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Chapter 11 of The Race Gallery (1995)
Marek Kohn
Europe old and new: romantic ideas of national identity in the age of DNA
In discussing the ethnic convolutions of Macedonia, the most Balkan region of them all, it is commonplace to observe that a macédoine is a finely-chopped salad. The list of ingredients is variable, and intensely disputed, but never has it been so long as in 1918, when one of the fronts of the First World War ran through the region. A rainbow alliance was assembled on the Entente side of the line, deploying manpower not only from the homelands of the European powers, but also from their colonies in Africa and India. To Ludwik and Hanka Hirszfeld, he of the University of Zurich and she of the Royal Serbian Army's Central Bacteriological Laboratory, this variegated force offered an opportunity to create a new race gallery, based not on the form of the body but on blood.
The Hirszfelds' attempt to "attack the human race problem" was based on the discovery, made by Karl Landsteiner and his students in Vienna at the turn of the century, of the ABO blood group system. Were there racial variations in the distribution of these groups? The Hirszfelds, who themselves were from Poland, obtained samples representing the English, French, Italians, Germans, Austrians, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Arabs, Turks, Russians, Jews, Malagasies from Madagascar, Negroes from Senegal, Annamese (Vietnamese) and Indians. The Jews were refugees from the Macedonian town of Monastir, displaced once again after their arrival from Spain about four hundred years before; Macedonian Muslims were used to stand for the Turks, despite the certainty of a "large admixture of Slavic blood".
In a paper first unveiled at a reading to the Salonika Medical Society in June 1918, the Hirszfelds arranged their results according to the respective frequencies of groups A and B. The results, as they noted, were remarkable. In all the European groups, the prevalence of A was above forty per cent; in all the others, it was lower. Group A gradually diminished going southwards and eastwards, with Arabs, Turks, Russians and Jews forming an intermediate type between the Europeans and the "Afro-Asiatic" type. Conversely, group B was at its highest outside Europe, diminishing along a north-westerly heading. Its lowest incidence was among the English.
The Hirszfelds were struck by the fact that, elegant as these gradients appeared on a graph, they were at odds with certain aspects of traditional race classification. If blood groups had been aligned with familiar anthropological arrangements, the highest B levels should have been found among the Africans, or at least the Annamese. Yet these were only the third and second highest; they were far outstripped by the prevalence among the Indians, who were considered to be anthropologically closest to Europeans. Moreover, "the Russians and the Jews, who differ so much from each other in anatomical characteristics, mode of life, occupation, and temperament, have exactly the same proportion of A and B."
The blood groups thus defied both standard anthropometric measures and the Romantic race concept in which physical characters were inseparable from psychological ones. The Hirszfelds were convinced that blood revealed a deeper level of truth than body dimensions and form, a conviction shared by their descendants in the tradition of genetic diversity studies. They announced the discovery of "biochemical races", and suggested a double origin of the human species, the B race arising in India and the A race in Northern or Central Europe. Their contemporaries were frustratingly slow to accept their ideas. Later, however, the Nazis dabbled with the use of blood groups for racial classification. In the following world war, the Hirszfelds found themselves not in an ethnic macédoine, but in the enforced purity of the Warsaw Ghetto. There, Ludwik Hirszfeld organised a laboratory and gave illegal lectures on medicine, including one on the subject of blood groups and race.
In 1918, the researchers and their subjects had been brought together by the agencies of war, empire, expulsion and flight. It is now possible to detect the traces of such phenomena by using the same sort of techniques, mapping the rise and fall of gene frequencies across populations. Blood now offers many more genes to choose from, including a dozen or so blood groups, a similar number of red cell enzymes, and various proteins. In recent years, techniques for the direct examination of DNA have come into use.
As the capabilities of population genetics grow, its advocates become increasingly outspoken in their claims of explanatory power. "Our past is a combination of culture and biology," says Sir Walter Bodmer, a prime mover of the Human Genome Project. "One without the other is only half the story." In arriving at a stage where such a claim is credible both as a proposition and the basis of practical research, genetics has intertwined itself with human history and geography, from the grand panorama of continents to the genetic view from the village green.
The Hirszfelds' tradition has been maintained in the Balkan region, whose "disordered topography", according to Huxley and Haddon in We Europeans, "has much to do with the equally disordered distribution of its mixed population, and helps to account for the bitterness of their animosities". Pavao Rudan, of the University of Zagreb, has studied human microevolution along the Dalmatian coast, and has also been involved with similar studies in the Derdap region of the Danube valley in Serbia. In these surveys, blood group data are integrated with other characteristics, such as body measurements, cardio-respiratory measurements, bone dimensions and dermatoglyphs - finger and palm prints. All these are brought into dialogue with history. The Adriatic island of Korcula spent four hundred years, until the end of the eighteenth century, under the control of the Venetian republic; the Peljesac peninsula, just a mile away, belonged to the Dubrovnik republic. This, Rudan and his colleagues suggest, is the source of the biological differences they found between the people of Peljesac and the offshore islands today.
The report of the Derdap research appeared as part of a series entitled 'Ethnoanthropological Problems', launched in Belgrade in the mid-1980s, as ethnoanthropological problems began to loom large over a moribund Yugoslavia. Its narrative theme is that of a microcosm of Serbian history, a "transitory region" whose population periodically leaves during various crises and later returns. Biologically, the population is found to be homogeneous. One of the reasons offered is the fall in the birth rate, known in the area as the "white plague", resulting from emigration, war and economic crisis. This, it is reasoned, clears a space for immigration, which brings in a flow of genes that helps to homogenise the population.
