Circuits of Time: Enacting Postgenomics in Indigenous Australia

Abstract

Some Indigenous Australians have embraced developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) and epigenetic discourses to highlight the legacies of slow violence in a settler colonial context. Despite important differences between Indigenous and scientific knowledges, some Indigenous scholars are positioning DOHaD and epigenetics as a resource to benefit their communities. This article argues that time plays a crucial role of brokering disparate knowledge spaces in Indigenous discourses of postgenomics, with both Indigenous cosmological frames and DOHaD/epigenetics centring a circular temporal model. Drawing on interview data with scientists who work in Indigenous health, and broader ethnographic work in Indigenous Australian contexts where epigenetics is deployed, this article explores how different circularities of space and time become entangled to co-produce narratives of historical trauma. We use the concept of biocircularity to understand the complex ways that Indigenous and postgenomic temporalities are separated and connected, circling each other to produce a postcolonial articulation of postgenomics as a model of collective embodiment and distributed responsibility.