Archives of identity

Abstract

Questions of nature and culture, identity and biology, and certainly the nature of establishing ‘fact’ cut through multiple disciplines in ways that few other themes could. The duality of science and society could not be more clearly articulated than in The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology. Indeed, Nadia Abu El-Haj brilliantly describes the intellectual interplay between anthropology, epistemology, popular memes of society and political order, political commitments, ideologies, and how these factors influence cultural imaginations specifically through genetic anthropology. Situating her work at the intersection of history of science, philosophy of science, sociology, and anthropology, Abu El-Haj offers specific, precise, and well-grounded arguments about how the meanings of biological difference have changed over time—and, specifically, about the explanatory role that history and the historical sciences can offer to these multi-striated themes as she works to unpack the complexity of: (1) Jewish origins and the subsequent questions: (2) ‘‘Who are the Jews?’’ and (3) ‘‘Who determines this?’’ Structurally, The Genealogical Science is broken in six chapters with each chapter tackling a specific component of Abu El-Haj’s broader intellectual project. There is, however, a particular undercurrent to all of the chapters, focusing on the social construction of knowledge and the question of ‘‘Jewishness’’ or ‘‘Jewish origins.’’ This undercurrent centers around several types of social knowing. Abu El-Haj describes one type of ‘‘social knowing’’ that is relatively more common within history of science and anthropology literature—the collective identity or collective history of origins. The second type of ‘‘social knowing’’ is certainly interestingly unique to the questions and themes of the book’s broader project. This type of knowing centers around the social epistemology and politics of genetic ancestry testing and what it means ‘‘to be Jewish’’ and how one might define that