Genealogical View Research Articles

Beyond context: taking political economy seriously in the study of corporate accountability

ABSTRACT The article argues for taking political economy seriously in the study of corporate accountability in transitional justice processes. Corporate actors are now commonly involved in transitional justice (that is, attempts at doing justice in the aftermath of mass violence). However, the literature is still limited by an inclination to treat political economy as context, rather than as a structuring factor intervening both on the war-related or authoritarian violence and on the efforts to make corporate actors accountable. This article proposes three shifts towards a better understanding of the political economy of corporate accountability in TJ: from a focus on the proximate economic causes of war to a genealogical view of pre-war, wartime and post-war economies; towards a more holistic view of conflict financing; and from an emphasis on the political economy of war to the political economy of violence. These shifts allow us to analyse a greater variety of political economies of corporate accountability, address more diffuse responsibilities for violence and injustice, and cover forms of violence that extend over longer periods of time. While holding broader relevance for the field, the arguments are illustrated with reference to the former Yugoslav region and the Bosnian War.

The Passive Body and States of Nature: An Examination of the Methodological Role State of Nature Theory Plays in Williams and Nietzsche

In his work Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams offers a very different interpretation of philosophical genealogy than that expounded in the secondary literature. The “Received View” of genealogy holds that it is “documentary grey”: it attempts to provide historically well-supported, coherent, but defeasible explanations for the actual transformation of practices, values, and emotions in history. However, paradoxically, the standard interpretation also holds another principle. Genealogies are nevertheless polemical because they admit that any evidence that would serve to justify a genealogical account is indexical to a perspective. In short, genealogies are not true per se. This view of genealogy leaves it vulnerable to three criticisms. I call these three: (1) the reflexive, (2) the substantive, and (3) the semantic. In contrast, Williams argues that all genealogies provide a functional account for the manifestation of something and further, that a State of Nature story subtends these accounts. The upshot of Williams’ approach is that it makes for strange philosophical bedfellows. For example, Nietzsche’s account for the rise of Christian morality shares methodological features with Hobbes’ functional explanation for the emergence of civilization and yet Nietzsche seems to take issue with genealogists who are hypothesis mongers gazing haphazardly into the blue. In the following article, I flesh out, more fully, how to make sense of Williams’ novel reclassification of genealogy. I show that Nietzsche’s genealogies are State of Nature stories and, just like Hobbes’ State of Nature story in chapter thirteen of Leviathan, are subtended by our collective corporeality. I then demonstrate how Nietzsche’s three stories in the Genealogy, when brought together, serve to undermine what Williams refers to as “… a new system (of reasons)—which very powerfully resists being understood in such terms …” Finally, I explain how my reconstruction of Williams’ interpretation of the genealogy immunizes it against the three criticisms noted above.

Hard and Blind: On Wittgenstein’s Genealogical View of Logical Necessity

AbstractMy main aim is to sketch a certain reading (‘genealogical’) of later Wittgenstein’s views on logical necessity. Along the way, I engage with the inferentialism currently debated in the literature on the epistemology of deductive logic.

Judgments That Have Value “Only as Symptoms”: Nietzsche on the Denial of Life in Twilight of the Idols

Abstract In two passages from Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche makes the argument that negative valuations of life or valuations of life in general could be treated only as symptoms. In other words, Nietzsche here seemingly refuses to engage rationally the arguments that have been proposed in favor of such valuations and proceeds to view them from his typical genealogical perspective. In this article, I show that this initial impression is misleading and that it is possible to reconstruct from these passages in Twilight of the Idols an argument that justifies Nietzsche's genealogical view of such valuations. According to this argument, it is precisely because the value of life cannot possibly be justifiably estimated that the genealogical approach is warranted. I lay out the argument in detail, discuss some of its premises, and point the way to a more general conclusion.

Psychology and the historical power–body conjunction: Foucault’s different view of the history and philosophy of psychology

By changing his primary concepts—abstraction, alienation, dream, morale, and power—Foucault changed his perception of mental illness and the history and philosophy of psychology throughout his career. Nevertheless, despite conceptual changes, it seems that Nietzsche’s genealogical view of knowledge and the historical power–body conjunction runs like a red thread through Foucault’s works as early as 1961. This article highlights Foucault’s coherent and divergent views on the history and philosophy of psychology and their effects on his theories, findings, and contributions.

