Family Genealogy Research Articles

For Love or for Money: Balzac’s Rhetorical Realism by Armine Kotin Mortimer

is Meltzer’s rendition of “Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant” (136). Most of her arguments are lucid, firmly articulated, and also persuasive. But a few do overreach. Surely, the end of the envoi in Edmond Rostand’s famous “Ballade du duel qu’en l’hôtel bourguignon / Monsieur de Bergerac eut avec un bélître” has little to do with touching a ladylove and much to do with touching the vicomte de Valvert with a blade. More generally, determining the unwitting nature of various manifestations of Baudelaire’s double vision can be problematic. Still, Seeing Double constitutes a splendid performance and will represent a significant stop for anyone interested in Baudelaire and in modernity. University of Pennsylvania Gerald Prince MORTIMER, ARMINE KOTIN. For Love or for Money: Balzac’s Rhetorical Realism. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8142-1169-4. Pp. xi + 333. $52.95. While the author specifies in her introduction that “the reader will not find here anything like a complete interpretation of La comédie humaine” (8), she does provide a very thorough and convincing roadmap of Balzac’s vast literary domain. Mortimer insists on the interaction, rather than the static dichotomy, of what she repeatedly calls the “Prime Movers” of Balzac’s realism, or “the root causes of everything” (301) in the Comédie humaine: “what Balzac invented was precisely a world in which Love needs Money and vice versa” (5). However, even though the two basic forces are inextricably intertwined, relatively few of the multitudinous Balzacian characters can aspire to both: “Happiness means either Love or Money” (133). Indeed, the interaction of the “Prime Movers” usually takes the form of a drawn-out (and most often unequal) struggle, the results of which are frequently visible under the veneer of nineteenth-century bourgeois propriety: “Everywhere Money contaminates Love: greed destroys all the possible family bonds that love might make” (148). The twenty-one chapters of this study are organized into three broad sections—“Rhetorical Forms,” “Semiotic Images,” and “Mimetic Structures” of realism—that recall (but do not mirror) the tripartite structure Balzac chose for the Comédie: “Études de mœurs,” “Études philosophiques,” and “Études analytiques.” Mortimer offers a succinct overview of the three interrelated levels of meaning that she identifies and examines: “the plot, what is being conveyed to inform the reader constitute[s] the mimesis; the semiosis concerns the methods for conveying that information; rhetoric (taken broadly) provides the tools for mimesis and semiosis and in a sense subsumes both” (11). Despite the level of sophistication of the analysis, most chapters in For Love or Money are refreshingly jargon-free. Several chapters are devoted to, or touch on, the issue of Balzac’s famously elaborate family genealogies, which not only structure the plot and adumbrate the dénouement of numerous novels, but also reflect the convoluted financial transactions that link the characters: “The circulation of money, never secondary or insignificant in Balzac, follows a complex structure analogous to the excessive complexities of the genealogy” (158). Other chapters scrutinize the variety of Balzacian character types, which, as it turns out, “are not limited to people, as there are cities, streets, dwellings, furnishings, and clothing that function as types as well” (298). Another analytical thread running through the chapters is Balzac’s notable use of “explications nécessaires”—“where he writes the instruction manual Reviews 831 for his writing” (179)—ostensibly to supply useful background and causality, thereby guiding the reader through the intricacies of the plot, but also to arrive at a sharper or more precise level of realism. One entertaining as well as perceptive chapter is devoted to Balzac’s “Language of Sex”—which, despite being euphemistic and elliptical, usually remains clear. Unsurprisingly, Mortimer illustrates her close readings by regularly supplying quotes in French, followed by English translations. A very minor quibble: one wonders why it was necessary to translate , for instance, “condottieri de l’Industrie moderne” into “condottieri of modern Industry” (95). Consistently insightful and elegantly written, For Love or for Money will likely become an incontournable text for Balzac scholars. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin REGGIANI, CHRISTELLE. L’éternel et l’éphémère: temporalités dans...

