
the question of whether genetics has any place at all in the
ways in which Brazil and its communities are imagined, most
significantly in the black movement’s response to genetic arguments against affirmative action. The Supreme Court’s
dismissal of genetic arguments in favor of an interpretation
of Brazilian society in which race as a social construction
does play an important role reveals that the incorporation
of genetics into social identity has been partial at most. It
would be overstatement to consider this the “geneticization”
of identities; genetics has merely added another twist to ongoing processes of negotiation of identity. It is, however,
a relevant twist because it has partly reconfigured debates
about race and nation in Brazil by multiplying the possibilities of imagining communities and incorporating biological
repertoires into social discourses.
Michael Kent
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences,
University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, United Kingdom; [email protected]
Ricardo Ventura Santos
Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Escola Na-
cional de Saúde Pública,Rua Leopoldo Bulhões 1480, sala 617, Rio de
Janeiro 21041–210, Brazil; [email protected].
Peter Wade
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences,
University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, United Kingdom; www.manchester.ac.uk/research/peter.wade
NOTES
Acknowledgments.
This article arises out of the collaborative
project “Race, Genomics and Mestizaje (Mixture) in Latin America: A
Comparative Approach,” funded by the Economic and Social Research
Council (grant RES-062–23–1914) and The Leverhulme Trust (grant
RPG-044). The project was based at the University of Manchester
and ran from January 2010 to March 2013. It was directed by Peter
Wade, with codirectors Carlos López Beltrán, Eduardo Restrepo, and
Ricardo Ventura Santos; research associates Vivette Garcı́a Deister,
Michael Kent, Marı́a Fernanda Olarte Sierra, Sandra P. González
Santos, and Ernesto Schwartz Marı́n; and research assistants Adriana
Dı́az del Castillo, Verlan Valle Gaspar Neto, Mariana Rios Sandoval,
Abigail Nieves Delgado, and Roosbelinda Cárdenas González. The
ideas expressed here are indebted to the conversations and exchanges
of ideas with project team members. We warmly thank the geneticists
and members of the black movement who shared their time and
insights with us. We are also grateful to journal editor Michael Chibnik
and four anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
Kent et al. • Negotiating Imagined Genetic Communities
1. Neguinho translates as “blackie” and refers to the sambista’s dark
phenotype.
2. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/reporterbbc/story/
2007/05/070424_dna_neguinho_cg.shtml, accessed November 12, 2011.
3. See The Genographic Project (https://genographic.national
geographic.com/); see also Nash (2013).
4. Forensic identifications may also use ancestry-based genetic data
(M’charek 2008), but we do not address this here.
5. In the 20th century, there was also substantial Japanese,
Chinese, and Sirio-Lebanese immigration. Genetic data on these
populations have not been the focus of public debates.
6. Some university quotas exist for indigenous people, but the
debates have focused on the much larger black population.
7. Here we do not explore the long-standing tradition of research
that has focused on indigenous peoples. In brief, there are two
main lines of investigation in this area (Santos et al. 2014). The
first investigates the contribution of Amerindian populations to
the biological formation of the Brazilian population. This approach is evident in the “Retrato Molecular do Brasil” by Pena
et al. (2000), which contained details of DNA matrilineages of
Amerindian origin in the genomes of Brazilians. The second line
of inquiry focuses on the genetics of Amerindian populations
themselves, exploring, for example, the pre-Columbian populating of the American continent, the migratory routes of the
first Amerindians and the microevolutionary processes associated with the demographic dynamics of indigenous populations
(Salzano and Callegari-Jacques 1988). Brazilian population geneticists, including Pena, often research both lines of inquiry.
8. “Retrato Molecular do Brasil.” All translations from Portuguese
are ours.
9. Mitochondrial DNA and the Y-chromosome are inherited integrally from the mother and the father, respectively, without
recombination. Their analysis is a key tool in genetic research,
as it establishes the ancestry of an individual’s distant ancestors
in a direct line on the mother’s and father’s side.
10. The results of mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome analysis
were also published in academic journals (Alves-Silva et al. 2000;
Carvalho-Silva et al. 2001).
11. Pena (2002:1) relativizes the concept of “Homo Brasilis” by
admitting it is “somewhat irreverent.”
