The Social Sources of Genetic Genealogy
Family history research is a popular pastime for those seeking to discover unknown ancestors.1 For many, this pursuit has taken the form of genealogical journeys modeled on Roots: The Saga of an American Family, Alex Haley’s famous (and now infamously embellished) account of his venture to trace his African American family’s African lineage.2 The book and subsequent award-winning miniseries of the same name were the result of the author’s efforts to uncover the mystery of his ancestral origins with clues garnered from Gambian griots, deciphered linguistic retentions, archival research, and his own genealogical imagination. Haley’s account became an ur-text of African diasporic reconciliation for a generation of Americans, both black and white.3 Despite this example, few African Americans are able to fill in the contours of their past as Haley did, owing to the decimation of families (and, thus, the transmission of families’ oral histories and traditions) that was a hallmark of the era of racial slavery and to the dearth of records that remain from this period. As a consequence, genetic genealogy testing, which is broadly available and also less taxing and seemingly more authoritative than conventional genealogical research, holds considerable appeal for some root seekers of African descent.
Drawing on sampling techniques and statistical models developed in human population genetics, direct-to-consumer commercial genetic genealogy testing analyzes an individual’s DNA in order to infer information about family history, ethnic affiliation, or “biogeographic ancestry.”4 These services are becoming widely used. Some are niche marketed to specific social groups, such as the testing sold by African Ancestry, Inc., of Washington, D.C. Established by geneticist Rick Kittles and his business partner Gina Paige in early 2003, African Ancestry (also, www.africanancestry.com) is promoted among African Americans and “matches” customers to nation-states and ethnic groups on the African continent.5
African Ancestry is an information-age business—the exchange of a fee for service takes place online and through the mail. The company mails test kits to customers that contain the implements necessary to secure a DNA sample. The customer returns the sample to the company by mail; it is amplified and sequenced by the company’s lab partner Sorenson Genomics of Salt Lake City, Utah. African Ancestry then compares the resulting data to its proprietary DNA biobank—the African Lineage Database (ALD)—that is said to contain more than twenty-five thousand DNA samples from over thirty countries and two hundred ethnic groups in Africa. After several weeks, a customer will receive a results package that includes a printout of the customer’s Y-or mt-DNA markers, a “Certificate of Ancestry,” and sociohistorical information about the African continent.6 A hypothetical root seeker employing African Ancestry’s services may learn that her mt-DNA traces to the current Mende people of Sierra Leone and that her Y-DNA test, for which she submitted her brother’s DNA, traces to the Bubi group of present-day Equatorial Guinea.7 African Ancestry analyses might thus be regarded as ethnic lineage instruments through which an undifferentiated racial identity is translated into African ethnicity and kinship. By linking blacks to inferred ethnic communities and nation-states of Africa, African Ancestry’s analyses offer root seekers the possibility of constituting new forms of diasporic affiliation and identification.
On the surface, both the appeal and most likely outcome of the DNA testing service provided by African Ancestry (and other similar companies) appear to confirm that genetic genealogy is an essentialist practice—that ancestry testing, as a vehicle of identification, amounts to the reduction of transnational affiliation to molecular biology, in the process abetting the “reauthoriz[ation] of race as a biological category” and eliding the historical, political, and economic diversity of black experiences.8 However, as I describe here using ethnographic vignettes, the experiences of root seekers suggest that a more complex dynamic is at play. The genetic facts rendered as the outcome of genealogy testing may provide the circumstance for reconfigured social arrangements, yet this potential transformation does not stem solely from these data. Rather, the cogency of genetic genealogy testing is derived significantly from social sources that shape how facts are anticipated, interpreted, and mobilized by root seekers.
More specifically, in this chapter I begin to develop the concept of the factness of diaspora to describe the particular process of coproduction through which genetic genealogy testing attains value and validation for the root seekers of African descent I have encountered in the course of my ethnographic fieldwork and interviews.9
“Factness,” as I use it here, means possessing the state, condition, or quality of fact, yet not being only or exactly fact.10 The factness of diaspora denotes the imbrication of the “biogenetic facts” of genealogy testing and aspirations for African affiliation against the backdrop of histories of forced displacement and through the subsequent enactment of what I term reconciliation projects—practices in which scientific techniques are employed toward the resolution of the injuries of racial slavery.11 I elaborate the factness of diaspora through a discussion of three significant points in the interpretive trajectory of African Ancestry’s genetic genealogy testing service: the “authentic expertise” of the company’s chief science officer, Rick Kittles, which significantly influences root seekers’ confidence in its product; the forms of self-making—including affiliative self-fashioning, the creation of identity from both facts and desire for connection to a community—that may be spurred following the receipt of one’s genetic genealogy test results; and, related to this, the extragenetic forms of “kinship” the test outcomes may foster.
