Genealogical Account Research Articles

Can the Earth be Sacred Once Again? Christianity and Climate Change

The following paper takes Pope Francis’ Encyclical on Climate Change as an opportunity to re-open the debate, begun in 1967 by Lynn White Jr., on the theological origins of the environmental crisis. I note that the Pope’s critique of consumerist modernity is strong, but his lack of a genealogical account of modernity remains a weakness of the text. I argue, with White, that the technological revolution which has caused climate change would not have been possible without Christian assumptions. The original disenchantment of the world was the Abrahamic revelation which disjoined divinity and nature, and contra to appearances, the disjunction was only exacerbated by the doctrine of the incarnation. With climate change, modernity is returning to this revelation in the form of the sobering experience of the precarity of the planet. Nature is now experienced as finite once again, and it includes us. Modernity, however, cannot be disavowed any more than disenchantment can easily be forgotten. A return to the Christian roots of disenchantment might help us to remember what we have forgotten: the virtue of contemplation, which could qualify modern attitudes of control and domination, and engender a Christian experience of reverence for nature. While this is a Christian response to the climate crisis, other religious traditions will need to come to analogous forms of earth-centered ethics if we are to achieved the integrated ecological pluralism needed for the future of civilization.

Is there a pathological way of ageing?

This think piece discusses ‘Alzheimer’s disease’ from a critical anthropological perspective. I aim to challenge the taken-for-granted biomedical framing in four steps. First, a brief genealogical account shows that Alzheimer’s disease as a biomedical category has only recently become a public and global health preoccupation. Second, the concept of medicalization is mobilized to illustrate the construction of and the uncertainty around this new medical object. Third, I build a case for analysing this medical category within a sociocultural context. Finally, a brief account of the relevance of social intervention is given.

Una defensa genealógica del no purismo en la justificación epistémica

En este trabajo defiendo una concepción no purista de la justificación epistémica, según la cual ésta depende en parte de factores “no conducentes a la verdad”, como el contexto pragmático de las personas. Para ello pongo en relación tres perspectivas distintas sobre la noción de creencia justificada. En la primera sección analizo los aspectos prominentes de la noción pre-teórica. En la segunda sección defiendo una posición no purista permisiva que recoge teóricamente los elementos de la noción pre-teórica y los amplía hacia el no purismo. En la tercera sección defiendo esta posición mediante una explicación genealógica del origen del concepto.

The camp and the question of community

Recent literature in camp geographies has sought to emphasize the significance of political agency among camp residents, particularly in refugee camps, as part of a critical reaction against the highly influential Agambenian conceptual vocabulary of exception and bare life. The concept of community has been integral to this body of work, with diverse accounts of the camp implicitly or explicitly positioning community as the natural scale through which camp resident and inmate agency is formulated, and yet there has hitherto been little research reflecting directly on the meaning that community takes on in the specific context of the camp. In this article we adopt Roberto Esposito's critique of the concept of community to problematize the assumption that camp communities necessarily constitute a space of empowerment and agency for camp residents and inmates. Drawing on Esposito's genealogical account of communitas (2010), whereby community is encountered not in terms of a property shared among individuals but instead as the loss of individuality and other forms of ‘the proper’, we suggest that the implementation of community, while generative of agency, is also fundamental to camp authorities and related regimes of power. Furthermore, we argue that the operation of camp communities includes its own forms of politics that are specific to the exceptional space of the camp and that potentially expose individuals to violence. We develop this argument through an experimental reading of communitas in relation to the two empirical contexts that have been most influential on the trajectory of camp studies within geographical debates, the concentration camp and the refugee camp, represented in this paper by Auschwitz and the contemporary archipelago of Serbian refugee camps respectively. The ambivalent account of power relationships emerging from these readings suggests that Esposito's rendering of community may have important analytic value in investigating the complexity of camp spatialities and the distinctive co-articulation of power and agency therein.

The genealogy of the zoo: Collection, park and carnival

The zoo, like all organizations, is constituted by processes of collection and separation. This article provides a genealogical account of the conditions of possibility of the modern zoological gardens, beginning with the cabinet of curiosities, then the landscape park and the menagerie, and finally the carnival and fair. This leads to a discussion of the foundation of the bourgeois zoo in the 19th century, and its mutation into its contemporary combination of spectacle and civilizing institution. I conclude with some reflections on the dialectic between order and disorder that the zoo exemplifies, an organization which is constructed to civilize and contain, but which is always haunted by the financial need for spectacle and the production of the wild non-human.

