Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010030
Authors: Tom Johnson
Indigenous people continue to develop methods to strengthen and empower genealogical knowledge as a means of conveying histories, illuminating current and past values, and providing important cultural frameworks for understanding their nuanced identities and worlds across time and space. Genealogies are more than simply a record of a family tree; they are a rich tapestry of ancestral links, representing a tradition of thought and connection to entities beyond the human. This article proposes an Iwi-specific methodological approach to conducting research based on the specific paradigms (ontological and epistemological) of Māori (Indigenous peoples of New Zealand) from the region of Te Awa Tupua in the North Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand. A Whanganui world view can be actioned as an operating system within research by developing a bespoke place-based methodology drawing on kōrero tuku iho (ancestral wisdom) to conduct research amongst a genealogical group with whakapapa (genealogical connection) to a distinct geographic locale. This methodological shift allows the inclusion of human research participants and more-than-human, including Te Awa Tupua (an interconnected environment around the Whanganui River) and Te Kāhui Maunga (ancestral mountains that feed the Whanganui river) as living ancestors. Whanganui ways of knowing, doing, and being underpin a worldview that situates Te Awa Tupua and tāngata (people) as inter-related beings that cannot maintain their health and wellbeing without the support of one another.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010029
Authors: Vanessa S. Oliveira
About half of Luanda’s population comprised enslaved people in the mid-nineteenth century. Although scholars have examined the expansion of slavery in Angola after the end of the transatlantic slave trade and the use of slavery to underpin the trade in tropical commodities, the labor performed by enslaved children has been neglected. This study explores the experiences of enslaved children working in Luanda during the era of the so-called “legitimate” commerce in tropical commodities, particularly between 1850 and 1869. It draws upon slave registers, official reports, and the local gazette, the Boletim Oficial de Angola, to analyze the means through which children were enslaved, the tasks they performed, their background, family connections, and daily experiences under enslavement. This paper argues that masters expected enslaved children to perform the same work attributed to enslaved men and women. After all, they saw captives as a productive unit irrespective of their age.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010028
Authors: Jody Metcalfe
South African white supremacy has been shaped by over 400 years of settler colonialism and white minority apartheid rule to craft a pervasive and entrenched legacy of privilege and oppression in the post-apartheid context. This paper explores the constructions of white supremacy, specifically its role in shaping the perceptions of first-generation mixed-race identity in South Africa, through semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Through a critical race theory and an intersectional lens, this paper unpacks the personal, political, and social impact of white supremacist structures on the identity construction of first-generation mixed-race people in post-apartheid South Africa; specifically, societal- and self-perceptions of their identity within power structures with which they interact. Moreover, this paper aims to understand how first-generation mixed-race people understand their connections to white privilege. Ultimately this paper argues that although first-generation mixed-race people experience relative privilege, their access to white privilege and acceptance within structures of whiteness is always conditional.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010027
Authors: Gabriel Alberto Ceballos Rodriguez
For multicultural family members who live in cosmopolitan environments, concepts such as ethnic identity and integration have different significance. Some individuals can report, for example, that ethnic identity and integration have never played an important role in their lives and even feel that they represent old-fashioned notions from which modern societies should rather move on. For others, these concepts are much more relevant and are experienced in more challenging and complex ways. This article explores the influence that identity complexity—a cognitive disposition to perceive overlaps between different social identities, plays in this process. Forty parents of Estonian–foreign children (a traditionally cosmopolitan segment) were interviewed in Estonia and prompted to talk about topics such as their own ethnic identity(ies), their (and their family’s) feelings of integration into the Estonian society, and the way in which they represent their children’s ethnic identities, e.g., mostly Estonian/foreign, fifty–fifty, global citizen, etc. Thematic analysis combined with intersectionality suggests that there are associations between the identity complexity of interviewees and their attitudes towards these topics. Furthermore, results show that beyond the traditional dichotomy of high vs. low identity complexity, some interviewed parents have transitioned from higher to lower levels of identity complexity and vice versa at different times in their lives for different reasons. This study sheds light on identity complexity as a relevant predictor of acculturation and ethnic identity development outcomes among multicultural family members. It also contributes to the literature on cosmopolitan populations as a diverse group.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010026
Authors: Kamila Klauzinska
To understand the changing trends in Jewish Genealogy over the past 40 years, the author has interviewed more than one hundred genealogists around the world. All of them are connected to the two most important genealogy organisations, JewishGen and JRI-Poland. They range from hobbyists researching their own families to professionals researching specific prewar Polish shtetls and those serving the entire genealogical community. Based on their responses to 26 questions, the author has identified two important features of contemporary Jewish genealogy: its democratisation and institutionalisation. The democratisation of genealogical research has contributed to a great expansion of the field. The focus of interest is no longer limited to only rabbinical families but is also concerned with the common man. Thus, genealogists today speak not only on behalf of sheyne yidn and otherwise distinguished families but also on behalf of the millions of murdered „ordinary” Jews who once lived in Poland. The institutionalisation of genealogy refers to the degree to which genealogical research organisations like JewishGen or JRI-Poland now provide some of the same functions provided years ago by the landsmanshaft institutions. Today, descendants of a particular shtetl often discover and connect to each other through genealogical researchers and these genealogical organisations. How these Jewish genealogical practices can be/are used to strengthen the landsmanshaft-like function will be examined.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010025
Authors: Sara Palomo-Díez Ángel Esparza-Arroyo Cláudia Gomes Olga Rickards Elena Labajo-González Bernardo Perea-Pérez Cristina Martínez-Labarga Eduardo Arroyo-Pardo
Throughout history, it has been observed that human populations have buried the deceased members of their communities following different patterns. During the Copper Age and the Bronze Age—periods on which this study focuses—in the northern sub-plateau of the Iberian Peninsula, we identified different patterns of multiple or collective burial. This work analyzes a total of 58 individuals buried in different multiple or collective graves, to investigate whether the practice of these burials implies a family or biological link between individuals buried together. With this aim, STR markers of nuclear DNA were analyzed, as well as the hypervariable regions I and II of mitochondrial DNA, establishing both close kinship relationships and relationships through maternal lineage. We observed different burial patterns, detecting certain maternal lines preserved in some common burials maintained over time. Close family relationships were observed to a lesser extent, with some occasional exceptions. The results of the analysis formed the basis for a discussion on the concepts of family and community.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010024
Authors: Akeem Modeste-James Franklin Chilaka
In today’s sociopolitical climate, many marginalized communities face unique challenges and yet triumph in carving a pathway toward happiness and self-acceptance. Among those resilient individuals are Black gay men, who experience the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality, creating an array of experiences. This collaborative autoethnography explores the distinct hardship Black gay men face in graduate education while trying to find Black queer joy, particularly at predominantly white institutions (PWIs), where these programs can perpetuate institutional and systemic racism and homophobia. Through interviews, three themes emerged: a sense of belonging, battle fatigue, and finding joy. Elevating the experiences of Black gay men emphasizes the importance of recognizing intersectionality and inclusivity in institutional spaces for a more sustainable future.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010023
Authors: Jean-Pierre Stroweis
A list of the first Jews deported from Compiègne, France on 27 March 1942 to Auschwitz-Birkenau was never found. Similarly, there is no known arrival list for this convoy. All the 1112 men entered the camp, were assigned prisoner numbers, and were then tattooed. In 1978, Serge Klarsfeld created a list by assembling sub-lists from WWII and immediate post-war sources. Despite significant ongoing research by Klarsfeld and others, no definitive list was ever compiled. Material recorded and maintained by the Nazis (daily count book, death registers, entry cards) pertaining to this early period does exist. This paper demonstrates how systematic use of Auschwitz prisoner numbers combined with French censuses and metrical records enabled us to significantly revise our records of who was deported in this transport, by eliminating dozens of names, amending many more, and adding several others.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010022
Authors: Miri Song
I am very happy to contribute to this Special Issue on the works of Peter Aspinall [...]