Inferring human history in East Asia from Y chromosomes

East Asia harbors substantial genetic, physical, cultural and linguistic diversity, but the detailed structures and interrelationships of those aspects remain enigmatic. This question has begun to be addressed by a rapid accumulation of molecular anthropological studies of the populations in and around East Asia, especially by Y chromosome studies. The current Y chromosome evidence suggests multiple early migrations of modern humans from Africa via Southeast Asia to East Asia. After the initial settlements, the northward migrations during the Paleolithic Age shaped the genetic structure in East Asia. Subsequently, recent admixtures between Central Asian immigrants and northern East Asians enlarged the genetic divergence between southern and northern East Asia populations. Cultural practices, such as languages, agriculture, military affairs and social prestige, also have impacts on the genetic patterns in East Asia. Furthermore, application of Y chromosome analyses in the family genealogy studies offers successful showcases of the utility of genetics in studying the ancient history.

Antonio Carlos Jobim: An Illuminated Man (review)

Antonio Carlos Jobim: An Illuminated Man. By Helena Jobim. Translated by Dario Borim Jr. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2011. [xv, 267 p. ISBN 9781617803437. $27.99.] Illustrations. This 2011 publication is the first English translation of the 1996 biography of Antonio Carlos Jobim by his sister, the distinguished poet and novelist Helena Jobim. Colorful and poetic in style, it is a detailed social chronicle of her brother's life. It richly recounts their family genealogy, including many entertaining anecdotes and character studies. Helena lovingly details her brother's social life as well as situations and inspirations that led up to many of his major compositions. Antonio Carlos Jobim ranks with Cole Porter and Jerome Kern as one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century with popular appeal. Like Porter, Jobim had entire albums of his songs recorded by the eminent American pop singers Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. In fact, Jobim was in such high demand in the United States that eventually he had to maintain an apartment in New York in addition to his home in Rio de Janeiro; in addition, he had to devote periods of his career to stays in Los Angeles. The composer is recognized in the United States primarily as author of the masterful bossa nova hits Desafinado, Note Samba, and Girl from Ipanema, but in Brazil he is viewed as the successor to Heitor Villa-Lobos, the acclaimed classical music composer. This fact underlines the extensive formal training that Jobim underwent, which may be news for many American readers. In his sister's book we learn how thoroughly he was versed in classical composition and orchestration, in addition to being an accomplished flutist, guitarist, and pianist. It also may surprise American readers to learn that only about twenty percent of his output consisted of pop songs. Jobim scored the music for more than twenty movies and wrote large symphonic works. Helena Jobim recounts several particularly painful instances in her brother's career. Despite his successful tours of Europe and Japan and continued international acclaim, a number of particularly vocal Brazilian audiences and commentators rejected his music merely because it was popular elsewhere. Many of his countrymen downplayed the music because it was not a pure, shouting form of samba. Nor was he immune to the capricious and vicious assaults of music critics. After a Carnegie Hall performance that evoked standing ovations, one critic wrote, Bossa nova, go home! In Brazil another critic tried to make his own journalistic reputation by trashing him, just as a predecessor had done by trashing Villa-Lobos. Fortunately, a younger generation of critics understood the music's exquisite harmonic complexities and structures. One of them, Tarik de Sousa, remarked that Jobim's sambas cannot hardly be played on a matchbox, like a traditional piece of samba. His songs incorporate modernity into traditional forms (p. 225). Particularly sad are Helena's commentaries about her brother's being denied royalties for his biggest hits on three continents because he did not take sufficient business precautions early in his career. Being cheated time and again, Jobim ultimately prevailed, though he never gained more than a fraction of the compensation due him. An interesting sidelight to the book's musical and social history is Jobim's continuing interest in architecture. Helena treats us to comprehensive descriptions of every place her brother ever lived, including detailed design issues facing him when he was building new homes. …

Rutgers Manuscript Sources Relating to the African-American Community in New Jersey

