Genetics, DTC, and Their Social Implications: Original Articles
On gene-ealogy: identity, descent, and affiliation in the era of home DNA testing
2023 Volume 131 Issue 1 Pages 15-25
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2023 Volume 131 Issue 1 Pages 15-25
Over the last two decades, home DNA testing has reshaped popular narratives around identity, descent, kinship, and modes of ethnic and racial affiliation. The ability to pair oral histories and family lore with scientific data seems to have totally upended the formerly ‘quaint’ hobby of genealogical research. But genealogies have been serious business for thousands of years, and DNA is far from an objective witness to the past. Genetic data create visceral connections between past and present, self and other, here and there. As such, genetic genealogies, or ‘gene-ealogies,’ have proved to be a potent arena for the negotiation of identity, belonging, and authority—over both the past and the future. In this paper, we review diverse DNA-driven genealogical practices in Europe, the Americas, and beyond, developing a discussion about how genetic approaches are intersecting with traditional ideas of identity and descent, as well as new developments in ethnoracial politics in different parts of the world. In particular, we explore the genetic narratives and agendas of care that drive direct-to-consumer companies and communities of gene-ealogists, seeking not just to explain to what extent DNA tests might shift or reinforce conceptions of ‘who we are,’ but to contextualize this with regard to wider political and social forces.
In 2015, the US-based genealogy conglomerate Ancestry.com released a 30-second advert called ‘Kyle’ in which the eponymous central character (standing in front of a small table with two decorative stoneware beer steins sat upon it) described growing up believing he was German, wearing lederhosen, learning German dances. He recounts how a failure to identify German ancestors genealogically led him to try a direct-to-consumer (DTC) DNA test that identified 52% of his genetic heritage as being from Ireland and Scotland. ‘So’, Kyle explains, ‘I traded in my lederhosen for a kilt.’ At this point, his attire changes from a sweater and trousers to a full kilt and sporran in red-and-white tartan. The advertisement elides the difference between cultural and biological identity, suggesting that we are all just one genetic test away from abandoning our learned cultural practices for different ones more suited to our biology.
Today DTC DNA testing companies tell consumers their results can clarify a whole spectrum of issues: from dietary advice to infidelity, athletic talent, your children’s potential, and even assessing suitable marriage partners (Phillips, 2016). Here, we see otherwise contingent and continuous elements of personality and identity decomposed, isolated, biologized, and as a consequence, commodified. Paternity tests were among the earliest public (non-scientific, non-forensic) applications of DNA testing, so consumers of genetic tests are well primed to accept that genetic data can tell us who our relations are. However, this also universalizes a particular—and a quite historically and culturally contingent—style of deciding which relations are real and which are not.
TallBear (2003, 2013, 2018) has quite famously problematized this form of relation, linking it specifically to the colonial disruption of Native American kinship structures. Her interventions, and those of others, make clear that, for Native communities, concepts of kin and Indigeneity are not determined by the question what are you? but rather who claims you? (Carlson and Frazer, 2021). Indeed, they push us to recall that, for many people, kin are not just those with whom one shares genetic material but are, instead, people (human and non-human) or beings linked by other substances, by relations of care and obligation, and by forms of descent not captured in the combination of sperm and eggs in a human womb. Reducing all of this down to a biologically essentialist picture impoverishes our kinship imaginary, just as believing that a genetic test should determine whether one chooses to wear lederhosen or a kilt undermines the richness of cultural traditions.
At the same time, genealogies have long had salience in European societies and, to some degree, the contemporary DNA ancestry testing market may be seen as an outgrowth of the European and Euro-American fascination with ‘blood’—a metaphor now increasingly identified with ‘DNA’ (Bangham, 2020)—as the substance par excellence of kinship. Genealogies have been used since medieval times in Europe, and later in the European colonies, as technologies of social distinction and early tools of race-making, used to separate nobility from plebeian (de Miramon and van der Lugt, 2019; Klapisch-Zuber, 2000); Christian from ‘false convert’ (Nirenberg, 2007); the ‘racially pure’ from ‘impure castes’ (Bonniol, 1992; Gross, 2008; Martínez, 2008; Twinam, 2015). Elsewhere, they have been used to chart and understand the heredity of disease and other traits (Bonniol and Benoist, 1994; Pálsson, 2002); as a way to fortify links with a claimed homeland (Nash, 2008); articulate relations of care and kinship with the dead (Cannell, 2011, 2013); and consolidate authority through claims of descent from heroes, saints, and deities (Thornton, 2003; Guy, 2018). Far from constituting an ‘objective’ mapping of genetic kinship, genealogical trees (both historical and contemporary) can better be considered the result of ‘empirical and imaginative effort[s]’, which are ‘shaped by the active choices made by those doing their genealogy about which line to follow and thus who counts as more or less significant members of the (ancestral) family’ (Nash, 2008). Along similar lines, it has been argued that DNA ancestry technologies may be thought of as a ‘mechanism for individuals to come to care about—sometimes directly and sometimes diffusely—new kin and oneself as kin to others’ (Wolf-Meyer, 2020).