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010021
Authors: Xiao Di Tong
In the introduction to her influential work on Asian American cultural studies and feminist materialist critique, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe shatters the contradictions manifested in Asian immigration, wherein Asians’ entry into the United States marked them either as marginalized from “within” the national political sphere or as linguistically, culturally, and racially “outside” of the national polity For Asian immigrants, the debate of being simultaneously needed and excluded is no more evidenced historically than using Chinese labor during the California Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century. Their migratory relocation was hardly met with ease and public enthusiasm, however. Evoking anxiety in their Anglo counterparts, the Chinese were characterized as foreign noncitizens: barbaric, alien, and dangerous, the quintessential “yellow peril” threatening to displace white European immigrants such as the Irish. The irrational fear of the “Oriental” from the Far East led to a succession of immigration exclusion laws passed by Congress that denied the Chinese from entering the U.S. and their rights to naturalization in 1882. Passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended the entry of Chinese laborers into the U.S. based on their nationality for ten years. This paper argues that the possibility of agency for Chinese workers existed throughout the exclusionary period. Specifically, this site of agency resides with Chinese women and is expressed through a literary mode. For instance, Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family (1948) captures this moment of immigrant agency in the post-exclusion era. Lin, a pioneering Chinese writer and inventor who wrote texts such as My Country and My People (1935), The Importance of Living (1937), and Moment in Peking (1939), often utilized his narratives to bridge the clash between the East and West. Identifying what I see as the inadequacy of probing one of the earliest Chinese American texts from a rigid literary mode, I move to reconsider the novel as a legal counternarrative to the three exclusionary laws: the Page Law of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Cable Act of 1922. To direct my critical reorientation of Lin’s novel away from, though not necessarily against, literary castings of this early immigrant tale, I take the narrative as a strategic literary re-imagination that structures itself around these three legislative pieces to critique restrictive practices enacted upon the Chinese. The novel showcases how Chinese immigrants maneuvered and manipulated the legal system in their favor during assimilation. In this context, critical reappraisal is needed in scrutinizing how the Exclusion Act generated a wave of domestic-based diasporic relocation of Chinese workers from California to New York. Due to acute anti-Chinese sentiments on the West Coast, resetting Chinese workers in the northeast in search of a new Gold Mountain led to a unique phenomenon. This dispersal elevated Chinese women as valuable social capitals who transformed metropoles like New York City and redefined their views as nationalist subjects of the “about-to-be” in industrial capitalist modernity. Through a legal framework, then, Lin’s portrayal of the Fong clan suggests the emergence of a gendered Sino-immigrant agency, one that enabled the Chinese woman/mother to situate herself as the locus of the traditional patriarchal Chinese entrepreneurial family and the forefront of the northeast industrial capitalist scene.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010020
Authors: Cláudia Gomes Ana Curto
One of the periods with the greatest social, cultural, and religious changes was, without a doubt, the European medieval period. The concept of “Family” was one of the fields that gradually evolved, from individuals who shared the same biological lineage, to members of the same “House”. One of the ways to study the concept of “Family” in ancient periods is through a bioarchaeological perspective, where both anthropology and genetics have proven to be essential disciplines for studying “Families”. Through burial rituals, observing whether the graves were single or multiple, as is carried out in the study of human remains, we discuss the profound contribution of anthropology to the “Family” investigation, through mobility studies, the investigation of biological sex, observing certain congenital anomalies or, even, the study of certain ancient infectious diseases. Concerning genetics, the study of bones or teeth allows us to determine whether individuals were from the same close family or if they belonged to the same lineage through the maternal and paternal sides, being one of the only scientific ways of proposing social relationships between individuals, such as that created through adoption.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010019
Authors: Michelle M. Jacob Leilani Sabzalian Regan N. Anderson Haeyalyn R. Muniz Kevin Simmons Virginia R. Beavert
Indigenous peoples have education systems thousands of years old that have sustained our peoples in respectful relation with place. The backbone of our education systems is our stories and storytelling traditions. Beyond mere intellectual or analytical “texts” or “literature”, our stories place us in webs of relationships with sacred responsibilities. In this article, we discuss the importance of Indigenous genealogies of knowledge from both personal expertise and Indigenous Studies scholarship. We then describe a project on Yakama homelands in which Sahaptin storytelling is honored as a knowledge system that guides leaders and educators in their work. This project demonstrates the important role Indigenous stories can play in fostering more respectful and responsive systems. We argue that if educational programs or institutions wish to develop and remain in respectful relationships with Indigenous peoples and place, leaders and educators must learn to value, learn from, and lead with Indigenous knowledges.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010018
Authors: Saida Hodžić
In this experimental text that critically juxtaposes autoethnographic narration, reflection, and analysis with theoretical engagements, I suggest that the power dynamics that diminish and dispossess the lives of refugees and other displaced people also constrain and censor critical refugee epistemologies. Refugees are frequently impelled to speak, implored to speak, coached to speak, interrogated and ordered to speak, but on the condition that we consent to having our voices policed. Our narratives are welcomed if they affirm the humanitarian liberal order, but the knowledge we possess challenges it. Presented as benevolent and caring, the incessant demands for refugee stories and trauma erotics are also mechanisms of putting refugees in place: they assign the refugee a subject position of a conditionally accepted narrator who is refused authorship and self-possession. Our narratives fail to count as knowledge unless they are converted into writing by citizen ghost writers or coauthors. And when we refuse to recite trauma stories and instead disrupt the order of things by critically analyzing violent regimes of refuge and liberal complicity, we are censored. Refugees have things to say as ethnographers of their own lives, analysts of upside-down mobility, and critics of violent bureaucracies. This knowledge is needed and wanted. Rather than orienting our work to liberal publics, we are creating alternative, self-authorized structures that uphold displaced people as knowledgeable and world-building subjects, as people able to host others.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010017
Authors: Bruce Durie
Evidence is presented, from heraldic, linguistic and political–historical evidence, that the original author of the “Scotch Copy of a Poem on Heraldry” was not Adam Loutfut ca. 1494 but the earlier English writer John Lydgate, possibly drawing from French heraldic sources. A new transcription from the Harleian MS 6149 is given with a comparison to the text from a copy in Queen’s MS. 161, plus a modern-language “translation” and critical commentary.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010016
Authors: Viet Khoa Nguyen
This article presents a comprehensive exploration of Vietnamese surnames, with a specific focus on those attributed to the Kinh people, from an onomastic perspective. Beginning with a broad overview of general studies on Vietnamese names, the paper introduces the prevailing name structure, which follows the format [Surname + (Middle name) + Given name]. The study then delves into a careful examination of Vietnamese surnames, addressing key facets such as their origin, distinctive characteristics, quantity, and distribution. Notably, the article emphasizes the widespread usage of the Nguyễn surname, offering arguments and insights into its prevalence. Furthermore, the paper discusses the intricate nature of the meanings associated with Vietnamese surnames and highlights the legal considerations surrounding them. By combining historical context with cultural significance, the article aims to provide valuable insights into the complexities inherent in Vietnamese surnames. Ultimately, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the historical roots and cultural significance of Kinh group surnames within the broader context of Vietnamese onomastics.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010015
Authors: Ted Forsyth Mallory Szymanski
This paper examines the lineages of police violence, family trauma, and police reform through a case study of the Rochester police killing of Denise Hawkins in 1975. Michael Leach, a 22-year-old, white police officer, responded to a “family trouble” call involving a domestic dispute between Hawkins and her husband. When the 18-year-old, 100-pound Black woman emerged from the apartment, she held a kitchen knife. Within five seconds, Leach had shot and killed her, later claiming she endangered his life. Though Hawkins’ name is included in lists of Black women killed by police, little is known about her life and legacy. Using newspapers, police records, and oral history, we examine activists’ attempts to scale the call for justice for Denise Hawkins to the national level, the police department’s defense of Leach as the true victim in the incident, and the city leaders’ compromised efforts to establish a civilian oversight of police. Within the context of Rochester’s robust history of resistance to police violence, we argue that the reform efforts of the late 1970s ultimately failed to redress the police use of deadly force. Furthermore, when Michael Leach killed again in 2012—this time shooting his own son, whom he mistook for an intruder—his defense attorney successfully depicted Leach as the sympathetic figure. In shifting the focus to Denise Hawkins, this work contributes to the Black feminist call to memorialize Black women killed by police and suggests that the policies that protect the officers who use deadly force cause widespread, intergenerational harm to officers and their victims.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010014
Authors: Kristine Andra Avram
This article explores the interplay between my life and research on responsibility in the context of (past) collective violence and state repression in Romania, my country of origin. Reflecting on the five-year research process, I delve into my multiple and shifting positionalities during data collection, analysis, and presentation, pointing to the fluid identities of researchers along a continuum in which their backgrounds, professional roles, as well as dynamic negotiations in ‘the field’ and personal experiences intertwine and affect research at every stage. In particular, I explore the impact of my personal experience of loss and grief after the sudden death of my mother on my research, revealing its influence on reconstructing and writing about stories of violence. In doing so, research unfolds as a journey where personal and professional lives merge, showcasing knowledge production as an inherently subjective endeavor. Building on this, I advocate for recognizing the influence of emotions and personal experiences on narrative interpretations as well as for considering the intertwining between research and personal life’s as central facets of positionality and reflexivity.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010013
Authors: Melanie MacEacheron
Women’s marital surname change is important, in part, because it affects how often only husbands’ (fathers’) surnames are passed on to offspring: this, in turn, affects the frequency of these “family” names. Brides-to-be, novelly, from across especially western and central Canada (N = 184), were surveyed as to marital surname hyphenation/retention versus change intention, and attitude towards women’s such choices in general. Among women engaged to men, the hypothesized predictors of income and number of future children desired were positively predictive of marital surname retention/hyphenation under univariate analysis. Under multiple regression analysis using these and other predictors from the literature, previously found to be predictive of this DV under univariate analysis, only some of these other predictors were predictive. Of greatest predictiveness was the bride-to-be’s own mother’s marital surname choice (with brides-to-be, more often than would otherwise be predicted, following their mother’s such choice), thus suggesting a possible shift to a transmitted manner of bilateral descent reckoning, towards greater bilateral such reckoning, among a portion of the population. Reported, general attitude towards women’s marital surname retention was predictive of participant brides-to-be’s own reported (imminent) marital surname retention/hyphenation.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010012
Authors: Hemopereki Simon
The study examines how members of the historically white possessive and supremacist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States (mis)appropriated Māori genealogy, known as whakapapa. The Mormon use of whakapapa to promote Mormon cultural memory and narratives perpetuates settler/invader colonialism and white supremacy, as this paper shows. The research discusses Church racism against Native Americans and Pacific Peoples. This paper uses Anthropologist Thomas Murphy’s scholarship to demonstrate how problematic the Book of Mormon’s religio-colonial identity of Lamanites is for these groups. Application of Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s white possessive doctrine and Hemopereki Simon’s adaptation to cover Church-Indigenous relations and the salvation contract is discussed. We explore collective and cultural memory, and discuss key Māori concepts like Mana, Taonga, Tapu, and Whakapapa. A brief review of LDS scholar Louis C. Midgley’s views on Church culture, including Herewini Jone’s whakapapa wānanga, is followed by a discussion of Māori cultural considerations and issues. The paper concludes that the alteration perpetuates settler/invader colonialism and Pacific peoples’ racialization and white supremacy. Genetic science and human migration studies contradict Mormon identity narratives and suggest the BOM is spiritual rather than historical. Finally, the paper suggests promoting intercultural engagement on Mormon (mis)appropriation of taonga Māori.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010011