Special Collections and University Archives at the Rutgers University Libraries holds several manuscript collections relating to the AfricanAmerican exper ience in N e w Jersey. O n e of the earliest holdings is a volume of minutes of the African Association of N e w Brunswick. T h e minute book dates from 1817 to 1824. T h e Association was founded to provide funds for a school in Parsippany, N. J . , organized by the Presbyterian Synod of N e w York and N e w Jersey. T h e goal of the school was to educate Young M e n of Colour to be Teacher s and Preachers to People of Colour within theses States and elsewhere. Included in the volume are the Association's constitution, a list of subscribers, receipts, certificates of permission to join, and texts of addresses delivered before the Association by Jeremiah Gloucester of Philadelphia (January 1, 1820) and Augustavus Cesar (January 1, 1821). Rutgers also holds the records of the N e w Brunswick Colonization Society which include its minutes , memberships lists, and constitutions. T h e Society was active in 1838-1839 and revived in 1853-1854. T h e r e are collections that relate directly to slavery in N e w Jersey as well as to the lives of free African-Americans during the pre-Civil War period. T h e records of M i d d l e s e x County , N. J . , include a vo lume of slave manumiss ion records, 1800-1825, and a vo lume recording the births of Black children in the county, 1804-1844. T h e manumission register's entries include the name (and somet imes age) of the freed slave, the date of manumission, and the name and residence of the person registering the manumission. T h e volume is indexed by the name of person freed. Entries in the birth register include the name and sex of the child, the mother's given name, the name of the person reporting the birth, and the dates that the birth was reported and recorded. T h e Peter Still Papers (Burlington County, N . J . ) include correspondence, 1850-1875, relating to the purchase of his wife and family held as slaves in Alabama and to the publication of his biography. T h e collection also includes a Still family genealogy, 1798-1821.

The Scent of Memory: Strangers, Our Own and Others

Using, as a point of departure, Tim Lott's recent autobiography where he attempts to make sense of his mother's suicide of 1988 through a reconstruction of his family genealogy, this article tries to map the production of gendered, classed, and racialized subjects and subjectivity in west London. It addresses the tension between Lott's discourse of his own white working-class boyhood during the 1970s where questions of ‘race’ are all but absent, and the racialized ‘commonsense’ that pervades the interviews with other local white contemporaries of Lott and his parents. These narratives are analysed in relation to the socio-economic context and the political activism of the period. Theoretically, it analyses the ‘diaspora space’ of London/Britain, interrogating essentialist ‘origin stories’ of belonging; reaching out to a glimmer on the horizon of emerging non-identical formations of kinship across boundaries of class, racism and ethnicity; and exploring the purchase of certain South Asian terms – ‘ajnabi’, ‘ghair’ and ‘apna/apni’ – in constructing a nonbinarized understanding of identification across ‘difference’.

Diverse Evill Persons: Echoes in the Landscape, Echoes in the Archives

This is an account of a process, the working together of cross-disciplinary insights between an artist and a historian, to create a means by which members of the public might encounter the past on their own terms. In the summer of 2009, the historian [MB] and the conceptual artist [PB] decided to collaborate on a project based around events at Cannon Hall, Cawthorne in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1673-74. The events are located in the B family genealogy but carry in them echoes of deeper social and economic forces in the past, as well as relevance to modern debates about crime, welfare and justice. The aim of the project is to create an exhibition/installation within which members of the public can experience what it means to make sense of the past through the prism of the present. The project is intended to challenge normative approaches in museology and the interpretation of heritage objects, places and documents. The article explores the foundational processes and concepts.

The Present Situation of Possession of a Collection of Royal Family Genealogies and It Sorts in Jangseogak

The Present Situation of Possession of a Collection of Royal Family Genealogies and It Sorts in Jangseogak

Evolution of entrepreneurship and organizational configurations at Zildjian, 1623–2010

This work uses a case-based research approach and Siggelkow’s (Acad Manag J 47:125–159, 2002) four-phase organizational configuration model to analyze Zildjian’s evolutionary growth and entrepreneurial initiatives in the global music industry. Zildjian is a unique and well-respected cymbal manufacturer that originated out of Turkey in 1623 and continues to be a major force in the music instruments sector. Turkey was a growing market during the periods of 1700 and 1800 that helped Zildjian to become an increasingly successful company. This also led to creating 13 generations of a successful family business. The work discusses Zildjian’s 387-year family genealogy and its growth within the domains of entrepreneurship, organizational configurations, and strategic inertia. The work finds that behind Zildjian’s marvelous expansion and well-known cymbals, there is a tightly knit family firm that continues to operate like an entrepreneurial venture, dealing with thousands of artists, musicians, educators, orchestras, and bands worldwide. As of 2011, the company may not be a large multinational corporation but its business model is a classic addition to the international entrepreneurship literature. Staunchly traditional in its family business, Zildjian thrives as a privately held company and protects its closely guarded metallurgical formula. The significance of this work lies in its unique methodology within the evolution of Zildjian’s entrepreneurial growth and organizational configurations.

