ABSTRACT
The making of identities and the construction of belonging involve multiple interactions between the spheres of history, politics, culture, law and economics. In recent years, genealogical research into family histories has gained enormous popularity, not least because of technological advances such as the internet, which has opened up new avenues of access and communication, be it via databases, chatrooms or online forums that provide the root-seekers with an unprecedented infrastructure to pursue their advance into the past. The diasporic ‘self-fashioning’ that ancestry testing facilitates is thus deeply political in its foundations as well as its articulations. Genetic ancestry testing is firmly placed in this discursive realm of inherited human variation. The ambiguity of ancestry testing can be stressed even further if one takes into account the fact that the testing focuses exclusively on one singular line of biological descent.
