Accidents of Geography: Historicizing Genetic Cartographies of the Middle East

Over the past two decades, human geneticists have substantially embraced the concept of “biogeographical ancestry” to account for the racial, ethnic, and linguistic categories they use to analyze and interpret genetic difference. Understanding the ongoing role of these categories in human genetic research therefore requires attention to geneticists’ representations of geography, particularly the geographic maps they use to illustrate gene distribution and migration. This article examines how the methods and imagery of international genetic geography and its major evolutionary narratives have reinforced or refashioned nationalist practices of geography in the Middle East. Geneticists simultaneously conceptualize the region’s physical space as both a historical “crossroads” of human migration and the birthplace of distinct gene sequences and civilizations, alternately blurring and sharpening the boundaries between Europe and Asia. Focusing on genetic research in Turkey and Iran, this paper analyzes how geneticists draw and interpret geographic maps of the region while selectively erasing or highlighting state borders. These genetic maps negotiate between the idealized aims of international projects to reconstruct human evolutionary history, and the reality of practicing science under the constraints of nation-state politics.