Paper short abstract:

This paper briefly explores the relationship between indigenous understandings of the ‘Arab Genome’ and desert cosmologies in the United Arab Emirates, arguing that indigenous categories of the body and fate radically inform attempts the promote health seeking behaviour in the Emirates.

Paper long abstract:

In light of increasingly high rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity among citizens of the Arabian Gulf, popular health discourse in the region has emphasised the emergent Arab genome as the primary etiological basis of major health conditions. Local health authorities seek programmes that research genetic susceptibility for certain health concerns. However, after both many years of public dissemination of genomic knowledge in the region, and widespread acceptance of this knowledge among Gulf Arab citizens, the rates of diabetes, obesity and heart disease continue to increase. This paper briefly explores the clash between indigenous Islamic knowledge systems and biomedical knowledge systems imported into the United Arab Emirates. Rather than radically informing health seeking behaviours among many UAE citizens, the emphasis on the 'Arab Genome' has instead reconfirmed the authority of Bedouin cosmological understandings of disease, reshaping the language that people use to engage with their bodies and their health. Local cosmology, Islamic ideology, and desert kinship practices remain powerful constructs that often operate in contention, in sometimes powerfully subtle ways, with novel health initiative regimes. For many people in the region, genomic information, is it is often discussed and propagated in the UAE, shares an intimate relationship with ideas of fate and agency, and sometimes serves to mitigate the increasingly uncertain terms of engagement that people share between the body, the city and an unstable ground.