We find the concept of ‘care’ useful for thinking about how DNA ancestry tests frequently become a vehicle for articulating ideas about racial, ethnic, and national belonging, since ‘care’ holds simultaneously meanings of nurture (to care for); the attachment of importance to something (to care about); and to attend to something to avoid certain risks (to take care with). Based on our own research and the existing literature, in this paper we give an overview of the commercial discourses and sociopolitical practices surrounding DTC DNA ancestry testing in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere, focusing on the entanglements between genetics, race, and identity.
In the first section, we describe the growth of the global DTC ancestry testing industry from the 2000s onwards, the identity discourses it has promoted, and the critiques levied at it. In the second section, we distinguish some broad regional, and in other cases more specific national trends regarding how personal DNA data are being mobilized by different publics, notably to reclaim ‘lost’ ancestries or validate existing identities, in line with—and occasionally against the grain of—collective identity myths and racializing projects. Overall, we argue that the agendas of care articulated by gene-ealogical technologies can encompass a range of affective responses and practices, both towards dekinning or demarcating difference, and in search of kinning or emphasizing relatedness, including in ways that can be tokenistic or constitute forms of appropriation.
The first internet-based DTC genetic ancestry testing companies appeared in the United States and the United Kingdom in the year 2000. Broadly, these businesses focused on two forms of genetic affiliation, which continue to characterize the services offered by DTC companies today: biogeographical ancestry tracing, which links clients to one or more regions or populations (historical and/or contemporary) around the world; and relative-matching tools, by which clients can connect themselves genealogically to particular individuals (living and/or ancestral) via shared segments of their genome.
The earliest commercial DNA testing analyses relied on uniparental (mtDNA and Y-chromosome DNA) markers, which were used to shed light on clients’ ‘deep ancestry’—often expressed through the names of prehistoric (and sometimes fictional) ‘tribes,’ ‘clans,’ or ‘peoples’—or by enabling genealogists to test putative biological relationships to historical or living individuals, via particular maternally or paternally inherited genetic lineages (Davis, 2004; Nash, 2004; Oikkonen, 2020). Shortly after, the first admixture tests (usually based on just a few dozen ancestry-informative markers (AIMs) from different sites across the genome) began to be marketed as a way of estimating clients’ ‘ethnoracial mix’ in relation to between three and five continental categories (Bolnick et al., 2007; TallBear, 2013; Gannett, 2014).
More recently, the application of next-generation sequencing (NGS) methods has yielded increasingly detailed ancestry estimates, based on the analysis of hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across the genome. Genetic ‘ethnicity’ reports now present customers’ admixture results in relation to dozens or even hundreds of regions and populations around the world, and test-takers can opt in to ‘relative-matching databases’ where they may be connected to hundreds or thousands of ‘genetic relatives,’ up to an estimated genealogical distance of sixth cousins (Abel, 2022a, 2022b). These approaches have had broad public appeal, likely due to the range of services they offer and their price point (usually around US$99). Since around 2015, large companies such as AncestryDNA, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA (all based in the United States) and more recently the Israeli company MyHeritage (whose DNA tests are provided by FamilyTreeDNA) have been shipping their ‘genetic ethnicity’ tests to numerous countries in Europe, the Americas, and Australasia, among other regions.