A text such as this can be read not just as a scientific paper, but as a reflection upon national history and contemporary concerns. In its depiction of genetic variation as a perennial ebb and flow, driven by the hydraulics of war and other crises, it serves as a poignant reminder that from the mid-1980s, people in Yugoslavia knew what was coming.
Just as history and politics were drawn into scientific discourse, scientific language occasionally cropped up in nationalist rhetoric. Scientists themselves are not, however, usually prominent in the vanguard of nationalism, particularly the sort which has emerged after the collapse of the Soviet system. Since the characteristics which most obviously differentiate neighbouring ethnic groups are cultural rather than biological, linguists and historians are natural leaders in the politicisation of these differences. Thomas Gamkrelidze, for example, has long been a leading authority in the debate over the origins of the Indo-Europeans, which he considers to have been somewhere in the region of his native Georgia. As well as being a professor of philology, he became the chairman of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee early in Georgia's turbulent independence. His scholarly work includes arguments that the Abkhazians, who fought a war of secession from the Tbilisi government, are not an authentic ethnic group with a separate identity from the Georgians.
A scientist, if so minded, may nonetheless play an active part in a nationalist cause. While a number of prominent figures in the Bosnian Serb leadership emerged from those disciplines ironically known as the humanities, the woman known as "Vice-President" is a biologist. Biljana Plavsic stands out among her colleagues not only as a scientist, but as a nationalist whose views are extreme even by Bosnian Serb standards. She does, however, have her admirers. Yuri Lochtchich, one of the Greater Serbian movement's numerous Russian groupies, considers her "the incarnation of European beauty".
On at least one occasion, Plavsic has used her scientific credentials to lend authority to her political opinions. "The Bosnian Serbs ... have developed a highly-tuned sense which permits them to sense when the nation is in danger and to put a defence mechanism into operation," she observed to the Serbian newspaper Borba. "In my family, we always said that the Bosnian Serbs were better Serbs than the Serbian Serbs ... I am a biologist and I know that the species best armed to adapt and survive are those which live close to other species which represent a danger to them."
By arguing along these social Darwinist lines, she is able to refer to the differences between Bosnian Muslims and Serbs in terms of differences between species. She has also made the explicit claim that Serbs are genetically superior. When a journalist asked Plavsic for her reaction to a comment by Ejup Ganic, the Bosnian foreign minister, that the Bosnian Muslims are of Serbian origin, she retorted: "What can I say? It is true. But what we have here is genetically defective material, that has converted to Islam. And now it becomes denser from generation to generation. It is becoming more pernicious and malignant, it expresses itself ever more strongly, dictating thought and action. All that is already implanted in the genes." [February 2003: Plavsic was sentenced to 11 years' imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague, for persecution, a crime against humanity.]
Conversely, the Serbian genotype preserves mankind's highest instincts, according to Radoslav Unkovic, director of the Establishment for the Historico-cultural Heritage of the Serbian Republic. Writing in the newspaper of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party, he observed that "even in the gravest and darkest times, we have never lost our cultural tradition and the genetic impulse towards civilisation".
These examples of biologistic rhetoric are among a number collected by Ivan Colovic, a Belgrade anthropologist who has taken an interest in the florid language of nationalism. It is a rich vein to work. Among the contributions to Serbian folk-genetics is one from a correspondent for the newspaper Vojska Krajina (Krajina Army), published in the Croatian border region controlled by Serbian secessionists. When the reporter and his companions arrives at a refugee camp, the children "spontaneously and unexpectedly" mount a cultural programme for the visitors. The highlight is a song, supposedly of their own composition: "We have donned the khaki uniform / To defend the village where we were born / Smokovic, place where we first saw the light of day / We will not let you fall into the hands of the Ustasha / Oh you fascists, your mother is wretched / You will not forget Captain Dragan."
Not only do these children, one of whom is only five years old, speak the language of their elders, but they have instinctively adopted the rhythm of their ancestors. The song is in the decasyllabic meter typical of nineteenth-century Serbian epic verse. Yet the refugee children "have no idea what a decasyllable is, nor are conscious of having used it when they composed this song, it is innate in them, inscribed in their genetic code".
It appears that spontaneous demonstrations remain a feature of formerly communist countries, rather as the Blessed Virgin Mary is wont to make regular appearances in Catholic ones. Post-communist propagandists have an unprecedentedly wide repertoire of images and devices on which to draw. The Vojska Krajina correspondent has contrived to link the rhetoric of the Second World War anti-fascist struggle to an explicitly Serbian tradition of patriotic culture; one whose continuity is preserved in the genes. There could be no clearer illustration of the way in which the idea of the gene can be used to dress the Romantic concept of racial character in contemporary scientific terms.
An obvious objection to this example is that it may be no more than a rhetorical conceit, which the author does not intend to be taken literally. But the distinction between literal and figurative is probably not a meaningful one in such circumstances. Any nation at war is likely to succumb to a regime of authoritarian hysteria, in which the questioning of any expression of patriotism is regarded as unpatriotic. Even to consider whether such a claim is literal or figurative would count as questioning, and therefore a disloyal act. The result is rhetorical hyperinflation.
There is also an apparently endless supply of belief systems which refer to biological notions and which therefore appear, at least in the eyes of their sympathisers, to mediate between science and other domains of discourse. Another example from Serbia suggests that pseudo-science may be a useful device for obscuring the distinction between biology and culture, and for reifying nationalistic myth as physiological reality. Like Radovan Karadzic, Jovan N. Strikovic is a psychiatrist and a poet. Drawing upon Jung's idea of archetypes, Strikovic claims that the "collective mind" of a nation bears physical, heritable traces of great historical events:
According to a phylogenetic law, the psychic structure of the personality also preserves the mental imprint of ancestors, in the same manner as its anatomical substrate. When a nation attains a certain level of spiritual development, the personalities which have marked their epoch reappear; it is not a matter solely of a 'metaphysical' substance, but of a concrete and physical substrate present in the central nervous system of the members of a nation because the ancestors have undergone a 'psychic trauma and a torture', consisting of a cerebral excitation touching them in the same way as the collectivity, and have created a mental engram in the form of a material imprint.
