January 8, 2024

Thinking about gene-ealogies

Happy new year! I hope you all had a really fulfilling and restful holiday season!

This is part one of two posts of me thinking through some stuff. None of it is entirely new, per se, but consider this me fleshing out some of my own thinking based on interdisciplinary material so I have a foundation to get where I want to get with the archaeology over the next few years...

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About three years ago I read an amazing paper by an early career anthropologist named Sarah Abel. Her paper (co-authored with Hannes Schroeder) explored the ways that African diaspora communities in North America engaged with genetic ancestry tests; and used these complex engagements as a tool to explore the ways social and genetic identities are created, imagined, and communicate wider norms of relating - as well as reflecting on the responsibility of anthropologists working in the milieu.¹ I emailed Sarah to say how much I liked her paper and we struck up a correspondence that turned into her giving a seminar talk about her work here at ANU and a joint chat about genetics and identity on the podcast The familiar strange.

Sarah generously invited me to write a paper with her that built off this conversation, and (for me at least) it was a really formative writing experience. I learned a lot from writing my parts of the paper, and speaking across disciplines and time periods (not to mention global regions) really helped me clarify my own thinking and sharpen my own approach to kinship past and present.²

What I wanted to discuss here is the idea of gene-ealogies that we propose in this article - what we tried to do was think about the various permutations of kinship and how genetics are woven into these in the contemporary discourse. Telling histories through blood and bodily relation is a way of narrating the past and connecting past and present in ways that can be meaningful at the personal level, but many genealogies are effectively social - they are the mapped representation of stories and understandings communicated from one generation to the next. Genetic genealogies - the connections we draw between individuals via their DNA - may mirror traditional genealogies or create alternative stories.

At present genetic relations and genealogical thinking are conflated within the context of Direct to Consumer DNA testing. This leads to deeply cringe ads for DTC products where a genetic test is shown to change aspects of the tester's social relations - their clothing, food, taste in music. The suggestion here is, very obviously, that your DNA determines your tastes, your people, and your society. It implicitly questions the importance or validity of non-biological relations - what about the adoptee, for example? Or the person raised between two or more cultures? What about families of choice and other sorts of deeply formative relations that aren't based in genetics?

At the same time, one of the interesting aspect of genetic data is that it can create affiliations that can lead to the emergence of just these sorts of relations of care between people who were previously strangers. Sarah has explored this aspect at length in her work on the way genetic research is deployed among the African diaspora in South and North America.³ These sorts of gene-ealogies, then, are not just about tracing genetic patterns, but building new sorts of trellises around which social relations can be grown.

So, there's a tension here between gene-ealogical thinking and genetic essentialist ideas of relation. This is, of course, exactly the same issue facing archaeologists swimming in oceans of aDNA data - how we parse the relations that emerge from these data alongside our interest in the lived social worlds of past people is an open question. For me, it has been clarifying not just to separate out genetic pedigrees from social kinship, but also to explore (via gene-ealogies) the ways both map onto or are distinct from genealogical thinking. This is, hopefully, one avenue to building a more complex archaeology of kinship.