Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the discourses of ancestry/history and place/space/geography at work in laypeople’s reflections on the possibilities offered by genetic ancestry tests for tracing individual and collective racial, ethnic and national identities and ancestries.

Paper long abstract:

Population geneticists have argued that innovations in genetic science show that the DNA contained in a swab of saliva provides information on the genetic identities of the subject's ancestors. In recent years there has been a commercialisation of this technology for public consumption. The potentiality of such technologies has led to the marketing of these tests to individuals interested in tracing their ethnic, racial and national identities. In the wake of the commercialisation of these technologies, I shall explore what some lay Britons think of the possibilities offered by these tests for imagining the genealogical constitution of their own and the nation's identities. I will analyse publically available blogs written in response to a newspaper article that argued that the commercialisation of genetic ancestry tests is 'genetic astrology'. I illustrate how bloggers' thoughts on and reactions to this claim offers a window on the spatial and temporal narratives that constitute laypeople's conceptions of individual and collective national, ethnic and racial identities and ancestries. I will scrutinise how bloggers narrate identities that are both fluid and fixed, orientated to ancient racially white indigenous pasts as well as post-racial presents and futures, geographically bound to Europe but also spatially connected to differing parts of the globe. Crucially I examine the potentially socially progressive and regressive consequences of these discourses in relation to wider public issues concerning multiculturalism and immigration. I also reflect on how my analysis of this blog material has raised questions that anthropological inquiry is well placed to address.