ABSTRACT
The call for help here is to participate in the second of the Project’s three strands. The first – Field Research – comprises the core of the project and involves ‘the collection of blood samples from indigenous populations whose DNA contains key genetic markers that have remained relatively unaltered over hundreds of generations making them reliable indicators of ancient migratory patterns’. This will involve ten scientists in Australia, China, Russia, India, Lebanon, the USA, Brazil, South Africa, the UK and France, each covering a world region and carrying out local field and
laboratory research. The second component, its Public Participation and Awareness Campaign, invites ‘the general public’ to participate in the project by paying $99.95 to have their own genetic material analysed and located on the project’s developing map of human genetic diversity. Participants who learn of their own ‘deep ancestral history’ through the analysis can help the project by opting to allow the results to be added to the project’s global database. The net proceeds of the sale of the Genographic Project Public Participation Kits will fund the third strand, the Genographic Legacy Project ‘which will build on National Geographic’s 117year-long focus on world cultures’ by supporting ‘education and cultural preservation projects among participating indigenous groups’. The Genographic Project thus represents one of the latest large-scale
projects to map human genetic diversity. It also reflects the recent application of human population genetics in personalised genetic ancestry tracing (Tutton 2004). In the Genographic Project the genetic material submitted by ‘non-indigenous’ participants will be analysed by Family Tree DNA, one of the most popular commercial providers of genetic tests in genealogical research, at the University of Arizona. Companies selling genetics testing services for genealogy have capitalised on the popularity of genealogy in Western Europe and in countries of European settlement in the New World – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States – and the scientific promise of genetics, by creating new genetic commodities for the genealogical market from the data and methods of population genetics. ‘Personal interest genomics’ is the term recently coined to describe the ‘personal or recreational use of genetic ancestry information’ (Shriver and Kittles 2004: 615). In the Genographic Project the methods of commercial genetic testing companies are incorporated back into a study of population genetics as a means of generating public interest and securing public support. The Genographic Project thus represents the entwining of two areas of
contemporary genomics that make direct claims to be able to tell us where we came from, and therefore in some sense who we are, as individuals, as human groups and as humanity as whole: population genetics and genetic genealogy. In this chapter I focus on the Genographic Project and Family Tree DNA to explore these two areas of science, commerce and culture. My questions are about the ways in which ideas of human difference, commonality, and connection are figured within these fields as they move between internet sites, newspaper reports, television documentaries, maps, material culture and science press. Genetic accounts of origin and relatedness have significant potential effects on the historical self-understandings and constitution of collective membership of groups whose ‘myths’ of origins are tested by population geneticists (Davis 2004; Nash 2006; TallBear forthcoming). The results of genetic ancestry testing may challenge, confirm or intersect with pre-existing familial, national, cultural, ethnic or racial identities (Brodwin 2002; Elliott and Brodwin 2002; Simpson 2000). As others have pointed out, recent developments in genetics suggest both
the resurgence of racialised accounts of difference and new complex equations of culture, biology and genetics (Goodman 2001). Yet recent commentators, challenging earlier broad critiques of the resurgence of biological determinism and biological essentialism within and as a result of rhetoric of molecular genetics, have argued that people actively incorporate genetic information into their sense of selfhood and collective identities in complex and creative ways (Novas and Rose 2000; Rose 2001; Rose and Novas 2005; Wade 2002). New genetic knowledges, it is argued, are producing new active, informed and self-actualising forms of personhood and new communities and networks of obligation, identification and distributed expertise. But this creative incorporation of genetic knowledge and its dynamic deployments in the practice of identity and community coexists with the increasing reliance on genetics in legal cases concerning questions of collective membership, cultural ownership, rights to group benefits and, in forensic cases, identity itself. Furthermore, the effects of genetics on the dynamics of subjectivity and social relations are partly shaped by the sort of genetic knowledge in question. Here I want to consider a particular form of genetic knowledge, its pro-
duction and its lexicon of ‘diversity’, ‘deep ancestry’ and what I call ‘genetic ignorance’ in relation to ideas of geographical origins and relatedness: where we are from and who is related to whom? This involves considering its relation to the figuring of subjectivity, ethnicity and national belonging in popular genealogy. The growth of interest in genealogy has complex causes but in part reflects a version of subjectivity both forged and found through self-exploration – explorations of family history, as well as psyche and spirit. This model of the self, shaped through both the facts of genealogical knowledge and the process of uncovering those facts, intersects with the particular configuration of the categories of ‘native’, ‘settler’, ‘national subject’ and ‘immigrant’ in societies shaped by complex geographies of historical and contemporary migration. Both family histories of migration and reactions to new immigrants shape interests in ancestry (Nash 2002). In this chapter I explore the ways in which the Genographic Project,
with its avowedly anti-racist account of shared human origins, configures the meanings of human similarity and difference, connection and distinction. What sort of geographical imagination of human migration and mixing does it present? How is its ‘public’ constituted through its maps of genetic lineage and its participation strategy? How are people being invited to know themselves in new ways via genetic ancestry by Family Tree DNA and similar genetic ancestry services? In what ways is race refigured as well as avoided in attempts to construct forms of relatedness that make genetic kinship meaningful? In focusing first on the Genographic Project and its relationship to the wider field of population genetics, and second on genetic genealogy via Family Tree DNA, I trace the uncertainties and elisions that characterise the nature and interpretation of these technologies of origination as well as their more predictable effects.
