Practice Of Genealogy Research Articles

A World Without Why

A World Without Why

Daring the Truth: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Genealogy of Critique

This paper draws attention to Foucault’s genealogy of critique. In a series of inquiries, Foucault traced the origins and trajectories of critical practices from the ancient tradition of parrhesia to the enlightenment and the (neo)liberal critique of the state. The paper will elucidate the insights of this history and argue that Foucault’s turn to the genealogy of critique also changed the valence of his theoretical assumptions. Foucault developed a more affirmative practice of genealogy that not only discredits truth claims by tracing them back to their inglorious origins. Rather, he presents a politics of truth as a complex interaction of (governmental) power-knowledge and critique that questions the power effects of truth and rationality. This genealogy of critique contributes to current problematizations of critique by thinkers like Boltanski, Latour and Rancière in highlighting the role of epistemological and technical critique of social rationalization and political reason.

Family Trees: A History of Genealogy on America by François Weil (review)

Reviewed by: Family Trees: A History of Genealogy on America by François Weil Caroline-Isabelle Caron Weil, François – Family Trees: A History of Genealogy on America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 2013. Pp. 304. With this book, well-respected François Weil proposes a history of the Americanization of genealogy as a (West) European practice and the transposition of its main concepts, such as lineage and forebears, into the North American context. Weil admits he was not interested in family history before taking on this project. The inspiration came in 2008, from his surprise at the “engrossing fascination” (p. 1) given by journalists and the public at Barack and Michelle Obama’s respective ancestries. At the confluence of racial affiliation, the history of slavery and immigration, and issues of class, Weil argues that their genealogies beckoned enquiries into the meaning of personal and collective history, but most importantly on the importance of family history in the United States. As such, Family Trees casts its gaze broadly, over four centuries, tracing the evolution of the practice, the varying rationales of its actors, and the main institutions that led the way. [End Page 839] Weil’s assertion that there is a relative dearth of historical research on genealogy is somewhat misleading. Though it is true that there have been relatively few studies by American historians, the study of genealogy has been a rich field among historical anthropologists, ethnohistorians, sociologists and members of related fields all over the Western World, especially in the late 1980s and 1990s. However, there has been very few syntheses of these works, and few publications since the beginning of the 21st century (my own 2006 monograph being a rare exception). As such, Weil’s book is indeed more than welcome: he presents a readable comprehensive overview of the history of the practice and meaning of genealogy in the United States from the late 17th century, based both on the studies that do exist and hitherto unknown examples from his own original research. Weil divides his book into four lengthy periods he calls “genealogical regimes” (p. 5). As such, Weil adheres to the common periodization used by those few historians and sociologists that have studied genealogical practice in North America. Each of these four periods “was articulated around a particular organization of impulses for genealogy [he] describe[s], with one of several of these impulses setting the tone for that regime” (p. 5). Indeed, Weil is more interested in each period’s ideological stance about ancestry than at the socioeconomic conditions that could have affected the impulses towards genealogy. He looks for its “successive dominant meanings” (p. 5), though he innovates by tracking the commercial aspects of American genealogy throughout its long history. Prior to the mid-18th century, the American Colonials who researched their ancestry were primarily fulfilling a private quest for a pedigree that would attach their family to British Imperial gentility. It was mostly the purview of New England upper middle classes. By the latter half of the 18th century, with the transition to Independence, the impetus for genealogy shifted as sharply as American politics. Genealogists of middling classes turned to genealogy as a means to ground their family history in the emerging republic. Until the advent of the Civil War, Americans of means would invest scientific value to genealogical research, even as the many genealogists for hire would go to great lengths to invest suitable ancestries for their clients. From the late 1860s to the mid-20th century, as the United States experienced a wave of nationalism, nativism and anti-immigration sentiment, genealogy became more of a search for racial purity and Anglo-Saxon ancestors. “Proper” ancestry would not only allow one admission to numerous hereditary associations and clubs, but was also increasingly associated with overtones of morality and purity. Notably, the advent of Eugenics and its sociological views of genetics easily found strong support among American genealogists who embraced the moral superiority the “correct” ancestors would afford them. After the Second World War and especially from the 1970s, genealogy became a truly popular, democratic and multicultural endeavour. Taken on by Americans of all social and ethnic...