A Product Family Genealogy Based Configuration Model

Product variation and customization is a trend in current market-oriented manufacturing environment. Product configuration is the key technology in this customization environment. But complex customer requirements are still hard to resolve. So the purpose of this study is to offering a new intelligent configuration algorithm to this problem, which is based on Product Family Genealogy Model (PFG). Characteristics of customer group, modules and product platform are discussed to build a PFG model - a hierarchy of reasonable configuration models. Based on it, both the customer requirements and constraints are classified and treated respectively. So the product configuration task can be easily accomplished by four sequenced stages i.e. “PFG position”, “key configuration”, “basic configuration”, and “form configuration”. Finally, an example of desktop configuration is presented to demonstrate this approach.

Family Genealogy: A Sociological Imagination Reveals Intersectional Relations

AbstractThis article depicts everyday family genealogy as a vehicle for the sociological imagination that links personal biography to social–historical contexts across generations. As genealogists construct current from past identities, they engage a sociological imagination that potentially enables them to grasp how intersectionality – gender, race, ethnic, sexuality, nation, class, and age relations – is articulated through history. The key aims here are: (1) to provide background conditions behind the growth of genealogy; (2) to reveal how doing and studying family genealogy engages a sociological imagination that can be a vehicle for perceiving theintersectionalunderpinnings of social memories. Genealogy can be seen as a political practice where race‐class‐gender within social memories can contribute to diverse stories from new standpoints in American history.

The Genesis of Venice in Anthony Hecht's "Venetian Vespers"

The Genesis of Venice in Anthony Hecht's "Venetian Vespers"* Jonathan F. S. Post (bio) "Where to begin" wonders the disturbed, wandering speaker early on in Anthony Hecht's celebrated dramatic monologue, "The Venetian Vespers." The question will be repeated halfway through this poem of more than eight-hundred lines, a poem divided into six sections or, better yet, six parts or movements, to begin to conjure up the poem's musical affiliation; but a poem also too long, too dark, and too zealously belated to fit comfortably into the genre of "tourist poetry" that Robert Von Hallberg has identified as one important legacy of post-World War II American imperialism. Even more to the point, "Vespers" has managed the nearly unique feat of garnering high praise from two critics unlikely to agree on almost anything: Harold Bloom and Christopher Ricks. Ricks noted in the New York Times in 1979 that the title poem, and several other long poems in The Venetian Vespers, "confirm Hecht as a poet of the widest apprehensions and comprehension, and this without the gigantism that so haunts American poetic ambition." Bloom, no stranger to the windy heights of American gigantism, likewise viewed the poem as a crowning achievement. Introducing Hecht at a 1994 poetry reading sponsored by the American Academy in Rome, Bloom singled out the poem's "Shakespearian" fusion of "high passion [and] furious warmth" as among the poetic qualities that, in his view, led Hecht to surpass his early mentor, in this case no less a poet than W. H. Auden. The poem tells the story of an aging American expatriate living in Venice. Haunted by recollections of the War and a sullied family genealogy, [End Page 166] he seeks to empty the self, with its accumulated burdens, into the immediacy of a deeply realized visual presence of which Venice offers so many opportunities. Here is one such visionary moment, taken in this case from the third movement. It is a moment, too, that every visitor to Venice has experienced, although few have phrased it better—when, upon entering St. Mark's Cathedral, the eye begins to adjust to the dim surroundings: GraduallyGlories reveal themselves, grave mysteriesOf the faith cast off their shadows, assume their formsAgainst a heaven of coined and sequined light,A splatter of gilt cobblestones, flung grainsOr crumbs of brilliance, the vast open fieldsOf the sky turned intimate and friendly. PatinesAnd laminae, a vermeil shimmeringOf fish-scaled, cataphracted golden plates.Here are the saints and angels brought togetherIn studied reveries of happiness.Enormous wings of seraphim upholdThe crowning domes where the convened apostlesReceive their fiery tongues from the GodheadDescended to them as a floating dove,Patriarch and collateral ancestorOf the pigeons out in the Square. Into those choirsOf lacquered Thrones, enameled ArchangelsAnd medaled Principalities rise upA cool plantation of columns, marble shaftsBearing their lifted pathways, viaductsAnd catwalks through the middle realms of heaven.Even as God descended into the massAnd thick of us, so is He borne aloftAs promise and precursor to us all,Ascending in the central dome's vast hiveOf honeyed luminosity. As Hecht noted many years later in a 2003 letter to Norman Williams, the dramatic present tense so evident here and throughout the poem is used "as a way of conveying the speaker's attempt to escape from [End Page 167] past and future by concentrating on the immediate present"—in this case with the language carrying the speaker's and reader's thoughts upward into the magnificent image of "the central dome's vast hive / Of honeyed luminosity." As an extended ekphrasis placed near the poem's center, we might also rightly and readily say, "Ruskin revived and improved." On the back of a note card, Hecht had jotted down a few of the crucial lines from The Stones of Venice that serve as his point of departure here, but composed, it should be noted, in blank verse and to the copious tune of a painterly Milton ("enameled Archangels / and medaled Principalities"). The passage is brightly alert to the radiating glint of surfaces but not...