Authors: Jacqueline Holler
In the diverse multiethnic setting of colonial New Spain, women faced challenges in separating themselves from marriages they considered unendurable. The Catholic Church, which exercised hegemony over definitions of marriage in the colony, controlled access to permanent, formal separation or “ecclesiastical divorce”, while secular courts offered shorter-term separations generally aimed at reunifying couples. Outside of these options, flight, concealment, and bigamy, or “self-divorce,” offered the only recourse for women seeking to leave an untenable relationship. While it is well known that few women sought (and even fewer were granted) ecclesiastical divorce, it is clear that many women sought separation through formal and informal means. Using ecclesiastical petitions for divorce, this paper investigates the experience of deposit (depósito) for New Spain’s separated women. Deposit was likely a primary goal of women’s divorce petitions. Moreover, the hegemony of marriage was less complete in reality than in ideology; the number of single women in the colony is now known to be vast, and their networks substantial. Building on Bird’s and Megged’s insights on separation and singleness, this paper argues that studying deposit reveals a custom that offered women of all classes a substantial degree of respite and agency in separation, particularly in the early colony, when institutional options were less formalized. Sometimes, depósito permitted lengthy separations that blurred into permanency, while at other times it served as a crucial safety valve. Nonetheless, the practice was a contested terrain on which husbands also sought to exercise power and control. Deposit, therefore, was a highly ambivalent form of “separation” in Latin America. This was undoubtedly true both in the early-colonial period and thereafter, but as colonial society matured and institutional deposit became more possible and common, men’s power was enhanced. Studying the practice before the late seventeenth century therefore reveals some of the ways that early colonial societal flux authorized female agency.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010010
Authors: Nicla Cucinella Rossella Canale Paolo Albiero Costanza Baviera Andrea Buscemi Maria Valentina Cavarretta Martina Gallo Marika Pia Granata Alice Volpes Cristiano Inguglia Sonia Ingoglia Nicolò Maria Iannello
This study was aimed at evaluating the associations between maternal parenting practices (positive, negative/inconsistent, and punitive), children’s difficulties (such as conduct problems, emotional symptoms, peer problems, and hyperactivity), and prosocial behaviors. Participants were 131 Italian mothers of primary school children; mothers were aged between 26 and 52 years (M = 38.38, SD = 5.46); children (54% girls) were aged between 6 and 10 years (M = 7.15, SD = 0.98). Mothers completed two scales assessing their parenting practices and their children’s psychosocial adjustment. A path analysis was run to test the hypothesized model. The results showed the following: (a) maternal positive parenting was negatively and significantly related to children’s conduct problems and hyperactivity, and positively and significantly to children’s prosocial behavior; (b) maternal negative/inconsistent parenting was positively and significantly related to children’s conduct problems, emotional symptoms, and hyperactivity; (c) maternal punitive parenting was positively and significantly related to children’s conduct problems and emotional symptoms. Moreover, the results showed that, according to the mothers’ perceptions, boys tended to exhibit higher levels of hyperactivity and peer problems and lower levels of prosocial behaviors than girls. Overall, this study highlights the unique role of different maternal parenting practices in the psychosocial adjustment of primary school children.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010009
Authors: Collin Michael Sibley
In 2019, a noise complaint from a new, white resident of Shaw, a historically Black neighborhood of Washington, DC, led a local MetroPCS store to mute the go-go music that the storefront had played on its outdoor speakers for decades. The cultural and social implications of muting go-go music, a DC-originated genre of music that has played a central role in DC Black culture, inspired a viral hashtag, #dontmutedc, on social media, as well as a series of high-profile public protests against the muting. The #dontmutedc protests highlighted the increasing impact of gentrification on DC’s Black communities, and connected gentrification to several other important social issues affecting Black DC residents. In the wake of the #dontmutedc incident, several DC-area activist organizations have integrated go-go music into major, public-facing racial justice projects. The first part of this article presents a brief history of go-go music and race in DC community life, mainstream media, and law enforcement in order to contextualize the work of go-go-centered activist work in the aftermath of the #dontmutedc protests. The second part of this article highlights the go-go-centered activist work of three organizations: the Don’t Mute DC movement, Long Live Go-Go, and the Go-Go Museum and Café. These movements’ projects will be used to categorize three distinct approaches to go-go-centered racial justice activism in the Washington, DC, area.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010008
Authors: Atamhi Cawayu Hari Prasad Sacré
This article analyses the search strategies of first families in Bolivia contesting the separation of their children through transnational adoption. These first parents’ claims to visibility and acknowledgement have remained largely ignored by adoption policy and scholarship, historically privileging the perspectives of actors in adoptive countries, such as adoptive parents and adoption professionals. Filling in this gap, we discuss the search strategies employed by first families in Bolivia who desire a reunion with their child. Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s feminist postcolonial theory, we analyse ethnographic fieldwork with fourteen first families in Bolivia. We read how the agency of first parents, severely limited by the loss of legal rights through the adoption system, is caught in a double bind of dependency and possibility. While hegemonic adoption discourse portrays first parents as passive and consenting to the adoption system, the results of our study complicate this picture. Moreover, we argue that the search activity of the first parents can be read as a claim and request to revise and negotiate their consent to transnational adoption. Ultimately, we read first parents’ search efforts as resistance to the closed nature of the adoption system, which restricts them in their search for their children.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010007
Authors: Pierre Darlu Pascal Chareille
The evolution of the Armenian presence in mainland France from 1891 to 1990 is described on the basis of an inventory of more than 7000 family names of Armenian origin extracted from the INSEE surname database. Several surname samplings are proposed, and parameters such as the number of different Armenian names, the number of births with these names and their proportions are used as descriptors for each of the 320 French arrondissements and the four successive 25-year periods between 1891 and 1990. Before 1915, Armenian surnames and births with these names are infrequent and almost exclusively located in Paris and the arrondissements of Marseille. From 1915 onwards, subsequent to the genocide in Turkey, the number of births and the diversity of Armenian surnames rose sharply until 1940, before stabilizing thereafter. The diaspora remains essentially centred in Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, with little regional extension around these poles.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010006
Authors: Collin Sibley
In the closing decades of the 19th century, a wide range of Tamil authors and public speakers in colonial India became acutely interested in the notion of a Dravidian “race”. This conception of a Dravidian race, rooted in European racial and philological scholarship on the peoples of South India, became an important symbol of Tamil cultural, religious, and social autonomy in colonial and post-colonial Tamil thought, art, politics, and literature. European racial thought depicted Dravidians as a savage race that had been subjugated or displaced by the superior Aryan race in ancient Indic history. Using several key works of colonial scholarship, non-Brahmin Tamil authors reversed and reconfigured this idea to ground their own broad-reaching critiques of Brahmin political and social dominance, Brahmanical Hinduism, and Indian nationalism. Whereas European scholarship largely presented Dravidians as the inferiors of Aryans, non-Brahmin Tamil thinkers argued that the ancient, Dravidian identity of the Tamil people could stand alone without Aryan interference. This symbolic contrast between Dravidian (Tamil, non-Brahmin, South Indian) and Aryan (Sanskritic, Brahmin, North Indian) is a central component of 20th- and 21st-century Tamil public discourse on caste, gender, and cultural autonomy. Tamil authors, speakers, activists, and politicians used and continue to use the symbolic frame of Dravidian racial history to advocate for many different political, cultural, and social causes. While not all of these “Dravidian” discourses are meaningfully politically or socially progressive, the long history of Dravidian-centered, anti-Brahmanical discourse in Tamil South India has helped Tamil Nadu largely rebuff the advances of Hindu nationalist politics, which have become dominant in other cultural regions of present-day India. This piece presents a background on the emergence of the term “Dravidian” in socially critical Tamil thought, as well as its reversal and reconfiguration by Tamil social thinkers, orators, and activists in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The piece begins with a brief history of the terms “Dravidian” and “Aryan” in Western racial thought. The piece then charts the evolution of this discourse in Tamil public thought by discussing several important examples of Tamil social and political movements that incorporate the conceptual poles of “Dravidian” and “Aryan” into their own platforms.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010005
Authors: Thomas Fürth
Anyone who traces their Jewish ancestors back to the 18th century and even further back in history encounters the challenge of looking for ancestry without the clue that a fixed family name provides. Before the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, when Jews were forced by law to adopt a fixed family name, Ashkenazim Jewish families used patronymic names as last names. A patronymic name changes every generation. Sometimes, in larger cities, various types of nicknames were used as last names. Such a nickname could change within a generation and often indicated the place a person came from, his occupation, or personal characteristics. In this article, I will show, using three case studies, how I have faced the challenge of determining which patronymic names and nicknames my ancestors used as last names before they were forced to adopt a fixed family name. The three case studies are the ancestors of Josef Stern, who lived in the late 18th and early 19th century in Neu Bistritz in southern Bohemia, today Nova Bystrice in Czechia; Julius Strauss, 1883–1939, who lived in the late 18th, 19th, and early 20th century in Frücht and Giessen in Nassau/Hesse, today in southern Germany; and Simon Reiniger, who lived in Prague in the 18th and early 19th century.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010004
Authors: AKM Ahsan Ullah Diotima Chattoraj
The concept of “exposure to migration” helped us understand family dimensions, such as the role of members who remained behind, especially wives, changing gender roles, and changing exposure to remittances. However, most existing migration studies have not examined whether exposure to migration has anything to do with gender dynamics. This has often resulted in women or wives playing a subordinate role in contemporary discourse on gendered migration. Because they have very little to do with remittances compared to male family members, their role in the family is viewed critically by their male counterparts. This research is based on interviews with women from a selection of countries in Asia. Based on the analytical framework of “exposure to migration”, this study contends that the degree of exposure to migration for women depends on the country’s social and cultural milieu. In many cases, this exposure also leads to marital problems and family complications.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010003
Authors: Barbara A. Mitchell Boah Kim
A rapidly rising number of people are engaging in family genealogical research and have purchased home-based DNA testing kits due to increased access to online resources and consumer products. The purpose of this systematic scoping review is to identify and elucidate the motivations (i.e., pathways, reasons for conducting family history research) and the consequences (i.e., psychosocial impacts) of participating in this activity by amateur (unpaid) family genealogists. Studies published from January 2000 to June 2023 were included in our review, using the PRISMA methodology outlined by the Joanna Briggs Institute’s (JBI) Reviewer Manual. A total of 1986 studies were identified using selected keywords and electronic databases. A full-text review was conducted of 73 studies, 26 of which met our eligibility criteria. The multiple dominant themes that emerged from the data analysis are organized into five categories: (1) the motivations for practicing family history research, (2) emotional responses to family secrets and previously unknown truths, (3) impacts on relationship with the family of origin and other relatives, (4) impacts on personal identity (including ethnic/racialized and family/social), and (5) identity exploration and reconstruction. Finally, these themes are connected to broader theoretical/conceptual linkages, and further, an agenda for future research inquiry is developed.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010002
Authors: Sergio DellaPergola
