‘Are you paying for somebody else’s?’ The value of secrecy in the uses of DNA paternity tests in the USA
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Based on an ethnographic study carried out in 2015–16 in a New York DNA testing centre, this article focuses on the different costs (economic, emotional, symbolic and political) of a paternity test result. Whether a mother is trying to defend her son’s interests, or a man wants to check the genetic authenticity of his parentage, the material drawn on here reveals the issues at stake in situations understood as enigmas that can be solved. What is the value of these enigmas, at the heart of family histories? In other words, what uncertainties do people want to resolve by identifying a biological father? Rather than taking a reductive approach framing the relationship to secrets as relating to a deep‐seated or even imperative ‘need to know’, this article, instead, problematises the current preoccupation with ‘truth making’.