Radicalizing Reunion: Helen Keller's The Story of My Life and Reconciliation Romance

The 1903 Doubleday, Page, and Co. edition of Helen Keller's The Story of My Life contains several photographs of Keller with prominent Americans. (1) The last photograph in book is a picture of Helen Keller and Mark Twain, arguably most famous of his time. This image reinforces Keller's status as a cultural icon, and it complements her efforts to fashion herself as a national hero in The Story of My Life (hereafter Story). In this narrative, Keller follows Franklinian pattern, portraying herself as a self-made individual who, through industry and self-reliance, conquered personal hardship and became a national celebrity. In so doing, she invites her readers to consider her work a distinctly American text, which exhibits models of selfhood established in nation's autobiographical traditions. Yet, while Story shows Keller to be a prototypical American, it also reveals her peculiarly southern roots, which Keller continually plays up. In first chapter, she claims that her paternal grandmother a granddaughter of Alexander Spotswood, an early colonial governor of Virginia, and second cousin to Robert E. Lee (13). Here, Keller links herself not only to patrician class of antebellum Virginians but also to Confederacy. She sustains this connection by informing readers that her father was a captain in Confederate Army (13). If Keller wants her readers to recognize her as a paradigmatic American, then why does she associate herself with rebel South? It is no surprise that Keller provides information about her father's past; he figures prominently in her memories of growing up in Alabama. However, her inclusion of Lee, a distant relative, in Keller family genealogy seems a conscious and symbolic statement. (2) By observing conventions of autobiography while linking herself to Confederate South, Keller asks her readers to consider her a representative and a child of South. As and southerner, she has a powerful double identity, which affords her special insight into of conciliation that characterized North-South relationship in Gilded Age years (Silber 2). After 1865, many white northerners and southerners, eager to ease sectional tensions, wrote novels and plays that dramatized North-South reunion. Providing an imaginary space for negotiating the reunion process and redefining nationalism, these romances were important products of culture of conciliation (Silber 3). (3) Set in South during Reconstruction, romances featured marriages between Union veterans and southern women or between Confederate veterans and northern women that symbolized national reunion after Civil War. These texts also romanticized lifestyle of planter class and perpetuated much of sentimentality ... of old Southern myth, which portrayed antebellum South as a pastoral paradise destroyed by war and Yankee occupation (105). Although northern writers established conventions of genre in 1860s, some southerners tried their hands at writing romances after Reconstruction. In fact, during last two decades of nineteenth century, Virginia-born novelist Thomas Nelson Page became one of America's most celebrated authors of reunion fiction (110-113). Both northerners and southerners used this fiction to work through social problems of Gilded Age America, and romances often reflected dominant cultural values of time. According to Nina Silber, many of these texts promoted an ideology of reunion tailored to interests of propertied white males. Affirming traditional class, race, and gender hierarchies, novels and plays of reunion often endorsed social marginalization of poor, African Americans, and women. By idealizing antebellum plantation culture, writers of reunion fiction expressed their sympathy with aristocratic southern values, suggesting that reconciliation remained province of social elite (Silber 106). …

Edgar Hynes Thompson Centenary

AbstractA significant landmark for British and international photogrammetry, as well as for this journal, occurred in January 2010 with the centenary of the birth of E. H. Thompson. Soldier and academic, polymath and wit, his scholarly contribution to our discipline has endured long after his too early death in 1976. So too have the vivid memories of those who worked with him or who were taught by him. This centenary tribute has been written by an author, E. H. Thompson’s first cousin once removed, who has researched the Thompson family genealogy. The second author was a student and then an academic colleague of Thompson as well as being Assistant Editor of this journal for 11 years under Thompson’s editorship.