In their marketing materials, DNA ancestry companies tend to represent their products, variously, as: a response to the public’s ‘natural’ and ‘universal’ curiosity to find out more about who we are and where we come from; an aid for attempts to recover ancestral information lost through episodes of geographic displacement, trauma, violence, or the simple passage of time; and a means to connect with and celebrate one’s family ‘heritage’ on a deeper, more visceral level (Sommer, 2012b; Abel and Sandoval-Velasco, 2016; Scodari, 2017). Through the ways in which they visualize and categorize their ancestry information, and the selection of world regions they offer reports for, DNA testing companies shape the range and type of kinship connections that their technologies can produce for users. In this respect, companies try to anticipate the types of imagined communities and relationships to which particular publics would like to connect, and in doing so they legitimize the idea that these connections are scientifically, historically, and epistemologically valid. The definition of genetic ‘ancestry’ or ‘ethnicity’ categories therefore responds, in part, to the marketing logic of ‘what will sell’—something that often sits uneasily with these products’ claims to scientific precision and accuracy.
For instance, whereas the new generation of ‘genetic ethnicity’ test providers claim to estimate clients’ ancestry spanning the last few hundred to a thousand years, the labels given to the ‘genetic ethnicities’ or ‘regions’ listed in their DNA reports typically refer to contemporary nation-states. This apparent anachronism can be understood as an attempt to offer clients a ‘usable past’ (Nelson, 2008), which, in the context of the United States (still today the global hub of the DNA ancestry testing industry), is typically identified with the period of European colonization (c. 1500 CE onward) and the processes of mass migration, mixture, and identity loss and formation it incurred. The idea is to link users, via their genetic heritage, to living ‘relatives’ and ‘cultures,’ presenting opportunities not only to recuperate lost ancestral knowledge, but to create new connections to imagined communities and genetic ‘homelands’—practices that are further encouraged by corporate partnerships between DNA testing businesses and travel agencies offering discounts on ‘roots tourism’ (Abel, 2022b). Critiques of this DNA testing model have called into question the scientific merit of companies’ marketing claims, which often rely on misleading consumers about the precision of DNA ancestry technologies; their ability to historicize genetic data; the fact that results are based on statistical modelling, making them predictive rather than truly personal; as well as the sociocultural significance of the reported ‘ethnic’ clusters (Rotimi, 2003; Bolnick et al., 2007; Abel and Schroeder, 2020).
Other businesses and products cater to different tastes, interests, and historical horizons. A company called Gene Plaza, for example, allows users to upload the results of an existing DTC genetic test or buy a new one, in order to (for a price) run their results through any number of different apps—many sourced from the site’s users, apparently based on published data (https://www.geneplaza.com/app-store). Many of these seem relatively neutral (if a touch astrological), such as apps that link one’s genetic results to taste perception or how well one metabolizes coffee. Lurking among these are apps that claim to compare modern genetic testing results to ancient DNA (aDNA) data (a methodological mismatch) to identify specific ancestral affiliations with Eurasian Bronze Age (c. 3000–1000 BCE) populations, as well as others that claim to calculate one’s ethnicity, mathematical capabilities, and intelligence. These tools conjure obvious parallels with race science, which is heavily fixated on the idea that intelligence is biologically based—a dehumanizing framework that sees some ‘races’ as innately and biologically less sophisticated and human than others (Jackson and Weidman, 2004; Saini, 2019).
Of course, DNA ancestry-testing companies generally do not present themselves as sympathizing with racialist and racist ideologies. On the contrary, some have aligned themselves overtly with liberal antiracist ideologies, embracing the idea that DNA testing can debunk conceptions of racial purity and foster kinder, more open-minded societies by showing how, genetically, ‘we are all related.’ These companies tend to view racism fundamentally as a problem of false ideology, which can be ‘cured’ by exposing individuals to the genetic ‘facts’ about ancestry. However, racism is increasingly understood in the social sciences as a structural and systemic feature of capitalist societies, which is reproduced and exacerbated by unequal relations of power and oppression among differently racialized groups (Omi and Winant, 1994; Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Moreno Figueroa and Wade, 2022). According to this perspective, tackling racism requires profound changes to political, social, and economic systems, and cannot simply be achieved by working on the level of ideology with the aim of altering individual mindsets. Hence, the narratives of DNA companies have been criticized for placing the power for social and ideological change in the hands of the white middle classes and envisaging biocapitalism as the conduit to kinder, more egalitarian societies (Tyler, 2021), while ignoring the structural ways in which the DNA testing industry plays into racializing tendencies and operates through biocolonial practices (Cross, 2001; Roberts, 2011; Reardon and TallBear, 2012; Reardon, 2012; Nash, 2015; Abel, 2022b). Moreover, the industry’s claim to antiracism is further belied by concrete, emerging evidence of the various ways in which these technologies have been used to support white supremacist agendas (Panofsky and Donovan, 2019; Mittos et al., 2020; Leroux, 2019; Frieman and Hofmann, 2019; Panofsky et al., 2021; Tyler, 2021; Abel, 2022c).
