Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how DNA testing becomes an emergent way of constructing relatedness along with local notions of personhood among the Rukai of Taiwan, thereby coming to make the heterogeneous ontologies of ‘inheritance’.

Paper long abstract:

According to Rukai kinship practices, the children born from extra-marital relationships are often adopted or brought up by the siblings of their parents. Kinship practices as such will not face the question of identifying biological paternity until family members start to gravely concerns about the inheritance of private property. Interestingly, instead of the parents claiming their children, Rukai residents leave to the children the question of identifying the biological paternity on the grounds that children at the age of twenty are legally eligible to make a case in the Family Court. It is the agency and will of children which initiate the process of obtaining genetic information to make it revealed in the Court. This 'discovery' (Strathern 2005) of biological paternity in turn manifests and co-exists with Rukai residents' existing knowledge concerning the constructs of relatedness both through everyday caring and affective experience and through bodily dispositions considered to be ancestor-connected. In this sense, the legal notions and practices with respect to the right of private property allow relatedness to be possibly objectified and scientifically revealed. Moreover, the genetic information obtained then comes to make an emergent, heterogeneous ontology of 'inheritance' connected to, penetrating, even in symbiosis with, their existing ontology of inheritance realized and informed by everyday kinship practices.