Abstract

In this paper, Dr Kriti Kapila describes the accidental discovery of a rare blood group in Bombay (today’s Mumbai) in 1951 and the centrality of sociological questions that framed its bioscientific understanding. Early and contemporary scientific understanding of the Bombay Phenotype - as the blood group came to be known, are shaped equally by biochemical knowledge as they are by tacit models of the kinship, heredity, and descent to explain its emergence and epidemiology. From the outset any science of human biology is inherently social, where the nature and unit of the social varies with context. The hinge concept in India is that of the descent group, or jati, often regarded as the building block of caste, and which discursively lies at the interface of the biological and the social. Exploring the overlaps between physiological theories of caste and scientific understanding of genetic variation, Dr Kapila investigates the popular understandings of scientific ideas of genetic difference and the scientisation of caste and marriage rules in and through genetic research. She explores the conjoined life of the biological and the social, and the physiological and the sociological, in India especially as it is made manifest in the concept of jati. She explores the gap between heredity and descent, or between bio-scientific and anthropological models of inheritance, to open up the old conundrum between caste and race in new ways.

Speaker

Kriti Kapila

Kriti Kapila is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Law at King’s India Institute and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. She is the author of Nullius: The Anthropology of Ownership, Sovereignty, and the Law in India (2022, HAU Books), which won the 2024 Bernard S Cohn Award. She is currently completing her second monograph on the social life of genetics and genomic medicine in India.

This seminar is jointly organised by the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and the King's India Institute. Lunch will be served at 12 pm and the event will start at 12:30 pm.

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