Response to Chloë Taylor

Response to Chloë Taylor Ladelle McWhorter As Chloë Taylor notes, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America puts forth a genealogy of race and racism. It also contains fragments of genealogies of intelligence, disability, family values, and a few other concepts and practices that were hugely influential in the twentieth century and have been since. In addition, it presents a certain conception and experience of abnormality and of sexuality in relation to all of the above. But the book does not present a theory of racism or of sexual oppression or of both together. There are important differences between theorizing and the practice of genealogy, at least in the way that I understand the two, and that difference makes a difference in the book’s structure and aims. When I began my graduate education in the early 1980s, feminists were producing compelling critiques of regimes of knowledge and techniques of knowledge production that claimed legitimacy through detachment, dispassionate observation, and objectivity.1 Theory was a not infrequent target of those feminist critiques. Theory (from the Greek theoria, as Heidegger reminds us) is about seeing (not, for example, touching or feeling), and theorizing is typically about representing with accuracy and thoroughness what non-theorists see only incompletely, if at all. Theory, therefore, seeks to correct distortions as it captures reality under concepts.2 Theory also aims to be unitary and exclusive. And theories compete with each other; no matter how many theories there are, only one can possibly be true. By contrast, genealogy is not detached or dispassionate; on the contrary, one takes up genealogy precisely because one feels a need to change something—including something in or about oneself. One takes up genealogy, Michel Foucault maintains, in order to “free thought from what it silently [End Page 216] thinks,” to “enable it to think differently,”3 to get free of oneself as one has been constituted in a certain milieu. Genealogy is concerned with accuracy of representation, therefore, to the extent that detail, facts, and logical plausibility make a narrative more compelling, more moving, more potent—to that extent, and no further; it does not employ scholarly observation and insight to get at “the truth.” A good genealogy constructs a new way of seeing and experiencing that may well disturb a given regime of truth and may make possible the generation of new truths or perhaps new habits of thought and action, but it does not purport to be final or exclusive. It problematizes habitual practices and ways of seeing and, thus, it opens toward indefinite possibilities. My book is genealogical; it promotes no theories. I emphasize this, because I want to insist on the book’s hospitability to the extension of its analyses beyond its covers and to its own (self-)overcoming. Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America presents some genealogies, then, but it is not only a collection of genealogies. It is explicitly framed by a set of contemporary political and ethical contingencies, some of which it identifies as problems, and it considers what to do in response to them. Its genealogies are undertaken and constructed in the context of grappling with those questions, a featured one of which is this: Can we find enough common ground to make common cause between antiracism and anti-heterosexism activists? In the course of tracing a genealogy of twentieth-century racism, I found quite a bit of common ground between racial minorities and nonhetero-sexual people in the United States. So, in addition to my genealogies, I offered some (admittedly perhaps heavy-handed) advice to antiracism and anti-heterosexism activists, namely: Not only is there ground for common cause, but you ignore this ground at your peril, because there is not a lot of other ground for you to stand on; if you do not acknowledge this common history and the strong connections among the forces that oppress your group and those that oppress these other groups, you will have to deny much of your own history and obscure many of the sources of your own oppression. I did not issue the same advice to disability activists or environmentalists, although they might do well to consider it too. I singled...

Doing Our Own Thinking for Ourselves: On Quentin Skinner's Genealogical Turn

In the original publication of "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," Quentin Skinner enjoined that when it comes to seeking "answers" to questions, "we must learn to do our own thinking for ourselves." In this article, I focus on one of the most recent turns in Skinner's work, to a practice of genealogy. By disentangling various claims too often bundled together under the heading of "contingency," and by distinguishing Skinner's practice of genealogy from Nietzsche's, I argue that that Skinner's genealogical turn is at once less novel, more modest, and more productive than his own characterization of it makes it appear.

Who Are We? Genealogists Negotiating Ethno-Racial Identities

This paper analyzes how ethno-racial standpoints influence the ways that genealogists negotiate and narrate biological and/or social interpretations of family and social history. A constructivist methodological approach grounds the analysis of three family genealogists who all have African and European lineages, but differ in their current ethno-racial identities. These case studies serve as exemplars of how individuals negotiate the racial formation processes of past and present. I suggest that there is reflexive and political potential in bio-based genealogy to transform our current racial “common sense.” The practice of genealogy reveals tacit social and biological assumptions that can serve as points of leverage for progressive social change, and yet vary by standpoint. In the context of the iconic gene we must be vigilant about the threat of genetic essentialism, yet the threat is mitigated by the simultaneous democratization of our knowledge and control over origin stories.