Similarly, the turn to aDNA techniques has been justified as a means of reinforcing the antiracist message that all humans are mixed, and that modern conceptions of race do not map easily onto evidence of the origins and configurations of prehistoric populations (Reich, 2018). Yet a number of recent critiques have highlighted the ways that the biologized explanations driven by aDNA research reinscribe racist, sexist, heteronormative, and (perhaps most cuttingly for academic researchers) out-of-date models onto the past, by projecting modern Eurocentric preoccupations with blood, biology, social structure, and race onto ancient populations (Booth et al., 2021; Brück, 2021; Brück and Frieman, 2021; Crellin and Harris, 2020; Frieman and Hofmann, 2019; Frieman et al., 2019; Furholt, 2018, 2020; Dobson Jones and Bösl, 2021). In a series of recent articles, Catherine J. Frieman and colleagues have delineated how aDNA research in Europe has unwittingly echoed outdated, racist and sexist tropes about vicious migrants endangering pure Europeans (Frieman and Hofmann, 2019); social institutions such as marriage existing to allow men to trade women’s reproductive potential among themselves (Frieman et al., 2019); and family structures that only reproduce capitalist relations of care (Brück and Frieman, 2021). Indeed, these are not just important concerns for archeologists, determined to present a nuanced and accurate picture of past peoples and their lives, but are also increasingly relevant to the present, since ideas of blood and lineage are profoundly embedded in contemporary culture, and form a key part of the allure of DTC genetic testing.
The industry standards for DTC genetic testing companies can frequently be understood as building out of and reinforcing particularly insidious ideas of racialized and biologized identities which have had considerable negative impacts in the real world (Livingstone, 2017; Perry, 2017). In the following section, drawing primarily on case studies from Europe and the Americas, we examine some broad trends in how DNA ancestry tests are being used by different publics. We find that racializing practices are indeed prominent and widespread; yet test-takers and the contexts in which they are embedded are heterogeneous, and their kinship practices and agendas of care can exceed—and in some cases subvert—those endorsed by DNA testing companies.
Public interests in DNA ancestry testing are neither ‘innate’ nor ‘universal,’ but culturally and historically contingent (Abel, 2018a). They, like the marketing narratives of companies, respond to political tensions, historical legacies, social aspirations, and attendant agendas of care (both positive and negative). Structural factors also play a part: DNA ancestry companies have typically had earlier and greater commercial successes in countries with deeply embedded genealogical traditions and established markets in genealogy and heritage resources—in particular, the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and certain European countries (Pálsson, 2002; Davison, 2009; De Groot, 2009; Abu El-Haj, 2012; Hinterberger, 2012; Abel, 2022b).
Several authors have made the case that the contemporary public fascination with DNA ancestry testing responds to collective anxieties about the loss of cultural identities and links to ancestral homelands that have been spurred by increasing mass migration, industrialization, and processes of ethnoracial mixing—often in the aftermath of violent regimes of colonization (Shriver and Kittles, 2004; Wailoo et al., 2012; Fullwiley, 2014). This narrative is perhaps most obvious in the United States, where companies and public advocates of DNA testing have framed these technologies as a way of recuperating one’s unique ‘ethnic’ origins against the grain of ongoing and historical processes of cultural trauma and identity loss (Nelson, 2016; Abel, 2018a). While we find this argument convincing, it is worth noting that such anxieties, which are often underpinned by preoccupations about ethnoracial ‘purity’ and mixture, manifest in heterogeneous and sometimes oblique ways in different societies.
In Latin America, for instance, the narratives woven around DNA ancestry data (usually produced in the context of national or international genetic research projects rather than commercial initiatives) have tended to focus less on the uniqueness of individual genealogies than on reinforcing claims of a common racial background, shared among the national community (Santos and Maio, 2004; López Beltrán, 2011; Wade et al., 2014; Wade, 2017; Abel, 2022b). This is particularly the case in nations that have been historically oriented by hegemonic discourses of mestizaje/mestiçagem (cultural and racial mixture), which operate by encouraging citizens to selectively forget aspects of their family histories and instead privilege future processes of mixture as a way of producing modern, ‘raceless’ nation-states (Twine, 1998; Moreno Figueroa, 2011; Abel, 2022b). Only in the last few years have commercial DNA ancestry initiatives (often modelled on the US paradigm of “genetic ethnicity” testing) begun to gain greater traction in countries such as Brazil, giving way to a greater proliferation of DNA-based practices and ancestry narratives (e.g. Gomes, 2021).