12. This includes Pena’s earlier research, in particular the “Molecular Portrait” (Pena et al. 2000).
13. For examples of media and Internet interventions, see the
“Destaques” section of the website of Pena’s Laboratorio Gene
at http://www.laboratoriogene.com.br/. See also Pena’s We
R No Race project, http://wearenorace.com/. (Both were accessed February 27, 2014.)
14. Pena has made frequent reference to authors associated with the
racial democracy approach, such as Gilberto Freyre and Darcy
Ribeiro (Alves-Silva et al. 2000; Pena et al. 2009).
15. This study included the Central West region, not studied in
Pena et al. (2011).
16. Interviews with Santos, Bortolini, and collaborators were conducted by Kent between June and November 2010.
745
17. Kent conducted interviews with black activists between November 2011 and July 2012.
18. Genetic variants causing sickle cell anemia are not exclusive to
African regions.
19. In a number of other areas, however, the Ministry of Health did
implement differentiated, race-based policies.
20. See http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ciencia/877676-dna-denegros-e-pardos-do-brasil-e-60-a-80-europeu.shtml, accessed
May 29, 2012.
21. See http://veja.abril.com.br/blog/reinaldo/geral/que-mama
-africa-que-nada-e-mama-europa-mesmo/, accessed May 29,
2012.
REFERENCES CITED
Abu El-Haj, Nadia
2012 The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and
the Politics of Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Alves-Silva, Juliana, Magda da Silva Santos, Pedro E. M. Guimarães,
Alessandro C. S. Ferreira, Hans-Jürgen Bandelt, Sérgio D. J.
Pena, and Vania Ferreira Prado
2000 The Ancestry of Brazilian mtDNA Lineages. American Journal of Human Genetics 67(2):444–461.
Anderson, Benedict
1991[1983] Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Bertoni, Bernardo
2011 Admixture Mapping and Genetic Technologies: Perspectives
from Latin America. In Racial Identities, Genetic Ancestry, and
Health in South America: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and
Uruguay. Sahra Gibbon, Ricardo Ventura Santos, and Mónica
Sans, eds. Pp. 103–120. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bliss, Catherine
2009 Genome Sampling and the Biopolitics of Race. In A Foucault
for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium. Sam Binkley and Jorge CapetilloPonce, eds. Pp. 320–337. Boston: Cambridge Scholars.
2012 Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bolnick, Deborah A., Duana Fullwiley, Troy Duster, Richard S.
Cooper, Joan H. Fujimura, Jonathan Kahn, Jay S. Kaufman,
et al.
2007 The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing. Science 318(5849):399–400.
Burchard, Esteban Gonzalez, Luisa N. Borrell, Shweta Choudhry,
Mariam Naqvi, Hui-Ju Tsai, Jose R. Rodriguez-Santana, Rocio
Chapela, et al.
2005 Latino Populations: A Unique Opportunity for the Study
of Race, Genetics, and Social Environment in Epidemiological
Research. American Journal of Public Health 95(12):2161–
2168.
Burchard, Esteban Gonzalez, Elad Ziv, Natasha Coyle, Scarlett Lin
Gomez, Hua Tang, Andrew J. Karter, Joanna L. Mountain,
et al.
746
American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 4 • December 2014
2003 The Importance of Race and Ethnic Background in Biomedical Research and Clinical Practice. The New England Journal
of Medicine 348(12):1170–1175.
Cardoso, Greice Lemos, and João Farias Guerreiro
2006 African Gene Flow to North Brazil as Revealed by HBB*S
Gene Haplotype Analysis. American Journal of Human Biology
18(1):93–98.
Carvalho-Silva, Denise R., Fabrı́cio R. Santos, Jorge Rocha, and
Sérgio D. Pena
2001 The Phylogeography of Brazilian Y-Chromosome Lineages.
American Journal of Human Genetics 68(1):281–286.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. Luca, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza
1994 The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Choudhry, Shweta, Natasha E. Coyle, Hua Tang, Keyan Salari,
Denise Lind, Suzanne L. Clark, Hui-Ju Tsai, et al.
2006 Population Stratification Confounds Genetic Association
Studies among Latinos. Human Genetics 118(5):652–664.
Daher, Adel, Adelaide Jóia, Adriana Atila, Aguinaldo Silva, Alba
Zaluar, Almir Lima da Silva, Alzira Alves de Abreu, Amâncio
Paulino De Carvalho, Ana Maria Machado, et al.
