Transcript: Turkey at the Genetic Crossroads with Dr Elise Burton

[00:00:04] Hello everyone, welcome to our Imagining Turkey podcast series. I, Sertaç Sehikoğlu, am very happy to welcome you with our co host team, Meryem Zişan Köker and Hazal Aydın. Today we are hosting Dr. Elise Burton from the University of Toronto. She's an assistant professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto.

[00:00:32] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Her research explores the history of life sciences in the modern Middle East, particularly developments in genetics, evolutionary biology, physical anthropology and medicine during the 20th and 21st centuries. I have known Elise from her fellowship years at Newnham College University of Cambridge, and I think our conversation today will be inevitably based on your fantastic book, Genetic Crossroads published in 2021, and it received several awards, Independent Publisher Book Award [00:01:04] under the World History category and the Nikki Keddie Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association. And just to quickly summarize the book itself in a nutshell genetic crossroads draws on extensive archival research across the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. States using sources in Turkish, Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew, and the book reveals how Middle Eastern peoples, both scientists and research subjects, played a vital role in development of human genetics.

[00:01:37] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Western scientists often uncritically accepted and perpetuated nationalist historical narratives about migration, endogamy, and admixture from local scientists. When these narratives were taken up by the international scientific community, they then reinforced the social engineering created by ethnic nationalism in the broader region of the Middle East.

[00:02:00] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: And Dr. Burton, we're delighted to have you on the [00:02:04] show today to discuss this fascinating intersection of science, identity, and nationalism in the Middle East. 

[00:02:10] Dr Elise Burton: Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. 

[00:02:14] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: And we're very, very excited. And Elise, I found your book extremely relevant also to this podcast series, Imagining Turkey, as it lies in the intersections of pseudo scientific narratives and national myths.

[00:02:28] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: So that's the kind of angle that really, really excited us when we were reading your book. Let's start with asking you to elaborate a little bit more on the role of the study of human genetics in the construction of Turkish nationality. There is a consensus in Turkey that Turks are not racist and racism is not the problem.

[00:02:50] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Sorry, the racism is actually the problem of Western nations. So how does your work show or not the relevance, but the kind of discursive significance of racial hierarchies in the constitution of Turkish [00:03:04] national identity. 

[00:03:05] Dr Elise Burton: Okay, so this is a great question to start with because I'd like to acknowledge my debt here to some Turkish scholars who also helped me when I was beginning the research for this book.

[00:03:18] Dr Elise Burton: So, there's a sociologist named Murat Ergin and also a historian named Nazan Maksudyan who both did really pioneering work starting in the early 2000s to critique this exact notion you're talking about, that racism is not a problem in Turkish society and it doesn't have any connection to Turkish nationalist discourse.

[00:03:39] Dr Elise Burton: So they already started breaking this down through critical analysis of the history of Turkish physical anthropology. So they were looking at the early years of physical anthropology in the Turkish Republic. So they were focusing on what we would consider now the older fashioned versions of genetic science, which focus, for [00:04:04] example, on skull and bone measurements.

[00:04:06] Dr Elise Burton: Now that's a form of anthropology that we associate very closely with European colonial and racial sciences, right? And what Ergin and Maksudiyan wanted to show is that Turkish anthropologists themselves were participating in these sciences. And they were participating in such a way to show Europeans or to participate in a European debate about race science, which would position Turkish people as racially white.

[00:04:36] Dr Elise Burton: So one of their primary concerns in participating in race science was actually externally motivated. So there's no big divide between what Turkish scientists are doing—a so-called non-racial science or non-racially-motivated science—and what scientists outside of Turkey are doing, right?

[00:04:57] Dr Elise Burton: They're being, they're actively participating in really a global scientific practice. And so where [00:05:04] I built upon that was actually to extend that work, to look at how that early foundation of participation of Turkish physical anthropology. And extended into the newer technologies of genetic research. 