DNA testing companies oriented toward European markets, conversely, have often placed less emphasis on revealing clients’ ‘global ancestral mixture’ than on linking them to lineages and groups that are framed as ancestral to white Europeans. For example, Oxford Ancestors and BritainsDNA (both established in the United Kingdom, and now defunct), and the Swiss company iGENEA, offer to connect clients to ancient ‘tribes’ and ‘clans’—sometimes geographically rooted, in the case of Oxford Ancestors (Nash, 2004; Tutton, 2004; Sommer, 2012b), or else referring to premodern ethnic denominators: Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Vikings, Vandals, Ancient Egyptians, and so on (Sommer, 2012a; Cheng, 2017; Kennett et al., 2018). Studies into the ways test-takers interact with these identities suggest that affiliation with premodern identities may be coveted by test-takers as an expression of nostalgia for times when gender roles were supposedly ‘simpler’ and more in tune with ‘natural’ differences between men and women (Nash, 2015; Scully, 2018), or used to account for recurring behavioral traits within families, such as male violence, which are naturalized as expressions of an ingrained ‘ethnic’ trait (Sommer, 2012a; Strand and Källén, 2021).
By referring to a period that predates European colonialism, these identities may also be regarded as a way of reframing whiteness or making it more palatable by replacing a racial identity that is integrally associated with coloniality and oppression with a series of ‘indigenous’ cultural identities, inherited from ‘travellers,’ ‘warriors,’ and ‘heroes’ (Sommer, 2012a; Fortier, 2012; Oikkonen, 2018; Strand and Källén, 2021). Strand and Källén (2021), for instance, highlight the desire of many (white) Europeans and Euro-Americans to find their putative Viking ancestry through genetic testing. This is a biological impossibility since, first, no ethnic group is biologically homogeneous, and, second, where ancient DNA analysis has been carried out on apparent Viking-style burials, the individuals have proven to be especially genetically diverse, indicating that Vikings shared a way of life and cultural practices, not biological ancestry (Margaryan et al., 2020). This desire to find connections to imagined past populations, and especially groupings such as the Vikings who continue to play a role in the popular imagination, must be understood with regard to contemporary racial and white supremacist discourses (Saini, 2019; Strand and Källén, 2021).
Indeed, there is a long history of white supremacists anchoring their identity in an imagined, ethnically homogeneous past (Arnold, 1990; Trigger, 1984; Brophy, 2018); and both aDNA and DTC DNA testing have rapidly become part of this milieu (Richardson and Booth, 2017). Hakenbeck (2019), for example, noted that discussions of recent publications (scholarly and popular) concerning aDNA were common on Stormfront, a white supremacist online forum, and typically focused on specific prehistoric groupings (i.e. archeological ‘cultures’ such as Yamnaya or Bell Beaker) that they believed to be linked to the Aryans of Nazi mythology as well as to their own Y-chromosome haplotypes, which they compare to historic haplotype diffusions believed to represent the conquest of western Eurasia by ‘white’ men.
Other research has indicated that self-proclaimed white supremacist communities are using these tests not only to ‘verify’ their ‘racial’ purity, but to reshape the biological boundaries of whiteness (Mittos et al., 2018, 2020; Stănescu, 2018; Panofsky and Donovan, 2019). In her study of comments about DNA ancestry testing in a right-wing British newspaper, Tyler (2021) notes how genetic ‘ethnicity’ results are used to create hierarchies of relatedness and reinforce the sense that Europeans are more closely related (and therefore more apt to share cultural bonds) than people from other parts of the world. Anti-racialist readings of DNA ancestry in these contexts are seen as politically driven (by ‘leftists,’ ‘multiculturalists,’ and ‘Jews’) and therefore not neutral—they are regarded as contradictory to what DNA portraits ‘really’ show about the links between genes, peoples, and territories (see also Santos and Maio, 2005; Panofsky and Donovan, 2019). These racializing practices also extend outside the ‘white’ dominated Euro-American sphere. Models of genetic ethnicity have been used to bolster 19th-century ideas of Korean ethnic homogeneity, support notions of racial difference in East Asia, and project these into the deep past through mtDNA and Y-chromosome phylogenies (Kowal and Llamas, 2019).