Surnames and the Y Chromosomes

Most people get their surnames from their fathers. The surnames therefore well exhibit patrilineal heredity. Strict patrilineal heredity is also obeyed by parts of our genome, the Y chromosome non-recombinating portion. Therefore, men sharing a surname are expected to have similar Y chromosomes. However, association between surnames and Y chromosomes is always weak or absent due to the complicated social behaviors of surnames, e.g., various founders for a surname, surname changing, and non-paternity events. To set up better association, the family genealogies in combination with Y chromosomes should be used in historical anthropology studies. Two kinds of markers on Y chromosomes, single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) and short tandem repeat (STR), are widely used in setting up the Y chromosome genealogy and estimate the time. Y chromosome studies show strong power in resolving many doubtful cases existing for hundreds of years. Application of Y chromosome analyses in the family genealogy studies will be a most important part of historical anthropology researches.

Sturdy Scandinavian Women

Formerly called Lapps by outsiders, the nomadic reindeer pastoralism of the Saami people resides in arctic regions of Europe, stretching from Norway, across Sweden and Finland, to Russia. The story of God’s Mercy is a seductive journey, probing the interplay between Scandinavian and Saami cultures and spaces. Two cultures, two languages, two natures...touch, merge, diverge, overlap, and even ignore each other. There emerge, in time and across space, interstitial forms of beliefs, practices, and communication not dependent on juxtaposition or hybridity, and there emerge too the insidious hierarchies naturalized in social class. We face in this novel a proliferation of differences, not shapeless homogenous societies. Imagine a midwife as protagonist in earlytwentieth-century Sweden. Hillevi Klarins, trained in the urban center of Uppsala, opts to launch her professional career in a northern hinterland among expanding Swedish farmers and the indigenous Saami inhabitants. Hillevi’s move north might seem idealistic or adventurous were it not for the reader’s awareness of her mundane motivation, namely, getting herself into position before her lover and intended husband should be transferred to that same outpost parish. That union never materialized. In the north, Hillevi, like an amateur ethnographer, began accommodating to the peasant and pastoralist cultural practices. She studiously documents the rural Swedish and Saami survival skills, midwifery practices, yoik chants, Swedish songs, recipes, and frontier wedding feasts as they might appear in an anthropological treatise. Through several generations, Hillevi will come to oversee the births of new bodies and witness the deaths of others. As Hillevi muses, “It’s all about who manages to live the longest.” Midwives, like nurses and more so than doctors, have always understood the interplay of accident and necessity when it comes to life and death at any age, and in those days, giving birth was a life-threatening ordeal for both (or all) parties. At the same time, preparing a nursery for a prospective infant could invite bad luck. In many societies, midwives have been at risk of being accused of witchcraft. Hillevi herself came to be respected, but also suspected, and even feared, as she mediated the dreams and expectations of her Swedish and Saami families. Hillevi’s own expanding family ties and some of the novel’s nomad characters wandering into other cultures, languages, and countries will extend to two further books in the Wolfskin trilogy by Kerstin Ekman. That family genealogies appear neat and linear reflects an ideology; kinship diagrams have to presume that paternity is clear, even when the mother herself may not be certain. Hillevi observes that a mother is never free—not even free to share her knowledge of the workings of culture and how it’s transformed as tradition percolates through exigencies to quotidian experiences. Besides parturition, another most significant kink in genealogies occurs through the fostering and adoption of children and through adults converting their alignments for whatever reasons. Hillevi felt herself a class-based Swedish “half-breed.” Later, she adopted an orphaned Saami child, Risten (or Kristen, as she would be known in Swedish). Risten’s mother’s family had seasonally camped near the so-called Mount Giela. This imaginary name could be translated as “language” or “snare” mountain. A Tower of Babel, perhaps, or a site of entanglement? Risten’s father’s identity can only be suspected, but it is clear that she, too, is a “half-breed.” This novel reveals itself in two voices: Saami and Scandinavian; the auxiliary first-person narrative from Risten and the omniscient third-person accounts of everything else, neither set of revelations being either temporally linear or spatially logical. Risten’s narrative overlays the basic story about her stepmother, Hillevi. Even though Risten poses many questions she seeks to understand about herself, her narrative helps fill in the cracks of the master narrative while also fueling its forward motion. Faded rosemaling emblems punctuate the segments of chapters of God’s Mercy, and longer strings of eight initiate separate chapters. Rosemaling is the traditional Scandinavian decorative painting placed on traditional wooden furniture and other objects. If the entranced viewer of these emblems abandons focus on the floral motifs, they might transform to icons atop a Saami shaman drum, but then the little sprigs and flowers return to the page of God’s Mercy.

