Genetic Geographies: The Trouble with Ancestry

Description

Introduction : geography, genetics, kinship -- Genome geographies : the making of ancestry and origins -- Mapping the global human family : shared and distinctive descent -- Our genetic heritage : figuring diversity in national studies -- Finding the "truths" of sex in geographies of genetic variation -- Conclusion : degrees of relatedness: "natural" geographies of affinity and belonging.;What might be wrong with genetic accounts of personal or shared ancestry and origins? Genetic studies are often presented as valuable ways of understanding where we come from and how people are related. In Genetic Geographies, Catherine Nash pursues their troubling implications for our perception of sexual and national, as well as racial, difference. Bringing an incisive geographical focus to new genetic histories and genetic genealogy, Nash explores the making of ideas of genetic ancestry, indigeneity, and origins; the global human family, and commerce of ancestry in the United States and the United Kingdom, including the National Geographic Society's Geographic Society's Genographic Project and the People of the British Isles project. Tracing the tensions and contradictions between the emphasis on human genetic similarity and shared ancestry, and the attention given to distinctive patterns of relatedness and different ancestral origins, Nash challenges the assumption that the concepts of shared ancestry are necessarily progressive. Through sex, nation, and race, and its novel spatial lens. Genetic Geographies provides a timely critical guide to what happens when genetic science maps relatedness.