2008 113 cidadãos anti-racistas contra as leis raciais [113
anti-racist citizens against racial laws]. Petition Online.
http://www.petitiononline.com/antiraca/petition.html, accessed June 30, 2014.
Epstein, Steven
2007 Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research.
Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning series. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Freyre, Gilberto
1946[1933] Casa-grande e senzala: Formação da familia Brasileira
sob o regime de economia patriarcal [The masters and the
slaves: The formation of the Brazilian family under a patriarchal
economic regime]. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio.
Fry, Peter H.
2005 A persistência da raça: Ensaios antropológicos sobre o Brasil
e a África Austral [The persistence of race: Anthropological essays on Brasil and Southern Africa]. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização
Brasileira.
Fry, Peter, Yvonne Maggie, Simone Monteiro, and Ricardo Ventura
Santos, eds.
2007 Divisões perigosas: Polı́ticas raciais no Brasil contemporâneo
[Dangerous divides: Racial policies in contemporary Brazil].
Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira.
Fujimura, Joan H., and Ramya Rajagopalan
2011 Different Differences: The Use of “Genetic Ancestry” versus
Race in Biomedical Human Genetic Research. Social Studies
of Science 41(1):5–30.
Fullwiley, Duana
2007 The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing Human
Difference in Pharmacogenetics Practice. Science as Culture
16(1):1–30.
2008 The Biologistical Construction of Race: “Admixture” Technology and the New Genetic Medicine. Social Studies of Science 38(5):695–735.
Globo
2011a Genética derruba teses racialistas [Genetics undermines
racialist theories]. Globo, February 18:7.
2011b Um paı́s mais Europeu: Genética de Brasileiros revela
menor ancestralidade negra e Índia [A more European country: The genetics of Brazilians reveals less black and Indian
ancestry]. Globo, February 18:1.
Guimarães, Antonio Sérgio
1999 Racismo e anti-racismo no Brasil [Racism and anti-racism in
Brazil]. São Paulo: Editora 34.
Hamann, Edgar Merchán, and Pedro Luiz Tauil
2001 Manual de doenças mais importantes, por razões etnicas,
na população Brasileira Afro-descendente [Manual of the most
common disorders, by ethnic origin, in the Brazilian Afrodescendant population]. Brası́lia: Ministerio da Saúde.
Hamilton, Jennifer A.
2012 The Case of the Genetic Ancestor. In Genetics and the
Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History.
Keith Wailoo, Alondra Nelson, and Catherine Lee, eds. Pp.
266–278. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Hasenbalg, Carlos
1979 Discriminação e desigualdades raciais no Brazil [Discrimination and racial inequalities in Brazil]. P. Burglin, trans. Rio de
Janeiro: Graal.
International HapMap Consortium
2003 The International HapMap Project. Nature 426(6968):789–
796.
Kaufmann, Roberta Fragoso Menezes
2009 Arguição de descumprimento de preceito fundamental 186–
2/800 [Allegation of breach of fundamental precept 186–
2/800]. Brasilia: Supremo Tribunal Federal.
Kent, Michael
2013 The Importance of Being Uros: Indigenous Identity Politics
in the Genomic Age. Social Studies of Science 43(4):534–
556.
N.d. Genetics against Race: Science, Politics and Affirmative Action in Brazil. Unpublished MS, Social Anthropology, School of
Social Sciences, University of Manchester, United Kingdom.
Kent, Michael, and Ricardo Ventura Santos
2014 “The Charrua Are Alive”: The Genetic Resurrection of an
Extinct Indigenous Population in Southern Brazil. In Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin
America. Peter Wade, Carlos López Beltrán, Eduardo Restrepo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos, eds. Pp. 109–133.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Kikuchi, Berenice
2003 Anemia falciforme: Manual para agentes de educação e saúde
[Sickle cell anemia: Manual for educators and health workers].
São Paulo: Editora Health.
Koenig, Barbara A., Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah S. Richardson,
eds.
2008 Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. Studies in Medical Anthropology series. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Kohlrausch, F. B., A. Salatino-Oliveira, C. S. Gama, M. I. Lobato,
P. Belmonte-de-Abreu, and M. H. Hutz
Kent et al. • Negotiating Imagined Genetic Communities
2008 G-protein Gene 825C>T Polymorphism Is Associated with
Response to Clozapine in Brazilian Schizophrenics. Pharmacogenomics 9(10):1429–1436.
Lewandowski, Ricardo
2012 Arguição de descumprimento de preceito fundamental 186:
Voto [Allegation of breach of fundamental precept 186: Vote].