Unhomed Geographies: The Paintings of Julie Mehretu

Unhomed Geographies:The Paintings of Julie Mehretu Sarah E. Lewis (bio) As Greg Tate conducted Burnt Sugar: the Arkestra Chamber one night in New York City, his arm whipped the air with a directorial gesture that mirrored the dark elliptical line cutting through a painting by Julie Mehretu hanging just above the musicians with mimetic precision (see the photograph by Mehret Mandefro in the Visual Art section of this issue). The memory of the painting that he stood facing for the entire performance lingers still. Torrentially circulating layers of real, internalized, and imagined spaces and signs communicated in a language that the improvisational performers understood. "Julie's not afraid of chaos. It's about not being afraid of finding rhythm," Tate tells me. "The essence of conduction is bringing chaos to order. You can turn all nomads into a tribe with one gesture." Mehretu has a near bottomless syntax of gestural marks that materializes the agency borne of itinerancy. She has found freedom in constructing narratives out of inimitable movements from around the globe, a sensibility akin to the nomadic consciousness consonant with film scholar Teshome Gabriel's concept of Third Cinema practice. Over time, Mehretu's painted and drawn marks have become a capacious phenomenological notation. Her inscriptive acts have created a language that tie gestating subjecthood to the spatial real. The arc of Mehretu's trajectory, from making "story maps of no location" to a Whitmanian embrace of everyplace, first began with a self-ethnography. Born in Ethiopia, raised in East Lansing, Michigan, educated in Providence, Rhode Island and in Dakar, Senegal, and now living in New York, she approached her identity analytically, "systematically organizing and collecting stories and photographs of my family, reviewing family genealogies, delineating their separate geographies, and stitching it all together into an archive of resources" (qtd. in Ilesanmi 11). Turning one's own history into an archival resource became a shared process. In 2003, in conjunction with the Walker Art Center, she invited thirty young people of East African descent to conduct their own self-ethnographies using photographs, journals, and sound recordings. Yet the way in which Mehretu's personal history is fused into the work is through abstract and personalized gestures prompted by probing experiential questions. "How do you recall Addis Ababa from Berlin?" she muses aloud with an excitement more consonant with an explorer than a bewildered traveler. Recently returned to New York from a sojourn in Germany to complete a suite of paintings for her Guggenheim Museum exhibition, she tells me, [End Page 219] There would be moments when I was driving in Berlin, like just off of Alexanderplatz and I would think of Piazza in Addis Ababa, the plaza of the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, or near Teirgarten or Zoo I would think of Miazia 27th Square or maybe Menelik square; sometimes parts of Berlin would bring up the Jubilee Palace and other types of monuments in Addis. (Interview) She offers reasons why this could be: because of the spatial similarity of the international style of the early plazas of modernism, the old East, the urban structure, and maybe later the Soviet impact on both places. Yet none of the answers seem to fully address the core interest behind her question as do the phantom traces that have moved throughout her paintings, prints, and drawings. The visual effect of residual lines on her absorbent acrylic-silica surface even after erasure and sanding can be seen as a metaphorical answer to her spatial meditations: no matter where we now stand, we are never fully deracinated from the space we once knew. To hear the artist describe the early stages of her process shows the marriage between subjectivities and space from the inception of her work in the mid 1990s. "At first the paintings were just composed of layers of drawing. There were a few characters that huddled together and created a community. As they migrated and mixed with other characters, they made new cities. Eventually a whole terrain would be drawing upon and entangled with narrative" (qtd. in De Zegher 18). In early works, such as Inkcity Le Grande Villa (the herd) (1996), her ink on paper lines coalesced nomadic...