In October 2005 I attended the three-day national meeting of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS) for the first time. The conference program consisted of social events, tours of historic sites, invited lectures by prominent figures, and concurrent panels on topics of interest to the genealogists in attendance. Panel topics included accounts of hurdles and successes in family history research, how to use the now fully digitized Freedman’s Bureau records for family history research, how to participate in the Library of Congress’s oral history project for veterans, and how to document one’s genealogical research in compelling narrative form to share with family, friends, and local historical societies. The Saturday morning keynote address, a lecture entitled “Trace Your DNA and Find Your Roots: The Genetic Ancestries of African Americans,” was delivered by Rick Kittles, African Ancestry’s cofounder and scientific director. I previously attended other public presentations by Kittles and, as on these prior occasions, I watched with wonder as he performed his unique combination of erudition, charisma, and folksiness to a rapt audience comprising over one hundred people—women and some men who, with a few exceptions, appeared to be above age fifty, and many sixty years of age or older.
Kittles discussed how genetics could be used to help blacks trace their roots to African ethnic groups, detailing the scientific assumptions on which African Ancestry’s products are based. In addition to educating those in attendance about the technical aspects of MatriClan and PatriClan analysis, his presentation was also clearly intended to demonstrate how much Kittles held in common with his customer base, including their concerns about privacy and the unique historical circumstances that inspired their root-seeking pursuits. “African Ancestry is the only [genetic genealogy] company that focuses on people of African descent; it’s run by Black folks and it’s going to stay that way,” Kittles proclaimed. Genetic genealogy research should be “guarded by someone who shares the same sensitivity to the concerns of the community,” he continued to applause. The many audience members who cheered in response to Kittles’s assertion of community mindedness testified to the effectiveness of the geneticist’s claim to cultural authenticity.
This legitimacy was shored up as Kittles continued his pitch, changing registers slightly from man of the people to genealogist colleague. He recalled that he “caught the genealogy bug”—using a phrase common among genealogists who liken their interest in the pursuit of the past to a virus—as a doctoral student in biological sciences at George Washington University. “AAHGS is near and dear to my heart,” Kittles said; “I came to this event even before my research interests emerged in this area [of genetic genealogy testing].” Continuing to speak as a fellow traveler, with a PowerPoint slide in the background of the iconic image of the cross-section of a slave ship packed with black bodies, Kittles recounted his personal frustrations with genealogical research and spoke of the challenges facing even the most diligent amateur historians seeking to trace their African roots. He discussed how genetic genealogy testing had helped him discover that his maternal mt-DNA matched to the Mandinka of Mali. His paternal Y-chromosome line traced to Germany, a result he attributed to what he described as “the Thomas Jefferson effect.” This characterization doubly signaled the sexual violence of racial slavery and the forensic DNA analysis establishing (along with archival records) that the third U.S. president fathered the children of his slave Sally Hemings.12
At the conclusion of his formal presentation, Kittles raffled off a free African Ancestry test and then spoke at turns with thirty or so audience members who stood in a queue, which wound through the aisles of the auditorium, to await their turn to offer questions, comments, and compliments. One African American woman, attired in red, white, and blue clothing adorned with rhinestone American flags and a lanyard for her ID cards embroidered with the acronym DAR (for Daughters of the American Revolution), introduced herself as a member of the “underground railroad of the DAR, called the Daughters of Color,” before proceeding to ask Kittles for further interpretation of the genetic genealogy results she had recently received from his company.13 The great majority of Kittles’s audience, however, gathered in the lobby just outside of the auditorium where the lecture had taken place. Here vendors had set up tables arrayed with items for sale ranging from African-themed knickknacks to genealogical research primers. Most merchants sat noticeably idle. But enthusiastic customers surrounded one vendor’s table. In the center of this crowd was African Ancestry cofounder Gina Paige, who struggled to stay on top of the many orders being placed for her company’s services. Her business partner’s presentation, during which Kittles had stressed his shared experience with the audience, had succeeded in persuading many of the AAHGS membership to purchase African Ancestry’s genetic genealogy test.
