Implications of Racial/Ethnic Classification in the Hungarian Post-Genomic Medical Discourse

Abstract

Abstract Racial/ethnic categorization in medicine presents challenges for clinicians and patients alike. Challenges arise because racial/ethnic identities do not match with objective biological traits, and at the same time, these identities do have medical consequences in a racially and ethnically stratified society. Three major epistemological approaches – biological realism, eliminativism, and constructivism – dominate scientific theorization on the consequences of racial/ethnic categorization in medicine. In this paper, I present a case study of Hungarian medical genetic discourse that focuses on the possible applications of race/ethnicity regarding Roma and non-Roma patients. In applying the methods of constructivist grounded theory, I recorded and analysed 34 expert interviews with human geneticists between 2011 and 2015. In this paper, I argue that the constructivist understanding of medical diagnoses must be complemented with materialist sensitivity, thus making sense of the contingent nature of race/ethnicity as factors that contribute to medical understanding.