When Technology, Law, and Family Converge: Rethinking Questions of Filiation, Gender, and Generation in Connection with DNA Paternity Tests

Anthropologists have noted recent trends in contemporary kinship patterns that, throughout the Western hemisphere, have resulted in the decreased importance of conjugal relations and the increased reliance on inter-generational ties.  Historians looking at working-class populations in Latin America, however, remind us that such practices are nothing particularly new.  Here, working from ethnographic field research in the judicial instances of a major city in southern Brazil (Porto Alegre), I examine the great demand for DNA paternity tests, seeking to understand the interaction of “traditional” with new family conducts, due to the interweaving of “local” as well as “global” influences.   Asking how recent legislation and available technology interact with “clients’” demands and shape their projects for family organization brings us to reconsider fundamental questions of gender hierarchies, inter-generational relations and notions of kinship.