[00:05:22] Dr Elise Burton: And there's two major ways in which the legacy of that earlier physical anthropology science became attached to genetic science in Turkey. One was this continued preoccupation with the definition of Turks as a white people, to head off what had been these earlier discourses that Turks are perhaps “Mongoloid” or “Mongols”, Asians, “Yellow races” - that older, you know, what we now recognize as an offensive terminology, right?

[00:05:54] Dr Elise Burton: At the same time as they were trying to participate in that international discourse about the racial classification of the Turks, there's of course so much going on [00:06:04] internally within Turkey. There are what are perceived as threatening competing nationalist movements by minority groups in the new Republic of Turkey, right?

[00:06:15] Dr Elise Burton: And so at the same time as Turkish scientists are trying to participate in this external racial classification science—defined in terms of “white” Europeans, “yellow” Asian races, “black” African races— they're also concerned with defining the Turkish race as a homogeneous, national population.

[00:06:37] Dr Elise Burton: And so they're concerned about how to talk about Kurdish people, Armenian people, Arabic-speaking communities within Turkey itself. And in those early years of the Republic, those peoples are considered a threat to the stability of Turkey and its creation of a sovereign nation in the post-Ottoman period.

[00:07:01] Dr Elise Burton: So those are just some of the big contextual [00:07:04] issues that Turkish geneticists are grappling with. And they're very much aligned to the nationalist ideology and invested in making sure that the Turkish Republic succeeds in its goals to establish a sovereign state.

[00:07:20] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: I think in this I'm mostly referring to the section “Reinventing the Turk.” For those who want to get the book, page 47, that's a fantastic section. So yes, Zişan? 

[00:07:35] Meryem Zişan Köker: Following up on that, I just want to ask how have you, like what are some of the most compelling pieces of evidence like, can you give our listeners more examples of how you say this in the history of human genetic studies and how you, how have you demonstrated this in your work? 

[00:07:53] Dr Elise Burton: Okay, so I understand this to be a question about what kinds of source materials I used in writing the book, right? So for me the starting point was primarily [00:08:04] to look at historical scientific publications. So what I did in the beginning was I looked really closely at scientific journals that were published in Middle Eastern languages, but also in English, French, German, the real international scientific journals.

[00:08:20] Dr Elise Burton: And I looked closely at all of the things that were being published in relation to Middle Eastern communities. And how their anthropological characteristics and how their genetic characteristics were being studied and interpreted by all kinds of people. So I was looking at studies, both for example, by Turkish geneticists and anthropologists, but I was also looking at what British and American people were studying and noting that many of them were actually coming to different parts of the Middle East.

[00:08:51] Dr Elise Burton: So even people from as far away as Australia, became interested in studying different people across the Middle East, not only in Turkey, right, but also in Iran, in the Levant, in the Arabian Peninsula. And so [00:09:04] what I was trying to understand is what was it about these specific communities within the Middle East that all geneticists seem to be interested—what is it about them that, that make them interested in coming to this region in particular?

[00:09:20] Dr Elise Burton: And then how are they interacting with the scientists who actually come from these communities in some cases? So there I was looking first at these scientific publications and then trying to investigate specific scientists who come up over and over again, either because they're local scientists, Turkish, Arab Iranian scientists who are publishing extensively in this field, then who are they for example, co-authoring publications with?

[00:09:50] Dr Elise Burton: Who are they acknowledging in the acknowledgements to their research papers? So then it became about tracing networks of people who are involved in these studies. In some cases, I was lucky enough to find that they had left behind [00:10:04] actual memoirs. In some cases, I was lucky to find that they had left behind correspondence in different archives.

[00:10:12] Dr Elise Burton: And in a few rare cases, they had even left behind oral histories. But these were sort of patchier sources than the scientific documents. So you'll note when you read the book that depending on what materials I was able to find, in some cases, I'm able to put together rather personal narratives. I'm able to recover some of the personal motivations of some of the scientists who were involved in this work.

