Anti-Drug Policies in Colombia: Successes, Failures, and Wrong Turns eds. by Alejandro Gaviria and Daniel Mejía (review)
The authors find that genomic research fixes the concept of race but at the same time unfixes it. It fixes race through “[genetic] precision and triangulation,” absent in the early works of historians and anthropologists like Justo Sierra, Robert Redfield, or Stanley Stein (214–215). It unfixes race because, while genetic research may pinpoint ancestral paths and proportions, it also uncovers “different combinations” that “could be possible, and that the number of [these ethnic] combinations is practically unlimited” (223). At this point, Wade even leans on Michel Foucault, who believed that “classic 19th-century social formations . . . walked between a conception of finitude (the realm of humans) and infinity (the transcendent realm of God)” (222). Wade views these newly discovered permutations as the “re-figuration of race . . . through the unlimited finity generated by genomics [which] creates a sense of movement and modulation” (224).