Trente ans d'étude de la maladie de Rendu-Osler en France : démographie historique, génétique des populations et biologie moléculaire

Résumé La maladie de Rendu-Osler est une génopathie héréditaire qui a fait l’objet de plusieurs études interdisciplinaires au fil des trois dernières décennies. Une enquête épidémiologique menée dans les années 1980 a d’abord permis d’en établir la prévalence en France à un niveau nettement plus élevé que ce qui était alors admis, et de pointer l’existence de zones de forte concentration. L’étude généalogique et l’étude de démographie historique qui ont suivi, centrées sur le principal pôle de concentration, n’ont pas permis de prouver la théorie d’un effet fondateur unique à l’échelle nationale, mais d’émettre des hypothèses quant à la date d’apparition d’une mutation locale. Enfin, l’identification, au cours des dernières années, des gènes responsables de cette maladie a permis d’en établir la grande hétérogénéité génétique et d’identifier un grand nombre de mutations différentes présentes sur le territoire français. Toutefois, de nombreux malades résidant dans le principal pôle de concentration étudié précédemment partagent une mutation unique associée à un haplotype spécifique. Au terme de cette étude, exceptionnelle par son aspect interdisciplinaire et sa durée, les différentes démarches convergent pour affirmer l’existence d’un effet fondateur local, et s’accordent sur une datation approximative de cette mutation.

"Fascismo garibaldino" e garibaldinismo antifascista. La camicia rossa tra le due guerre di

- The essay analyzes the recoveries of the garibaldian tradition in the period among the two world wars. The levels are manifold: the political dimension and the generational aspects, the family genealogies of the garibaldinism and the imaginary genealogies, sometimes interwoven and contrasted. Particular attention has been therefore reserved to the pages of "Camicia rossa", in which take form the perspectives and the claims of the "garibaldian fascism", but some contrasts also manifest themselves among the public use of the history promoted by the regime and the position of Ezio Garibaldi. On the long period the antifascist declination of the garibaldian tradition has in the French context its ground of fundamental development. The diplomatic relationships between Italy and France constitute the background to the dynamics in which the refugees try to create or to preserve a social and political role. The political emigration doesn't give up at all valorizing the patrimony of the Risorgimento in antifascist key. In the environment and on the pages of "Giustizia e Libertŕ" the dispute on the Risorgimento is faced in more systematic way. The recoveries of the garibaldian tradition - fascists and antifascists - concern a fundamental historical knot: the inheritance of the Great War and the choice of the Italian volunteers of the 1914. Recovering a constitutive and native aspect of the camicia rossa, the stories of the garibaldinism in this phase have therefore an international dimension and they are subscribed in a triangular perimeter that has Italy, France and Spain as vertexes.

Social Aspects of Genetic Testing Technologies

AbstractSince the early days of the Human Genome Project, there has been increasing social scientific research that promises to elucidate the social implications, aspects or dimensions of research on human, animal and plant genetics. This paper discusses the literature on the social aspects of different types of genetic testing technologies and their applications in the contexts of clinical medicine, biomedical research, personal and family genealogy, and criminal justice. Although there are many differences in the practices, purposes and organization of these technologies across such contexts, this paper shows that social scientists’ understandings of their social aspects centers on individual and collective experiences of how genetic testing technologies operate in practice.

Colonial Proprietary Elites and Institutions: The Persistence of De Facto Political Dominance

One of the central questions in political economy is whether there is path dependence in the political dominance of historic elite families in post-colonial societies. This paper uses a unique combination of household surveys, archival data and family genealogies to empirically estimate whether the political dominance of historic elite groups in the colonial period predicts local political dominance, today. This question is analyzed in the context of rural Punjab, in Pakistan, where the colonial state established institutions that granted unequal political and economic power to proprietary families and excluded non-proprietary groups. The results suggest that political dominance established 150 years ago persists in spite of the abolition of the de jure political institutions of the colonial state. We find that path dependence is the result of continuity in local village institutions. Within the sample of elite families we find that the magnitude of current land ownership impacts political dominance.