Peter Wade's edited collection is concerned with human relatedness, and in particular the changes in personhood and belonging that have been argued to accompany developments in genomics and biotechnology. These issues are explored by anthropologists using a range of concepts – race, ethnicity, nation, kinship and genetics – in various European contexts, including Lithuania, Norway, Spain and the UK. Given the central concern with relatedness, the coherence between the various contributions can be captured by using a pun about family resemblances. The chapters have recognizable unity, but while some are separated at birth (Chapters 5 and 8 by Campbell) others are more like distant cousins. Nonetheless, as the stated aim is to bring fresh anthropological perspectives to debates that have been somewhat dominated by sociology, ethics and law, this diversity has the benefit of opening up the field of enquiry. Transnational adoption, Basque nationalism and Lithuanian citizenship might not have figured greatly thus far in debates over ‘biosocieties’ but the authors here stake a claim for their relevance.

Wade introduces current debates in anthropology that claim ‘nature’ as a concept has been destabilized, thus upsetting the commonplace nature–culture dichotomy. This theoretical framing is adopted by many of the contributing authors. Daukšas (Lithuanian citizenship) and Marre (transnational adoption) use their examples to argue that nature and culture are interwoven or blurred. Howell and Melhuus discuss debates about three different kinds of potential outsiders to Norwegian society (immigrants, transnational adoption and babies conceived using donor sperm) to highlight different positions of a continuum of nature–culture. Immigrants, they argue, are subject to ‘cultural fundamentalism’, while children born using donor sperm are subject to ‘biological fundamentalism’. Children adopted from abroad ‘manifest a middle position’ as they are challenged by both ‘biological and cultural belonging’ (p. 55). These children are distinguished from other immigrants because their adoptive parents ‘kin’ them as Norwegian, as ‘insiders’ (p. 67). The issue of transnationally adopted children (Marre, and Howell and Melhuus) is also notable because it highlights the continuing importance of ‘race’ and racism.

Indeed, debates over ‘race’ are central to many chapters. Tyler reports on a ‘mix up’ in a UK IVF lab which led to black twins being born to a white mother. She argues that racialized characteristics were central to the narratives of her interviewees and in press coverage, but that ‘race’ was not necessarily viewed as fixed or essentialized. Campbell (Chapter 8) also reveals ambivalence in his analysis of UK press stories that addressed ‘race’, nation and genetics. He claims that ‘genetic information is used in a creative politics of identity’ but that it is valuable both to claims of ‘bounded lines of singularity’ and the ‘historical realities of intermixture’ (p. 184). Campbell (Chapter 5) also discusses the racialized aspects of ‘gamete-matching’, whereby regulations encourage that ‘donated gametes should match the physical characteristics of the recipients’ (p. 95). The UK, Spain and Norway, he explains, have different regulatory regimes for assisted reproduction, but all three, ‘explicitly, or by implication, prevent clinically assisted cross-‘racial’ mixing’ (p. 113). He distinguishes this ‘racialized management of reproductive fertility’ (p. 101) from historical racialized hierarchies, but argues that gamete-matching nonetheless demonstrates ‘a tenacity of sensibilities over race and reproduction, and the power that ‘racial’ mobility is deemed to hold’ (p. 116). Porqueres i Gené offers hope against the persistence of racism from his examination of the shifting discourse of Basque nationalism, by suggesting that racist ‘ideologies based on the maintaining of discrete blood lines’ can be challenged by the logic of kinship (p. 141).

This collection fulfils its aim of broadening the terms and contexts of current debate. On a critical note, it is limited in its examples of biotechnology, and in some places it provides only restricted methodological detail. It is nonetheless recommended to scholars interested in human relatedness in its different forms and particularly those working at the intersections between relatedness and development in bioscience.