As an essential prerequisite to the genealogical study of Jews, some elements of Jewish demographic history are provided in a long-term transnational perspective. Data and estimates from a vast array of sources are combined to draw a profile of Jewish populations globally, noting changes in geographical distribution, vital processes (marriages, births and deaths), international migrations, and changes in Jewish identification. Jews often anticipated the transition from higher to lower levels of mortality and fertility, or else joined large-scale migration flows that reflected shifting constraints and opportunities locally and globally. Cultural drivers typical of the Jewish minority interacted with socioeconomic and political drivers coming from the encompassing majority. The main centers of Jewish presence globally repeatedly shifted, entailing the intake within Jewish communities of demographic patterns from significantly different environments. During the 20th century, two main events reshaped the demography of the Jews globally: the Shoah (destruction) of two thirds of all Jews in Europe during World War II, and the independence of the State of Israel in 1948. Mass immigration and significant convergence followed among Jews of different geographical origins. Israel’s Jewish population grew to constitute a large share—and in the longer run—a potential majority of all Jews worldwide. Since the 19th century, and with increasing visibility during the 20th and the 21st, Jews also tended to assimilate in the respective Diaspora environments, leading to a blurring of identificational boundaries and sometimes to a numerical erosion of the Jewish population. This article concludes with some implications for Jewish genealogical studies, stressing the need for contextualization to enhance their value for personal memory and for analytic work.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy8010001
Authors: Izabella Parowicz
The concept of genealogical memory is commonly presumed to be synonymous with family or intergenerational memory. However, this paper asserts the necessity for a more detailed examination, seeking to refine and contextualize these notions from a genealogist’s perspective. Exploring the focal point of this study, genealogical memory unveils distinctive characteristics that warrant meticulous scrutiny. Foremost among these characteristics is its intentional nature and inherently reconstructive essence, enabling the recollection of long-deceased ancestors and contemplation of their fates. Consequently, genealogical memory proves invaluable in bridging the ‘floating gap’ between communicative and cultural memory, as posited by Jan Vansina’s conceptualization. The primary objective of this article is to comprehensively explore and structure the concept of genealogical memory, with a particular focus on the genealogist’s role as a memory-maker.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040101
Authors: Eli Park Sorensen
This article delves into the history of one of the most infamous internment facilities in Korea’s recent past—Hyungje Bokjiwon (형제복지원), or Brothers Home. The article outlines the history of Brothers Home, its biopolitical production of ‘vanished lives’, and what enabled it to come into existence—arguing that this is an essential context for understanding the history of international adoption from Korea. Located in Busan, South Korea, Brothers Home began as an orphanage in the early 1960s but developed into a ‘social welfare institution’ in the early 1970s. The events that transpired from the early 1970s until the facility shut down in the late 1980s—a period which aligns with the height of international adoption from Korea—have led to some referring to this place as Korea’s ‘concentration camp’. Inmates died in the hundreds, predominantly due to malnutrition and illness, while many suffered brutal deaths through physical abuse and torture. Some of the children from Brothers Home were relocated to Western nations for adoption. The history of Brothers Home embodies the biopolitical process of bodies and lives simultaneously enveloped in and, at the same time, kept outside socio-legal frameworks to invalidate those lives or render them insignificant or invisible; to erase them from any meaningful, socio-legal context and thereby reducing those lives to bare life. The article will focus on three main areas: the history of Brothers Home, the biopolitical production of vanished lives, and how the latter resonates with specific instances depicted in testimonies written by people returning to Korea to uncover details about their adoption circumstances, that is, moments encapsulating this ‘production of vanished lives’. The central concern here is less to draw a direct line between international adoption and the events at Brothers Home, but rather to outline a crucial biopolitical context—epitomized in the history of Brothers Home—that precedes the adoption process and thus constitutes its condition of possibility. By juxtaposing this biopolitical context with autobiographical testimonies of people searching for information about the circumstances of their adoption, the article seeks to understand what it means to bear witness to the existence of a life whose desubjectivization—or disappearance—at the same time constitutes the witnessing subject’s condition of possibility.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040100
Authors: Jovan Jonovski
This article will cover the different types of migration in Macedonia and its Prespa region at the end of the 19th and 20th centuries through the Jonovski family from the village of Orovo. Poverty and wars caused many men to look for work and to earn money in distant places. Joshe, who was born around 1766, was first an economic migrant with his father, Marko, internally within the Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor (1880–1890). Later, he immigrated to the USA (1914–1918), before returning home to his family. However, after WWI, with the harsh attitude of the Greek government toward the Macedonian minority, this turned into permanent migration. His sons would be migrant workers in the USA, France, and Australia, while their wives and children stayed in Orovo. The village was destroyed and depopulated at the end of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). Joshe and the remaining family reunited in Wroclaw, Poland, where in the 1950s Joshe died, and his daughters-in-law finally joined their husbands in the USA and Australia. His son Boris, with his family, moved to Skopje, Macedonia, Yugoslavia in 1968. We will look at the life and migrations of Joshe, his four children, and four grandchildren.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040099
Authors: Ankica Kosic Silvia Andreassi Barbara Cordella Serena De Dominicis Alessandro Gennaro Salvatore Iuso Skaiste Kerusauskaite Terri Mannarini Matteo Reho Giulia Rocchi Alessia Rochira Fulvio Signore Sergio Salvatore
As immigration is one of the dominant issues in contemporary public discourse, it is important to explain the mechanism of prejudice against immigrants from a cultural psychology perspective. Several studies in the literature have confirmed a significant relationship between perceptions of the estimated size of the immigrant population and negative attitudes towards them. This study aims to investigate whether this relationship is moderated by symbolic universes, i.e., affect-laden generalized worldviews. The study involves a representative sample of 3020 Italians who participated in a computer-assisted web survey and completed a questionnaire containing items measuring their estimates of the size of the migrant population in Italy, political orientation, cultural worldviews (symbolic universes), and the perceived threat posed by migrants. The results confirm that the relationship between the estimated size of the migrant population and the perceived threat is moderated by symbolic universes, being stronger for participants who hold both pessimistic and idealizing symbolic universes. The results are interpreted within the framework of semiotic cultural psychology theory.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040098
Authors: Brian Lightbody
What is philosophical genealogy? What is its purpose? How does genealogy achieve this purpose? These are the three essential questions to ask when thinking about philosophical genealogy. Although there has been an upswell of articles in the secondary literature exploring these questions in the last decade or two, the answers provided are unsatisfactory. Why do replies to these questions leave scholars wanting? Why is the question, “What is philosophical genealogy?” still being asked? There are two broad reasons, I think. First, on the substantive side, the problem is that genealogical models will get certain features of the method right but ignore others. The models proffered to answer the first question are too restrictive. The second reason is that the three essential questions to ask regarding the nature of genealogy are run together when they should be treated separately. In the following paper, I address these problems by attempting to reconstruct genealogy from the ground up. I provide what I hope is an ecumenical position on genealogy that will accommodate a wide variety of genealogical thinkers, from Hobbes to Nietzsche, rather than a select few. Therefore, I examine two of the three questions above: What is philosophical genealogy and its purpose? I argue there are seven main features of genealogy and that these features may be used as a yardstick to compare how one genealogist stacks up to another along the seven aspects I outline in the paper.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040097
Authors: Tiffany J. Lytle
The image of the Apsara, a celestial dancer in Cambodian myth, is closely associated with Cambodian cultural preservation practices like Cambodian classical dance. The Apsara, its aesthetic features and its association with Cambodian cultural preservation have taken on new meaning in Cambodia’s diasporic communities. In the diaspora, Apsara aesthetics have come to symbolize Cambodian heritage, history and identity, becoming a major feature of performances by Cambodian diasporic artists. However, orientalist expectations of Asian performers in the diaspora, paired with both the forgotten history of colonial intervention in Cambodian arts and state-sanctioned initiatives towards Cambodian nationalism, contributes to orientalist (and thus racialized) expectations of Cambodian diasporic performance. Mixed-race artists fail to fit neatly into the dominant narratives of Cambodian performance and have been marginalized by the Cambodian diasporic community’s dominant conceptions of performance that are rooted in cultural preservation. As people that sit outside of the aestheticized markers of Cambodian-ness, mixed-race artists often struggle to have their work and their subjectivities recognized by their communities. To circumvent questions of their racial legibility, mixed-race Cambodian American artists construct performances that are strategically padded with markers of Khmer identity by engaging with Apsara aesthetics. This article will explore how three different SoCal-based artists have negotiated their Cambodian American identity and cultural politics through performance and/or performance related materials (ads, images, etc.). I will be using examples from the work of music artist and violinist Chrysanthe Tan, theater practitioner Kalean Ung, and autoethnographic engagement with my own creative projects to show how examining the work of multi-racial Cambodian American performing artists can bring forth the complex dynamics of Cambodian diasporic cultural politics and belonging.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040096
Authors: Leendert Brouwer
Name change can only take place in the Netherlands under strict conditions and according to patronizing regulations. At the moment, an amendment of name law is being drafted that would give descendants of Dutch citizens whose ancestors lived in slavery an exemption. If they have a family name that their ancestors received upon their release, they may change it free of charge. It remains to be seen, however, whether the desire to adopt new names in keeping with a reclaimed African identity can also be granted. After all, that would conflict with the general regulations when creating a new name. The whole issue shows political opportunism. First, it would be useful to get a good picture of name adoption in light of surnaming in general. Is it right to consider the names in question as slave names? Are they really that bad? It is more likely that precisely the exceptional position now obtained leads to undesirable profiling. In fact, the only solution to embarrass no one is a wholesale revision of the name law that does away with outdated 19th century limitations. Why should anyone be unhappy with their name? Why should someone who insists on having a different name be prevented from doing so? This essay examines the announced change in the law against the background of surnaming in general and the acquisition of family names in Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles in particular.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040095
Authors: Dolores Figueroa Romero
The most prominent social effects of the drug war in Mexico are the criminalization of poverty and increased rates of feminicide. Feminist academics and community leaders have been developing and working hand in hand to find the most appropriate methods to document gender-based violence and feminicide to shed light on the impunity that hides the systemic dismissal of women’s lives. This essay presents a critical analysis of my own positionality as a feminist and academic ally in building a collaborative research alliance with indigenous women leaders who are politically engaged in the production of knowledge from an intersectional perspective that adequately reflects the matrix of violence that affects the lives of indigenous women in urban and rural areas. This process has been fruitful and promising, although it has also entailed challenges and contradictions arising from disparate meanings of gender justice and the lack of encounter of feminist/indigenous politics of resistance.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040094
Authors: Jorge Hugo Villafañe
This study constitutes a preview of a broader research project on kinship, family, and society in colonial La Rioja. In this context, the results obtained from the study of five generations of the Villafañe and Guzmán family are presented. Various aspects such as family organization, inheritance system, conflicts between families, the construction of a distinct identity, and the strategies that allowed this family to preserve its heritage and maintain a prominent status in the local elite are examined and analyzed in detail.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040093
Authors: Pirjo Ahokas