Origin as a grimase: Nietzsche's view of genealogy

Classical understanding of genealogy sees it as a process of tracing an origin though lineage: a search for the beginning. It descends all the way to the first ancestor and tends to take the very beginning out of the lineage, to consider it as something atemporal, something that is created in itself, that has no origin, but produces one. That atemporal beginning is considered necessary. Since it has no origin, it has no context to come out of. Nietzsche's genealogy, however, shows that the beginning is always arbitrary: it is always contextual, because it has its own history. There is always something that precedes that which is seen as an original, someone who is 'more first' than the first. Establishing a beginning is always a matter of convention. Classical genealogy de-contextualizes the beginning, while Nietzsche's genealogy does exactly the opposite: it puts it in a context, it contextualizes it. The consequences of Nietzsche's understanding of genealogy, as Foucault shows us, bring not only a radically different understanding of a method, but also crucially affect the understanding of the Greek arche - the basic principal that transcends time and any historical context. Genealogy shows how precisely that context determines even what is considered to be originless - something that escapes every context.

The Cultural Grounding of Kinship

Kinship systems are conceptually grounded in culturally formulated idea-systems we refer to as kinship terminologies and through which the boundaries, form and structure of human social systems are culturally constituted. A terminology, contrary to a long-standing assumption in anthropology, is not based on a prior categorization of genealogical relations, as the latter is derived from the structural logic of the kinship terminology. The terminology structure, formally represented as an algebraic structure, can be generated from primary kin terms in accordance with a hypothesized universal theory of kinship terminology structures. Terminologies differ culturally according to the primary terms and equations used for generating them. This requires a paradigm shift from the received view of genealogy as the primary basis for kin relations to a new paradigm in which kinship incorporates both a kin term space expressed through a culturally constituted idea-system we refer to as a kinship terminology and a genealogical space constructed recursively using parent-child relations. Both of these spaces are grounded in a family space composed of parent-child, spouse and sibling positions.

The infinitely many genes model with horizontal gene transfer

The genome of bacterial species is much more flexible than that of eukaryotes. Moreover, the distributed genome hypothesis for bacteria states that the total number of genes present in a bacterial population is greater than the genome of every single individual. The pangenome, i.e. the set of all genes of a bacterial species (or a sample), comprises the core genes which are present in all living individuals, and accessory genes, which are carried only by some individuals. In order to use accessory genes for adaptation to environmental forces, genes can be transferred horizontally between individuals. Here, we extend the infinitely many genes model from Baumdicker, Hess and Pfaffelhuber (2010) for horizontal gene transfer. We take a genealogical view and give a construction – called the Ancestral Gene Transfer Graph – of the joint genealogy of all genes in the pangenome. As application, we compute moments of several statistics (e.g. the number of differences between two individuals and the gene frequency spectrum) under the infinitely many genes model with horizontal gene transfer.

Sprachklassifikationen in den ukrainischen handschriftlichen Logikkursen vom Ende des 17. bis zum ersten Drittel des 18. Jahrhunderts

Some logic courses given at the Kievan academy in the last decade of the seventeenth and the first third of the eighteenth century comprised a discussion of language kinship conceived in terms of 'mother languages' and 'daughter languages'. The inclusion of such discussion aimed at corroborating the thesis about the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, particularly evident in the case of the 'corrupted' post-Babelic languages that arose by human institution. In this respect, the Ukrainian logicians leant on previous works by the Roman Catholic theologians Gilbert Génébrard and Cornelis Cornelissen Van Den Steen. However, many of them (Stefan Javors'kyj, Innokentij Popovs'kyj, Ilarion Levyc'kyj, Amvrosij Dubnevyč, among others) made significant corrections to the lists of Germanic and especially Slavonic languages as provided by their predecessors. Their contribution to this field is illustrative of the fact that the genealogical view of language kinship had become quite current by that time.

Estimating linkage disequilibria

Estimating linkage disequilibria

Phylogeny of the Drosophila mesophragmatica Group (Diptera, Drosophilidae): An Example of Andean Evolution

The mesophragmatica group of Drosophila belongs to the virilis-repleta radiation of the Drosophila subgenus. This group comprises 13 Neotropical species that are endemic to the South-American continent and seem to be fundamentally Andean in their distribution. The mesophragmatica-group phylogeny has been inferred previously by other authors based on morphological, cytological, and isozyme analyses. However, the relationships within the group have not yet been completely resolved, although its monophyletic origin has already been confirmed by molecular data. This work attempts to enhance the molecular approach to the relationships among the species of the mesophragmatica group, using both nuclear and mitochondrial markers. Phylogenetic analyses were performed using fragments of the nuclear alcohol dehydrogenase (Adh; 631 bp), alpha-methyldopa (Amd; 1211 bp), dopa-decarboxylase (Ddc; 1105 bp), and hunchback (Hb; 687 bp) genes and the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit II (COII; 672 bp) gene, and included a total of 4306 bp. The sequences obtained for eight representatives of the mesophragmatica group were analyzed both individually and in combination by distance methods, maximum parsimony, and maximum likelihood. Our results support subdivision of the mesophragmatica group into three main lineages: the first is composed of D. viracochi; the second comprises a clade grouping the sibling species D. pavani and D. gaucha; and the third encompasses D. gasici, D. brncici, and D. mesophragmatica. The best supported scenario suggests that D. viracochi is an early offshoot in the mesophragmatica group, with this and other early branchings occuring in the Pliocene/Pleistocene Epochs, possibly associated with Andean glacial refuges. Also based on the phylogenies obtained, we present a genealogical view of the evolution of previously described characters within the group.