So there we have the assurance of an intellectual, his windy assertions of physical substance attempting to cover up his total lack of empirical substance, that the ethnic character of a people is biologically transmitted. And if ethnic character as a whole is heritable, why not the propensity to compose verse in decasyllables? Is that any more improbable than the proposition, popular among the Bosnian Serb militiamen on the hills overlooking Sarajevo, that the city is the aggressor and its besiegers are the victims? Like Pavao Rudan, Strikovic offers a mechanism by which history leaves its mark on biology. But under the all-consuming imperative of blind loyalty, it becomes irrelevant whether an intellectual is constructing falsifiable hypotheses, or spouting mumbo-jumbo.
Surrounded by the war hysteria of Belgrade, Ivan Colovic has published an Orwellian satire in which he quotes a brochure for a fictitious book entitled 'A Pure Serbia - New Vade-mecum of Eugenics', published by the imaginary 'Military Institute of Ethnohygiene', promising "everything you need to know about Serbian ethnic hygiene". "The authors of this indispensable book are eminent ethnogeneticists, ethnopathologists, craniologists, anthropogeographers, migrationists, sappers, aviators and artillerymen." Its contents are in the spirit of the genuine quotations Colovic appends; from contemporary Serbian nationalists, on the "mystery of blood"; from Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, on "war, the only hygiene of the world", and of course from Hitler's Mein Kampf, on racial purity.
Colovic's various examples establish that biologistic race concepts are part of the Serbian nationalist imagination. Biljana Plavsic's remarks about the genetic defectiveness of Bosnian Muslims are particularly reminiscent of Nazism. But the prospect of an Orwellian eugenic apparatus exists only in the realm of parody. It implies a coherent totalitarian ideology which simply does not exist in the post-communist world. The techniques of totalitarianism may be extensively employed, from control of the media to "spontaneous demonstrations", but they are part of an array of options which can be adopted, combined or discarded as the situation appears to demand. The result is an oxymoronic kind of regime, in which totalitarian methods co-exist with liberal ones. Like Stalin and Hitler, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia controls his people through his control of the media. Unlike the great dictators, however, he permits the existence of a few dissident organs; and of small liberal dissident groups like Colovic's Belgrade Circle. Race science is just one of a number of discourses which are pressed into service at various points. There is not, however, anything comparable to the totalising Nazi vision of politics as "applied biology". Biological race concepts are less powerful than hitherto, but more insidious.
The political potential of genuine science like Pavao Rudan's studies becomes apparent when it is compared with the pseudo-science of a Plavsic or a Strikovic. As scientific discourse, it exists within a framework that allows the investigation of at least part of its claims to truth. That framework also crosses national and political boundaries, albeit unevenly. As a reflection on politics, human biological diversity studies may encourage an appreciation of complexity; of the heterogeneity within an ethnic group, or the distinction between genetic inheritance and the sense of ethnic identity.
They may also make more or less explicit political observations. The Derdap study, for example, refers to "generations which freed themselves without prejudice from 'ethnic purity'". The region, the researchers suggest, shows evidence of longstanding "ethnic symbiosis", which is "only one of a series of changes which, both in the social and biological context, refreshes human communities and opens the way for new ethnobiological laws". Whatever these might be, and however elliptical the remarks, it seems clear that the authors are favouring the idea of diversity, and opposing it to the suspect notion of purity. Change refreshes; purity is associated with prejudice.
The more that biological diversity research interweaves itself with history, geography and other disciplines, the more it involves itself with the essential ingredients of the Romantic race concept. These integrated studies have the potential to appropriate blood and soil, very belatedly, on behalf of the Enlightenment. They may assert that, yes, forests and mountains may shape a people, but no, there is nothing about those influences which - in theory at any rate - is beyond the scope of rational inquiry. Conversely, however, such studies may be influenced by Romantic ideas, or may be appropriated to Romantic causes. Or, more likely, they may incorporate a variety of such influences and inclinations.
A case in point is a collection entitled 'Genetic and Population Studies in Wales', edited by Peter S. Harper and Eric Sunderland, and published by the University of Wales Press in 1986. It arose from the work discussed in the two preceding chapters on the genetics of Welsh Gypsies, in which Harper collaborated with E. Mair Williams; one of the accounts discussed earlier is included in the volume.
The first chapter, written by E.G. Bowen and published after his death, considers the relationship of land and people. It points out that, roughly speaking, Wales is a rectangle with two salient features, the peninsulas at the northern and southern ends of the country. These, Bowen asserts, were vital in bringing Wales its 'Mediterranean' population. He goes on to point out that Wales has no natural focus where a central authority could develop: draw diagonals across the rectangle, and their intersection is roughly where the major valley ways arise, but it is also near the peak of Pumlumon. Instead, the accessibility of the southern plain left it open to Anglo-Saxons and Normans, who were then able to penetrate into the Welsh heartland along the valleys which open onto the lowlands. This resulted in the "settlement of strong Alpine and Nordic elements". The high moorland of the interior provided a refuge for aboriginal types: early physical anthropological studies indicated a close similarity between the skulls of people in the Pumlumon area and the Palaeolithic specimens found in France and Spain.