The audience’s indisputably positive response to African Ancestry, evidenced both by their reception to the lecture and their purchase of its product, was perhaps preconditioned by the fact that Rick Kittles is among the most well-known molecular biologists in the United States. The authenticity Kittles displayed at the AAHGS gathering was bolstered by scientific authority established through press coverage, scholarly publications, and institutional associations. He has made frequent media appearances over the last several years in his capacity as chief scientist of African Ancestry. For example, he appeared in Motherland: A Genetic Journey, a 2003 British Broadcasting Company documentary that aired in the United States on the Sundance Channel, as well as in the PBS documentary African American Lives, in 2006, in which his company’s services were employed to trace the roots of black celebrities.14 Kittles has also been featured on ABC’s Good Morning, America and The Morning Show and 60 Minutes on the CBS network. Since 2002, scores of newspaper and magazine articles, including those in the New York Times, Time, New York Daily News, Black Enterprise, Wired, Fortune, and the Los Angeles Times, have cited commentary from Kittles, solidifying his position as an expert on genetic genealogy testing.15
Kittles’s professional ascent has included the publication of scholarly papers in leading science journals as well as stints at prestigious institutions. He has authored numerous articles in the area of human variation and genetics in notable publications, including the American Journal of Human Genetics, Science, the Annals of Epidemiology, and the American Journal of Public Health. The scientist has also held positions at the National Human Genome Center at Howard University, at Ohio State University, and, presently, at the Cancer Research Center at the University of Chicago. Kittles’s “hard” scientific research at prominent institutional settings on the genetic determinants of prostate cancer—a disease that disproportionately afflicts African American men—is concomitant with his investigations into what might be regarded as the “softer” science of the genetic genealogy testing.16 The geneticist’s demonstrated concern for black communities thus covers a spectrum from the prevention of racial health disparities to biological “optimization” of identity.17
As the public face of African Ancestry, Rick Kittles draws together cultural and scientific legitimacy into a complex I term authentic expertise. In his guise as a genealogist colleague who shares his customers’ desires for ancestral reckoning and their reservations about DNA analysis, Kittles establishes genetic genealogy testing as a legitimate and safe practice for African American root seekers. At the same time, his renown as a scientist and his involvement with cutting-edge medical genetics research lend authority to his commercial genetics enterprise. Thus, many root seekers are as compelled by Kittles as they are convinced by genetic science. “I trust Dr. Kittles,” a root seeker named Pat explained to me when I asked if she had any apprehensions prior to purchasing the MatriClan test that linked her to the Akan of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.18 Although Alicia, another informant, had reservations about the genetic genealogy results she received from African Ancestry because they were inconsistent with those from another company, she took great pride in telling me that she had been in contact with Kittles by both telephone and e-mail. Her misgivings were subsequently assuaged through her interactions with him. Kittles’s authentic expertise is an unmistakably important aspect of the appeal of African Ancestry’s genetic genealogy testing and of consumers’ faith in the genetic facts it supplies to its customers. This symbolic capital produces value around genetic genealogy tests that extends beyond the presumed capacity of DNA to assign identity and subsumes yearnings for African diasporic affiliation.
Back at the AAHGS conference, the society’s annual “sharing dinner” took place in a large ballroom of the on-campus hotel of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. All the genealogists at my table were women, as were the large majority of conference attendees. The gendered nature of this space is unsurprising if we appreciate the genealogists as “kin keepers.” Kin keeping refers to the maintenance of familial links, the circulation of information and traditions through the familial network, and the provision of financial and emotional support to kin that is predominantly performed by women and often passed intergenerationally between grandmothers, mothers, and daughters.19 The genealogical practices in which these women are engaged surely solidified kinship ties. At the same time, the genealogists drew upon new techniques, uncovering and also establishing family history with archival research and through the use of forms of genetic analysis.