Afflicted by Innocence: An Examination of the Innocence Revolution and Its Failures

This article offers a genealogical account of innocence in US jurisprudence alongside an account of the depersonalization of black people in legal proceedings and shows their entanglement. By examining both slavery-era laws as well as the punitive surge of the 1990s, this paper finds that while white people were protected by the presumption of innocence, black people were under siege by the legal presumption of slavery. Even after the Civil War, the presumption of innocence remained illusory through a legally codified correlation between blackness and criminality. The article uses the case study of Rodricus Crawford to show how the focus on exonerations as an antidote to mass incarceration leverages a notion of innocence that helps some get out of prison, while further entrenching the criminalization and punishment of the majority of others. This text argues that the innocence revolution and wave of exonerations is not only insufficient, but harmful. The innocence revolution continues to legitimize and further entrench the validity of “true” guilt as a category deserving punishment.

The aporia of ἢ ἐϰ παντὸς in Posterior Analytics II.19

Abstract This article sketches, and works to motivate, a controversial approach to Posterior Analytics II.19. But its primary goal is to recommend a novel solution to one particular interpretive aporia that’s especially vexed recent scholars working on Post. An. II.19. The aporia concerns how to understand the enigmatic ē ek pantos... (≈ “or from all...”) in the genealogical account of foundational knowledge at II.19 100a3-9. Our proposed solution to the aporia is discussed in connection with a number of larger philosophical issues concerning Aristotle’s theory of epistē mē.

Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire

In Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson takes on the ambitious project of providing a broadly Foucauldian genealogical account of the concept and practice of “terrorism.” While I am not quite sure she summits every mountain she attempts to climb, Erlenbusch-Anderson makes a valuable contribution to an under-developed literature and she offers some tantalizing points of departure for future explorations of an important and timely subject. Genealogies is an eminently worthwhile read; while some grounding in Foucault (among others) is sure to enhance the experience, Erlenbusch-Anderson’s introduction provides an able road map, making the ascent up through the complex and truly fascinating history of “terrorism” an adventure that doesn’t leave the reader out of breath, yet offers some genuinely startling moments of insight that stop us, urging us to review much of what we think we know about a term that sees a good deal of use—one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter—if much less comprehension. Articulating a creative use of Foucault’s notion of a dispositf, that is, larger historical formations “on which discursive and nondiscursive practices, laws, institutions, political decisions, military measures, architectural forms, and mentalities are joined together” Erlenbusch-Anderson is able to provide comprehension to use, and like a page-turner detective novel, she provides use to the comprehension of the history of “terrorism” and thus to terrorism.

The evolution of the European Union’s failed approach to Afghanistan

ABSTRACTThis article provides a genealogical account of European actorness in Afghanistan. It argues that European agreement towards facilitating modernisation and development in Afghanistan was initiated with aid and trade, evolving into humanitarianism in the 1990s, and reconstruction and democratisation in the 2000s. The European Union has had a positive impact on Afghanistan, focusing on humanitarianism, but its multilateral and programme level approach to reconstruction and democratisation has failed to meet the EU’s stated objectives. By promoting the flawed “Bonn Model”, the EU is proportionally culpable for failed international attempts to reconstruct Afghanistan; even though the United States has been the primary international actor. Drawing a series of broader lessons, such as tensions between Atlantic solidarity and European integration, and the limitations of the European crisis management, the article demonstrates how European policy has been shaped by crises inside Afghanistan and the larger geopolitical crises these have generated. These have contemporary importance as history suggests that as the US withdraws its commitment to Afghanistan, the EU will have a very significant role in attempting to fill a humanitarian vacuum.

Make Hegel great again: on Hegel’s epistemological contribution to critical terrorism studies

ABSTRACTDespite the contribution of Foucaultian inspired approaches to Critical Terrorism Studies, this article invites us to consider Hegel’s epistemological insights. Foucault’s power-knowledge nexus is an invaluable intellectual tool which reveals how terrorism can be a “social fact”, yet it rests on a genealogical account of history and a passive notion of subjectivity determined by power (regimes). Hegelian philosophy maintains some of the benefits met in Foucault’s approach (sociality and contingency of knowledge) while providing a richer epistemological account. This article introduces Hegel’s epistemological insights to: i) challenge the portrayal of terrorism as a major external threat against the western liberal democratic states in the vein of “New Terrorism” or the “Clash of Civilizations”; and ii) domestically explore how the concept of liberal democratic rights, equality, freedom affect the interpretation of counter-terrorist bills, the threat perception of terrorism and domestic polarisation. Hegel’s insights critically interrogate the notions of “liberal rights”, “equality” and “freedom”, revealing how their ambiguous definition accommodates inherent contradictions which can fuel a controversial interpretation of counter-terrorist bills, leading to domestic polarisation and (reciprocal) radicalisation. Therefore, Hegel’s epistemological insights reveal how the defective definition of human rights, equality and liberty can amplify the effects of Terrorism and radicalisation.