Much later, with the industrial revolution, the railways brought migrants from other parts of Britain to the coalfields bordering the northern and southern shores. This increased the divergence between a heterogeneous, economically dynamic, English-speaking periphery and a core that was homogeneous but declining. The opposition between Inner and Outer Wales is the fundamental principle of the book, which is chiefly concerned with 'Welsh' Wales and the nature of 'Welshness'.
In this, as Eric Sunderland acknowledges in his overview, it stands squarely in the tradition established by Herbert John Fleure, the founding father of Welsh biological anthropology. In 1904, Fleure arrived at the University College in Aberystwyth, where, aptly and significantly, he later occupied a chair in geography and anthropology. He was a socialist, and criticised the racist political movements that arose between the world wars. But his socialism seems to have been of the William Morris variety, rooted in a romantic view of his native Guernsey as an ideal egalitarian and co-operative community. Its virtues, he felt, were the product of mankind's natural instincts; he mistrusted the possibility of human progress through conflict. The militancy of the South Wales industrial workers, numbers of whom adhered to a Marxist view of class struggle, must have been profoundly alien to him.
He certainly regarded the industrial populations of the Principality as alien to Wales. Fleure did not object to the concept of race, only to what he saw as its political misuse. (Similarly, he believed in the principles of eugenics, but objected to the class bias he perceived in the Eugenics Society.) He sought out his research subjects in the rural regions, interested only in the identification and description of the "real" Welsh. This population, pure and traditional, might perhaps be expected to preserve the naturally benign instincts of humanity in an uncorrupted state.
At the heart of Wales, on the high moorland of the Pumlumon region, Fleure detected what he believed to be physical similarities between living people and the Palaeolithic remains found in France and Spain. These, according to one contemporary popular account, included "heavy brow-bridges [sic], low and sloping foreheads, massive and retreating lower jaw, all characteristic of Neanderthal man". In a chapter on ABO blood group frequencies among the "indigenous population", I. Morgan Watkin, one of the doyens of Welsh genetic studies, notes that B levels are consistently raised in moorland areas. They are at their highest right in the centre of the country. Interpreting this as evidence of ancientness, Watkin also refers to a Scottish study which found that the B gene is much more common in the vicinity of megalithic monuments.
He also suggests that the traces of "ancient mariners" may remain, in the form of an ABO distribution similar to those found in various Mediterranean islands, the "White Mediterraneans" of North Africa, and sundry locations from Iceland to the Caucasus. This interpretation perpetuates the notion of a Mediterranean dimension to Welshness, once taken for granted as part of the tripartite European race-concept - Mediterranean, Alpine, Nordic - to which Bowen alludes in his opening chapter. Elsewhere, however, these have succumbed to a combination of political and theoretical revisionism. Politically, they are inherently suspect, while more recent techniques of cranial analysis result in divisions which do not correspond to the traditional scheme, causing the Alpine class to disappear altogether. Science once invested skulls with its fullest confidence; in the post-war era, the notion that peoples with similar crania must be related is apt to invite derision. "There is no reason to believe that a 'Mediterranean', 'Dinaric', or 'East Baltic' subject in Wales will possess the same residual heredity as the similarly typed individual in Warsaw," observed Stanley M. Garn in 1962, echoing the comments of Tadeusz Bielicki that were noted in Chapter 2. "Faced with 'Australoids' marching over the South Pole to Patagonia, 'Semites' migrating to Papua, 'Koreans' to the Kalahari ... most of us gave up the typological approach in sheer exhaustion."
Speaking of the Inner Welsh as a whole, Fleure noted "a remarkable persistence of type". Convinced of the fundamental stability of physical characters, he used them as the foundation of his race concept, and was unable to accept Franz Boas' demonstration that skull form could be plastic. Thanks in large measure to Boas' work, blood groups came to be regarded as replacements for bones, rather than complements to them. Morgan Watkin, however, sought to investigate whether the ABO system supported the earlier findings of physical anthropology. He concludes that, broadly speaking, it does. Other contributions also seek to incorporate more modern techniques into the Fleurian tradition. R.L.H. Dennis affirms earlier anthropometry using computers and updated statistical methods. As Eric Sunderland notes, Fleure's influence has induced a number of researchers to base their studies on the opposition between Inner and Outer Wales, including Sunderland himself.
This preoccupation with the "real" Welsh obviously resonates with the idea of the "true Gypsies": E. Mair Williams' decision to exclude Irish Travellers from her research population can thus be seen as consistent with the Fleurian tradition. Within the conceptual framework of the book, it is not regarded as problematic - indeed, Sunderland highlights her work as a demonstration that Gypsies are not an entirely isolated population, but have many links to both the Welsh and the English. Yet, as we saw in Chapter 10, Thomas Acton argued that her conceptual scheme derived from the outmoded beliefs of scientific racism.
There are certainly critical elements in the volume, most notably in M.T. Smith's account of a blood group survey on the island of Anglesey. In this, the first blood group study to examine systems other than ABO and Rhesus in the north of Inner Wales, Smith questions some of the assumptions on which Fleurian research has been based. He argues that Anglesey too has a long history of migration, in both directions, and suggests that some sections of society may be more prone to migration than others. It is not necessary to go along with him as he flirts with the idea that this might be genetically influenced, or that blood groups vary between social classes, to accept his argument that the population samples may be biased. The most striking instance arises from the Fleurian tradition's dependence on surnames as indicators of kinship and descent, which excludes married women from the population samples.
Overall, however, the tone is expressed by Frances Lynch's contribution, in which she alludes to the doubts now abroad concerning the traditional view of population movement as an endless series of invasions. The debate has centred on the so-called Beaker Folk, known for their round barrows and round heads. In 1977, a British archaeologist named Stephen Shennan advanced the argument that the beakers and associated objects were status symbols. The Beaker Folk were a class rather than a race.