Representations of adoptions tend to concentrate on normatively conceived forms of identity, which prioritize the genetic lineage of adoptees. In contrast, scholarship on autobiographical writing emphasizes that identities are not fixed but are always in process and intersectional because they are formed in within inequal power relations. Kay’s experimental, autobiographical narrative Red Dust Road (2010) tackles the themes of adoption, the search for close relatives, and reunion. Many scholars of her autobiographical writings describe the fluidity of the diasporic adoptee identities created by her. My aim is more specific: I examine what I call Kay’s continuously mobile, processual identity construction as a transracial adoptee in Red Dust Road. I argue that her identity formation, which is also intersectional, is interconnected with her multidirectional networks of attachments and the experimental form of her adoption narrative. In addition to an intersectional approach and autobiographical studies, I draw on insights from adoption studies. In my reading of Kay’s work, I pay special attention to the inequalities derived from the intersecting vectors of adoption and race, which also intersect with other dimensions of difference, such as nation, gender, class, and sexual orientation. I employ the notion of the multidirectional in the sense in which McLeod applies it to the study of adoption writing. As I demonstrate, multidirectionality and the complex form of Red Dust Road provide versatile means of conveying Kay’s fragmented acts of memory, which assist her ongoing mobile, processual identity construction. Her multidirectional lines of transformative attachments finally bond her to her adoptive and biogenetic families as well as other affective connections. While Kay’s socially significant narrative indicates, amongst other adoption issues, that transracial adoptions can be successful, it is significant that it has no closure. The last chapter gestures toward potential new beginnings, which indicates that the story of adoption has no end.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040092
Authors: Jane Pilcher Jan Flaherty Hannah Deakin-Smith Amanda Coffey Eve Makis
Names are increasingly recognised in sociology as important routes for understanding family relationships, as well as familial and individual identities. In this article, we use qualitative ‘name story’ data to examine the meanings of surnames for adults who were adopted as a child and for adults who have adopted a child. Our findings suggest that adult adoptees and adopters can feel differently about surnames and how these connect them—or otherwise—to familial identities of belonging and to their own individual identities. Especially for adopters, shared surnames are understood as important for ‘family-making’ through the way they cement and display familial belonging. Adult adoptees’ feelings about belonging, birth surnames and adoptive surnames appeared more complicated and often changed over time. For some, adoption enabled a flexibility in the choice and use of different surnames. Cultures of patronymic and patrilineal surnaming meant that women adoptees and women adopters also faced an additional layer of complexity that shaped decisions made about surnames and family belonging. Through examining experiences of and feelings about family names in adoption, our article highlights the complexities of surname praxis in identity construction, adoptive family life and lineages.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040091
Authors: Aaron Demsky
This paper examines the structure, message, and content of biblical genealogies in light of literary analysis and social anthropology. In particular, the focus is on the so-called “Table of Nations” in Genesis 10. My basic assumption is that most biblical genealogies are a literary genre employing various devices that carry a message using symbolic numbers, chiastic structure, and anticipation. These lists interact and supplement the narrative, sometimes as a foil to the story line. They are inserted at relevant points of change in the story of mankind from Adam and Eve to Joseph and his brothers. I even propose that these insertions are the earliest form of dividing the book of Genesis into installments, a precursor to weekly Torah readings and to the later division into chapters as in the printed text. The underlying message of this chapter is the value concept of the brotherhood of mankind stemming from one father—Noah. This innovative idea of universal kinship breaks with the common pagan view prevalent in antiquity that man’s place is to serve the gods and to have little or no personal identity. Note that the great urban cultures of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia have left us no real records of family lineage other than the long king lists that reflect dynastic power. No doubt the importance of oral and written lineage stems from a tribal culture like that of the ancient Hebrews and their kindred. This overriding view even shaped the Nimrud pericope, describing his founding the urban centers of Babylon and Assyria. Genealogy became the natural medium expressing this message of universal kinship. Basic to understanding biblical genealogies is discerning two patterns of kinship, one, linear, stretching up to ten generations, and two, segmented genealogies, noting an eponymous “father” and his segmented offspring or wives. Our understanding of these structures in the Bible is shaped by the research of social anthropologists who studied oral genealogy among analphabetic tribes in Africa and the Middle East. I apply these observations and methodology in a detailed commentary on the Table of Nations.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040090
Authors: My Ngoc To Ramona Beltrán Annie Zean Dunbar Miriam G. Valdovinos Blanca-Azucena Pacheco David W. Barillas Chón Olivia Hunte Kristina Hulama
Background: Diasporic Indigenous peoples of Mexico living in the United States continue to survive and reclaim their cultures despite multiple disruptions to identity formation resulting from systematic violence and cultural silencing enacted through white settler colonialism in the United States and Mexico. Honoring Indigenous survivance, the authors present a conceptual model of Indigenous identity healing and reformation that mirrors the dynamic qualities of water for Indigenous Mexican peoples living in the United States. Methods: The conceptual model arose from a ceremony-based, participatory, digital archiving project documenting Indigenous oral histories. The model is illustrated through case analysis of three Indigenous Mexican individuals living in the United States whose stories holistically represent the model’s components. Results: The case narratives illustrate how Indigenous Mexican identities are (re)formed by moving through the model components of Rift (disconnection from land, culture, and community), Longing (yearning to find what was lost), Reconnecting (reclaiming cultural practices), and Affirmation (strengthening of identity through community), via Reflection (memory work which propels movement through each stage). Conclusions: Findings suggest that identities can be (re)formed through reclaiming cultural practices and reconnecting with the community. This conceptual model may be useful for further understanding Indigenous Latinx identity development and healing.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040089
Authors: Nergis Canefe
This essay documents my three-decade-long journey of connections and resultant transformations between scholarly knowledge and artistic production in my work. In reinvestigating my history with stage and visual arts, I trace the relationship between traditionally ‘alien’ practices and academic understandings of societal and political mass violence and invite the reader to reconsider what academia stands for in order to engage with borderless histories of conflict, violence, and displacement. This essay dwells on how artistic engagement is both a personal and a profoundly political process through which the experience of violence is communicated through thoughts, emotions, hopes, and expressions of trauma. There are also significant ethical concerns present concerning the portrayal of violence, death, and suffering, which the paper discusses under the aegis of ethics of witnessing as responsibility.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040088
Authors: Justyna B. Walkowiak
Contemporary Lithuania remains the only European country in which official feminine surnames indicate their bearers’ marital status, and this has been the object of fierce public debates over the past decade. Czechia and Slovakia grapple with surprisingly similar issues, even though Czech and Slovak feminine surnames do not reveal marital status. Similar debates in Poland took place a century earlier, a fact which may indicate the possible direction of the changes in the three countries studied. The aim of this article is to present debates concerning feminine surnames in Lithuania from a wider perspective, regarding contemporary Czechia and Slovakia, as well as Poland in the interwar period, and to show from a wider Central and Eastern European perspective that, despite the obvious differences in naming patterns, Lithuanian discussions are not exceptional, and they are part of a larger tendency towards more freedom in the choice of official surname forms for women. It is evident that, although female surnames are inexorably embedded in the language systems of the countries in which they function, their future largely depends on extralinguistic factors such as societal attitudes. While feminine surnames in European states generally seem to be on the decline, the most controversial remain those types that reveal marital status or imply male possession of women, though pragmatic factors might play some role as well, particularly in the case of minorities.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040087
Authors: Michele Klein
This essay argues that the earliest genre of Jewish family photograph albums, the nineteenth-century portrait-card albums created by the bourgeoisie, may become a starting point for genealogical discoveries. Some display the visual genealogies of extended families, and many reveal the genealogical memories of family migration. The case studies presented here showcase the process through which an album became a starting point for the construction or expansion of a family’s genealogy. They draw on the radial sources commonly employed by family genealogists, including birth and burial records, censuses, and other archival materials. The discussion looks at the role of family albums in the passing down of family history to future generations.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040086
Authors: Maja Korac Cindy Horst
This reflective piece explores the ‘I am the evidence’ side of the process of knowing. It offers the story of the Yugoslav wars of secession (1991–1999) and their human consequences from the point of view of someone who refuses to surrender ground to the socio-political conditions of life in which ethno-national and cultural differences have to be transgressed. The core of this article is based on the life history of Maja Korac, developed in conversation with Cindy Horst. It approaches the intersections of her life and research from a narrative research perspective. We engage in a contrapuntal discussion of how Maja’s family background, gender, social class, and ethnic/national identity affected her life choices in terms of political engagement, research trajectories, and mobility paths. In doing so, we follow Barad’s argument that we do not obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are part of the world. Hence, our discussion and analysis enables the multivocal articulation of the interweaving of personal, collective, geopolitical, and historical contexts in Maja’s research. This process made Maja feel visible after a very long time, because it opened the possibility of (re)gaining the vocabulary to express who she is, and how it has been for her as a human being within a professional role and identity, as well as within an ascribed ethnic identity during a specific historic time. This opportunity for understanding and knowing while being inside the world allowed Maja to repossess her life and identity—individual, professional, collective. It also re-opened the possibility to challenge further the notion of ‘true knowledge’ that is presumably based on ‘methodologically sound paradigms’, all of which exclude the researcher as a person, as who, as a life.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040085
Authors: Kendra Willson
Iceland stands out in today’s Europe due to the fact that most Icelanders use patronymics rather than surnames. However, a small percentage of Icelanders do have surnames inherited in a fixed form. The first surnames were adopted in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, increasing numbers of Icelanders were taking up surnames, often Danicized or Latinized versions of Icelandic patronymics or place names. The practice became controversial with the rise of the independence movement, which was closely connected to linguistic purism. The use of surnames in Iceland has been debated since the 19th century. Whereas the other Nordic countries introduced legislation requiring citizens to have surnames, Iceland went in the opposite direction, forbidding new surnames starting in 1925. However, the surnames that were already in use were allowed to remain in circulation. This created an inequality which has haunted Icelandic name law discourse since. Having a surname in Iceland has often been linked with social prestige, and surnames have been perceived as a limited good. Since the 1990s, the fraction of Icelanders with surnames has increased through immigration and some liberalizations in the rules regarding the inheritance of existing Icelandic surnames. In the name of gender equity, surnames can be inherited along any line, not only patrilineal. Since 1996, immigrants seeking Icelandic citizenship are no longer required to change their names, and their children can inherit their surnames. The category of millinöfn (middle name), surname-like names that are not inflected for gender, was introduced in the 1996 law; some Icelanders with millinöfn use them as surnames in daily life even if they officially have patronymics. Despite the expansion in eligibility to take surnames, the basic principle that no new Icelandic surnames are allowed remains in the law and remains a point of contention. Many of the same themes—individual freedom vs. the preservation of cultural heritage, national vs. international orientation, gender equity—have recurred in the discourse over more than a century, reframed in the context of contemporary cultural values at any given time.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040084
Authors: Athena Leoussi
Our journal, Genealogy (https://www [...]