John Farmer and the Making of American Genealogy

In the context of post-Revolutionary America's future-oriented egalitarianism, genealogy was considered to be a suspect, elite activity. The essay studies the crucial role of John Farmer (1789–1838), an amateur historian, in drawing together a group of antiquarians to professionalize and legitimate the practice of genealogy in the new nation.

Deleuze and Foucault: Series, Event, Genealogy

Deleuze and Foucault: Series, Event, Genealogy C. Colwell (bio) Although the term ‘genealogy’ is most closely associated with Nietzsche and Foucault it is Judith Butler who gives us the clearest, or at least most succinct, definition: “...genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin.” Here Butler specifies the goal of tracing the lines of descent that run between identity categories, institutions, practices, discourses and multiple points of origin. Defining the practice of genealogy is another story. In an earlier time we might have searched for a method that specified how we applied the practice of genealogy to particular problems, how we applied the theory to a field of investigation. To a great extent, this is no longer possible in the wake of contemporary criticisms of the very notion of method. Indeed, one might well claim that anything that achieves the goal outlined above is genealogy, that genealogy is defined or identified by its effects instead of something intrinsic to the process itself. Nonetheless, at the risk of being caught essentializing the inessential, I would like to try to think about what genealogy is apart from its goals. Specifically, I would like to bring to bear on the notion of genealogy a couple of concepts deployed by Gilles Deleuze, those of series and event. Briefly, my argument will be that genealogy functions by decomposing the particular series along which events have been organized in order to create a different series for those events. To put it another, no less idiomatic, way, genealogy counter-actualizes events, returns to the virtual structure of events, in order to re-actualize them in another manner. If history is the collective memory of a particular social group then genealogy is a counter-memory composed of the same elements repeated and arranged in a different manner. Let me set the stage by briefly rehearsing parts of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. In each case what we find is an overturning of the accepted reading of a series of events, the overturning of a collective memory. In Essay I of the Genealogy Nietzsche attacks two key concepts of Western Christian thought, the primacy of good from which humanity turns in its fall into evil and the primacy of divine love as the ground of Christianity. With regard to the first, Nietzsche breaks the series of events that grounds both Judaism and Christianity by denying its origin, i.e., Nietzsche elides the central myth of the Garden as the ‘good’ beginning and the Fall as the origin of evil. In its place Nietzsche begins the series with the conquering of Judea by the Romans and the consequent constitution of evil as the (all too human) response on the part of the Jews. Following this, Nietzsche argues that the hatred directed at conquerors (Egyptian or Roman) that characterizes much of Jewish thought is repeated in the Christian era, for example in the concept of eternal damnation. Nietzsche replaces divine love with human hatred as the grounding structure of Christianity. Foucault likewise overturns the accepted reading of the shift from torture to imprisonment. In the traditional interpretation (mythologized in the phrase ‘cruel and unusual punishment’) power structures become more humane in the wake of the Enlightenment. Likewise, the Enlightenment produces a diminishment in the power exercised over populaces. But, much as he did with regard to the mad (in Madness and Civilization) Foucault argues that there is less a decrease in the exercise of power than a shift of aims and strategies. Instead of simply attending to the series torture-reform-imprisonment Foucault correlates this series with others, most notably the multiple series of the development of disciplinary technologies in the military, the monastery, the school, the hospital and the factory. What is interesting here is that it is the relation between these series that enables the correlative re-cognition of each as modalities of increasingly coercive forms of power. What I want to suggest is that it is the shift in the way events are serialized, the way that they are...

La Mémoire Familiale du Bourgeois Gentilhomme: Généalogies Domestiques en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles

Parmi les causes de la Révolution et de la faillite de l'Ancien régime, on a souvent cité le fait que les élites mises en concurrence par la monarchie n'étaient jamais parvenues à s'entendre sur un compromis politique alors qu'elles avaient trouvé assez facilement une culture commune. Ce compromis culturel a permis à un modèle de distinction combinant l'inné et l'acquis, le patrimoine et le mérite, de survivre à l'Ancien Régime et de conserver tout son prestige jusque dans la France républicaine: la manie généalogiste fait partie de ce modèle.