While tests offering a broader (i.e. non-European) range of ancestral categories might be seen as troubling discourses of white racial purity, Native American and Indigenous scholars have argued that such products also play into the logics of white supremacy and settler colonialism. For instance, the plethora of companies offering to ‘validate’ clients’ Native American ancestry, or link them to a particular tribal community, has been characterized by critics as another example of ‘self-proclaimed Europeans continu[ing] to make a claim to indigenous peoples and their resources, only this time … in the name of the civilizing project of antiracism’ (Reardon and TallBear, 2012). In reality, DNA tests are rarely able to provide evidence of sufficient resolution or accuracy to support claims for tribal enrollment under current US laws and membership norms (TallBear and Bolnick, 2004; Watt and Kowal, 2019). However, this does not neutralize the symbolic violence done by such claims. In North America, for instance, scholars have observed that ‘Native American’ DNA is often coveted by non-Indigenous test-takers as a way of cementing a professed ‘spiritual’ link to the land (often with little regard for the violent events that paved the way for this connection) (TallBear, 2013; Golbeck and Roth, 2012); in other cases, it is seen as a way of mitigating the perceived ‘blandness’ of white identities (Roth and Ivemark, 2018). Leroux (2018, 2019) documents how genetic and genealogical evidence of Indigenous ancestry (however distant and numerically minimal) have been used by self-denominated ‘Métis’ communities to ‘indigenize an otherwise primarily French Québécois settler population’ and stake their claim to being ‘the only truly Indigenous people in Québec.’ Elsewhere, in her work on the Ainu, lewallen (2016) has raised concerns that access to DNA ancestry testing will likely empower the Japanese state’s longstanding efforts to define Ainu identity according to strictly biological notions of ‘blood,’ which have gradually replaced the traditional use of textiles to mark kinship, which allowed for more expansive cultural concepts of belonging.
In Latin American countries marked by mestizaje/mestiçagem discourses that have historically placed a premium on racial whiteness, it is to be expected that DNA testing may appeal to some test-takers as a way of ‘proving’ the Europeanness of their pedigree (Abel, 2022b). So far, though, studies of user interactions with DNA ancestry in countries like Brazil and Mexico have typically focused on politically liberal communities such as university students (who have participated in genomic research studies), who may tend to be critical towards discourses of racial whitening. These studies find, conversely, that participants tend to overestimate their proportions of Indigenous American and/or African ancestry, based on these countries’ national myths that all citizens share mixed Indigenous and European ancestry (in the case of Mexico), or Indigenous, European, and African ancestry, in the case of Brazil (Ruiz-Linares et al., 2014; Nieves Delgado et al., 2017; Abel, 2020). The affective reactions of test-takers (surprise, disappointment) to their results could, potentially, provide space for critical reflections on the racist historical agendas that have underpinned processes of racial whitening, and lead to a revalorization of Indigenous and African ancestry among mestizo/mestiço test-takers. However, the antiracist potential of such mobilizations is ambiguous, since in ‘mestiza’ nations like Mexico and Peru, hegemonic discourses celebrating ‘ancestral’ Indigenous cultures such as the Aztecs and Incas have long gone hand-in-hand with ongoing racism towards and erasure of contemporary Indigenous groups (Bonfil Batalla, 2019; Molinié, 2004).
Meanwhile, in Southern Cone countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, where national identities are predicated on whiteness—enforced by the myth that all Indigenous and African populations were ‘wiped out’ or replaced by European migrations in the 19th century—researchers have signalled that DNA testing could trouble these racial narratives and lend legitimacy to family histories that preserve memories of non-European ancestors (López Mazz, 2018; Di Fabio Rocca et al., 2018). The impulse to recover one’s ‘non-white’ ancestry has been strengthened across many parts of Latin America in recent decades by the efforts of Indigenous and Black social movements to destigmatize these identities, as well as the introduction of affirmative action schemes aimed at African-descendant and Indigenous populations in numerous countries in the region, intended to alleviate the longstanding effects of structural racism upon these groups (Góngora Mera, 2014; Lehmann, 2018). While DNA ancestry testing has sometimes been seen as a convenient way to prove one’s eligibility to claim these political resources (e.g. Mardones Marshall, 2021), in other cases these technologies have been mobilized to argue the unconstitutionality of such initiatives within ‘racially mixed’ countries (Kent and Wade, 2015). Cases of phenotypically white individuals using DNA tests either to gain access to, or initiate legal proceedings against, affirmative action schemes aimed primarily at Black and Indigenous populations have similarly raised concerns about how far genetic ancestry should be given social and legal legitimacy as a source of identity claims (Harmon, 2006; Kent and Wade, 2015; Modarressy-Tehrani, 2019).
