The Stones, the Bones, and the Genes: classification practices and narratives of human origins in post-apartheid South Africa

This ongoing project examines the emergence of new forms of biologisation across various fields of knowledge and practice in South Africa following apartheid. In South Africa, the sciences of human origins have a long and multidisciplinary history, involving paleoanthropology, physical anthropology, archaeology, and in recent years increasingly genetics. Inasmuch as the early fossil finds of Raymond Dart (Taung Child, 1925) and Robert Broom (Mrs Ples, 1947) were regarded as proofs for the evolution of humankind in Africa, the scientific discourse on human origins has from the start been closely linked to ideas about the contemporary difference between ‘races’ that were at the foundation of apartheid politics.

This project is concerned with the genealogies of these classification practices and their ongoing and/or shifting significance in contemporary science. It looks at the dynamics between the formation of scientific classifications (mainly in relation to biological concepts of ‘populations’, i.e. race and ethnicity), their historical situatedness (in different contexts, such as the Pan-African and Black Consciousness Movements, apartheid, and the “African Renaissance” in post-apartheid South Africa) and their political and legal impact on notions of self and collective identities. How are symbolic categories of belonging translated into biological concepts of ancestry and relatedness, and vice versa? In other words: How do concepts of (cultural) heritage intersect with those of (biological) inheritance?

Scientific laboratory, public sphere, and political practice are analysed as mutually constitutive. Biological classifications and identities are thus under-stood as deeply political and connected to ideas of national belonging. The project aims to concretise both the epistemic objects that are central to it (e.g. ‘race’, ‘DNA’, ‘specimen’, ‘ethnicity’, or ‘citizenship’) as well as the social actors that are involved in the various translation processes between science and the public (i.e. scientists, politicians, museum workers, consumers, and activists) and the assemblages in and through which they are connected (i.e. collections, archives, sequencing machines, human remains, etc.).