Land, Clay, Causality: Genetic Causation and Epistemic Lessons from Pueblo Pottery

In this experimental paper, we advocate for a culturally and epistemically pluralist approach to understanding genetic causation. Specifically, we amplify voices of Native American scientists, knowledge holders, and philosophical traditions to challenge some problematic themes, assumptions, and dualisms we argue govern contemporary discussions on biological causation in general, and genetic causation in particular, in politically harmful and scientifically reductive ways. But before carving out our concerns, we begin with a reflection on one way many Pueblo nations share truths about the nature of causation and explanation: pottery. As you hold and sit with the following description, see if your fingers can trace the philosophical claims about life, knowledge, and the world that are carved and baked into Pueblo life and culture, fired into the design of sacred and everyday objects.Each of the nineteen current Pueblo nations, survivors from the more than seventy that existed prior to Spanish and US colonization and genocide, has a distinct pottery style—in form, methods, and symbolic representation on the clay. Yet they all play with what is often called isomeric representation—using paired forms that can be perceived as reversible, often painting 3-D representation on 2-D objects, and generating optical illusions. Pueblo designs are often figure-ground ambiguities that play with the visual and symbolic relation between black and white, dark and light, background and foreground—between what one notices and the conditions that make those features noticeable. Pueblo pottery often contains at least two related but distinct images: a black image visible on a white background, or a white image on a black background, and sometimes, with training, both simultaneously, or something in between. Many designs also play with the visual phenomenon called “perceptual filling-in”; they create designs of partial or broken spirals and geometric shapes that invite viewers’ perception to complete or fill in a shape that is not actually present on the pot. Finally, each design is a unique instantiation or combination of several smaller designs which themselves shift and change as they connect or overlap in new ways on each pot. In each instance, the viewer, holder, or tender of the clay is explicitly invoked in the imagery, with their perceptual tendencies and capacities central to the design's intelligibility.These designs reflect systematic philosophical principles constitutive of Pueblo epistemology, traditional ecological knowledge, and culture. The designs demonstrate and play with the following kinds of claims about the nature of the world, claims we explore further in the rest of the paper: truth and reality are perspectival; the viewer cannot be extricated from the viewed; layers of understanding and meaning are irreducible to a single account or cause; the background is at least as generative and causal as the smaller, seemingly distinct figures or foreground to which some might grant priority.The sophistication, non-dualistic thinking, playful trickery, and relationality exemplified in these designs was overlooked for centuries when Euro-American preferences for privileging black figures on white backgrounds—the sort of training reading and writing might facilitate—led non-Indigenous art historians to frame Pueblo pottery as “black on white” design. While not strictly wrong, “black on white,” or “smaller, discrete dark figures on light ground” impose a figure/ground or black/white dualism that misses the complexity of what is actually happening on the pot. That account also centers on non-Pueblo viewers, ignoring how the designs are experienced otherwise by Pueblo communities. As Ortman and Traugott put it, “our (i.e., Euro-American trained) minds are so conditioned to seeing figures on a ground that it's hard to unlearn that to the point that you can effortlessly see these patterns in the way Pueblo people saw them in the past” (Ortman and Traugott 23). Thus, what “causes” the perception, experience, and explanation of Pueblo pottery as “black on white” is not what is on the pot, or a neutral description of how the pottery gets painted; interpretations require a conceptual training and worldview that condition what is possible to see and what explanations are available or sensible.In what follows, we treat biological and genetic causation like a pot, holding it in our hands and considering the different ways it could be understood from various perspectives. In section 2, we paint with broad strokes the trans-disciplinary conversation on genetic causation as it is emerging across philosophy of biology, behavioral genetics, psychology, and so on. We suggest that current conversations on genetic causation tend to be organized into both certain problematic dualisms like fact/value, metaphysics/epistemology or ethics, expert/layperson, material/non-material, and by equally culturally specific conceptual preferences for causal explanations that prioritize simplicity, reduction, teleology, and stability, and so on. This paper is especially motivated by one recent locus of conversation that exemplifies the fact/value distinction. In her influential book, The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden hopes to save and sanitize genetics: to say genes are meaningfully correlated and causally related to specific effects in lived experience (like educational attainment) such that we should first better understand and explain the facts around genetic causes, and then use those facts for progressive ends to offer tailored interventions for at-risk (oppressed) populations. Harden's work has been challenged on many fronts, from her depiction of genetic causation to the possibility that her genetic intervention strategy is reductive and demeaning, not reparative. But our concern with the resulting conversation—and discussions on genetic causation more widely—is the seemingly unchallenged belief that it is possible for “us” to first separate out and fine-tune the facts and only then consensually intervene in oppressed communities. This move, together with the other dualisms we argue shape conversation on genetic causation, mirror the “black-on-white” interpretative tendencies discussed above, which emphasize discrete causes while backgrounding relational conditions that make them possible.Not only is the fact/value dualism antithetical to many Native epistemologies; it is also part of the settler-colonial matrix that explicitly reproduces and naturalizes power in part by rejecting Indigenous epistemic authority and structurally excluding Native persons from scientific or theoretical conversations about what the facts even are. Attempting to intervene in genetic causes without including Native citizens and worldviews, taking seriously their knowledges of life and causation, is the “progressive” move par excellence. It is what Tuck and Yang call a “settler move to innocence” (4, 9–28): a move that allows supposed allies (including scientists with so-called progressive values) to feel supportive without shifting the power around who has epistemic authority, political agency, and economic security. Isn't that imbalance precisely what the genetic intervention strategy supposedly hopes to solve? So how might causation look if we didn't take these “black on white” dualistic tendencies as the starting point and instead explored how the partial shapes of causality could be filled in otherwise?In section 3, we begin to explore this “otherwise” and to amplify various Native American philosophical approaches to causation. We note that these traditions (1) lend causal explanatory weight to complexity over simplicity, perspectivism over reductionism; and (2) tend to lean away from preferring stability and toward emphasizing probability, chance, and the causal oomph of the so-called “background” and, instead of having a strong teleology, we find a non-hierarchical ordering of metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. Because traditional ecological knowledge (including causation) is part of sovereignty (Whyte), we argue that respecting and engaging such knowledge systems at the level of causal theory is a condition for fully allying with, supporting, and advocating for Indigenous nations, especially in contexts of genetic/epigenetic education and biodata sovereignty.Given other anti-colonial battles and global challenges, amplifying First Nations perspectives on causation might seem a niche and un-pressing intervention. But there is no denying that genes (as material and as explanations) are a battleground for power, politics, and sovereignty. In our current episteme, we have problematically bestowed upon genes a kind of a sovereign causal power and despotic explanatory authority to reveal what is real, biological, natural, and good. Saying something is “in our genes” is a poor understanding of genetic causation, but a compelling strategy (deployed on all sides of the settler American political spectrum) to defend either the superiority and equality or inferiority of persons, species, identities, and so on. Furthermore, all lives are now tied to a global political context in which genes are malleable material components of life increasingly manipulated for bio-capitalist aims. In the shadow of current and proposed genetic intervention strategies for altering humans and non-humans alike, we agree with Harden that talking about and understanding genes and causes cannot be abandoned to biotechnologists or policy elites. We just insist there are more voices at the table—or hands at the throwing wheel—at the levels of both theory (how we understand genetic causes) and practice (how, when, and why we intervene).Rather than starting at the very beginning, gathering clay from scratch, this section is a kind of re-wedging: we take influential claims (drawn from across the interdisciplinary conversation) that are already documenting causal cognition patterns in and outside the academy, within and beyond the sciences. 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