Fragile Umanità

Fragile Umanità

Groundwater in California: From Juridical and Biopolitical Governmentality to a Political Physics of Vital Processes

This article analyzes the emergence of a political rationality of groundwater in contemporary California. It contrasts a new government of nature that we call a ‘political physics of vital processes’, operative in the case of the Orange County Water District, with juridical and biopolitical rationalities of groundwater governance. To do so, we propose a genealogical account grounded in a reading of a key concept in Aristotle’s first book of Politics. The case is analyzed along the axes of subjectivity, space, and temporality, opening to a novel way of conceptualizing the relation between power and nature.

Artificial and Unconscious Selection in Nietzsche’s Genealogy: Expectorating the Poisoned Pill of the Lamarckian Reading

I examine three kinds of criticism directed at philosophical genealogy. I call these substantive, performative, and semantic. I turn my attention to a particular substantive criticism that one may launch against essay two of On the Genealogy of Morals that turns on how Nietzsche answers “the time-crunch problem”. On the surface, there is evidence to suggest that Nietzsche accepts a false scientific theory, namely, Lamarck’s Inheritability Thesis, in order to account for the growth of a new human “organ”—morality. I demonstrate that the passages interpreted by some scholars to prove that Nietzsche is a Lamarckian can be reinterpreted along Darwinian lines. I demonstrate that Nietzsche hits upon the right drivers of phenotypical change in humans, namely, torture and enclosures (e.g., walls of early states), but misinterprets their true impact. Nietzsche believes that these technologies are responsible for producing what I call “culture-serving memory” and the bad conscience by causing emotions that once were expressed outwardly to turn inward causing the “psychological digestion” of the human animal. In reality, however, these mechanisms are conducive to breeding a particular type of individual, namely, one who is docile, by introducing artificial and unconscious selective pressures into the environment of early humans. In showing that Nietzsche’s genealogical account of memory and bad conscience is not underpinned on a false scientific theory and is consistent with Neo-Darwinism, I deflect a potentially fatal blow regarding the veracity of Nietzsche’s genealogies.

Pentecostalism, economics, capitalism: putting the Protestant Ethic to work

ABSTRACTIn recent years, academic interest in the nexus between Pentecostalism, economics, and capitalism has grown significantly. Notably, the vast majority of publications that have addressed this interface are to some degree conceptually framed by Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In this article I consider what The Protestant Ethic might contribute to our understanding of the relationship between Pentecostalism and capitalism. First, I assess a particularly noteworthy attempt to draw Pentecostalism into Weber's genealogical account which draws a series of parallels between Pentecostalism and ascetic Protestantism. Second, I discuss the merits of an approach that is not primarily genealogical but remains indebted to the concepts that Weber introduces, elaborating a new affinity between Pentecostalism and capitalism in its present iteration. With this article, I seek to comprehensively extend the scope and sharpen the conceptual underpinnings of future analysis and empirical work in this area.

Katherine Sophia Baily (Lady Kane) andThe Irish Flora(1833)

When she was only 22 years old, Katherine Sophia Baily published, anonymously, a pocketable account of the native flora of Ireland. While her name was not on the title-page, it was evidently not a secret and was soon revealed in several Irish periodicals. The following year, 1834, Miss Baily also published two articles on arboriculture in Ireland, but nothing else, as far as can be ascertained. She was the first woman admitted to the Botanical Society of Edinburgh shortly after its founding in 1836, and was the first woman to put together a flora (preceding Mary Kirby's 1850 Flora of Leicestershire). Little has been published about Katherine Baily (1811–1886) apart from general entries in standard biographical dictionaries and bibliographies. Common to most of these is the statement that she was “of Newbury, Berkshire”, but that is not confirmed by details given in a genealogical account of the Baily family of Berkshire. Also unstated is the fact that she belonged to the Roman Catholic church, causing one Irish reviewer to remark that she was “a young lady, a native, and …, we understand, a member of that anti-botanical church”. In 1838 Katherine married the Irish scientist Robert John Kane, and when he was knighted in 1846 she became Lady Kane. Conferva kaneana McCalla was intended to honour her.