During the meal, genealogists were invited to stand and share highlights of their experiences as family history researchers, if they were so inclined. Although none at my table availed themselves of this opportunity, we spoke amongst ourselves about our respective genealogical research projects. I struck up a conversation with Bess, an African American woman in her fifties who lives near Baltimore, Maryland seated next to me. I told her about my ethnographic study of conventional and genetic root seeking, including my preliminary foray into my own family’s history, which had brought me to the AAHGS meeting. Bess confided that she had been conducting genealogical research on her family for about a decade and had also recently received genetic genealogy test results from African Ancestry.
The next morning, I ran into Bess in the hotel lobby, where merchants, including Gina Paige, were setting up their tables for the day. Bess said to me, “I have something for you.” We sat together on the edge of a water fountain in the hotel atrium, and she showed me the results of her genetic genealogy test, which she had arranged in a binder. A letter from African Ancestry indicated that mtDNA analysis had linked Bess to the Kru of Liberia “plus/or Mende-Temne of Sierra Leone.” Her result package also contained a “Certificate of Ancestry” signed by Rick Kittles, a printout of the genetic markers from which Bess’s African ethnicity was inferred, a map of the African continent with Liberia foregrounded, and a flier advertising Encarta Africana, a CD-ROM encyclopedia, at a discounted rate.
Bess explained to me that she wants to “do something” with her results, like perhaps “travel to Africa.” Curious as to which of the two possible ethnicities suggested by African Ancestry was most compelling to Bess, I asked whether she planned to visit Liberia, neighboring Sierra Leone, or both countries in the future. “My sister was married to a man from Sierra Leone; his name was Abdul,” she replied obliquely, intimating that she would likely travel to the natal home of her deceased brother-in-law. “When will you be ready to travel to Africa?” I asked. “After I get back further in time [with my genealogical research],” she responded. As is common with other root seekers who make use of genetic ancestry tracing, Bess assumed a role in determining her test’s significance and its potential import to her life. Her intention to engage in practices motivated by the findings she received from African Ancestry after she advanced with conventional genealogy underscores how the interpretative work that commences following the receipt of genetic genealogy results can involve consumers’ efforts to “align” genetic DNA analysis with other evidence of their ancestry as well as with their genealogical aspirations and with prior experience or extant relationships.20
The conduct by which root seekers decide to accept or jettison genetic genealogy test results in the constitution of African diasporic connection and identity can be described as “affiliative self-fashioning.”21 Writing about the interface of brain imaging techniques and social identity, Joseph Dumit employs the phrase “objective self-fashioning” to explain how subjectivity can be “fashion[ed] and refashion[ed]” from the “received-facts of science and medicine.”22 By extending this useful analytic from objective self-fashioning to affiliative self-fashioning, I seek to emphasize that root seekers’ aspirations to be oriented on the African continent and/or within its diaspora mediate how technoscience becomes incorporated into self-making. Affiliative self-fashioning accounts for how identities culled from genetic genealogy are shaped not only by “received facts” but also by desires for diasporic connection—a confluence that impacts root seekers’ evaluations of genetic genealogy testing and, in turn, the way that the data it provides is incorporated into their lives. Affiliative self-fashioning thus reflects, on subjective and interpersonal levels, an aspect of the interpretive arc of ethnic lineage testing that I term the factness of diaspora.