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040083
Authors: Inmaculada de Jesús Arboleda Guirao
This study explores the evolving interest in names. Until now, the little research conducted has focused on surnames and place names. This paper examines the influence of origin and self-identity on reactions to forenames and pet forms by employing a comparative approach across English and Spanish languages. With 425 participants from Murcia, Spain, and Leeds, United Kingdom, this study employed a self-designed semi-structured questionnaire in both languages. The questionnaire addresses demographic information and name preferences and liking based on the participant and name origins. Using quota non-probability sampling and personal interviews, the research applied qualitative and quantitative analyses utilising SPSS 28.0.0 and thematic analysis. The findings highlight participants’ connections between names and origins, echoing the linguistic–cultural interplay. Divergences emerge in discussing fashion trends and self-identity expressions between Spanish and English participants, potentially tied to historical and linguistic factors. The study underscores varying name significance in the two districts, revealing insights into cultural and identity associations. Future research is recommended to explore sociodemographic factors and gender differences.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040082
Authors: David Aberbach
The chronological/genealogical narrative structure of the Hebrew Bible points to an editorial aim: to give a history of Israel as a nation from Creation to the 6th century BCE Babylonian exile and the return to the land of Israel, and in so doing to bring to life and unite two dead Near Eastern kingdoms. This article considers the scribes and editors who created the structure of the Hebrew Bible as forerunners of modern cultural nationalists, especially of defeated or endangered peoples, who sought the survival and growth of the nation in literature. However, the monotheisms that derived from Judaism, and adopted Hebrew scripture as sacred, rarely accepted the Bible as the translation or adaptation of a Jewish work in the Jewish national language mostly on Jewish soil and under Jewish government in the 1st millennium BCE. Rather, anti-Semites taught a genealogy of Jewish guilt to the world, with extra charges based on supersessionist theology and anti-Jewish fantasies.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040081
Authors: Morsheda Akhter Philip Q. Yang
Despite the rapid growth of the Bangladeshi diaspora in the USA, knowledge about this new diasporic community remains very limited. This study argues and demonstrates that the Bangladeshi diaspora in the USA is a fast-growing and sizable diasporic community that requires systematic research and better understanding. It delineates the history of the Bangladeshi diaspora to the USA in four periods and documents the phenomenal growth of the Bangladeshi diasporic community in the USA since 1981, using data from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). By taking into account the legal Bangladeshi immigration as well as the emigration and mortality rates of immigrants and undocumented Bangladeshi immigration, it estimates the current size of the Bangladeshi diasporic community in the USA at about 500,000 instead of a range of low-to-mid 200,000s normally cited. Additionally, using the pooled samples of the 2001–2019 American Community Surveys (ACS) and other ACS data, as well as the DHS data, this paper provides a demographic and socioeconomic portrait of the Bangladeshi diasporic community in the USA. The findings are generalizable to the population and fill some important gaps in the literature.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040080
Authors: Lina Fadel
In responding to the call for exploring and explicating aspects of the research process that remain unspoken about in most social science fields, this narrative asks deceptively simple questions: what does it mean to carry out research as an academic with a lived experience of displacement, loss and pain? What are the methodological choices available to me as a migrant scholar? What does it really mean to write (about) the displaced-turned-emplaced self from the margin—myself being a case in point—within contexts of loss and displacement? My aim is to present a personal narrative that is uniquely mine, a story that may work with or against what is thought to be the official story. I defend the use of fragments, theoretically and methodologically, to avoid the homogenisation of narratives and assumptions about how research is carried out, how knowledge(s) are produced and reproduced, and who has the power to produce them. Thus, building on established scholarship cutting across various fields and guided by postcolonial and postmodernist theories, I hope to unpack the tensions and possibilities inherent in thinking about borders and positionality in academia (when the researcher dwells at the margins), identity, its fragmentation, and its entanglement with questions of decoloniality, narrative and voice.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040079
Authors: Russell A. Evans
As researchers, we take the subjectivity we have formed over time into each research project. These subjective traces are a product of our lived experiences, gradually shaping our perceptions and interpretations of the world. Despite being an Indigenous scholar, my lived experience has not primarily occurred within Indigenous settings, resulting in biased subjectivities emerging while researching First Nations communities. This paper describes my subjective traces and reflects on the biases I uncovered while researching Indigenous communities. The reflection consists of three main sections: a personal background, a description of experiences in the research sites, and a discussion of what the reflections mean to the decolonization of academia. Overall, I hope that the insights in this reflection go beyond the mere recognition of Indigenous voices and encourage Indigenous researcher activism toward advancing and diversifying academia.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040078
Authors: Andrew Milne
Queensland became an independent state in 1859, separating from New South Wales. Almost immediately, an ambitious plan on migration was embarked upon in order to attract emigrants to Queensland, above all other possible colony destinations in the British Empire. Henry Jordan was instrumental as the Emigration Commissioner (1861–1866) in devising the land order scheme and Richard Daintree, as Agent-General, wooed, through modern techniques on never-before-seen photography in colour, small capitalists to the isolated outreaches of Queensland, where settlement was encouraged. Life there for those that migrated was, however, vastly different from what either they knew in Britain, or what they expected. But, ultimately, they settled, took possession of considerable stretches of lands, as selectors, or pastoral land owners, with disregard for the indigenous populations there. In this article, I examine one migration story on an ancestor in the nineteenth century, Andrew Milne, from London to Queensland, through the lens of critical settler family history theory. I take up the challenge for historians to question who their ancestors were, since the past is telling of the present, and the perceptions that are longed for in the future selves. Namely, in the construction of the future self, an individual must also confront their past, and the lives of those that preceded them. In particular, in the case of Australia, settlement, colonisation, and the possession of land are not benign, and are not isolated events, but have an impact on the present and future lives of both descendants of those that possessed the land, and those from whom it was taken away. The legacy of racial segregation (through the Stolen Generations), and despite the attempt to ‘close the gap’ since 2008, Aboriginal peoples in Australia still suffer the consequences of objectification and dehumanisation to which they were subjected. The consequences are not only financial and economic, but are visible in health, education, social status, and in their mistrust of public services.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040077
Authors: Žaneta Dvořáková
The study focuses on changes of surnames among Czech and Moravian Jews. The changes are tracked until the start of the German occupation in 1939. The source material is comprised of Jewish birth registers from 1867 to 1918 from Prague, as this was the most populous Jewish community of the region. These records are part of fund No. 167 stored in the Czech National Archive. More than 17,000 Jewish children were born in Prague during this period and only 350 of them changed their surnames. Surnames were mostly changed by young men under the age of 30. A large wave of renaming occurred mainly at the beginning of the 1920s shortly after the formation of Czechoslovakia (1918). Renaming was part of the assimilation process but was not connected to conversion to Christianity. The main goal was the effort to remove names perceived as ethnically stereotypical, which could stigmatize their bearers (e.g., Kohn, Löwy, Abeles, Taussig, Goldstein, etc.). Characteristic of the new surnames was the effort to preserve the same initial letter from the original surname. The phenomenon is compared with the situation in neighboring countries (Germany, Hungary, and Poland).
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040076
Authors: Azra Hromadžić
This essay explores the dominant expectations of “objectivity” and “distance” that continue to penetrate classrooms and academic journals, and conferences and public spaces. In the process, I argue, they (re)produce everyday violences that stretch their slippery tentacles, keeping in suspension those who think, feel, write, and relate otherwise. In order to trace the lived effects of these processes, I focus here on several instances, their articulations and permutations, where I and those close to me were reminded, suspected, even accused—jokingly, scoldingly, teasingly, lovingly, and/or violently—of “being too close to it.” Here, “it” stands for a geographical location (“the field”), lived experience, and particular sensibility, struggle, and commitment that comes from being proximate—nationally/ethnically, geographically, politically, and affectively—to the field/home.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040075
Authors: Eva Mikuska
Serbia is a country with a long tradition of emigration. The increase in the number of displaced people sharply rose in 1992 when all the diplomatic options to preserve Yugoslavia had failed. The ensuing ethnic conflict resulted in mass mobilization by young adults who were required to go to war, mainly against their will. The main purpose of the paper is twofold: to draw attention to the key challenges that displacement plays on individuals and to show how traumatic events, such as the war in Ukraine, can mobilize historical traumas. To elicit deeper and new understandings of how displacement impacts people, conversations with my elementary school classmates of Hungarian ethnic origin, including those who were serving the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) between 1991 and 1992, were analysed through the lens of the author’s autoethnographic positioning. It shows how life stories are co-produced through narrative inquiry and, by ‘co-reflecting’ on the past, it shows how they are simultaneously positioned within social categories of intersectionality, such as gender, social inequality, stayed and displaced. These reflections offer a broader understanding of how qualitative research can enrich existing knowledge of the effect of this specific conflict, and ethnic conflict in general.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040074
Authors: Yang Zhou
Through case studies of Chinese–African couples living together with Chinese parents, this paper examines conflict coordination within intergenerational relationships in the same living environment. Among intergenerational families living in China and Africa, intergenerational differences as well as family relationship issues are sometimes inevitable. In addition, different families employ varying methods in order to alleviate intergenerational tension and maintain harmony within the family. Through fieldwork, it was found that there are three types of intergenerational relations: regulation by an intermediary, formal democracy, and excessive participation. Although all three models attempt to balance intergenerational voices and decision-making power, the first two models are generally present in relatively stable family relationships, while the last model consists of relatively negative aspects that actually add fuel to the fire when family conflicts arise. Although young Chinese–African couples and elderly Chinese parents expect family relations to function well, the contradictions brought about by power imbalances not only hurt the parent–child relationship, but more importantly affect the intimate marriage relationship and the upbringing of the children.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040073
Authors: Burcu Akan Ellis
The rise in recognition of children’s agency—that is, their status as inalienable right-bearing actors—has been a welcome change in international organizations, albeit often through a set of media activities that depict children variously as victims or beneficiaries of moral leadership. Typically, a handful of children/youth affected directly by a particular tragedy become the recognizable faces of identified human rights abuses. This research explores media representation of children born of war in Bosnia, “invisible” children who only recently were legally categorized as victims of war. As children who were born of wartime rape, the lives of select young activists have been documented through movies and media interviews since their childhood. This paper explores the costs of such disclosure and performativity, and sacrifices that young activists make to expose their “truth” to gain recognition of their attendant rights. It ultimately highlights the tension between the search for the rights of affected children and the dilemmas inherent in the actions of the few youth activists who publicly embrace the conditions of their birth to bring voice to others.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040072
Authors: Suriamurthee Moonsamy Maistry
The narrative of the colonisation of South Africa that prevailed and continues to prevail in certain segments of contemporary South African society is that of the white coloniser as an industrious, noble, peaceful and innocent being, divinely tasked with the project of bringing civilisation to the country’s indigenous Black tribal people—people bereft of religion, cognitive competence and incapable of responsible land ownership. In this article, I reflect on the genesis of anti-Blackness over three and a half centuries and argue that despite Black resistance over this period, the systematic orchestration of anti-Blackness through repressive violence, constantly morphing policy legislation and relentless propaganda machinery has imprinted on the psyche of South Africans in particular ways. Black academe in South Africa has been systematically frustrated with Western Eurocentric epistemologies and ontologies and struggle to engage in any substantive epistemological or ontological delinking. Inspiration from decolonial theory is invoked to offer an analysis of the paralysis of the new Black political, economic and academic elite, as they occupy a zone of being co-opted into the stranglehold of white economic and cultural hegemony.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040071
Authors: Klára Berzeviczy Gyula Pályi
The medieval respect towards progenitors induced not only sentimental feelings but also practical steps, such as sponsoring works of art. In the present study, the family connections of Landgrave Hermann I of Thuringia to the Carolingians and to (Saint) Guillaume/Guilhem d’Orange, from the family of the Counts of Autun, have been explored. The possibility of the role of these kinships as a “driving force” behind initiating and sponsoring the epos Willehalm of Wolfram von Eschenbach has been analyzed.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7040070