Lynch herself seems to lean towards the traditional explanation, noting the association between round heads and Beaker graves in the Rhineland and France as well as England. Her account of archaeology and fossil remains also alludes to the people who lived in the territory before the advent of farming; probably short, with long narrow heads and marked brow ridges: "We may guess that their colouring was dark." A fair guess, given the preponderance of darkness among extant humans, but here its effect is to imply a primordial quality to the association between the land of Wales and the short, dark, narrow-headed people of the Welsh stereotype.
Harper and Sunderland's collection contrasts markedly with 'Archaeology and Language', written by Colin Renfrew, who is not only a Lord and a Professor but the Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. Though Cardiff and Cambridge are only two hundred miles apart, and the books appeared within a year of each other, they appear to belong to different conceptual continents. In his discussion of the Beaker Folk controversy, Renfrew barely mentions the evidence of the round skulls, except to dismiss it. The reason is clear from his introduction: "Craniometry ... has in recent years enjoyed about as much prestige in scientific circles as phrenology ... Racial anthropology - Rassenkunde to use the German term - has been convincingly discredited."
Renfrew acknowledges that newer techniques of measurement are being developed, but makes it clear that he doubts their usefulness. He is more positive about genetics; and indeed has subsequently prophesied a "brilliant future" for DNA studies, looking forward to a "new synthesis" of archaeology, linguistics and genetics. A touch ironically for an archaeologist, his writing imparts a powerful message of progress; that the new is good and the old is bad. All but the most recent osteometry is tainted by racism; the 'classical' genetic markers such as blood groups are better; most interesting of all are the new molecular techniques which examine DNA directly. Also progressive is the shift from biological to social explanations, epitomised by Shennan's argument that the Beaker Folk were not an ethnic group, but elite members of various groups. The underlying theme is of a movement away from race and racism.
The Cardiff volume conveys an equally powerful message of conservatism. It is not reactionary; it does not consider contemporary ideas and rail against them. But its presiding spirit is that of respect for tradition, and the classically conservative inclination to build upon what already exists, rather than to demolish and start afresh.
Metropolitan sensibilities may favour the explanation that these people are simply provincial and out of touch. This argument, however, can be rejected on the grounds of its shallowness as well as its snobbery. The book's character derives from a commitment which goes deeper than science. It is prefaced by a quotation from the poet R.S. Thomas, held in awe not just for his talent but for the intransigence of his conservative nationalism. This is a conservative Welsh nationalist text, proud of its concern for ethnic purity and the terrain in which that purity may still be found; respectful not only of the elders who contribute chapters to the work, but also of the ideas that formed them in turn.
As is clear from the accomapnying maps, showing the area where most people can speak Welsh, Inner Wales still extends over much of the Principality. To analyse and record it is to help preserve it; even where the preservative effect is not as obvious as in the chapter 'Welshness and Disease', which considers the illnesses to which the "real" Welsh are predisposed. There is a commonality of interests between this tradition of science and that of the culturally conservative strain in Welsh nationalism. Both are Romantically concerned with the relation between a remote land and an original people; both gaze inward, away from the urban and heterogeneous towards the rural and the homogeneous; to the past.
In the period since 'Genetic and Population Studies in Wales' appeared, the contrast between Romantic cultural nationalism and mainstream political nationalism has been heightened by the development of transnational European institutions. Political activists of the smaller nations of Europe increasingly see European integration as the best hope for fulfilling their national ideals. At a pragmatic level, the lesson has been driven home by large disbursements of European Community regional funds to peripheral areas. At a theoretical one, the framework of the European Union has been welcomed as the solution to the great traditional objection to independence, that small nations are incapable of standing alone. Nowadays intellectuals from Scotland to Slovenia talk a new language of nationalism; an "inclusive" variety which understands national well-being to depend on interconnection with the rest of the world, not isolation. In this new perspective, it becomes easier to see interweaving - of industries, of culture, of genes - as the means by which identity is developed, not destroyed.
Romanticism is incurable, however. Militant groups inspired by atavistic visions are a perennial feature of the nationalist fringe. The Scottish Nationalist Party was the unwilling host to a faction called Siol na Gael, Seed of the Gael, which sought to discover the Celtic warriors within unemployed urban youths, and dress them in paramilitary uniform. Meibion Glyndwr, the Sons of Glendower, became famous for burning down Inner Welsh houses bought by outsiders as holiday homes. This tactic emphasised the class dimension of the issue, and sympathy for the property-owners was diminished by the widespread feeling that houses should fulfil local needs rather than the taste of the distant rich for luxuries. But the essentials of the conflict are clearer in those cases where permanent residents have been warned to leave. Both in Scotland and Wales, local people have taken to referring to incomers as 'white settlers', a post-colonial term which implies an attitude of superiority on the part of the settlers, and an identification with the oppressed on that of the locals. Ironic as the expression is, it may be used to make the point that for the Seed and Son strain of nationalism, this is at bottom a matter of race.
Heritage is scarcely the exclusive preserve of nationalism, however. When the BBC began work with Professor Steve Jones of University College London on a major series about genetics, they did not adopt the title of his book, 'The Language of the Genes', even though its ideas are the basis of the series. The BBC called it 'Origins', because everybody is fascinated by where they came from. Although the uses of genetic diversity are numerous, the popular imagination responds to the one that deals with ancestry.
