Genealogy, Volume 2, Issue 2 (June 2018) – 7 articles

In his short story Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, Borges describes the extraordinary and paradoxical feat of an imaginary 20th century French writer who recomposes, as it were, part of Cervantes’ early modern masterpiece. Borges’ duplication of the text of the Quijote is meant to give narrative shape to the acknowledgement that a text acquires different meanings in different epochs. This essay first sets Borges’ approach to the construction of the past within a lineage of authors, which harks back to Nietzsche and points to Foucauldian genealogies. It then renews the endeavour of Borges’ character Menard, as it reproduces significant portions of Foucault’s 1971 paper Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire. Whilst the selections of the Foucauldian text are not simply rewritten, as they are given a new English translation, they are also recombined and reconsidered in the light of our contemporary cultural and political context, which underwent significant changes during the apparently short span of time that separates us from the composition of Foucault’s seminal work. Full article

The intersection of education and genealogy is of interest to academia. Although learning is an important aspect of the genealogist’s need to understand the connection with family relationships, there is a paucity of research about the intersection between education and genealogy. This study sought to answer the research question, “How do genealogists use education to better understand family connections?” A narrative inquiry method was used to interview 10 members of the Oberlin African-American Genealogy and History Group, in Oberlin, Ohio (OAAGHG). Participants were recruited through convenience sampling and purposive sampling, after an announcement about the study was presented at the January meeting of the genealogy society. Members who were interested in participating contacted the researcher through e-mails, text messages, and by telephone. Interviews were transcribed, and transcripts were sent to each member to verify the accuracy of each transcript. Nvivo11 was used to assist with analysis of the data. The results of the study presented three ways that education intersected with genealogy: self-directed learning, collaborative learning, and life-long learning. The conclusion of this study is that genealogists are life-long learners and expand their education as necessary to better understand family connections. Full article

There remains both a great deal of confusion over the nature of kinship and an inappropriate resistance to understanding the nation as one form of kinship, specifically, territorial kinship. Although one finds the relatively early and occasional analysis of the nation in terms of kinship, for example, by Lloyd Fallers, anthropologists, including paradoxically Ernest Gellner, have avoided understanding nationality in this way. Despite Anthony Smith’s attention to ethnie, those associated with nationalism studies have also generally avoided analyzing the nation in terms of kinship, as can be seen by the ill-informed hostility to the category “primoridal”. This article rectifies this mistake by re-examining the category of kinship, along both its vertical, temporal axis and horizontal, geographical axis, with attention to nationality in general and, in particular, in antiquity. Full article

The central philosophical problem of birth concerns the fact that it is an event necessary for all events. As such, it is the nihilated a priori of itself—in short, it is lost in an abyss of consciousness. The article engages with the thoughts of Sartre, Ricoeur, Henry, Romano, Marion, and Husserl to explain some facets of abyssal birth. It argues that family genealogy may contribute to the philosophical dialogue about birth. Family genealogy is usually practiced with a methodology oriented to epistemology. At times, however, genealogical research may bring the historical ancestral past to presence as a lived experience, thus grounding birth in transgenerational intersubjectivity. To explain this more fully, the article compares this presence affect with similar affects in history, art, and psychoanalysis. The article does not make the birth-as-abyssal problem—as framed by philosophers—vanish, but it questions considering one’s birth exclusively as epistemological. Presence, though closer to ontology than epistemology, is more accurately classified as phenomenological, being as event rather than event as being. Full article

From the wars of Ancient Greece to the collapsing Islamic State in the present, the same, apparently timeless protagonists appear and their stories told and re-told: the heroes, cowards and other combatants. This article proposes a framework which combines a Foucauldian genealogical approach with his conception of the subject as both constituted in relation to code-oriented moralities, and creatively self-formed in relation to ethics-oriented moralities (^{Foucault 1992, pp. 5, 25}), to understand how it is possible to speak meaningfully of heroes and cowards in the age of the drone and the jihadist. Section one will explore the applicability of Foucauldian genealogy as the methodological basis for understanding present combatants in the context of war. The second section will assess Foucault’s ‘modes of subjectivation’ and ‘practices of the self’ (^{Foucault 1992, p. 28}), as a means of analyzing the emergence of the subject of war over millennia, with emphasis on the ethical dimension of subjectivity that can be applied to heroes and cowards. Then the third section will use insights from Homer and Augustine to begin to illustrate how Foucault’s genealogical approach and his conception of ethical subjectivity combine to enable heroes and cowards to be meaningfully spoken of and better understood in the domain of war today. The purpose of such a study is to set out the basis on which political genealogy after Foucault can provide a nuanced conceptualization of subjectivity in modern war, as those subjects are formed, claimed, valorized and criticized by competing entities in contemporary political discourse. Full article

This paper is an examination of Djanet Sears’s Afrika Solo (1990) as a unique example of how Blacks in the global diaspora trace their genealogical roots back to Africa. Drawing from research in anthropology, cultural studies, and performance, the paper purports that Sears’s African-Canadian identity is underlined by her recuperation of a heritage, epistemes and performative aesthetics, and, real or imagined, practices that are not just Afrocentric but specifically Yoruba. Essentially, the paper examines Afrika Solo in the context of Black Aesthetic and more significantly as “text” in a Yoruba sense, which constitutes her own way of “going back to get it.” The paper is divided into two parts: the first part presents a general argument about Sears’s journey back to Africa and the culturally-rooted nature of the performance as opposed to feminist/gender readings of same, while the second part explores ways of understanding the play through the lens of Yoruba ritual and its aesthetics. Full article

This article explores the unique contribution that Foucault’s work on genealogy and governmentality can make to the analysis of contemporary programs of government. The article uses an Australian study of the ‘problem’ of chronic illness to argue that this perspective offers valuable insights into how ‘problems’ such as chronic illness have become linked to advanced liberal discourses and practices of self-governing and self-responsibility. These insights are particularly valuable in fields such as primary health care that have a noted shortage of critical and reflective studies that explore the links between people and changing ideas of health and disease. This article details how taking up an analytics of governmentality and political genealogy informed by Foucault, facilitated the tracing of the dominant discourses and practices, and the connections to the day-to -day lives of the clients with chronic diseases. Importantly, this approach opened up a more critical consideration of the ways in which dispersed approaches to governing through programs, such as integrated care, shape and influence the lives of individuals. These dispersed ways of governing are not linear but rather unfold through ongoing relays, connections and the (re)production of discourses. Full article