February issue of Cultural Anthropology includes a paper by Michael Montoya on race and diabetes detection. It is a reificiation of what is now common knowledge among most people who study race, but not so much beyond this sphere.

“Although it’s true that certain ethnic groups have higher rates of diabetes, our social understanding of race is grafted into the scientific research,” said Montoya, assistant professor of anthropology and Chicano/Latino studies. “Therefore, research that presumes race is biological may confuse matters instead of improving our understanding of the causes of chronic diseases like diabetes.”

Of course, it is not really true that certain ethnic groups have higher rates of a certain allele. Alleles are distributed somewhat unevenly in the broader population. “Ethnic groups” are social, geographical, and lineal identities that often have deep time frames. It is more likely than not that clumps of alleles come and go, and perhaps move from one part of the population to another, in ways that are only closely linked to ethnic identity when part of that ethnic identity is strict inbreeding and the alleles are not being selected against for a long period of time.

It is rather more correct to say that juxtaposition of a framework built on ethnic identity and population-wide genetic data sometimes gives the appearance of an association between a “group” and a higher than expected frequency of an allele.

One of the costs of the rejection and shape, undue and overdone criticism of science by cultural anthropology is that when cultural anthropology tries to use the science in support of their own ideologies they don’t always know what tools to use or how to use them.

A significantly more accurate and relevant characterization of this work (and I’m not saying Montoya’s work is not important … it is just not necessarily framed properly) is from a UCI press release:

“Montoya’s detailed ethnographic research on Mexican American diabetes shows us just how problematical it is to link health inequalities in any way to genetic variation rather than structural inequalities,” said Alan Goodman, president of the American Anthropological Association and professor at Hampshire College.

Goodman does manage the cultural/science crossover very well.