A similar sensibility was evident in an earlier documentary about genetic diversity, 'Sir Walter's Journey', broadcast in 1994 as part of the 'Horizon' series. Sir Walter Bodmer's journey takes him from London to Pembrokeshire, to Cumbria, and finally to the Orkney Isles, north of Scotland and beyond the Celtic fringe. It also takes him back in time, his quest being to find genetic traces of people more ancient than the Ancient Britons. We are fascinated by aboriginal people even if they are not our direct ancestors.
The film, produced by Tim Haines, is unusually charming for a science documentary. It deploys a whole bag of cinematic tricks to evoke, very successfully, the various forms of memory and the ways in which they combine in our imaginations. To introduce the notion of genetic inheritance, we are shown old ciné footage of a younger Sir Walter and members of his family, his commentary making the reassuringly familiar point that relatives tend to resemble each other. This is the footage that all ideal families should have, and for that reason we are touched by other people's home movies, once they have acquired the patina of age.
The ciné device is used throughout the film, the black and white sequences giving the journey the aura of a childhood holiday, and Sir Walter's colleagues the look of a family. This is entirely authentic in the cases of two of them, his wife Julia and daughter Helen. At the level of a shared culture, the idea of a knight on a quest across the ancient places of Britain has an obvious romantic resonance - even if he does it in a Range Rover. The sights he witnesses on route - a stately home in Wales; traditional sports such as Cumberland wrestling and a kind of mob football in the Orkneys called the Ba' - speak to the sense of national heritage that has developed so greatly in recent years. These signs of tradition, of collective memory, are contrasted with the homogenisation represented by motorway service stations.
Before Sir Walter leaves the metropolis, however, he has to attend to some pressing business. He must establish that the study of genetic diversity need not be tainted by racism, and indeed may oppose it. He is seen in a Greek Orthodox church speaking to Father Andreas and his son Father Constantine, two Cypriot priests. Father Andreas reveals that he lost two other sons to thalassaemia, the hereditary blood disease which resembles sickle cell anaemia, but affects Mediterranean rather than black African people. Sir Walter tells his hosts that different types of mutation cause the disease in different areas. Greek and Turkish Cypriots share a thalassaemia variant with each other, but not with people from Greece or Turkey.
"Couldn't you prove biologically that we are descended from Ancient Greeks?" asks Father Constantine. Sir Walter replies that the common mutation implies a common descent for all Cypriots, from an indigenous population who were there before the Greeks: "From a biological point of view, you are one people."
This is received with wry amusement. "It is news to us!" observes Father Andreas. "Maybe you can solve our political problems as well," suggests Father Constantine. "I hope so," answers Sir Walter, "because it's so common that people have a common biological heritage, and yet it's the cultural difference on top that causes them to have the conflict." He seems to imply that biological truth is more fundamental than cultural truth, not just to biologists but to society as a whole.
It is not at all surprising that the Ancient Greek question was uppermost in Father Constantine's mind. Greece's heritage is, naturally enough, a source of infinite pride; by the same token, Greeks are vulnerable to invidious comparisons between the accomplishments of Ancient Greece and the undistinguished record of the modern state. In a pseudo-academic variation on the commonest form of insult in the world, Greek-baiters of an especially malicious bent are prone to question the modern Greeks' ancestry.
A sustained effort on these lines appeared as an anonymous "profile" of the Greeks in the London Sunday Telegraph , during a period in which Greece occupied the presidency of the European Community: "The world must nod dumbly at the proposition that in the veins of the modern Greek, with his dark glasses, car-phone and phantom olive groves attracting EC subsidies, there courses the blood of Achilles." To sustain the heavy hand of invective, the essay went back to the 1830s to cite the opinion of the Austrian historian Jacob Philip Fallmerayer that modern Greeks contain "not a drop of pure Greek blood"; further on, it claimed that "the Greeks today are a mixture of Slavs, Turks, Greeks, Bulgars, Albanians, Vlachs, Jews and Gipsies". The following week, a trenchant rebuttal from the Greek ambassador appeared on the letters page, pointing out that Fallmerayer was not the only Austrian to have been inspired by a similarly Romantic race concept. Rejecting any racial basis for Greekness, he drew upon the ancient authority of Isokrates, who proclaimed that "we consider Greeks those who partake in our culture".
Wisely, however, Sir Walter has avoided this Balkan quagmire. The first stop on his progress around Britain is in Wales' southern peninsula. Pembrokeshire is crossed by the Landsker line, marked on the ground only by the ruins of fortifications, but enduring in the division of the county into the Welsh-speaking villages of the north, and a southern region known as 'Little England beyond Wales'. Its character derives from Norman settlement; Sir Walter discusses this in Picton Castle, a Norman edifice, where he compares the appearance of the present occupant to the ancestral portraits on display.
The main point he wishes to make in this region concerns not the Normans, but the Flemings. These people were used by the English monarchy as a mobile human buffer, most of them being transferred from the Tweed by Henry I in 1108. They had helped keep out the Scots; now they were to perform the same function against the Welsh. (The Serbs of Krajina were likewise originally deployed as a frontier garrison.) Today, the Norman legacy is visible, as shots of Picton Castle's Norman arches illustrate. Sir Walter argues, however, that conventional history is unable to detect the traces of the Flemings, which persist only in gene frequencies. History is therefore incomplete without genetics. The images of the castle and the ancestral portraits suggest that genes must be readmitted to our notion of heritage, already so densely packed with historical baggage.
The case for readmission turns on whether the race concept will not inevitably slip back in with the genes. When science is popularised, it naturally begins to merge with everyday speech and ideas. In Cumberland, Sir Walter searches for Norse influence, visiting a primary school along with a pair of men dressed in Viking costumes, who demonstrate the use of spear and shield. Taking his lead from research by the Newcastle-based population geneticist Derek F. Roberts, which discovered children who bore a closer genetic resemblance to Norwegians than to their English neighbours, Sir Walter asks the class if any of them are of Viking stock. "There's a nice blond-headed lad," he observes. Within a matter of minutes, the putative Norse ancestors have been translated into fair-haired warriors. The Nordic type appears to be raising his blond head.