There are also cases of genetic ancestry technologies being used to restore ancestral identities against the grain of processes of racialization and cultural trauma (Eyerman, 2001). Since 2003, for instance, the US company African Ancestry has specialized in ‘recovering’ the ethnic identities and country origins of individuals whose ancestors were displaced by the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. The tests are framed as a form of symbolic repair to the cultural trauma and processes of racialization suffered by enslaved individuals and their descendants in American and Caribbean plantation societies (Nelson, 2008; Benn Torres and Torres Colón, 2020; ABC Repórter, 2021; Abel, 2022b), and in some cases have been used (albeit with limited success) by test-takers to seek financial reparations from companies that benefited historically from slavery (Nelson, 2016). DNA testing has been used, similarly, to articulate a diasporic consciousness between people living in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and Irish-descendants elsewhere in the world (Nash, 2008); and among the Jewish diaspora (Abu El-Haj, 2012)—including groups whose claims to Jewishness have been reinforced by genetic testing, such as the Lemba in South Africa (Tamarkin, 2020). Scholars have also speculated that the rise in popularity of DTC DNA ancestry testing in Australia may lead to the recuperation of Aboriginal identity among individuals whose ancestors were subjected to state-enforced assimilation programs during the 19th and 20th centuries (Watt and Kowal, 2019; Watt et al., 2020).
These practices have been shown to have important psychological ramifications for individuals and communities living with diverse forms of inherited trauma (Winston and Kittles, 2005). Nevertheless, the genetic tools they rely on continue to have major methodological and epistemic limitations, while also holding the potential to further racialize ethnic identities by assuming these diverse categories map easily onto structures of genetic relatedness (Rotimi, 2003; Keita and Stewart, 2010; Roberts, 2011; Flegontov et al., 2016; Jobling et al., 2016; Abel and Schroeder, 2020). While some test-takers show enthusiasm for using DNA tests to support citizenship claims (e.g. in West African countries and in Israel), if accepted by states, the geneticization of ethnic and national identities would just as likely lead to exclusionary practices, as to more inclusive ones (McGonigle and Herman, 2015; Abel, 2018b; Schramm, 2020; Kohler, 2021).
One aspect of DTC genetic ancestry testing that remains relatively understudied is the use of interpersonal DNA relative-matching technologies and databases (also known as ‘identity by descent’ (IDB) tools). Although IDB tools are offered today by numerous companies, they tend to be eclipsed in advertisements by the emphasis on ‘genetic ethnicity’ tests. IDB tools are of particular interest to family history researchers, as well as people searching for biological kin (e.g. adoptees), because of their potential to shed light on a greater range of genealogical relationships, including lateral (e.g. cousin) links. Research among family historians has revealed a greater scepticism toward the reliability of ‘genetic ethnicity’ estimates, and more moderate approaches towards genetic data in general, which are regarded as an additional mode of verification rather than as a replacement for traditional genealogical research (Stallard and de Groot, 2020; Abel, 2022a). Overall, genealogical research that incorporates DNA data tends to be characterized by collaborative practices and careful assessment of different types of historical evidence, with researchers often maintaining an agnostic view about what data they might uncover, rather than attempting to prove or disprove a preestablished identity hypothesis (Evans, 2011). In many cases, practitioners view their work as a form of care for the dead, which is extended to both known and unknown ancestors (Cannell, 2011; Stallard and de Groot, 2020). Such practices have the potential to complicate conventional conceptions of race, for instance by revealing biological kinship ties that have been obscured under regimes of racial segregation (Abel, 2022a). Nevertheless, this is not an ‘in-built’ effect of family history research; genetic kinship links and associated identity claims always remain subject to negotiation and contestation, particularly when they threaten to overturn established family narratives and inheritance claims, or to shed light on painful family secrets and histories of trauma (Williams, 2005; Vaisman, 2012; Fonseca, 2015; Barnwell, 2017; Abel and Pálsson, 2020).
