Paper short abstract:

This paper draws upon an ethnographic study of consumers of direct-to-consumer genetic testing and probes the uncertainty and potentiality of genetic information in the search for “genetic kin” and investigates how algorithms of relatedness are taken up in individual and group identity.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past several decades, rapid development of genetic technologies have ushered in new approaches to determining individual human ancestry from algorithms of genetic relatedness derived from population genetics. The precipitous decrease in the cost of high throughput genetic sequencing technologies have fueled commercial efforts to sell genetic ancestry testing services direct to consumers (DTC) via the internet. Despite the proliferation of commercially available genetic ancestry tests, little is known on how individuals consume test results and interpret their meanings. This paper builds on an ongoing study of the personal genome testing company 23andMe, Inc. based in California's Silicon Valley and examines in depth interviews with 23andMe consumers and other social actors in probing how consumers engage genetic ancestry information in identity formation and understandings of relatedness. Bundled with genetic information on disease, drug response and other traits provided by the company, this paper probes how information on genetic ancestry is taken up in conjunction with these other test results in rendering risk meaningful. This paper examines how genetic ancestry information is suggestive of new forms of relatedness and how commercial ancestry services capture and cultivate a desire for specificity and certainty in an inherently contingent landscape of probability. Examining the productive ambivalence over genetic ancestry information and selective memory in the construction of genetic kin, this paper probes how potentiality is inscribed not only onto the biological materiality of DNA in, but provides the lens in excavating the past in identity formation of individuals and groups