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Genealogy has long been one of humanity's greatest obsessions. But with the rise of genetics, and increasing media attention through television programs like Who Do You Think You Are? and Faces of America, we are now told that genetic markers can definitively tell us where we came from.
The problem, writes Eviatar Zerubavel, is that biology does not provide us with the full picture. After all, he asks, why do we consider Barack Obama black even though his mother was white? Why did the Nazis believe that unions of Germans and Jews would produce Jews rather than Germans? Are sixth cousins still family? In this provocative book, he offers a fresh understanding of relatedness, showing that its social logic sometimes overrides the biological reality it supposedly reflects. In fact, rather than just biological facts, social traditions of remembering and classifying shape the way we trace our ancestors, identify our relatives, and delineate families, ethnic groups, nations, and species. Furthermore, genealogies are more than mere records of history. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Zerubavel introduces such concepts as braiding, clipping, pasting, lumping, splitting, stretching, and pruning to shed light on how we manipulate genealogies to accommodate personal and collective agendas of inclusion and exclusion. Rather than simply find out who our ancestors were and identify our relatives, we actually construct the genealogical narratives that make them our ancestors and relatives.
An eye-opening re-examination our very notion of relatedness, Ancestors and Relatives offers a new way of understanding family, ethnicity, nationhood, race, and humanity.
1. The Genealogical Imagination
2. Ancestral Chains
3. Co-Descent
4. Nature and Culture
5. The Politics of Descent
6. The Genealogy of the Future
7. The Future of Genealogy
CGME
Posted January 13, 2012
Professor Zerubavel has written an excellent sociology text on how societies in general views their ancestry and other people around them. And, as the cover summary says, it does offer "a new way of understanding family, ethnicity, nationhood, race, and humanity."
However, the text bares no relationship to how genealogists today practice their profession. It does provide a review of the glaring mistakes many people make when they start doing their family genealogy.
A close look at the notes and bibliography show that Professor Zerubavel did not read any genealogical articles or books, very likely never attended a genealogical conference, and probably never spoke to a genealogist.
In writing a book subtitled "Genealogy, Identity, & Community" it would have been nice if Professor Zerubavel had made himself familiar with the people & profession he alleges to be writing about.
Overview
Genealogy has long been one of humanity's greatest obsessions. But with the rise of genetics, and increasing media attention through television programs like Who Do You Think You Are? and Faces of America, we are now told that genetic markers can definitively tell us where we came from.
The problem, writes Eviatar Zerubavel, is that biology does not provide us with the full picture. After all, he asks, why do we consider Barack Obama black even though his mother was white? Why ...