Finally, it is worth noting that while many DTC DNA testing services used in Europe and the Americas offer ‘ancestry’ and past lineages as primary objects of care and attention, in China and Japan these technologies are more commonly framed as a way of caring for one’s immediate family and future descendants (Nagai et al., 2023). Genetic testing for hereditary disease, and for paternity (including during pregnancy) are prominent motifs among Chinese DTC DNA companies, and some Japanese and Chinese companies market tests claiming to inform users about their children’s health and ‘identified talents’ (Nagai et al., 2023). The concern with testing for heritable traits, both ‘positive’ and ‘negative,’ speaks to the cultural and communal pressures associated with creating healthy and ‘high-quality’ children in these countries, to the extent that the outcomes of DNA tests may influence citizens’ decisions to go ahead with a pregnancy or a marriage (Kato and Sleeboom-Faulkner, 2009; Sleeboom-Faulkner, 2011). The lesser prominence given to ‘ancestry’ products by Chinese and Japanese companies may appear congruent with these countries’ national identity discourses, which strongly emphasize the cultural and/or ethnic homogeneity of their citizens (Sleeboom-Faulkner, 2011; Takezawa, 2015). However, assumptions of ethnic homogeneity do not necessarily preclude a national interest in genealogy, and in some cases population genetics and DNA testing can trouble such discourses (e.g. Pálsson, 2002; Abel and Pálsson, 2020). Further in-depth research into how DNA ancestry products are being used in China, Japan, and other parts of Asia could provide a more nuanced understanding of how these technologies are becoming entangled with local conceptions of ethnicity, race, and kinship.
There is an ambiguity at the heart of genetic testing. On the one hand, your genetic profile is unique to you amongst all the other humans and non-humans to have ever existed. It encodes many aspects of your being and connects you directly, bodily, substantially to specific other bounded people and their separate embodied selves. On the other, we share genetic material not just with other members of our species, but with every living organism—more with some than with others, but the molecular ties still bind us closely enough to flies, mice, and pigs for these to be useful test subjects for human medical treatment. Over the past two decades, ancient genetic data have systematically broken down the walls between us, Homo sapiens, and our extinct cousins. Geneticists have turned private investigators and documented our affairs, finding traces of interbreeding events with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and at least one other population of the genus Homo yet to be identified outside the bodies of living people (Ahlquist et al., 2021; Bergström et al., 2021). In our bounded selves and unique species, we are hybrid creatures.
Twenty-five years ago, in her expansive meditation on feminist technoscience Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse, Donna Haraway (1997) captured the heart of this conflict, with a text that contrasts the intimacies created between humans and non-humans by shared genetic information (both naturally occurring and anthropogenic) with the cultural and scientific strategies designed to separate us. In her words, ‘the gene and gene maps are ways of enclosing the commons of the body’ (Haraway, 1997). That is, the act of categorizing and clustering (genotyping) that divides up a continuous dataset (genetic material) creates boundaries, just as it creates affinities.
DTC genetic testing is an amplification of this dynamic boundary/affinity creation process. Genetic tests, as we have seen, create kin between individuals who may have no personal or familial connection or between living people and fictive past populations. They also break populations up into separate parts (‘tribes,’ ‘peoples,’ ‘genetic ethnicities’), empowering customers to appropriate identities, histories, and kin-connections to differing degrees, on the basis of statistical clustering of molecular patterns—and allowing commercial entities to charge for access to these newly divided parcels of self.
Although geneticists emphasize the connections created by shared bodily substance, Haraway (1997) rightly identifies the Eurocentric and modernist anxieties about purity and pollution—a desire to separate self from an impure, mixed, or hybrid other—that better characterize the DTC genetic testing industry, not to mention the wider popular reception of population genetics (both ancient and modern). As described in some of the examples above, nonetheless, DNA-driven concepts of affiliation and identity can create regimes of care that encompass total strangers or articulate lineage stories that push back against hegemonic histories of cultural destruction. Overall, the insights we find in personal genetic tests are not the sort to launch us into Haraway’s dangerous-but-lively borderlands or to transgress our sense of reality, and bounded selfhood, but they may extend causeways out into these liminal spaces. While the authors of this paper fundamentally doubt the ability of genetic data to tell us much that is profound or new about who we are as individuals, the way genetic testing is marketed, received, understood, and engaged with by both scientists and the public is fertile ground for exploring how we collectively understand and negotiate our place in the world, alongside the other people with whom we share it.