[00:10:34] Dr Elise Burton: In other cases, I'm having to draw more on what we'd call circumstantial evidence, right? Sometimes I'm able to understand what these scientists were doing solely on the basis of what was written about them by other people, and from their own scientific publications. So we're able to see in some chapters, I can reconstruct really personal stories of engagement

[00:10:58] Dr Elise Burton: between scientists with each other. Sometimes in certain chapters, I'm able to recover really serious [00:11:04] disagreements between scientists who are sort of fighting with each other over who will get credit, who has the right to study certain communities, and in other cases, I'm trying to just patch together 

[00:11:15] Dr Elise Burton: based on the language that's used in scientific publications, which if you read genetics publications, to the uninitiated, they might seem very opaque, right? There's a language that seems extremely formulaic. And if you're not familiar with the way that scientists write, it's hard, maybe not to take it at face value.

[00:11:32] Dr Elise Burton: I have the benefit of, as an undergrad, I was actually trained as a geneticist before I moved into the history of science proper and so I have a certain familiarity with how genetic studies get put together. I'm able to investigate even these sources which seem very opaque, you know, scientific papers are short, they're put together in a very formulaic way, but I was able to turn a really critical eye on those, and detect where the scientists were actually making specific choices that other scientists [00:12:04] might not necessarily have made.

[00:12:05] Dr Elise Burton: And try to pick apart those choices and show to the reader how those choices might have been influenced by certain kinds of material circumstances or ideological circumstances that the scientists were working in.

[00:12:18] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Thank you. Yeah. Now, Hazal Aydin.

[00:12:20] Hazal Aydın: Thank you. I want to ask a bit of a longer question regarding the relationship between nationalism, colonialism and sovereignty which is, I think, it's still a powerful dilemma. So you argue that the history of genetic science and pseudoscientific racial classifications were appropriated by Middle Eastern intellectuals in collaboration with Western scientists.

[00:12:44] Hazal Aydın: And you also state that it is like intimately tied to this national self-determination and national sovereignty at the time. So I think that's a very powerful dilemma that is also the remnant of colonialism and its impact on nationalism. [00:13:04] So these scientific paradigms are built on Western colonial biases, but also Middle Eastern elites and scientists were trying to fit into this framework, to claim national sovereignty and freedom.

[00:13:18] Hazal Aydın: Often at the expense of minorities within the newly emerging nation states. So I'm kind of echoing others here, but your analysis seems to see colonialism and nationalism as these co-constitutive projects. So how would you reflect on this paradox? To this argument?

[00:13:38] Dr Elise Burton: Yes, this is a good question. And I would like to also say that in making this kind of paradoxical observation, I'm certainly not the first one to make this observation. I think many other scholars, including postcolonial scholars of different topics have, have noticed this problem, that there's a certain kind of entanglement between nationalist ideologies and colonial ideologies, and they can't always neatly [00:14:04] be picked apart.

[00:14:05] Dr Elise Burton: And there is, there is an uneasiness to this. There's, there's a discomfort that actually emerged for me even in the process of researching and writing this book, because on the one hand one thing that I would like to do, as a historian of science of the Middle East… The history of science has traditionally been, you know, rather a Eurocentric field, especially if we're looking at the emergence of this field in the very time period I'm writing about, which is sort of the mid-20th century and later.

[00:14:39] Dr Elise Burton: There's this very strong perception that the… That science and particularly a modern science, like genetics, has really nothing to do with a place like the Middle East, that if genetic science is done in this region now, it's only because scientists there are sort of copying what has been done by Western scientists.

[00:14:58] Dr Elise Burton: And as a historian of science, I really wanted to foreground the work of Middle Eastern scientists [00:15:04] and show that, no, in fact, from the very beginning of the history of genetics, Middle Eastern scientists have been involved in the formation of the science and they made real contributions, and there was a process of erasure within the historiography of science that made it possible to imagine that people from this region were somehow not part of professional international science.