Brasilia, Brazil: Supremo Tribunal Federal.
Lewontin, Richard C.
1972 The Apportionment of Human Diversity. Evolutionary Biology 6:391–398.
M’charek, Amade
2008 Silent Witness, Articulate Collective: DNA Evidence and
the Inference of Visible Traits. Bioethics 22(9):519–528.
Maio, Marcos Chor, and Ricardo Ventura Santos
2005 Polı́tica de cotas raciais, os “Olhos da Sociedade” e os usos da
antropologia: O caso do vestibular da Universidade de Brası́lia
(UnB) [Racial quota policies, the “Eyes of Society” and the uses
of anthropology: The case of admissions in the University of
Brazilia (UnB)]. Horizontes Antropológicos 11(23):181–214.
Marrero, Andrea Rita, Claudio Bravi, Steven Stuart, Jeffrey C.
Long, Fábio Pereira das Neves Leite, Tricia Kommers, Claudia
M. B. Carvalho, et al.
2007 Pre- and Post-Columbian Gene and Cultural Continuity:
The Case of the Gaucho from Southern Brazil. Human Heredity
64(3):160–171.
Marx, Anthony W.
1998 Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States,
South Africa, and Brazil. Cambridge Studies in Comparative
Politics series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nash, Catherine
2013 Genome Geographies: Mapping National Ancestry and Diversity in Human Population Genetics. Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers 38(2):193–206.
Nelson, Alondra
2008 Bio Science: Genetic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of
African Ancestry. Social Studies of Science 38(5):759–783.
Oliven, Ruben George
1996 Tradition Matters: Modern Gaúcho Identity in Brazil.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Palha, Teresinha J. B. F., Leonor Gusmão, Elzemar RibeiroRodrigues, João Farias Guerreiro, Andrea Ribeiro-DosSantos, and Sidney Santos
2012 Disclosing the Genetic Structure of Brazil through Analysis
of Male Lineages with Highly Discriminating Haplotypes. PLoS
ONE 7(7):e40007.
Pálsson, Gı́sli
2007 Anthropology and the New Genetics. New Departures in
Anthropology series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pálsson, Gı́sli, and Paul Rabinow
1999 Iceland: The Case of a National Human Genome Project.
Anthropology Today 15(5):14–18.
Parra, Flavia C., Roberto C. Amado, José R. Lambertucci, Jorge
Rocha, Carlos M. Antunes, and Sérgio D. J. Pena
2003 Color and Genomic Ancestry in Brazilians. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America 100(1):177–182.
747
Pena, Sérgio D. J.
2002 Homo brasilis: Aspectos genéticos, lingüı́sticos, históricos
e socioantropológicos da formação do povo Brasileiro
[Homo brasilis: Genetic, linguistic, historical and socioanthropological aspects of the formation of the Brazilian people]. Ribeirão Preto: FUNPEC-RP.
2005 Razões para banir o conceito de raça da medicina Brasileira
[Reasons to abolish the concept of in Brazilian medicine].
História, Ciências, Saúde–Manguinhos 12(1):321–346.
2008 Humanidade sem raças? [Humanity without races?]. São
Paulo: Folha de São Paulo.
2009 Igualmente diferentes [Equally different]. Belo Horizonte:
Editora UFMG.
Pena, Sérgio D. J., L. Bastos-Rodrigues, J. R. Pimenta, and S. P.
Bydlowski
2009 DNA Tests Probe the Genomic Ancestry of Brazilians. Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research 42(10):870–
876.
Pena, Sérgio D. J., and Telma S. Birchal
2006 A inexistência biológica versus a existência social de raças
humanas: Pode a ciência instruir o etos social? [The biological
nonexistence versus the social existence of human races: Can
science instruct the social ethos?]. Revista USP 68:10–21.
Pena, Sérgio D. J., and Maria Catira Bortolini
2004 Pode a genética definir quem deve se beneficiar das cotas
universitárias e demais ações afirmativas? [Can genetics define
who should benefit from university quotas and other affirmative
actions?]. Estudos Avançados 18(50):31–50.
Pena, Sérgio D. J., Denise R. Carvalho-Silva, Juliana Alves-Silva,
Vânia F. Prado, and Fabrı́cio R. Santos
2000 Retrato molecular do Brasil [Molecular portrait of Brazil].
Ciência Hoje 159:16–25.
