ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the collision of spectacle, science and racial-ethnic identifications in the contemporary scientific search for a 'Jewish gene'. It considers the inextricability of both as composite elements, mutually constituting 'difference' as racial-ethnic identification. The chapter argues all of these themes are articulated on a terrain in which racial-sexual knowledge's are deployed through representational as well as scientific economies; and through regimes of desire as well as bodies of knowledge. It draws its impetus from a tradition of feminist semiotics that is the study of signification informed by a particular focuses on the complex articulations of gender, sexuality, race and class as they constitute a signification field. Trinh Minh-ha suggests that the anthropological gaze is characterised by overtones of anthropomorphism, hence its association with the zoologically focuses tropes of Natural History. The African context investigation is as familiar, indeed is a veritable cliché as is the instrumentation of colonial cultural taxonomy and its imbrications in a eugenic racial imaginary.
