Overview

Ordinary Genomes is an ethnography of genomics, a global scientific enterprise, as it is understood and practiced in the Netherlands. Karen-Sue Taussig’s analysis of the Dutch case illustrates how scientific knowledge and culture are entwined: Genetics may transform society, but society also transforms genetics. Taussig traces the experiences of Dutch people as they encounter genetics in research labs, clinics, the media, and everyday life. Through vivid descriptions of specific diagnostic processes, she illuminates the open and evolving nature of genetic categories, the ways that abnormal genetic diagnoses are normalized, and the ways that race, ethnicity, gender, and religion inform diagnoses. Taussig contends that in the Netherlands ideas about genetics are shaped by the desire for ordinariness and the commitment to tolerance, two highly-valued yet sometimes contradictory Dutch social ideals, as well as by Dutch history and concerns about immigration and European unification. She argues that the Dutch enable a social ideal of tolerance by demarcating and containing difference so as to minimize its social threat. It is within this particular construction of tolerance that the Dutch manage the meaning of genetic difference.

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Ordinary Genomes is a timely, provocative, compelling account of how research in the genome sciences at once challenges the norms of national culture and is made meaningful through those norms. Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative In this important book Karen-Sue Taussig provides an excellent ethnographic account of the perceptions and practice of genetics in the Netherlands, and a classic anthropological argument for thinking comparatively as we approach twenty-first-century genomic medicine. --Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America Ordinary Genomes is a thoughtful, nuanced book. Through Karen-Sue Taussig's close and careful readings of geneticists at work in the multiple spaces of the laboratory, the field, and the clinic, we get an all-too-rare ethnographic look at genetics in practice. Here we have fleshed out, complex figures who negotiate diagnoses, reflect on their own practices and knowledge, and allow us to enter a professional life that is probably far different than we might have imagined. I cannot stress enough what an important achievement this is. --Michael Fortun, author of Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation

Author Information

Karen-Sue Taussig is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.

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