Between Secularity and Post-Secularity: Critical Appraisal of Charles Taylor's Account

The article deals with Charles Taylor's account of the secular age. In the first part, the main constituents of Taylor's narrative account are presented: the central concepts, distinctions, definition of the subject, the aims etc. The author pays special attention to the notions of secularity, secular age, religion, and transcendence. In the second part, Taylor's genealogy of the secular age is outlined and comparatively placed in the context of other main relative forms of genealogical account. Because our age is an age of authenticity, a special section is devoted to it. The final section presents some reproaches to Taylor and evaluates their strength and the value of Taylor's contribution. Besides, some speculative »forecasts« about secularity and post-secularity in Europe, the USA, and at the global scale are presented (by reference to Taylor's account). The author concludes that despite some (serious and cogent) reproaches and second thoughts about Taylor's account, it is doubtless one of the major achievements in the area that manifests features of a paradigmatic work. It helps us a lot to understand the condition of religion not only in the past and today, but also gives us directions and guidelines, conceptual and methodological tools, and ideas to more clearly discern the forms and condition of religion in the future.

Migration, membership, and republican liberty

ABSTRACT Neorepublicanism holds that domination is the foremost political evil. More, it claims to be able to address today’s most pressing issues. It follows that neorepublicanism should, then, speak to questions of migration, membership, and domination. However, this is not the case. Some critical voices inspired by the idea of non-domination arrive at interesting critiques of migration, membership, and domination, but their answers are often partial and in some ways problematic. They are also largely ahistorical. The contemporary paucity of neorepublican reflections on migration contrasts sharply with its centrality in republican history. In the US, from the colonial period until late into the 19th century, some republicans understood the domination of migrants and citizens as conjoined concerns. They developed a robust account of the relationship between domestic domination and exclusionary migration regimes. They conceptualized the republic as a global asylum where membership is based on volitional allegiance, and they vigorously defended the right of aliens to expatriate. Those ideas were ultimately defeated by aristocratic, oligarchic, and statist forces. This article explicates that history through a genealogical account of what I call ‘insurgent republicanism’. The article then returns to contemporary theorization to diagnose its limitations, continuities, and potentials as seen from the perspective of the insurgent republican tradition.

The fine structure of ‘homology’

There is long-standing conflict between genealogical and developmental accounts of homology. This paper provides a general framework that shows that these accounts are compatible and clarifies precisely how they are related. According to this framework, understanding homology requires both (a) an abstract genealogical account that unifies the application of the term to all types of characters used in phylogenetic systematics and (b) locally enriched accounts that apply only to specific types of characters. The genealogical account serves this unifying role by relying on abstract notions of ‘descent’ and ‘character’. As a result, it takes for granted the existence of such characters. This requires theoretical justification that is provided by enriched accounts, which incorporate the details by which characters are inherited. These enriched accounts apply to limited domains (e.g. genes and proteins, or body parts), providing the needed theoretical justification for recognizing characters within that domain. Though connected to the genealogical account of homology in this way, enriched accounts include phenomena (e.g. serial homology, paralogy, and xenology) that fall outside the scope of the genealogical account. They therefore overlap, but are not nested within, the genealogical account. Developmental accounts of homology are to be understood as enriched accounts of body part homology. Once they are seen in this light, the conflict with the genealogical account vanishes. It is only by understanding the fine conceptual structure undergirding the many uses of the term ‘homology’ that we can understand how these uses hang together.

UNRAVELLING THE KNOT: ON RACE, RACISM, AND HUMAN HISTORY

This article argues for a shift in our thinking about racism. There are two main philosophical approaches at present: the moral view, which analyses racism in terms of individuals' attitudes, and the political view, which analyses it in terms of institutions. But neither is fully satisfactory. So I propose an alternative, genealogical account, which is better equipped to explain the phenomena associated with racism and is more in line with the historical record.

The Language Animal: A Long Trajectory

In my paper, I setThe Language Animalagainst a broader picture of Charles Taylor’s intellectual trajectory.Sources of the Self(1989) left open three major questions: (a) the viability of religious moral sources in a ‘secular’ age; (b) the compatibility between a robust moral realism and a genealogical account of modern identity; and (c) the meaning and destiny of the so-called ‘linguistic turn.’ This is the framing topic of his last book. Although Taylor’s variety of hermeneutics is unquestionably a product of the linguistic turn, he has operated with a broad notion of the linguistic capacity from the start. Language is, for him, a shared activity and the acknowledgment of its animal embeddedness functions in his work as an antidote against any too idealized a view of the kind of creatures that humans are. In his earlier writings, however, a structural tension lurked below the surface between a Gadamerian notion ofSpracheand a more phenomenological, Merleau-Pontyan, embodied outlook that was less modelled on articulate speech. My claim is that his new book marks a shift from a more speech-oriented to a more body-oriented understanding of language.