Pena, Sérgio D. J., Giuliano Di Pietro, Mateus Fuchshuber-Moraes,
Julia Pasqualini Genro, Mara H. Hutz, Fernanda de Souza
Gomes Kehdy, Fabiana Kohlrausch, et al.
2011The Genomic Ancestry of Individuals from Different Geographical Regions of Brazil Is More Uniform than Expected.
PLoS One 6(2):e17063.
Polina, Evelise Regina, Verônica Contini, Mara Helena Hutz, and
Claiton Henrique Dotto Bau
2009 The Serotonin 2A Receptor Gene in Alcohol Dependence
and Tobacco Smoking. Drug and Alcohol Dependence 101(1–
2):128–131.
Reardon, Jenny
2005 Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of
Genomics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rose, Nikolas
2007 The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Salzano, Francisco M., and Sı́dia Maria Callegari-Jacques
1988 South American Indians: A Case Study in Evolution. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Sans, Mónica
2011 National Identity, Census Data, and Genetics in Uruguay.
In Racial Identities, Genetic Ancestry, and Health in South
748
American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 4 • December 2014
America: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay. Sahra
Gibbon, Ricardo Ventura Santos, and Mónica Sans, eds. Pp.
195–212. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Santos, Ney P. C., Elzemar M. Ribeiro-Rodrigues, Ândrea K. C.
Ribeiro-dos-Santos, Rui Pereira, Leonor Gusmao, António
Amorim, Joáo F. Guerreiro, et al.
2010 Assessing Individual Interethnic Admixture and Population Substructure Using a 48-Insertion-Deletion (INSEL)
Ancestry-Informative Marker (AIM) Panel. Human Mutation
31(2):184–190.
Santos, Ricardo Ventura
2012 Guardian Angel on a Nation’s Path: Contexts and Trajectories of Physical Anthropology in Brazil in the Late
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Current Anthropology 53(S5):S17–S32.
Santos, Ricardo Ventura, Michael Kent, and Verlan Valle Gaspar
Neto
2014 From Degeneration to Meeting Point: Historical Views on
Race, Mixture, and the Biological Diversity of the Brazilian
Population. In Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and
Science in Latin America. Peter Wade, Carlos López Beltrán,
Eduardo Restrepo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos, eds. Pp. 33–
54. Durham: Duke University Press.
Santos, Ricardo Ventura, and Marcos Chor Maio
2004 Race, Genomics, Identities and Politics in Contemporary
Brazil. Critique of Anthropology 24(4):347–378.
Santos, Sidney E. B., Andrea K. C. Ribeiro dos Santos, Eduardo J.
M. Santos, and João F. Guerreiro
1999 The Amazonian Microcosm. Ciência e Cultura 51(3–
4):181–190.
Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz
1993 O espetáculo das raças: Cientistas, instituições e questão
racial no Brasil, 1870–1930 [The spectacle of the races: Scientists, institutions and the racial question in Brazil, 1870–1930].
São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Simpson, Bob
2000 Imagined Genetic Communities: Ethnicity and Essentialism in the Twenty-First Century. Anthropology Today 16(3):
3–6.
Skidmore, Thomas E.
1974 Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Smart, Andrew, Richard Tutton, Paul Martin, George T. H. Ellison,
and Richard Ashcroft
2008 The Standardization of Race and Ethnicity in Biomedical
Science Editorials and UK Biobanks. Social Studies of Science
38(3):407–423.
Suarez-Kurtz, Guilherme, Daniela D. Vargens, Claudio J.
Struchiner, Luciana Bastos-Rodrigues, and Sérgio D. J. Pena
2007 Self-Reported Skin Color, Genomic Ancestry and the Distribution of GST Polymorphisms. Pharmacogenetics and Genomics 17(9):765–771.
Telles, Edward E.
2004 Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in
Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Vargas, A. E., A. R. Marrero, F. M. Salzano, M. C. Bortolini, and
J. A. Chies
2006 Frequency of CCR5delta32 in Brazilian Populations.
Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research
39(3):321–325.
Vianna, Hermano
1999 The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity
in Brazil. John Charles Chasteen, ed. and trans. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
Zembrzuski, V. M., S. M. Callegari-Jacques, and M. H. Hutz
2006 Application of an African Ancestry Index as a Genomic
Control Approach in a Brazilian Population. Annals of Human
Genetics 70(6):822–828.