Negotiating Belgian identity in Wisconsin through ancestry genomics

Abstract

ABSTRACT How do Wisconsin-based descendants of Belgian immigrants – living in a mid-western, largely white, and mostly rural community – connect a perceived common Belgian ancestry to a contemporary sense of belonging through genomic ancestry testing (GAT)? Members of this community negotiate GAT’s results in relation to their prior self-identification with Belgian ancestry and present-identity claims, highlighting two important findings. First, in this community, prior self-identification with both Belgian ancestry and present-day identity are important for understanding how group members negotiate GAT’s results. GAT results have meaning for group members as long as they can be interpreted in a way that re-establishes the histories of connectedness and social life experiences that underpin a specifically ‘Belgian’ identity. Second, another feature of more interest for STS researchers is that there are no specific genomic markers clearly linking individuals to a ‘Belgian’ ancestry. The lack of genomic markers for Belgian ancestry ends up enabling a socially flexible interpretation of results. Indirectly and with inventiveness, community members establish their Belgian ancestry through the genomic results, despite the absence of a ‘Belgian’ category derivable from the tests. As such, there is significant flexibility in the way that genomic ancestry testing ends up filtering into everyday practices.