[00:15:27] Dr Elise Burton: So on the one hand, my book tries to really foreground these people as the main actors and agents. On the other hand, the kind of science that they're participating in is, you know, deeply problematic, right? The fact that they are entangled in many ways with racializing ideologies of postcolonial nationalism, that they are engaged in scientific work, which was mobilized for the exclusion or further marginalization of already marginalized groups.

[00:16:01] Dr Elise Burton: That's very troubling, right? So, [00:16:04] on the one hand, you want to center these, these actors who in many cases were vocally anti-colonial, right? Turkish Republican nationalism itself was motivated to push back against European colonialism and imperialism in certain ways. And that was also true of the post-colonial nationalisms of Arab states and of Iran.

[00:16:25] Dr Elise Burton: This desire to assert national sovereignty, to oppose European intervention and later American intervention in this region. But again the kind of nationalist ideologies that were mobilized against colonialism, they were themselves exclusionary. And again, so we see this in the studies of many other scholars on different topics.

[00:16:47] Dr Elise Burton: And so, I see my work as just contributing to that broader literature about the entanglement, the co-constitution, as you say, between colonialism and nationalism.

[00:16:57] Hazal Aydın: Fascinating. And I don't have an answer to this. It's, I think it is like a [00:17:04] conundrum. 

[00:17:05] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: To be honest, when I'm reading your book, I'm also connecting so many dots and remembering so many formal history texts that we were told back in the days. And, and it's kind of helping you to process all that information you were exposed to with a more scientific mind.

[00:17:24] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: So you are actually doing a lot of translation, like you said, the genetics texts might sound very vague to somebody who's not trained in that, that lingo. But you were still using a very kind of convincingly scientific language, doing the translation in a very smooth way, I guess. So, yeah. Zişan?

[00:17:45] Meryem Zişan Köker: Yeah, great conversation so far. But these questions and answers have made me curious. I wonder if you could tell us more about the particular connections or similarities you have observed in the formation of Turkish, Iranian, and maybe Israeli nationalism and how they have used [00:18:04] pseudoscience to support their nationalist myths.

[00:18:07] Dr Elise Burton: Okay. So it will be hard to talk about all three countries in a short time. And that's why I ended up writing what was a very long and dense book. But perhaps because I haven't talked about it yet, and you mentioned Israeli nationalism. I'll use this to try to connect the process through which I decided to write this entire book.

[00:18:28] Dr Elise Burton: So I personally actually come from a Jewish background. And in the course of some of my Jewish education, right, there was a big push, even as someone growing up in California, right, that Jews must identify with Israel or have an attachment to Israel as, as a homeland. And at the time that I was going through that experience, and this was the early 2000s, there was also a lot of kind of excitement about an emerging discourse of Jewish [00:19:04] genetics. So this was around the time that genetic studies had first come out on the Y chromosomes of Jewish men who were identified as, Cohens [priests].

[00:19:15] Dr Elise Burton: And so these were called the Cohen modal haplotype studies. And this was around the time when there was a lot of publicity around the idea that the connection of Jewish peoples around the world to an ancestral homeland in geographical Palestine was being heavily, sort of, promoted and talked about in the media.

[00:19:36] Dr Elise Burton: And by the time I went to university and was studying genetics even in my textbooks, there were references to these studies about kind of, the idea that a Jewish connection to the Middle East could be validated through genetic science. And this was becoming increasingly troubling to me as I, I was going through my undergraduate education both as a geneticist, but also someone who was taking classes in Middle Eastern history and becoming [00:20:04] familiar with this whole problem we were just talking about, nationalist discourse, and the notion that genetics could somehow support Zionist claims to Palestine and that Jews should support that kind of nationalist ideology because of something that was intrinsic to their own biological constitution. This was something that was, that was troubling to me. To me, it seemed like actually something that was co-constitutive with, in fact, anti Semitism, something that was deeply related to Nazi persecution and other forms of persecution of Jews was based on this predication, on this presumption that Jews have some intrinsic biological or racial identity.

