Investigative genetic genealogy: Current methods, knowledge and practice

Investigative genetic genealogy (IGG) has emerged as a new, rapidly growing field of forensic science. We describe the process whereby dense SNP data, commonly comprising more than half a million markers, are employed to infer distant relationships. By distant we refer to degrees of relatedness exceeding that of first cousins. We review how methods of relationship matching and SNP analysis on an enlarged scale are used in a forensic setting to identify a suspect in a criminal investigation or a missing person. There is currently a strong need in forensic genetics not only to understand the underlying models to infer relatedness but also to fully explore the DNA technologies and data used in IGG. This review brings together many of the topics and examines their effectiveness and operational limits, while suggesting future directions for their forensic validation. We further investigated the methods used by the major direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic ancestry testing companies as well as submitting a questionnaire where providers of forensic genetic genealogy summarized their operation/services. Although most of the DTC market, and genetic genealogy in general, has undisclosed, proprietary algorithms we review the current knowledge where information has been discussed and published more openly.

Typologies, Typifications, and Types

This article positions types at the center of anthropological knowledge production, considering them both from the abstract, analytical perspective of expert typologies and from the tacit, phenomenological perspective of everyday practices of typification. Proposing what an “anthropology of types,” broadly construed and across these two scales, might look like, I examine the histories and uses of types and typological thinking in anthropology, highlighting the empirical, analytical, methodological, ethical, and political questions they have raised. I then describe the phenomenological foundations of typification, how sociocultural and linguistic anthropologists have approached it, and the accompanying challenges related to translation and representation. Finally, I review ethnographies of expert practices of type production, tracing the circuit of typification–typology–type and back again to show how forms of expertise institutionalize lay knowledge in ways that further solidify the misrecognition of types as natural, and examine visual and arts-based interventions that draw attention to these processes.

Resurecting raciology? Genetic ethnology and pre-1945 anthropological race classification

This article places the current high-profile and controversial scientific project that I call 'genetic ethnology' within the same two-century tradition of biologically classifying modern peoples as pre-1945 race anthropology. Similarities in how these two biological projects have combined political and scientific agendas raise questions about the liberalism of genetics and stimulate concerns that genetic constructions of human difference might revive a politics of hate, division and hierarchy. The present article however goes beyond existing work that links modern genetics with race anthropology. It systematically compares their many similar practices and organisational features, showing that both projects were political-scientific syntheses. Studying how the origins, geography, filiations, 'travels and encounters of our ancestors' affect 'current genetic variation', both seem to have responded to a continuous public demand for biologists to explain the histories of politically significant peoples and give them a scientific basis. I challenge habitual contrasts between apolitical scientific genetics and racist pseudoscience and use race anthropology as a parable for how, in the era of Brexit and Trump, right-wing identity politics might infect genetic ethnology. I argue however that although biology-based identities carry risks of essentialism and determinism, the practices and organisation of classification pose greater political dangers.

Quantifying fertility? Direct-to-consumer ovarian reserve testing and the new (in)fertility pipeline

Frequently branded the "egg timer" or "biological clock test," anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) testing for women is becoming widely available in the United States (US) through online, direct-to-consumer (DTC) testing services. The level of AMH in the blood reflects the remaining egg supply or "ovarian reserve"-a potential fertility indicator. AMH level is primarily used as a diagnostic tool prior to ovarian stimulation for in vitro fertilization (IVF) or oocyte cryopreservation (OC; i.e., egg freezing). This article describes the first ethnographic research on DTC ovarian reserve testing in the US, with a recruited sample of 21 participants interested in pursuing testing who consented to participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Fieldwork took place from January 2018 to July 2018 in Chicago, Illinois. Ethnographic cases explore how experiences with ovarian reserve testing are shaped by relationship status, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, racial/ethnic identity, and medical insurance coverage. Thematic analysis suggests that DTC ovarian reserve testing is a unique means of investigating fertility; participants felt empowered by receiving testing outside of traditional medical contexts. It was an alternative tool for family planning, particularly for LGBTQ + individuals and single women. However, participants experienced varying degrees of certainty about test results and the appropriate next steps to take to confirm fertility status, preserve fertility, or conceive, thus suggesting that DTC testing may confound reproductive decision-making. I argue that DTC ovarian reserve testing is a new tool in a larger medical and social project to mitigate anticipated future infertility and is an entry point into what I term the new (in)fertility pipeline encouraging entanglement with reproductive technologies across the lifespan. Due to its low cost and widespread availability, DTC ovarian reserve testing reaches a broader demographic, encourages testing across diverse identities and backgrounds, and increases awareness of more advanced assisted reproductive technology (ART), including egg freezing.

Population Demography, Ancestry, and the Biological Concept of Race

For more than 50 years, biological anthropology has argued against the use of the biological race concept. Despite such efforts, aspects of the concept remain in circulation within society and within the discipline itself. As commonly articulated, anthropology's rejection of the biological race concept lacks an evolutionarily based explanatory grounding. Biological patterns of variation in living humans do not map onto commonly utilized categorizations of race, but this knowledge does not explain why human evolution has not produced such structures. This article attempts to offer one such explanation by constructing a biocultural framing of race around ancestry. By examining ancestry through two related lenses, genealogical and genetic, it is shown that the coherence of race as a biological concept has been disrupted by demographic changes in our recent evolutionary past. The biological construction of race is invalid not because it is impossible but because evolutionary forces have actively worked against such patterns in our evolutionary past.

Of African Descent? Blackness and the Concept of Origins in Cultural Perspective

Over the past decade, the DNA ancestry-testing industry—based largely in the United States—has experienced a huge upsurge in popularity, thanks partly to rapidly developing technologies and the falling prices of products. Meanwhile, the notion of “genetic genealogy” has been strongly endorsed by popular television documentary shows in the US, particularly vis-à-vis African-American roots-seekers—for whom these products are offered as a means to discover one’s ancestral “ethnic” origins, thereby “reversing the Middle Passage.” Yet personalized DNA ancestry tests have not had the same reception among people of African descent in other societies that were historically affected by slavery. This paper outlines and contextualizes these divergent responses by examining and comparing the cultural and political meanings that are attached to notions of origin, as well as the way that Blackness has been defined and articulated, in three different settings: the United States, France and Brazil.