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Refusing epigenetics: indigeneity and the colonial politics of trauma

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Abstract

Environmental epigenetics is increasingly employed to understand the health outcomes of communities who have experienced historical trauma and structural violence. Epigenetics provides a way to think about traumatic events and sustained deprivation as biological “exposures” that contribute to ill-health across generations. In Australia, some Indigenous researchers and clinicians are embracing epigenetic science as a framework for theorising the slow violence of colonialism as it plays out in intergenerational legacies of trauma and illness. However, there is dispute, contention, and caution as well as enthusiasm among these research communities.

In this article, we trace strategies of “refusal” (Simpson, 2014) in response to epigenetics in Indigenous contexts. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Australia with researchers and clinicians in Indigenous health, we explore how some construct epigenetics as useless knowledge and a distraction from implementing anti-colonial change, rather than a tool with which to enact change. Secondly, we explore how epigenetics narrows definitions of colonial harm through the optic of molecular trauma, reproducing conditions in which Indigenous people are made intelligible through a lens of “damaged” bodies. Faced with these two concerns, many turn away from epigenetics altogether, refusing its novelty and supposed benefit for Indigenous health equity and resisting the pull of postgenomics.

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Notes

  1. A number of scholars have already identified the ways in which women (and women of colour) are centrally positioned and blamed in gendered epigenetic and developmental origins of health and disease discourses (Warin et al., 2011; Mansfield, 2012; Mansfield, 2017; Richardson et al., 2014; Kenney & Muller, 2017; Lappé, 2018; Chiapperino & Panese, 2018; Richardson, 2021; Valdez, 2021; Yates-Doerr, 2011). As our interviewees were engaged with a wide range of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations and scientific fields related to epigenetics - across environmental, nutritional, psychological, emergency medicine, pregnancy, antenatal care, the carceral system - they were more often engaged with the multiple ongoing impacts of institutional racism and colonial violence, rather than pursuing personalised medicine of individual, gendered bodies or social intervention on mothers. For this reason we do not focus on maternal reversal or gender.

  2. As Susan Squier highlights, this kinship between epigenetics and genetics was not always so. While the earliest iterations of epigenetics in Waddington’s work on the epigenetic landscape were open-ended and non-deterministic, her 2017 book Epigenetic Landscapes tracks how epigenetics was narrowed into a sub-set of genomic inquiry through the course of twentieth-century developments in the life sciences.

  3. A similar concept is explored by Natali Valdez (2021) in her recent book Weighing the Future (2021). Valdez examines the ways in which prenatal trials around maternal obesity and metabolic illnesses in the US and UK exercise ‘epigenetic foreclosure’ – reducing experiences of racism and poverty to individual behaviours and bodies, and the biovalue of pregnant biobits.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the work of the Indigenous Advisory Committee, who oversaw the broader research project from which this article emerged.

Funding

This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP190102071).

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  1. School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Jaya Keaney

  2. School of Social Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

    Henrietta Byrne & Megan Warin

  3. Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

    Emma Kowal

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  1. Jaya Keaney
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Correspondence to Jaya Keaney.

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The empirical study received ethics approval from the Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee (project number 2020-262) and the University of Adelaide Human Research Ethics Committee (project number 2020-086).

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Keaney, J., Byrne, H., Warin, M. et al. Refusing epigenetics: indigeneity and the colonial politics of trauma. HPLS 46, 1 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00596-1

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