[00:20:52] Dr Elise Burton: And this on the other hand was something that actually fueled Zionism, right, Israeli nationalism from its inception. And so I initially came to this project [00:21:04] with the idea that I wanted to explore this discourse about Jewish genetics and its connections to Zionist ideology. But the more research I did, the more I realized that this was part of a broader phenomenon of nationalism.

[00:21:21] Dr Elise Burton: Generally, that it was something that couldn't be pinned down only to an Israeli exceptionalism or Zionist exceptionalism. And because I feel like the, one of the problematic issues that sustains Israel as it is now, is this notion that it is truly exceptional. It's in the Middle East but not of the Middle East, or it doesn't have any parallels in any other historical condition.

[00:21:48] Dr Elise Burton: That I realized I wanted to write a book that wasn't only about Israel or about Jewish genetics. but would look closely at the kinds of nationalism that were emerging in the Middle East as a whole. And so there I was also trying to build off [00:22:04] of work that had already been done, for example, by Israeli and Palestinian scholars like Nadia Abu El-Haj, Nurit Kirsh, and other historians and anthropologists who had been trying to problematize this concept of Jewish genetics.

[00:22:17] Dr Elise Burton: And I thought my contribution here can be to really expand these studies and look at the history of genetic nationalism as a broader phenomenon in the Middle East. 

[00:22:30] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: But great job. Normally we, as scholars of the Middle East, we tend to do that kind of strong, deeply researched comparative work in later stages of our career, not early on, and definitely not in the PhD. And that was your PhD project that turned into the book, obviously. So, I know the context of Turkey, and that angle was very thoroughly studied, and I was genuinely impressed with your, by your language skills as well.

[00:22:59] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Hazal? 

[00:23:00] Hazal Aydın: Just a quick question. You kind of talked about this [00:23:04] a bit, what kind of parallels do you see in the Middle East among like different kinds of nationalism. What are the connections there? And can you reflect a bit on that?

[00:23:15] Dr Elise Burton: So there are some parallels that seem to be very clear at the beginning of the 20th century, but then diverge over time. So the main example that I, I, I look at very closely in my book is a parallel between the case of Turkey and the case of Iran. And there have already been many studies done in the history just of politics and nationalism generally that show strong parallels between the creation of the Turkish Republic and the creation of Pahlavi Iran The creation of Iran as a nation state as it emerges after the collapse of the Qajar Empire.

[00:23:55] Dr Elise Burton: And part of this is of course the timing, right? In the early 1920s as the old empires are falling apart and they're [00:24:04] reemerging in the form of Iranian and Turkish nation states. So in the early years of state formation for both Turkey and Iran, there's a real preoccupation with homogenizing the populations.

[00:24:18] Dr Elise Burton: So imposing, for example Turkish language instruction on all citizens of the Turkish Republic the pressure to disavow other kinds of identities whether those be religious or ethnic or other kinds of non-normative identities in the Turkish Republic. A similar process happens in Iran, right?

[00:24:39] Dr Elise Burton: There's a strong focus on disavowing Kurdish identity in Iran, just as there is in Turkey, but also other identities such as Turkmen or other tribal identities in parts of Iran, other, other languages are suppressed in Iran, just as they are in Turkey, in favor of the Persian language; and there's, of course, as I noted in the Turkish case, a racialist [00:25:04] aspect to that Iranian identity which, as I explained in the book, is about an Aryan identity.

[00:25:09] Dr Elise Burton: So, both of those things are being reinforced by the way that genetic research is done, both in Turkey and Iran for many decades. So, in both cases, there's a pressure to do genetic research in a way that does not highlight ethnically defined communities. There's a pressure to do this research solely for the purposes of medical research. This research is done out of blood banks. And so the kind of genetic characteristics that are being talked about for Turkish and Iranian populations are always talked about at the level of this national identity: an Iranian genetic profile or a Turkish genetic profile.