Authors: María Gloria Cayulef
This article explores the process of decolonizing and indigenizing research from my perspective as a Mapuche woman. During this process, I examine how to approach and analyze colonial and patriarchal archives through an indigenous lens, leading me to consider a transformation of my work into an indigenous research endeavor. In this undertaking, I delve into the interplay of affective and political dimensions within indigenous research, recognizing them as catalysts for resistance and knowledge construction. I emphasize the significance of first-person research as a powerful means of empowering marginalized individuals and validating personal and collective experiences, countering Eurocentric epistemologies that perpetuate colonial and epistemic violence. Furthermore, I advocate for the recovery of marginalized knowledge and the integration of native epistemologies. As a third step in the process of decolonizing and indigenizing my research, I introduce the concept of ‘Mapuchization of research.’ This idea represents a process of reconnection with the ancestral knowledge of my people, where past and present come together. It intertwines several dimensions, including political, epistemological, and ontological, with the aim of contributing to indigenous research methodology, based on the knowledge found in Mapuche culture and history.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030069
Authors: Alison Crosby
This article argues for incommensurability, incoherence, and difference as the grounds through which to think about sexualized harm and its redress. It seeks to remove the “me” from the “too”, and to instead consider the structures of white supremacy and neocolonial power that have facilitated white Western feminists’ ability to participate in shaping a hegemonic discourse of sexualized harm and its transnational travelling. The article traces the author’s personal genealogy of rights work in the context of shifts in international jurisprudence in relation to wartime sexualized violence. It looks back and reflects on an eight-year feminist participatory action research project that accompanied 54 Mayan women protagonists who survived a multiplicity of harm, including sexual violence, during Guatemala’s 36-year genocidal war. The project documented the protagonists’ engagement with transitional justice mechanisms, including a paradigmatic court case and a national reparations program, as part of their struggles for redress. The concept of “protagonism” is used to understand agency in the aftermath of genocidal violence as relational, co-constructed, and imbued with power. The meaning of sexualized harm is always “in-translation” between Western and Mayan onto-epistemological positionings, as Mayan women seek to suture land-body-territory in their multifaceted strategies for redress that engage but always exceed rights regimes.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030068
Authors: Alexander Beider
The article provides an analysis of several aspects of the corpus of surnames used by Jews who lived after the end of the Middle Ages in the territory that today corresponds to the Republic of Georgia. One section covers historical aspects: the earliest attestations and their exact status and the period when the use of surnames became stabilized. The next two sections discuss morphological aspects: the endings found in the surnames and historical, linguistic, and social explanations of the distribution observed, compound names, names with demonymic suffixes, and those based on hypocoristic forms of given names (a detailed coverage of methods of constructing such forms is also provided). In the remaining sections, the reader will find an analysis of phonetic peculiarities found in Georgian Jewish surnames, the types of surnames with their statistical distribution, as well as the description of surnames that were not created in Georgia but were brought as ready-made forms by Jews who migrated during the 19th–20th centuries to Georgia from other territories.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030067
Authors: Susan M. Moore
Family historians frequently encounter ethical issues in the course of their research, and many come to recognise the moral dilemmas facing them. Common dilemmas revolve around topics such as whether family secrets should be revealed or favourite stories debunked in light of the evidence, how the privacy of living relatives can be maintained when family histories are published, if the ‘sins of the fathers’ require reparation (and how this might be possible), and to what extent is it acceptable to romanticise or ‘whitewash’ one’s ancestral story. In this paper, dilemmas such as these are discussed using the theoretical framework of psychologist Jonathan Haidt whose model of five moral ‘instincts’ includes care, fairness, loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity. It is concluded that examining ethical issues using such a framework has the potential to stimulate empathy, reduce impulsive action, and increase the likelihood of finding creative solutions to moral dilemmas.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030066
Authors: Margo Turnbull
In this article, I present a Foucauldian analysis of the speeches made by the then Prime Minister of Australia (Mr. Scott Morrison) in March 2020. This analysis sets out to explore the political rationalities that assembled COVID-19 as a particular type of ‘problem’ that warranted unprecedented governmental intervention into the everyday lives of citizens. I believe that the insights provided by such an analysis are relevant to ongoing examination of governing in liberal democracies both during a crisis and afterwards.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030065
Authors: Fleur Bianco Ankica Kosic
(1) Background: This study explores how threat perception mediates the relationship between binding moral foundations and prejudice toward migrants. We hypothesized that the relationship between binding moral foundations and prejudice against migrants, which is already established in the literature, is mediated through realistic and symbolic threat perception. (2) Methods: Two separate samples were gathered, in Malta (N = 191) and Italy (N = 189). The participants responded to an anonymous questionnaire containing several scales: the Moral Foundation Questionnaire, perceived threat from migrants, prejudice toward migrants, and social distance from several macro-categories of migrants. (3) Results: We confirmed a significant relationship between binding moral foundations and explicit prejudice toward migrants, and also found that this relationship was mediated by perceived realistic and symbolic threats in both countries. However, when the indices of social distance were considered as criterion variables, the direct relationship between binding moral foundations and social distance was not confirmed for all the migrant macro-groups. In addition, in some migrant groups, we found that this relationship was mediated by perceived realistic and symbolic threats. (4) Conclusions: This study indicates that the perception of realistic threats may have a significant role in determining the effect of binding moral foundations; this may have theoretical and practical implications.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030064
Authors: Mitterand Okorie Uchenna Okeja
Current perspectives on the intractability of child trafficking in Africa considers the problem as a failure of law enforcement or a lack of political will by state actors. In response, these works tend to suggest the need for strengthened institutional mechanisms as a preventative measure to curb the problem. We contend however, that this perspective does not fully appreciate the seeming detachment of civil society in Africa regarding the plight of children. In light of this, we argue that an examination of child trafficking as an intractable human rights problem ought to first, interrogate how childhood is viewed in the continent. Such interrogation creates the possibility of reimagining the problem by observing the lived realities of children in Africa and the (in)ability of society to keep track with their humanity. Further, we propose the need to memorialize the harms that children in Africa have been exposed to in the past and present through commemorative markers, as a means of appreciating the precarity of childhood in the continent. We reason that doing so will create a stronger sense of responsibility for state and civil society towards children and potentially curb child trafficking.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030063
Authors: Rocío Blanco-Gregory María Cortés-Ruiz
In the mid-20th century, the region of Extremadura suffered an important exodus of unskilled young people in search of work opportunities that would allow them to survive. Nowadays, the phenomenon is repeating itself, but with certain differences. The current emigrant is somewhat more adult, more qualified and without a specific job in the place of destination. The current study focuses on a survey carried out at the University of Extremadura among students in the areas of social sciences, humanities, legal sciences and economics in order to understand their intention to emigrate abroad once they have finished their studies. We found that there is no distinction between genders and that most of the students have direct or indirect cases of international mobility in their environment, which encourages them to take this option into account if, once they have finished their studies, their job aspirations are not satisfied in their place of origin. This reflects certain similarities with the migratory movement that took place in the mid-20th century; however, today, the objectives pursued with this mobility are quite different.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030062
Authors: Diana Melendez Diana Ballesteros Cameron Rasmussen Alexis Jemal
U.S. based post-secondary educational institutions usually have violent origin stories that include land theft, genocide, and the participation in slavery. Schools of social work are no exception. In recent years, colleges and universities, including schools of social work, have started to confront their histories of and participation in racial-settler colonialism. The severance of land as kinship, and land theft, have been a significant part of the harms of racial-settler colonialism. Colleges and universities have benefited from land theft, primarily through land-grants. Still, institutional accountability has been minimal, including limited acknowledgment of harm and modest changes in curriculum and staff. This paper expands the terrain of institutional accountability in social work higher education to consider land-based healing initiatives as a critical remedy for the harms of racial settler colonialism. This paper provides a historical review and decolonial analysis of the connection between social work higher education and land-grant institutions. Building on social cartography literature, a mapping framework for decolonizing higher education is examined in relation to questions of institutional accountability by land-grant universities. This framework is offered in conjunction with contemporary examples of struggles for institutional accountability in and outside of higher education. The paper concludes with future recommendations for research related to institutional accountability and the implications of land-based healing as an approach.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030061
Authors: Samson Maekele Tsegay
This paper explores the concept of migration, and its causes and effects, with a focus on international migration. Various journal articles, reports, and policy documents are reviewed to address the controversies concerning the concept and key issues of migration. The paper indicates that migration is not only a contested concept, but migration research has resulted in different outcomes. It is mainly affected by personal, socio-economic, and political factors associated with the origin and host countries. Similarly, scholars have been asking the question, “who is a migrant?” for decades without a definite answer. It is also important to consider “what would happen after migrants obtain host country citizenship”: would they continue to be migrants, the host countries’ citizens, or both? This paper contributes to advancing our knowledge and broadening our understanding of the concept of migration and key issues associated with it. It also serves as a base for further discussion.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030060
Authors: Ekaterina V. Sklizkova
The semiosphere reflects universal and culturally determined characteristics. Heraldry is one of the most complex sign systems. Alive and flexible semiotics is urgent for studies. The aim of this paper is to mark the axiological character of Russian and British sovereign state armorials with an accent on animals. Based on both Russian and British research, this paper focuses on syntactics and pragmatics of arms analyzed in a synchronic and diachronic manner. A cross-cultural comparative approach to Russian and British armorial bearings can be viewed as a novel contribution. The paper embraces structural and semantic aspects, the temporal and pragmatics sphere and Jargon du blazon. English heraldry is relevant to the European tradition, and the Russian one has political value. For both countries, it is associated with foreign influence. The system of European coats of arms is coherent with the institution of property and war, and the Russian one with inheritance. For Britain, heraldry was one of the culture-forming components, and for Russia, it was just one of the elements of culture.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030059
Authors: Antonia Bifulco Maureen Smojkis
We examine the identity of British Poles born in the UK, whose parents arrived as allied servicemen and their families, seeking asylum following WW2. The two authors are from this community, and here examine their British-Polish identity along with other second-generation Poles in the UK. These individuals grew up in distinct communities exposed to the Polish language and culture but with restricted contact with communist Poland. The themes of response to parents’ trauma experience, Polish identity in childhood and in midlife, Polish language, and visiting family in Poland were explored. Many described parents as secretive about the horrors of war but keen to retain and propagate their Polish identity. Some felt they were not fully Polish, but their identity increased with access to modern Poland as adults. The Polish language was important to identity but linked to feeling inadequacy when not fluent. Visiting family in Poland enhanced identity, was valued, and provided information on family history. European identity was adopted by some to cover both their British and Polish identity. Genealogy and family history are popular and linked to community, and British Poles have a distinct contribution and a voice in showing how identity can emerge out of family trauma.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030058
Authors: Esther Fitzpatrick Mike Fitzpatrick
The surname Fitzpatrick is readily identified as Irish. Until recently, the traditional Fitzpatrick surname narrative was of a medieval super-progenitor named Giolla Phádraig. His offspring, the eponymous Mac Giolla Phádraig, it was said, somehow came to dwell in every Irish province; yet this is an Irish surname myth that works to erase the history of ancient ‘Fitzpatrick’ clans. This article demonstrates how deconstructing the surname Fitzpatrick, through working the hyphen of gene-eaology, is a practice of decolonisation. Via genetic data and archival records, dominant clan identities are disrupted, while connections with lost clans are re/membered. Critical analysis dismantles the dominant narrative imposed by colonial strategies and reconnects people with kinship groups and forgotten forebears. Questions arise from the deconstruction of an Irish surname. How might new clan identities be imagined, and how is losing a dominant surname narrative negotiated?