Purveyors of genetic genealogy testing claim that their services trace or reveal otherwise unavailable information about ancestry and ethnicity. However, at present, matching a consumer’s DNA against proprietary genetic databases comprised of samples from contemporary populations, as African Ancestry and other genetic ancestry tracing companies do, cannot establish kinship with any certainty; ethnic lineage analysis does not associate a root seeker with specific persons at precise spatiotemporal locations. Also, owing to both technical limitations and historical dynamics, the associations inferred through the use of genetic genealogy are necessarily provisional.23
By supplying associations that are underspecified, genetic genealogy tracing presents consumers with the paradox of imprecise pedigree. Root seekers’ awareness of this paradox is indicated by their use of ostensibly redundant phrases such as “DNA cousins” and “genetic kin.”24 These composite descriptors, of course, acknowledge DNA analysis as the medium of affiliation. However, because the words cousin and kin are already commonly understood to connote “biogenetic ties,” the placement of the adjectives DNA and genetic before these words therefore should be unnecessary.25 Thus the circulation of these phrases also seems to suggest that the associations supplied through genetic genealogy are qualified and, therefore, must be rhetorically set apart from “natural” kinship or, in other words, that genetic genealogy testing is categorical yet imprecise. It is this space of indeterminacy that factness of diaspora unfolds. Root seekers forge “cultures of relatedness”—relationships, experiences, and narratives—that have some basis in molecular-level analysis but are also extragenetic.26
The recent family reunion of Marvin, a genealogist from the southern U.S., featured an appearance by someone he described as a “genetic kinswoman.” Some months prior, Marvin had purchased a genetic genealogy test from African Ancestry that associated him with the Mbundu people, the second largest ethnic group in the south-central African country of Angola. Marvin shared his results with a friend who subsequently put him in touch with Gertrudes, an Angolan immigrant neighbor of Mbundu ethnicity. At their first meeting, Marvin recalled Gertrudes as being “very accepting.” He continued, “She said that one of her passions is to connect with African Americans and tell them about their history in Africa and to let them know that, as she always says, ‘we are one.’ [She believes that] there is a disconnect between African Americans and Africans, and she’s trying to bridge the gap. One of her missions is to connect with more African Americans [and] teach them about Africa.”
Gertrudes subsequently invited Marvin to attend a celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of Angola’s independence from Portugal, hosted by the voluntary association for immigrants from the African country that she helms. Here Marvin, along with a cousin who attended the party with him, felt accepted by the larger Angolan expatriate community as well. “Once we told everyone there that our family came from Angola, they all said, ‘Welcome home. You’re home now.’ They even made me and my cousin get up on the dance floor. You know, they do a ring dance?… They told us, ‘You gotta come dance. Dance for your homeland!’”
In turn, Gertrudes would attend Marvin’s family reunion some months later. “Her presence was powerful,” Marvin recollected. “[She talked] about the importance of us coming together as a group of Africans. She expressed that we are all Africans and that Europeans try to divide us but now we must come together. And she also told our family some very interesting facts about the Mbundu people. And that was awesome, just for the family to hear about the people we descend from… directly from an Mbundu person. It was very powerful. She had the full attention of the whole family. Everybody was just sitting there in awe of her presence…. It was uplifting and powerful just to hear her tell us something about our African roots.”
The social exchange carried out between Marvin and Gertrudes points to how genetic genealogy testing circulates as a “diasporic resource.” As anthropologist Jacqueline Nassy Brown explains, diasporic resources can include “cultural productions such as music, but also people and places… [and the] iconography, ideas, and ideologies” of one black community that are employed by another as formative schema for political consciousness, collective empowerment, and identity formation.27 In Brown’s work, the concept describes, for example, how knowledge of a historic event such as the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth-century United States circulated globally via the media, popular culture, and social networks to become an important touchstone of self-determination for blacks in Liver-pool, England in the 1990s.28 In the context of genetic genealogy testing, the concept of diasporic resources elucidates how genetic information occasions “biosociality” between African communities and their diasporas, even in the absence of evidence of specific kinship ties.29 An imprecise pedigree connects Marvin and Gertrudes as “genetic kin” and “Africans.” The diasporic relatedness resulting from ethnic lineage testing is genetic inference inspired by genealogical aspiration and enacted through social interaction.
In recent years there has been increased scholarly interest in the study of “deterritorialized” or diasporic communities.30 Rogers Brubaker recently described this ideational proliferation as a “‘diaspora’ diaspora”: “a dispersion of the meanings of the term in semantic, conceptual, and disciplinary space.”31 While efforts to refine the concept of diaspora persist, many scholars are in agreement that its hallmarks include dispersal from long-held geographic homes; the constitution of a collective identity or consciousness in response to the experience of dispersal; connection to a place of geographic origin forged through practices such as communication, travel/tourism, philanthropy, and political engagement; and the circulation of collective memories, myths, or imaginaries about the homeland. Diverse diasporas, born of distinct historical, political, and economic push-and-pull factors, share these general contours.