[00:25:48] Dr Elise Burton: And there's no recognition of the diversity of people residing in these countries. Now, this starts to shift very dramatically in Iran in the beginning of the 1970s. You see, in Iran, a new [00:26:04] interest in this idea of a genetic anthropology in which actually there should be genetic studies of specific ethnic groups, for example, Kurds, Armenians, Azeris, nomadic tribes that have been forcibly settled in Iran but still maintain distinct sort of cultural or ethnic identities.

[00:26:24] Dr Elise Burton: There's now a push in the early 1970s, and it carries through the 1979 revolution and continues afterward, an interest in looking at genetic diversity within Iran. And yet there, there's a way that they make that diversity seems safe, whereas previously it had been considered sort of dangerous or a possible grounds for supporting competing nationalist movements. There was, this was considered, previously like a threat to territorial integrity. Well, now there was a drive to actually study this ethnic diversity, but to characterize it as part of a family [00:27:04] of, of Iran, right? A new move toward a discourse of unity in diversity.

[00:27:10] Dr Elise Burton: Okay, now we don't ever really see this happen in Turkish genetics. So there's this early parallel which was motivated by kind of the same pressures or fears about territorial disintegration that just shifts to a different discourse in Iran, whereas that change never really happens within the Turkish context.

[00:27:31] Dr Elise Burton: But there's, that's just one example of, I think, some of the obvious parallels, but these parallels are not set in stone, and as, as changes in the international scientific discourses start to change, as changes in technology and internal conditions within these countries happen, those patterns that you see in the early history of genetics aren't fixed, and they do change in response to those other circumstances. 

[00:27:56] Meryem Zişan Köker: I think mine is the last question. And I would like to ask, how did you approach the writing process for such a complex and [00:28:04] multifaceted topic? Like, where did you start? How did you navigate this interdisciplinary terrain with all the historical archives and the scientific aspects?

[00:28:14] Meryem Zişan Köker: And you yourself is a scientist, but by training as we all understood, but still, how did you organize this project?

[00:28:22] Dr Elise Burton: Yes. So it was not a simple process. And there was a major change between what I wrote for my PhD and this book as it appears in this form. So when I was getting started on the project and I had to find a way to sort of narrow the scope to make it possible to ever be finished with it, right?

[00:28:42] Dr Elise Burton: So when I first started, I tried to focus actually only on three national contexts. So I focused on Israel, Turkey and Iran. And even though it wasn't my intent to never look or never consider genetic science in the Arab countries, I thought that I had to start by looking at just three, sort of [00:29:04] bounded national contexts.

[00:29:05] Dr Elise Burton: And I thought at that time that the issue of a pan-Arab nationalism would sort of, be complex, and I wanted to leave that for, later studies. So when I was first getting started, I tried to just look at three countries. And then my, process for trying to organize what was a vast amount of material in, in many different languages.

[00:29:27] Dr Elise Burton: So as I said, I was looking at material in Turkish, in Persian, in Hebrew, but again, many of these scientists were actually publishing their work in French, in German, in English. There was even material in Italian that I was looking through. So to get this out in the form of a dissertation, I wrote it in really the most boring,

[00:29:46] Dr Elise Burton: and un-interesting way, which was just a chronological way. So I really broke down like dissertation chapters essentially by decades. And this was a way of just kind of sorting through, looking for patterns that were happening over time in conjugation with political and social changes in [00:30:04] those countries.

[00:30:05] Dr Elise Burton: But after I finally graduated I realized that for the book I was going to really need to rethink what was happening again, because I was sort of dissatisfied by the approach of only looking at nations as kind of these bounded contructs, constructs and comparing them. I wanted to pay more attention to, what are the scientists actually doing?

