Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, And Community - Softcover

Zerubavel, Eviatar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199336040 ISBN 13: 9780199336043

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2013

Synopsis

Genealogy has long been one of humanity's greatest obsessions. But with the rise of genetics, and increasing media attention to it through programs like Who Do You Think You Are? and Faces of America, we are now told that genetic markers can definitively tell us who we are and where we came from.

The problem, writes Eviatar Zerubavel, is that biology does not provide us with the full picture. After all, he asks, why do we consider Barack Obama black even though his mother was white? Why did the Nazis believe that unions of Germans and Jews would produce Jews rather than Germans? In this provocative book, he offers a fresh understanding of relatedness, showing that its social logic sometimes overrides the biological reality it supposedly reflects. In fact, rather than just biological facts, social traditions of remembering and classifying shape the way we trace our ancestors, identify our relatives, and delineate families, ethnic groups, nations, and species. Furthermore, genealogies are more than mere records of history. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Zerubavel introduces such concepts as braiding, clipping, pasting, lumping, splitting, stretching, and pruning to shed light on how we manipulate genealogies to accommodate personal and collective agendas of inclusion and exclusion. Rather than simply find out who our ancestors were and identify our relatives, we actually construct the genealogical narratives that make them our ancestors and relatives.

An eye-opening re-examination of our very notion of relatedness, Ancestors and Relatives offers a new way of understanding family, ethnicity, nationhood, race, and humanity.

"An erudite treatise about how culture drives human cognition about near and remote relatives, Ancestors and Relatives offers lay and academic audiences alike a great read."-Science

"The author examines how genealogical structures have been used to organize not only kinship, but a

About this title

Review:

An erudite treatise about how culture drives human cognition about near and remote relatives, Ancestors and Relatives offers lay and academic audiences alike a great read. (Marta Tienda, Science)

About the Author:

Eviatar Zerubavel is the Board of Governors Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous books, most recently The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life and Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0199336040
• ISBN 13: 9780199336043
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240