Some theorists suggest that the African diaspora that began in the sixteenth century is “exceptional” among human dispersals of the past and present because it was a forced migration set in motion by the demand for slave labor. Futhermore, it spurred the process of ethnogenesis—the substitution of specific African identities for more general collectivities, such as Pan-African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean.32 As William Safran maintains, a “specific homeland cannot be restored” to slave descendants. Because an African homeland cannot be restored, it has been imagined or “rememoried.”33
How “Africa” has been envisioned by its slave-descended diaspora is a topic of debate among theorists. At issue is the ethics of imagining Africa and diasporic connection: What is the substance of diaspora? Who in the diaspora gets to imagine “home”? How is it imagined and to what ends? While some scholars maintain that the conceptions of Africa that underlie diasporic consciousness may have many foundational bases, including political ideology, cultural production, desire, common experiences of oppression or redemption, and communication practices, others contend that diasporic claims to and about Africa—particularly those of African Americans—can be essentialist, homogenizing, and instrumental.34
Paul Gilroy, arguably the most influential critic of originary imaginings of Africa, argues in The Black Atlantic that “Africa” has been inaccurately conceived as a transhistorical umbilicus linking blacks globally to a regal, prelapsarian past. Indeed, a principal theme of the theorist’s body of work is antiessentialism, in particular, the contention that notions of black transnationalism should not be based upon the “the stern discipline of primordial kinship and rooted belonging.” Gilroy’s discomfort with the idealization of roots stems from insights gained from his valuable inquiries into “raciology”—the constellation of discourses, many drawn from the biological sciences, that sustain and justify epistemologies of race and racism and, in turn, social inequality. As an antidote to racial essentialism, Gilroy alternately advances an understanding of diaspora as network, interchange, and circulation. “Primordial kinship” and the search for roots are thus contrasted with an ethicocultural conception of diaspora.35
Notions of diaspora rooted in technologies of kinship may be better conceptualized as “cultures of relatedness” in which biological facts are not the necessary conditions of possibility for social ones. In Carol Stack’s classic 1974 ethnography, All Our Kin, for example, kinship among urban blacks in “The Flats” of inner-city Chicago is based on the exchange of economic resources and caring labor between residents. As Stack shows, kinship terms such as aunt and brother are used by members of the community, but these categories do not connote nature or blood; rather, these terms are engaged despite lack of demonstrable biogenetic links. Similarly, Judith Butler offers “the social organization of need” as one example of kinship based on “consensual affiliation” rather than “blood ties.”36 Recent scholarship on new reproductive technologies has shown that “biology” and “family” can be decoupled through egg donation, surrogacy, and adoption.37
Kinship can thus have many bases. Viewed through the prism of this recent scholarship, the discourses and practices of kinship facilitated by genetic genealogy testing can be understood to scale up to diaspora without necessarily scaling down to human biological essences. Indeed, the forms of sociality fostered by genealogy testing—both the aspirations for affiliation that inspire its use and the relationships it may occasion—are conduits through which the networked conception of diaspora that Gilroy advocates may take shape. Affiliations that incorporate biogenetic facts may nonetheless be the “families we choose.”38
I have advanced the concept of the factness of diaspora to describe how phenomena seemingly extrinsic to genetic genealogy testing like that offered by African Ancestry facilitate its legitimacy. The legitimacy of genetic genealogy testing is built on cultural scaffolding including the “authentic expertise” of scientist-entrepreneur Rick Kittles, the process of affiliative self-fashioning embarked upon following the receipt of test results, and the diasporic relatedness that this information may support. Mistrust of scientific authority and concerns about privacy have a nonunique but significant history in black communities. A shared background between a scientist and consumers, then, becomes crucial to making the facts of genetic genealogy testing efficacious and meaningful. As Henry T. Greely points out, the forms of association on offer through genetic genealogy testing, while tracing lines of matrilineage and patrilineage, do not and cannot establish direct lines of descent and thus in practice are necessarily flexible and “fictive.” As a consequence, root seekers also become root makers, taking up those elements of the testing that facilitate associations that are important to them.39 The factness of diaspora provides a window on how diasporic resources are put to the purpose of constructing individual and collective identity and helps us to understand the processes by which root seekers come to selectively invest in genetic genealogy testing.
Notes
1. This chapter is revised from Alondra Nelson, “The Factness of Diaspora: The Social Sources of Genetic Genealogy,” in Barbara A. Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah S. Richardson, eds., Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, 253–270 (Newark, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).
2. Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (New York: Doubleday, 1976).
3. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (Cambridge: Havard University Press, 2006).
