Figuring Out Type 2 Diabetes through Genetic Research: Reckoning Kinship and the Origins of Sickness

Abstract

Genetic research on type 2 diabetes serves as a point of departure in this paper. Drawing together classic work in the anthropology of medical epistemologies and the recent revitalization of kinship studies, the paper has two main objectives: (1) further unsettling a portrait of biomedicine as having a single overarching epistemological orientation that locates the origins of disease squarely within individual human bodies; and (2) inviting further reflection and discussion about history, social structures and cultural norms as bona fide causes of disease. The paper shows that causal roles ascribed to history, social structures and cultural norms through genetic research on diabetes hinge on underscoring evolutionary ‘blood relations’ between people, as well as between human and ‘lower’ nonhuman beings. It is argued that type 2 diabetes has not thoroughly undergone geneticization, but, partly through genetic research, it has undergone greater medicalization. Despite broad consensus that ‘the environment’ is the root cause of increased type 2 diabetes incidence, proposed remedies still tend to privilege clinical management.