Sir Walter, of course, does not see it like that. But the difference between a convenient generalisation and the notion of type may be less clear to a lay person than it is to a scientist. In attempting to communicate with lay audiences, population geneticists may inadvertently revive ideas that remain latent in popular notions of human variation. Similar processes may also develop as mediators such as journalists or television producers become involved. They will inevitably be less tightly bound by scientific rigour, and will be more inclined to draw upon non-scientific traditions in order to tell their stories.
So far, population genetics has yet to capture the imagination of the media in a major way. But 'Sir Walter's Journey' is not the only indication that the idea is beginning to be grasped. One curious example appeared in Le Figaro Magazine (the publication which began as a vehicle for the Nouvelle Droite guru Alain de Benoist, as described in Chapter 8). The cover of the 25 September 1993 issue featured the face of a man with hair and beard caked in mud. The headline read: "Exclusive! We have met the Etruscans". Inspired by the work of Alberto Piazza, who co-wrote the History and Geography of Human Genes with Paolo Menotti and Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the magazine gave an archaeologically-inspired makeover to some of the 1 815 inhabitants of Murlo, a Tuscan village south of Siena.
Piazza and his colleagues had previously mapped the frequencies of 34 genes, all governing characteristics of blood. Using the statistical technique of principal components analysis, so important to IQ studies, they produced a series of genetic maps of Italy. The one based on the second principal component, representing eighteen per cent of the total variation, has a round genetic eye right in the middle. This, the researchers noted, corresponds to the area occupied by the Etruscans before 800BC. Etruria subsequently expanded and flourished, but vanished as the Roman Empire rose. The end of the story, for pupils in Latin classes of more recent times, was that nobody really knows what became of the Etruscan people. They did, however, enjoy a revival in mythical form during the Enlightenment, when the cult of Etruscomania, or etruscheria, claimed that Etruscans had matched the achievements of Greek civilisation on Italian soil.
The Italian geneticists offered a new kind of answer to the question of what happened to the Etruscans: that they are alive and well and living in Tuscany. According to the headline of a Newsweek report of Piazza's research, a quote from Cavalli-Sforza, "The Genes Tell The Whole Story".
To investigate the Etruscan question further, Piazza settled on Murlo, a geographically isolated village. Modern culture transcends geography, of course; in the summer of 1993, the local cinema was showing The Last of the Mohicans to the putative last of the Etruscans. Le Figaro emphasised how the people of Murlo were culturally indistinguishable from other late-twentieth-century Italians.
Professor Piazza appears in the magazine himself, achieving the remarkable feat of looking benign while holding a vial of blood in one hand and a skull in the other. Fifty years ago, such a pose might have symbolised the old and the new markers of human variation. Now, with the advance of molecular biology, bones serve as a source of ancient DNA. Sir Walter Bodmer's team took a similar approach in the Orkneys, comparing blood samples from living Orcadians with a few strands of DNA that his collaborator Erika Hagelberg succeeded in extracting from bones, 5000 years old, found at a burial site known as the Tomb of the Eagles. Both studies are part of a co-ordinated European research effort. Alberto Piazza chairs a network of 25 laboratories around Europe, which have received some funds from the European Union's Human Capital and Mobility Programme, under the title 'Biological History of European Populations'; Sir Walter Bodmer chairs the European Regional Committee of the global Human Genome Diversity Project, which operates under the auspices of the Human Genome Organisation.
The interview with Piazza contained the standard disclaimer, in the form of a quote unequivocally rejecting both the notion of racial hierarchy and the notion of race itself. But this statement was little more prominent than the admission, buried within excited tabloid prose, that the research was still in progress - and even when complete, could not actually prove a link between the people of Murlo and the Etruscans. Overwhelmed by a heady rush of Etruscomania, however, the magazine had made up its mind. Several pages of glossy colour photographs showed various residents of Murlo dressed in styles suggested by Etruscan art, with which they were juxtaposed.
The centrefold featured Aldo Teccioli, a pizza and pasta restaurateur with a figure to match, reclining voluptuously in a bathrobe and a gold chain. "Sometimes, the resemblance is hallucinatory," the headline claimed. Actually, Signor Teccioli was the only one of the models who bore a really strong resemblance to their prototype, in this case a statue from a sarcophagus. But the text uses his example to claim that the physical similarities between ancients and moderns are "indisputable". Had he been alive to read it, Herbert Fleure's heart would have been gladdened.
The moral here is not that such remarks reveal a secret racist agenda, smuggled in under the guise of non-racist population genetics. It is that even the most forthright of anti-racist disclaimers is not sufficient to control the full range of ideas that will be sent into circulation by this research discipline and its ramifications in the media. Some of these ideas, particularly the vaguer and more peripheral ones, will derive from, or speak to, older traditions of racial science. Some will reassert notions that disappeared along with the old race science, but will place them in a new conceptual framework.
No system will succeed in clearly separating old from new, folklore from science, myth from data; especially not in Europe, the fabulous continent of endless identities which are infinitely recombinant but largely incommensurable. Macedonia is not an aberration, just a particularly acute instance of incommensurable identities happening to occupy the same space at the same time. As an aggregate of ideas, Europe is only tenuously connected to any scientifically measurable reality. Hans Magnus Enzensberger expressed that truth when he appropriated the Shakespearian reference to the "seacoast of Bohemia", via a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann, for the title of an essay about the future of Europe. Although a medieval Bohemian ruler did briefly secure a toehold on the Adriatic shore, the essential impossibility of a maritime Bohemia allows the phrase to serve as a metaphor for the distance between reality and European national fantasies.