4. L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberti Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Duana Fullwiley, “The Molecularization of Race: U.S. Health Institutions, Pharmaco-genetics Practice, and Public Science after the Genome,” in Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, 149–171; Michael F. Hammer, “A Recent Common Ancestry for Human Y Chromosomes,” Nature 378 (November 23, 1995): 376–378; Mark A. Jobling and Chris Tyler-Smith, “Fathers and Sons: The Y Chromosome and Human Evolution,” Trends in Genetics 11, no. 11 (November 1995): 449–456; Mark D. Shriver and Rick A. Kittles, “Genetic Ancestry and the Search for Personalized Genetic Histories,” Nature Reviews Genetics 5 (August 2004): 611–618.
5. Rick A. Kittles, personal communication, February 4, 2006. The new company received much media attention; typical newspaper articles included: A. J. Hostetler, “Who’s Your Daddy? Genealogists Look Inside Their Cells for Clues to Their Ancestors,” Richmond Times-Dispatch (Va.), April 24, 2003; Stephen Magagnini, “DNA Helps Unscramble the Puzzles of Ancestry,” Sacramento Bee (Calif.), August 3, 2003; Steve Sailer, “African Ancestry, Inc. Traces DNA Roots,” Washington Times, April 28, 2003; Frank D. Roylance, “Reclaiming Heritage Lost to Slavery,” Baltimore Sun, April 17, 2003.
6. The company sells two forms of genetic analysis with the brand names MatriClan and PatriClan that trace matrilineage and patrilineage, respectively. MatriClan analyzes genetic information linked to mitochondrial DNA that is inherited by both male and female children from their mothers. The PatriClan test examines the genetic sequence of the Y-chromosome to trace lineage from son to father, to father’s father, to father’s father’s father, and so on. The company’s extensive Web site, http://africanancestry.com, details the testing procedures and results.
7. African Ancestry reports that approximately 25 to 30 percent of male root seekers using its PatriClan (Y-chromosome) test will not match any of the paternal lines in the African Lineage Database (ALD). In such instances, the customer may be advised to have his sample matched against a “European database.” See Greg Langley, “Genealogy and Genomes: DNA Technology Helping People Learn More About Who They Are and Where They Come From,” Baton Rouge Advocate, July 20, 2003. A page about the PatriClan (Y-chromosome) test on African Ancestry’s Web site states: “We find African ancestry for approximately 65% of the paternal lineages we test. The remaining 35% of the lineages we test typically indicate European ancestry. If our tests indicate that you are not of African descent, we will identify your continent of origin.” “Discover the Paternal Roots of Your Family Tree,” http://africanancestry.com/patriclan.html (accessed July 1, 2010). Because the ALD (African Lineage Database) is extensive but not exhaustive, however, there is some chance that matching “African” genetic markers are not yet included.
8. Nadia Abu El-Haj, “The Genetic Reinscription of Race,” Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (2007): 284. See also Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003). On black experiences, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
9. I described this ethnographic research in more detail previously. See Alondra Nelson, “Bio Science: Genetic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry,” Social Studies of Science 38, no. 5 (2008): 759–783. On coproduction, see Sheila Jasanoff, States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order (New York: Routledge, 2004); Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
10. I distinguish “the factness of diaspora” from Bruno Latour’s “factish” (fact and fetish). See Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), chapter 9. While both concepts are concerned with and reflect the dual constitution of scientific and cultural knowledge, the combination of the artifacts of reason with a field of value, with the factness of diaspora, I am specifically concerned with the historical experience of displacement and oppression and the subsequent aspirations for reconciliation that animate a particular orientation to the cultures of science. Latour asks whether an idea is “constructed well enough to become an autonomous fact?” (ibid., 274). Here, I am interested in the values that shape the adjudication and interpretation of facts, such that we must understand them as “factness.”
11. For the concept of “biogenetic” facts, see David M. Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 24.
12. Thomas Jefferson Foundation, “Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings” (January 2000), http://www.monticello.org/plantation/hemingscontro/hemings_report.html. See also Mia Bay, “In Search of Sally Hemings in the Post-DNA Era,” Reviews in American History 34, no. 4 (December 2006): 407–426.
13. Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) is a genealogy- and membership-based organization for women who can trace their lineage to an individual who aided in the cause of the United States’ independence from England. The DAR has a checkered history with regard to race relations. In 1939 it prohibited renowned African American singer Marian Anderson from performing at the DAR-owned venue Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., that only allowed whites on its stage. As recently as 1984, a woman who fulfilled all DAR membership requirements was not initially allowed to join the group because she was African American. Ronald Kessler, “Black Unable to Join Local DAR: Race is a Stumbling Block,” Washington Post, March 12, 1984.
14. Coproduced, written, and hosted by Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., this PBS genetic genealogy documentary franchise also includes African American Lives 2 (2008), on which Kittles was a collaborator, and Faces of America (2010).
15. Shriver and Kittles, “Genetic Ancestry.”
16. On Rick Kittles’s educational and professional background, see http://africanancestry.com/management.html and http://genemed.bsd.uchicago.edu/~kittleslab/.
17. Nikolas S. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 82.
18. In order to protect the privacy of my informants, all names used here are pseudonyms unless otherwise indicated. The actual names of the purveyors of African Ancestry are used because they are public figures. I interviewed subjects who attempted to trace their family genealogy by conventional means prior to purchasing genetic genealogy testing services as well as subjects whose first foray into genealogy was the purchase of a test kit.
19. Carolyn J. Rosenthal, “Kinkeeping in the Familial Division of Labor,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 47, no. 4 (November 1985): 965–974.
20. Nelson, “Bio Science,” 759–783.
21. Ibid., 771.
22. Joseph Dumit, “Is It Me or My Brain? Depression and Neuroscientific Facts,” Journal of Medical Humanities 24, nos. 1–2 (June 2003): 39.
23. Deborah A. Bolnick et al., “The Business and Science of Ancestry Testing,” Science 318 (October 19, 2007): 399–400.
24. Catherine Nash, “Genetic Kinship,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (January 2004): 1–33.
25. Schneider, American Kinship. As I address further on, this is the common usage of these kinship terms, but not their exclusive meaning. See also contributions by Janet L. Dolgin, Susan McKinnon, Rayna Rapp, and Kath Weston in Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney, eds., Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis (New York: Routledge, 1995).
26. Janet Carsten, ed., Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
27. Jacqueline Nassy Brown, “Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space,” Cultural Anthropology 13, no. 3 (August 1998): 298, and Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 53.
28. Brown, Dropping Anchor, chapter 2.
29. For the concept of “biosociality,” see Paul Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 102–103.
30. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
31. Rogers Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 1 (January 2005): 1.
32. “Exceptional” is Khachig Tölölyan’s term in “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment,” Diaspora 5, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 13. For the process of ethnogenesis, see Michael Angelo Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review 43, no. 1 (April 2000): 11–45. There are, of course, many African diasporas, including twentieth-century and present-day movements spurred by globalization. This chapter is concerned primarily with the older migrations that were spurred by the slave trade and dispersed Africans to the Americas, although its insights are, hopefully, more broadly applicable.
33. William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 90. As developed in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, “rememory” is the continuous existence in the present of something lost or forgotten in the past. Morrison, Beloved: A Novel (New York: Plume, 1988).
34. Authors arguing for a multicausal foundation of diasporic consciousness include Appadurai, Modernity at Large ; James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (August 1994): 304–305; Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Patterson and Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations,” 13–15; Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies,” 83–84; and Rinaldo Walcott, “Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in the Diaspora,” in E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, eds., Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 90–105. For the essentialist camp, see Gilroy, Black Atlantic ; Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Kamari Maxine Clark, Mapping Yorùbá Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); and E. Frances White, “Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse, and African-American Nationalism,” Journal of Women’s History 2, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 73–97.
35. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 123.
36. Carsten, Cultures of Relatedness ; Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), chapter 4.; Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 74.
37. See, for instance, Carsten, Cultures of Relatedness ; Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, “New Directions in Kinship Study: A Core Concept Revisited,” Current Anthropology 41, no. 2 (April 2000): 275–279; Deborah R. Grayson, “Mediating Intimacy: Black Surrogate Mothers and the Law,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 525–546; and Corinne P. Hayden, “Gender, Genetics, and Generation: Reformulating Biology in Lesbian Kinship,” Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 1 (February 1995): 41–63.
38. Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
39. Henry T. Greely, “Genetic Genealogy: Genetics Meets the Marketplace,” in Koenig, Lee, and Richardson, Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, 215–234.