The genealogical view of speciation

The genealogical view of speciation

A genealogical view of geographical variation

John Avise and coworkers coined the term Ophylo-geographyO in 1987 when presenting their ideas on thepotential of combining intraspecific gene trees based onmitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) with geographical informa-tion to infer historical processess. Phylogeography hassince become an influential field of evolutionary biology.For instance, in the year 2000, 32 papers in

The Nation as a Problem: Historians and the “National Question”

How is it that the nation became an object of scholarly research? As this article intends to show, not until what we call the “genealogical view” (which assumes the “natural” and “objective” character of the nation) eroded away could the nation be subjected to critical scrutiny by historians. The starting point and the premise for studies in the field was the revelation of the blind spot in the genealogical view, that is, the discovery of the “modern” and “constructed” character of nations. Historians’ views would thus be intimately tied to the “antigenealogical” perspectives of them. However, this antigenealogical view would eventually reveal its own blind spots. This paper traces the different stages of reflection on the nation, and how the antigenealogical approach would finally be rendered problematic, exposing, in turn, its own internal fissures.

Foucault and the Problem of Genealogy

This essay explores the implications of Foucault's use of genealogy as the basis of his philosophical investment in history. It contrasts Foucault's reliance on genealogy as a solvent of historical continuity and linearity, and his view of genealogy as aleatory, contingent, potentially disruptive and delegitimising, with medieval concepts of lineage and genealogical legiti mation and interrogates, on this basis, the utility of Foucault's postmodern theories for the analysis of medieval genealogical phenomena. It suggests that the concepts derived from a Foucauldian analysis of genealogy are not applicable to premodern societies, given that Foucalt's very notion of genea logy stipulates local genesis and definite contexts in which period-specific modalities of knowledge, power, thought, epistemologies and technologies are put into play in the societies analysed.

Orígenes y elaboración de 'El burlador de Sevilla.' (review)

REVIEWS Márquez Villanueva, Francisco. Orígenesy elaboración de 'El burlador de Sevilla. ' Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1996. Paper. 202 pp. Others have covered some of this ground, among them the eminent Menéndez Pidal ("Sobre los orígenes de 'El convidado de piedra'"), Said Annesto (La leyenda de Don Juan. Orígenes poéticos de 'El burlador de Sevilla y Convidado depiedra *), and Hazañas y la Rúa (Génesis y desarrollo de la leyenda de don Juan Tenorio), to mention only three. The genealogical view of literary history continues to titillate the "detective function" ofour minds, even though it becomes increasingly apparent that the process is a mise en abîme, for no sooner do we identify a source than someone discovers another that antedates ours, and so on ad infinitum. Texts (written and oral) are made from other texts, and the process can be traced back indefinitely , for the original story will always remain elusive. Márquez avoids most ofthe pitfalls quite handily by focusing on traditional and folklore material that may have informed Tirso's classic text. His purpose is to offer a context for the "creation" ofthis mythical figure. Now there are titles that suggest more than they can deliver. This is an honest title, however, and it delivers what it promises, within the limitations sketched above. Marquez seeks out and scrutinizes antecedents to the burlador figure as these find expression in legend and myth, some ofwhich are rooted in Seville. The study was prompted by two circumstances: 1) the fact that Márquez spent a number of formative years in those parts; in his own words, "responde a una preocupación con Tirso, Sevilla y el Burlador iniciada en años juveniles durante muchas horas de goce del ex-convento hispalense de la Merced, actual Museo de Bellas Artes" (17); and 2) an invitation to prepare a series of three lectures on Tirso and the Burlador for presentation in January 1995 at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. Following this introductory mise-en-scène, the book is divided into three chapters: I. Estado de una vieja cuestión; II. La leyenda sevillana; III. Del 439 440BCom, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Winter 1998) trickster al burlador. Two brief appendices follow, the first of which discusses an essay on origins that came to his attention belatedly, while the other offers a one-page "etiología sinóptica de El burlador de Sevilla," showing in schematic form the similarities and differences among the main character and several possible precursors: the ballad tradition, Floovant, Joäozinho, and the trickster figure of the same name in Sevillan legend. These will be discussed momentarily. In the first full chapter, "estado de una vieja cuestión," a great many topics are covered in a limited space, but Márquez has done his homework on each of the issues he addresses, as the extensive footnotes make evident. Regarding authorship, he comes down very much on the side of Tirso, and justifiably so. The date of composition proposed is around 1620, give or take a few years. More debatable is his view that the Burlador and 7a« largo spring from a common source, now lost, rather than deriving one from the other. Although Tirso's role is central in the creation of the character we know today as Don Juan Tenorio, he does not create that figure from whole cloth. There are antecedents, and that is what this book is mainly about: "... Ia centralidad de Tirso deberá equilibrarse aquí con la noción no menos firme de la previa existencia del personaje, cuya materia prima sin duda encontró ya hecha en bosquejo" (23). Márquez proceeds to review various candidates who have been proposed as models for the Burlador: Miguel de Manara, Leontio, El Infamador-each ofwhom is found wanting, for different reasons. Regarding dramatic tradition, an interesting point is made concerning La serrana de la Vera (of Lope and then Vêlez), which Márquez sees as a significant variation on the burlador theme, since here the focus is less on the burlador who sets things in motion than on the burlada , "como antisocial vengadora y salteadora de...

Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction Nina Schwartz Roslyn Jolly. Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction. New York: Oxford U P, 1993. 239 pp. $41.00. Taking a genealogical view of James’s theory of fiction and its relation to history, Roslyn Jolly analyzes the complications of the idea of history for both James and his characters. In his earliest critical writings on the subject and in his early fiction, James saw history as the epistemological model to which the novel should aspire. Jolly, however, traces a number of transformations in and complications of this view. What remains constant, she claims, is the writer’s “panic...that fiction will ‘give itself away’, or be ‘given away,’ as not history, and the novelist’s whole enterprise will be thereby invalidated” (v). The first part of chapter one rehearses the nineteenth-century debates about the moral status of fiction and then examines James’s response to those debates: for James, “the realignment of ‘truth’ with ‘reality’ was to be achieved by appealing to the cultural prestige of modern historiography” (19). In the second part of the chapter, Jolly defines the “new historiography”—new theories of epistemology, causation, and representation informed by scientific and legal models—and considers the influence of this ideal on James’s defense of fiction. The literary criticism from the 1860s to the 1880s repeatedly suggests “ways in which the technical attributes of historical narrative could be used to enhance the realism and cultural standing of fiction” (24). The paradox of this commitment, however, is clear: to achieve a greater status for the novel, fiction writers should imitate the methods of historians, and yet their imitations, if successful, worked in service to illusion, not the “truth” history was supposed to provide. Jolly also notes that James’s developing theory of the realism of literary impressionism further challenged the presumptions of objectivity on which the historicist model depended. But these conflicts among incompatible models of fiction do not just inhabit James’s critical writing: they are also “expressed technically, structurally, and dramatically in the early novels”; indeed, Jolly claims, the conflicts expressed in these works generate “new narrative techniques and new theories of fiction which lead the later novels into radical departures from James’s early commitment to history” (35). Chapters two and three examine works from the early and middle period to demonstrate how they both manifest and challenge the anti-romance position. [End Page 242] The novels from 1870 to 1890—Washington Square, The American, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Princess Casamassima—pose contests between narrators who seem to embody the authority and tactics of the historian and characters whose “plots...are arbitrary, and must be defeated lest the narrator’s story should also appear so” (38). The apparent difference, however, between the narrators’ realism and the characters’ unwarranted faith in their own power to determine their histories depends precisely on the novelist’s construction of that difference. Thus, the novel achieves its authority only by “containing” its other, the unpersuasive romance plot of the character whose defeat is itself scripted by the novel. Not surprisingly, the novels embodying these contests expose the similarities between characters’ and author’s activities. But Jolly also identifies texts from this period in which James permits his characters somewhat greater freedom; in Roderick Hudson, The Europeans, and The Tragic Muse, she reads a less anxious and more ironic perspective on both fiction and the imagination in which James presents the possibility of moving beyond the static opposition between history and fiction, truth and falsity. This possibility underlies James’s later and more sophisticated treatment of these tensions in The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. To complicate her own apparent narrative of James’s “progress” here, however, Jolly identifies a rupture in the writer’s optimism about overcoming these oppositions. The works from 1895 to 1901 record the absence of any productive collaboration between the transformative impulses of the imagination and the determinative power of history, delineating instead worlds where fiction-making of all kinds is condemned. Jolly links the pessimism and hostility of these tales to unhappy shifts in James’s relation to his own audience and to the broader...