We set out from the position that nature and culture are co-produced and that biology, history, and culture are inextricably entangled ( Barad, 2007 Haraway, 1991 Latour, 1993 Lock & Nguyen, 2010). In other words, for common complex disorders, even those family members who share a specific gene in common may well not have a similar risk for future disease. This situation makes risk predictions exceedingly problematic, and no straightforward conclusions can be drawn about what exactly the “passing on of genes” or “blood relations” implies with respect to disease incidence and family relations. The question becomes one of how and under what circumstances a segment of DNA is expressed, and in what ways the segment functions in relation to other molecules and environments internal and external to the body. Although Mendelian genetics can be made use of to create predictions about the numerous comparatively rare single gene disorders seen in the clinic, when dealing with common adult onset disorders the process is very different. However, emergent postgenomic technologies have forced substantial re-thinking about what exactly constitutes a gene, and turned attention to the way in which segments of DNA function variably in different contexts ( Jablonka & Lamb, 2005 Lock, 2005 Oyama, Griffiths & Gray, 2001). The dominant model in molecular genetics for the second half of the 20th century has been one based on Mendelian segregation of genes in which sound predictions can be made with considerable accuracy about disease risk. However, it should not be assumed a priori that all newly emerging knowledge about genes will necessarily radically transform family relationships. The subject matter of this special issue of Social Science and Medicine – how bonds of kinship may potentially be transformed on the basis of newly acquired genetic information – appears to be invigorating kinship studies yet further (see, for example, Browner & Preloran, 2010 Cox & McKellin, 1999 Finkler, 2005 Hallowell, 1999 Konrad, 2005). Technological advances in assisted reproduction over the past two decades have further challenged the assumption that kin and “blood” relations must inevitably be constituted from sexual reproduction alone, ensuring that kinship continues to be a thriving research subject within the social sciences ( Franklin, 1997 Franklin & Ragoné eds., 1998 Franklin & Roberts, 2006 Strathern 1992 Thompson, 2001, 2005). Ethnographic research that followed deconstructed this “biologism” so evident in kinship studies and provided important insights into the epistemology of knowledge production and normative cultural practices associated with reproduction and kinship in EuroAmerica (see, for example, Carsten, 2000, 2004 Franklin, 1997, 2003 Franklin & McKinnon, 2001 Strathern, 1980). Schneider’s critique of the effects of the “naturalization” of kinship in anthropological research was one aspect of a broader move in the social sciences in which the concept of ‘nature’ itself was increasingly subjected to interrogation. He argued that this model, in which the primary ties of kinship are assumed to be “formulated in concrete, biogenetic terms,” is in effect culturally produced, and by no means universal ( Schneider, 1968: 23). Kinship studies constituted a key research focus within social anthropology for most of the 20th century, but a significant shift in orientation took place in the 1960s when the anthropologist David Schneider drew attention to how much of this research had been biased due to its basis on what he termed the Euro/American “folk model” of kinship.
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