[00:30:26] Dr Elise Burton: So if I break out of that, what I was calling a methodological nationalism, to compare what was being done in these countries at specific times, I was like, okay. If I focus on some of the specific genes that are actually being studied, then I will actually get a very different picture that will allow me to make a more thematic analysis, and it will allow me to draw in this regional picture without simply saying, Oh, shall I add Lebanon to my analysis? Should I add Egypt to my analysis, you know, and just looking at this thing as a question of comparing nationalisms. So that's how I ended up with the totally new structure for the [00:31:04] book, right? So once I started focusing on, for example, genetic diseases that were being studied. For example, there's a specific chapter on sickle cell disease and favism.

[00:31:14] Dr Elise Burton: Those, these are specific genetic diseases which are being studied by the middle of the 20th century. And that was real breakthrough in both my writing process, my research process, really my understanding of the problems that, that we're teasing apart here in this book. So that, that was a very long term process, right?

[00:31:34] Dr Elise Burton: So this was a project that really took, from the moment I got started to this book being published, was a 10 year process. So hopefully that gives you a sense that it wasn't easy. I'm not a special genius. It was a lot of hard work. It was a lot of reading. It was a lot of interaction with people along the way.

[00:31:55] Dr Elise Burton: And so, Sertaç, Dr. Sehlikoglu herself, was there for that later process of rethinking the book in its final stages. [00:32:04] And so I'm very grateful for the many scholars who I met along the way who helped me figure out this very complex topic. 

[00:32:12] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: I, of course, I want to talk more, but I'm very happy that we found a time in your very busy schedule to have this conversation today. I genuinely strongly recommend people to find your book, even if they find it sometimes very, like, there is a lot of work here in this book. It's very obvious. And even if they just read the parts on Turkey, they would find it very enlightening. Being able to trace that the kind of formation of the idea of Turkishness and all these little steps that you have, kind of, traced and helped us understand.

[00:32:48] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: are extremely valuable. And I have to say we didn't have a chance to talk about this, but it's also making me think very closely about all these conversations about both sciences and pseudosciences at the [00:33:04] time of political imaginary is in contemporary world as well. It's kind of making me always connect some dots to, I don't know, all these conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination groups, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:33:17] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: So, yeah, congratulations. We're very happy to have hosted you today. So Hazal and Zişan, if you want to join me in thanking Dr. Burton for joining us today. 

[00:33:29] Hazal Aydın: Just thank you for taking the time to join our episode. I mean, I, I'm at the sociocultural track of my anthropology department and I have a lot of friends at the bioanthro track and I just ran to them.

[00:33:43] Hazal Aydın: I'm like, you guys have to read this. This is like an amazing intersection. You have to know this. So I'm very excited. I'm just going to send this episode to them the moment we publish it. So thank you for taking the time to join our podcast. We appreciate it. 

[00:34:00] Meryem Zişan Köker: Thank you for joining us today. I think we've been talking about this book with [00:34:04] everyone in our department and our family and friends. We've been really, really impressed by how you interpreted and how you delivered all these conversations. So thank you so much for joining us today. 

[00:34:19] Dr Elise Burton: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:34:21] Dr Elise Burton: And I also just want to comment on Hazal's last point that I do appreciate the chance to have my work be read and be in dialogue with the ongoing work of physical anthropologists and geneticists, because one thing I do want to make clear in the book, and I hope this comes through in my writing, is that it's not about villainizing scientists, or saying that, necessarily all the work that they do has to be problematic.

[00:34:50] Dr Elise Burton: And I try to highlight cases, and especially in the case of, there are certain Turkish geneticists who have tried in the last 10 years to really combat some of these racializing tendencies, the way that genetic science gets used, as you say, eventually for [00:35:04] pseudoscientific arguments. So there are scientists who are trying to push back against this long legacy of racializing discourses.

[00:35:13] Dr Elise Burton: And I hope actually in a way that my book can encourage them to, to continue down that route and to make themselves heard within the scientific community. And thank you so much for including me in your podcast. And it's been so wonderful to talk to you today. 

[00:35:27] Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu: Thank you.