In the stabler regions of Europe, any new sense of biological heritage is likely to lead to theme parks rather than concentration camps. It is quite easy to imagine places like Murlo in which the gene frequencies of the inhabitants, suitably framed by costumes and tableaux, become tourist attractions. The people of Murlo and Kirkwall, the Orcadian capital, were united in their willingness to provide blood samples and their fascination with the findings. Keen to know where they came from and what makes them special, they helped science without payment (though the mayor of Murlo did hand out commemorative certificates). In the future, other towns and villages may grasp the commercial potential.
The poor prospects for a Fourth Reich should not obscure the fact that the data have political potential too. Piazza and his colleagues allude to a connection between population structure and politics in the History. They refer to the finding, by H. Le Bras and E. Todd, that family structure and political opinions are highly correlated. In north-eastern France, nuclear families prevail, and parties oriented towards the free market record their highest votes. The north-west is a stronghold both of patriarchal extended families, where Father's word is law, and authoritarian political parties. Social democratic tendencies are strongest in the south-west, home of the benevolent, non-patriarchal extended family.
France, like Gaul before it, is thus divided into three parts; Le Bras and Todd suggest that this division may be extremely old. The Italian geneticists endorse the idea, arguing that family structure is probably one of the most conservative aspect of culture, even antedating the language spoken. In fact, they suggest, it may be as old as the genes. They point out that the map drawn up by Le Bras and Todd to show the distribution of the socialist vote is similar to their own map of gene frequencies, which illustrates the division between Palaeolithic and Neolithic stocks in France. But they are clear that, although there would probably be a high correlation between socialist votes and the O blood group, the latter does not cause the former. O genes are simply a neutral indicator of population origins, and political tendencies are the result of the different cultural traditions which have prevailed in these populations.
Such a position rediscovers the idea dear to the heart of traditional race theory, that a population may have such a thing as a character, and the success of the Liberal Party in Yorkshire could be ascribed to short-headed Asiatic influence. By locating this phenomenon in the cultural sphere, however, it maintains the firebreak between modern population genetics and political controversy. Behaviour geneticists have no such inhibitions, however; indeed, they seem constitutionally disposed to polemic. Although none of them are likely to assert that O genes encourage voting for socialists, a link between genes and political views has become a favourite claim among behaviour geneticists, drawing upon comparisons of twins raised apart. It is probably only a matter of time before some psychologist devises an evolutionary theory of political outlook. Meanwhile in Japan, a folk genetic tradition maintains a widespread popular belief in the association between blood groups and personality, to be considered when forming intimate relationships and creating balanced teams in the workplace. It appears to have originated with the publication in 1916 asserting a link between academic success and type A, the commonest in Japan; the work was a reaction to contemporary Western claims of superiority for European blood groups.
Cavalli-Sforza, Menotti and Piazza do not make any observations about political opinion in their own country. Yet they are working at a time in which the differences between the populations of Italy are so marked that the continued existence of the Italian state is in question. Piazza and colleagues depicted their principal components analysis, in a paper entitled 'A genetic history of Italy', using a series of computer-generated colour maps. The first principal component, depicting the largest part of the variation in orange and red, revealed a distinctive area in the south which corresponded to Magna Graecia, the area dominated by the Greeks eight centuries before Christ. The second, the one which brings out the Etruscan eye, was rendered in shades of blue. The most notable feature of the third is a dark region in the north. The fourth map is a synthesis of the first three, in which Italy is divided roughly into northern, central and southern bands.
These do not correspond to features of antiquity, but they do bear a resemblance to contemporary political divisions. Elections held in 1994 showed a tripartite division in which the south was dominated by the self-styled post-fascists, the former communists maintained a belt of support in the centre, and the north fell to the right-wing populists of the Northern League. The ideologue of the latter movement, Professor Gianfranco Miglio, dwells on the distinctive characters of the peoples of Italy. Drawing upon the same fount of antique myth as Le Figaro Magazine, he embellishes his vision of northern glory by equating the region with Etruria. Southerners, he has said, are "anthropologically" different. The geneticists' maps illustrate his point.
Miglio, who prefers to locate the difference in climate rather than racial origins, might not feel inclined to draw upon such evidence himself, but when both scientists and society at large are preoccupied with ethnic diversity, such connections will undoubtedly be made. As it happens, there is a precedent in this instance. Another Northern League, the one founded by Roger Pearson, claimed that southern Italians are descended in part from African slaves imported by the Romans, whose miscegenation with them set the decline of their civilisation in train.
So far, population geneticists have been content to address the political implications of their work by rehearsing the standard scientific anti-racist line. They argue that by recording more details of the bewildering complexity of human variation, they can reinforce the scientific message of the meaninglessness of race. That has certainly been a key theme of the grand debate about race over the past half-century, which has been part of a still grander debate about human universals. But the newer era of nationalism and ethnic self-assertiveness has raised new political issues.
As far as the study of genetic diversity in Europe is concerned, these may not matter very much. If the initial ventures in Murlo and Kirkwall are anything to go by, European communities are likely to see such exercises as an interesting, even inspiring, exploration of their cultural heritage. They will be happy to have their ancestry examined within a scientific paradigm, confident that they and the investigators share broadly the same European culture. When scientists from the wealthy quarters of the world attempt to conduct studies among poor and isolated peoples, however, the reaction is likely to be very different. The lines of conflict are already clear, in the wake of an acrimonious controversy over the Human Genome Diversity Project.
Copyright Marek Kohn
