Ancestry Worship in the Age of At-Home Ancestry Tests
Why Ancestry Tests Are More Astrology Than Science
Anthropologically speaking, ancestor worship is simply the actions of the living in which subjects appeal to past ancestors for guidance. This typically appears in two main ways- communication between an individual and a recently dead ancestor, and communication between a group and their shared ancestor(s). The latter has reemerged in the United States during the 21st Century as Americans try to reconnect with lost heritage- usually predating arrival as immigrants to the United States.
For centuries in the United States, parents told their children stories of how their ancestors immigrated to the US from abroad, but that connection to pre-immigration ancestry largely became unimportant to most white Americans. Most descendants of Polish and German immigrants in contemporary US are monolinguistic English speakers. Few descendants of Czech or Norwegian ancestry can cook recipes from their ancestors’ home countries. At-home DNA ancestry tests made ancestral knowledge popular though- with the industry peaking in 2017.
At-home ancestry tests cross reference an individual’s genetics with dna samples from individuals across the world to determine regions of the world the customer’s genetic heritage most closely resembles. (For example, an immunity to a certain disease might compare to similar immunity among people living in Iceland- thus identifying Iceland as a high probability location for ancestral heritage.) Part of the problem with this model however is that these tests associate genetics with cultures- dividing human cultures by biology rather than sociology.
In anatomically modern homo sapiens, there is both only one species and only one subspecies- meaning there is more biology that unites us than divides us. Ancestry tests try to market the opposite however. For example, that test that may have shown ancestral heritage to Iceland creates the idea that being Icelandic is a biological status. In reality, any person around the world could immigrate to Iceland, become a citizen, then marry another immigrant- and their neighbors would consider all of them to be Icelandic.
When Americans take these tests, most of them are aware of all of this. Rather than taking to test to see what nationality their dna makes them, they are looking for what ancestral nationality their dna makes them. Essentially, Americans are looking for what cultures their ancestors belonged to. This is where it becomes comparable to astrology. Whether Greek, Mayan, or Chinese; the vast majority of astrological beliefs subscribe character traits to individuals born when a certain celestial body was in the night sky at the time of birth. Ancestral astrology implies cultural characteristics to individuals based on the genes they were born with.
If someone learns from an ancestry test that claims German heritage, the scientific basis might simply state a series of chromosome patterns that link that person’s heritage to Central Europe- like a specific constellation in the sky at the time of a person’s birth. The characteristics applied to that genetic pattern however is what become astrology. The problem with this is that those who take ancestry tests stereotype what is means to belong to a certain culture. That German heritage might invoke visions of schnitzel and oktoberfest, but the reality may be an ancestor who never drank alcohol and who could have been a vegetarian.
Ancestry tests provide the first half of astrology to their customers- the genetic equivalent to a constellation their customer was born with. But that’s not what people look for when they take these tests. Nobody’s looking at what diseases they’re immune to or what color their beards were- Americans are looking for what lives their ancestors would have lived- like what foods they ate, what music they listened to. DNA can’t tell someone that and it only establishes speculation and cultural stereotyping.
At the heart of it, heritage is simply the set of stories handed down through generations about ancestors that came before an individual. To find those stories, the only “ancestry test” is conversations with family. I learned more about the lives of my ancestors through talking to my parents and grandparents than any dna test could ever tell me- like the German immigrants in my father’s family who started a farm in Missouri or the Basque great grandfather who became friends with a young Hollywood movie star. Americans wanting to connect with ancestors from a thousand year ago often forget their best resource comes from their closest ancestors- their parents.
