Reviewed by: Genetic Geographies: The Trouble with Ancestry by Catherine Nash Nadia Abu El-Haj Catherine Nash. Genetic Geographies: The Trouble with Ancestry. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. viii + 238 pp. $25.00 (978-0-8166-9073-2). Genetic Geographies: The Trouble with Ancestry contributes to a growing literature on the making of genetic pasts—as scientific practice, commercial venture, and political and cultural imaginary. Coming at the topic from the field of geography, Catherine Nash explores how ancestry, origins, and relatedness are configured along the intertwined axes of historical geographies, on the one hand, and sex, reproduction, and kinship, on the other. Analyzing the naturalizing effects of anthropological genetics, Nash examines the complex ways in which the difference of both “race” and sex emerges through the work of mapping human relatedness on genetic terrain. Since its initial instantiation in the Human Genome Diversity Project, anthropological genetics has seen itself as an antiracist science: it presents “genetic differences” as seemingly “neutralized . . . a means to something else, to knowledge [End Page 753] of ancestry, something positive, rewarding, meaningful but politically neutral” (p. 7). As Nash makes clear, however, there is nothing politically neutral about this scientific-qua-commercial field: Nash demonstrates that neither the turn to a language of “ancestry” and “relatedness” nor the distinct scientific epistemologies that turn signals resolve the problem of race: the continental distinctions on which racial thought relied remain salient to delineating ancestry and relatedness (chaps. 1 and 2). Moreover, Nash emphasizes, anthropological geneticists work at multiple geographical “scales,” producing and reifying socially salient distinctions other than those of race (e.g., ethnic group, nation, “vanishing indigene,” and “primitivist fetishization” [p. 86]). Much of Nash’s analysis of the field is familiar by now. Her focus on “historical geographies”—that is, the spatial character of relatedness, and the “degrees of kinship connection” (p. 23, emphasis added)—however, is a significant move: it highlights the fact that ancestry and origins are spatial mappings, and that relatedness and distance are fixed onto geographic terrain. Nash’s reading of the People of the British Isles project is one of the most interesting chapters in the book (chap. 3). She analyzes the articulation of and the tension between nationalism and multiculturalism in Britain, and demonstrates how a project that set out to identify the genetic variation within the United Kingdom (p. 114) ends up grounding a British nationalism in a native Briton. Who is an appropriate representative of the genetic makeup of the British Isles? Who counts as “indigenous” in this project, worthy of being tested? In what historical peoples, events, and eras is British genetic “mixedness” to be found? Nash argues that the project produces a distinction between “old and new diversities,” and it locates the British national story in “those of ‘mixed’ but ancient descent” (p. 130). Those who have arrived more recently—those postcolonial citizens of, for example, Caribbean descent—do not partake in the genetic diversity of the British Isles; their “ancestral origins and ‘genetic heritage’ are beyond the country” (p. 130). As Nash argues, this scientific embrace of “mixedness” ends up producing the very naturalness—albeit as a “genetically mixed” population derived from “ancient settler groups,” (the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, or Vikings [p. 122])—of British “whiteness” itself. The most original contribution of Genetic Geographies is found in Nash’s reading of the assumptions about sex, sexuality, and reproduction on which anthropological genetics builds its historical tales. By and large, the existing scholarship focuses on the discipline’s implications for understandings of race, nation, origins, and ancestry. By way of contrast, Nash explores in vivid detail how the assertion of fundamental sex differences is essential to interpreting the genetic data. This science is not looking for genes for putatively feminine or masculine behaviors. It relies on patterns of genetic variation in mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome, “figured as indicative of maternal or paternal lineages,” and those patterns are interpreted as “products of, and thus evidence for, women’s and men’s different reproductive natures” (p. 18). In sum, Nash shows, history is represented as driven by the biological fitness of a few men who reproduce ad nauseam—via marriage, conquest, and rape—and...