SOCIAL THOUGHT AND COMMENTARY Genetics, Identity, and the Anthropology of Essentialism

For several decades, anthropology has participated in the general decon-struction of “identity ” as a stable object of scholarly inquiry. The notion that individuals craft their identity through social performances, and hence that their identity is not a fixed essence, fundamentally drives current research into gender and sexuality. The notion that collective identity emerges out of po-litical struggle and compromise underlies contemporary studies of race, eth-nicity and nationalism. The anti-essentialist mood of today’s anthropology fits with wider currents in philosophy (e.g., critiques of the autonomous, self-sus-taining subject within Western metaphysics) as well as feminism and cultural studies (e.g., examination of the unconscious aspects of identity formation and the political resistance enabled by multiple and hybrid identities) (see Hall and Du Gay 1996, McRobbie 1994). Outside the academy, however, and to the dismay of anthropologists who fancy themselves as the cultural avant-garde, essentialist identities grow ever more powerful and seductive. New genetic knowledge, for example, adds the cachet of objective science to the notion that one’s identity is an inborn, natu-ral, and unalterable quality. Rapid advances in sequencing and analyzing the human genome have strengthened essentialist thinking about identity i