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030057
Authors: Veronica Bergan Marikaisa Laiti
Early childhood education (ECE) institutions in Norway highly value nature and outdoor activities. The framework plan for kindergartens encourages that children get insights into the origin of food. The approach for imparting this knowledge incentivises foraging in kindergartens. The eco-ethology of humans is dependent on cultural values and practices and what is available for harvest in the local environments in different seasons. This paper explores the incentives and motivations for foraging in kindergartens in Norway through a qualitative approach. The data was collected from Sámi and Norwegian ECE professionals through on-site video documentation, group interviews, in-depth semi-structural interviews, and field notes. It was analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, in which the researchers had an active role in the process through reflexive engagement with theory, data, and interpretation. Three themes related to the incentives and motivations for foraging were found: (1) “viewpoints of nature”, (2) “transfer and production of knowledge”, and lastly (3) “motives and meaning for foraging”. Norwegian ECE professionals seemed to view nature as a place to explore outdoors (termed friluftsliv) and Sámi ECE professionals used nature for a practical purpose (termed meahcci). Nature was used by all the ECE professionals for transfer and production of knowledge. The motives and meaning for foraging in ECE settings in Norway originated from the cultural values of purposeful use of nature’s resources. Further studies are needed to investigate the prevalence and importance of foraging practices in ECE, especially in terms of its significance to education for sustainability.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030056
Authors: Giselle Byrnes Catharine Coleborne
Inspired by the work of Christine Sleeter and Avril Bell, among others, the articles that comprise this Special Issue seek to respond to questions focused on the relationship between family history and the processes of migration and colonisation and how this might impact on a family’s sense of itself today [...]
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030055
Authors: Ramona Beltrán Antonia Rose-Garriga Alvarez Angela R. Fernandez
Poetry is an ideal tool to convey participant voices in social research as it compresses the meaning and essence of participant narratives through using evocative sensory words that illuminate nuances of lived experience. Expressive poetics is an emerging arts-based research method that facilitates a multi-sensory and relational analytical process. In this article, the authors describe and illustrate an adapted expressive poetics research method through highlighting the experiences of Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, transgender, or queer (2SLGBTQ) Indigenous youth that participated in a culture-centered HIV prevention curriculum. It is our hope that through creating dialogic poems, we deepen and nuance the salient experiences of participant youth, acknowledge our relationship through adding our creative response to their calls for care, and create a model for others to engage in a similar process. In a time when 2SLGBTQ bodies are increasingly targeted and policed, it is more important than ever to center and amplify these voices.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030054
Authors: Jovan Jonovski
Heraldic traditions in southeast European countries are similar, as are the histories of their state emblems and coat of arms. Their development could be classified into three periods: (1) from the founding of the states until the end of World War II; (2) the socialist period; and (3) the period of democratisation after the collapse of socialism. The focus of this work is the processes of the adoption of coats of arms. The descriptions are taken from the appropriate legal documents. This paper examines the emblems and coats of arms of modern southeastern European, or Balkan states, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Slovenia, and Serbia.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030053
Authors: Klára Berzeviczy András Liska Gyula Pályi
Beatrix Frangepán (* c. 1480, +(27 March) 1510) from the Counts of Veglia (Krk), Modrus and Zengg was a descendant from one of the leading families of the Hungarian–CroatianHungarian–Croatian late Medieval Kingdom. She became wife of Crown Prince János Corvinus-Hunyadi and later of Margrave Georg Hohenzollern-Brandenburg. From her first marriage, she had three children. One of these, Kristóf, who died young, was buried together with his father in Lepoglava (Croatia). Recently, successful archaeogenetic analyses have been performed on the remains of János and Kristóf Corvinus-Hunyadi; and in the course of these studies, the family background of Kristóf’s mother, Beatrix Frangepán, became an important factor. The present study provides a nine-generation family tree of Beatrix Frangepan as a complementary data pool for an eventual expansion of the archaeogenetic studies. Preliminary results of archaeological study of the supposed grave of Beatrix Frangepán are also reported.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030052
Authors: Ana María López-Parra María Soledad Mesa Fernando Castilla Eduardo Arroyo-Pardo
In most Western European societies, surnames pass from generation to generation and in cases where surnames are shared by fathers to children, the Y chromosome passes down from fathers to male offspring in the same way as surnames do. The aim of this study was to ascertain the patrilineal relationship between individuals with the surname “Castilla” and their respective Y-chromosome haplotypes. The toponymic surname “Castilla” is part of the Spanish royal family. Genealogical studies of this surname have allowed the formulation of different hypotheses about its origin, most of which were centered in Burgos. To shed some light on the origin of the surname Castilla and to investigate the possible co-ancestry behind the living carriers of this surname, markers located in the Y chromosome-specific region were analyzed in a sample of 102 men whose paternal surname was Castilla. The study aimed to establish the minimum number of founders and the expansion time of the lineages from our sample. Two major haplogroups were identified: R1b and E1b1b-M81. The high frequency of the E1b1b-M81 haplogroup in comparison to that of the general Spanish population, its low haplotype diversity, and its young TMRCA (323+/− 255 years CE) are compatible with the historical timing of the obligation to use surnames. However, the coincidence of the most common haplogroup in the Castilla sample and the most frequent haplogroup in the Spanish general population, R1b, makes it difficult to identify founder haplotypes/haplogroups in the history of the Castilla surname.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030051
Authors: Sara Palomo-Díez Ángel Esparza-Arroyo Olga Rickards Cristina Martínez-Labarga Eduardo Arroyo-Pardo
The chronological period from the beginning of the Chalcolithic Age to the end of the Bronze Age on the Iberian northern sub-plateau of the Iberic Peninsula involves interesting social and cultural phenomena, such as the appearance of the Bell Beaker and, later, the Cogotas I cultures. This work constructs a genetic characterisation of the maternal lineages of the human population that lived on the northern sub-plateau between 5000 and 3000 years ago through an analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), a kind of genetic marker that is inherited through maternal lineages, unaltered from generation to generation. Population and cultural questions are investigated through mtDNA analyses. This study intends to shed light on the following questions. Were individuals who were buried together in multiple or collective burials biologically related through their maternal lineages? Were there distinct maternal human lineages in the same or different geographical areas if different material cultures (Bell Beaker and Cogotas I) were associated with the arrival of new human populations who established close biological relationships with the endogenous populations? Or could this be the result of the transmission of knowledge without human populations mixing? Another important question is whether the material cultures were related to the female populations. We analysed 91 individuals from 28 different archaeological sites of the Iberian northern sub-plateau from four different chrono-cultural periods (Pre-Bell Beaker, Bell Beaker, Proto-Cogotas I, and Cogotas I), from the end of the Chalcolithic Age up to the Bronze Age. There were two historical moments of new populations arriving: the first during the Pre-Bell Beaker period, associated with the K mtDNA haplogroup, and the second during the Proto-Cogotas I culture, with new lineages of the H, HVO, and T haplogroups. Neither of these new population flows were directly associated with the maximum development of the two main material cultures Bell Beaker and Cogotas I, so they must have occurred immediately beforehand, during the Pre-Bell Beaker and Proto-Cogotas I periods, respectively. However, we cannot discard an association between the populations and material cultures. Curiously, it has also been observed that there was also a tendency towards multiple burials, in which the individuals who were buried together belonged to the same maternal lineage, during these two periods of population change. This study has shed some light on the populational changes that occurred through these different periods in this specific geographical area of the northern sub-plateau of the Iberian Peninsula.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030050
Authors: Iain Hutchison
Records of asylums, schools, and benevolent organisations that intervened in the lives of disabled children in Scotland during the long nineteenth century have survived to varying degrees in public and institutional archives. This might suggest the existence of detailed primary source material that stands in contrast to the sparse data about those disabled children who ‘escaped’ the attention of organisations that aimed to support and direct their lives. However, the records of these formal organisations are inconsistent in what they reveal about the lives of the children under their patronage. This article explores the challenges presented by the records of three organisations, namely, the Scottish National Institution for the Education of Imbecile Children in Larbert, Edinburgh’s Gayfield Square blind school, and East Park Home for Aiding Infirm Children in the Maryhill district of Glasgow. Among the deficiencies of surviving institutional records are the frequent paucity of insights into the lives of their young residents. This article will consider how some of their life journeys can nonetheless be researched by marshalling data from the likes of mandatory registration records and decennial census enumerators’ books. In addition to benefits afforded to genealogists, such records provide historians with materials from which disabled lives can be reconstructed and analysed.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030049
Authors: Alexander Beider
This paper outlines a study of surnames used by various Jewish groups in the Land of Israel for Ashkenazic Jews, prior to the First Aliyah (1881), and for Sephardic and Oriental Jews up to the end of the 1930s. For the 16th–18th centuries, the surnames of Jews who lived in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron can be mainly extracted from the rabbinic literature. For the 19th century, by far the richest collection is provided by the materials of the censuses organized by Moses Montefiore (1839–1875). For the turn of the 20th century, data for several additional censuses are available, while for the 1930s, we have access to the voter registration lists of Sephardic and Oriental Jews of Jerusalem, Safed, and Haifa. All these major sources were used in this paper to address the following questions: the use or non-use of hereditary family names in various Jewish groups, the geographic roots of Jews that composed the Yishuv, as well as the existence of families continuously present in the Land of Israel for many generations.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030048
Authors: Isaac Yeboah Joshua Okyere Henry Ofori Duah Andrew Kweku Conduah Mary Naana Essiaw
Generally, men in sub-Saharan Africa make reproductive decisions that affect their partners. We examined the predictors of fertility desires among married men across three age cohorts: 20–35 years, 36–50 year, and 51–59 years. Using the 2014 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey dataset, we conducted ANOVA and multivariate binary logistic regressions on 1431 monogamous married men aged 20–59 years. Two indicators of fertility desire are constructed: (i) the comparison of men’s ideal versus women’s ideal family size, and (ii) the desire for more children. The results indicate that the fertility desire of men is stronger than that of women. The predictors of fertility desire are age, parity, religion, contraceptive use, wealth quintile, couples’ age difference and couples’ difference in education. At ages 20–35 years, men using modern contraceptives were more likely to desire more children compared with those not using any modern contraceptives. However, at ages 36–50 years, men using modern contraceptives were less likely to desire more children. This finding suggests that men change their fertility desires in response to changes in their ages.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030047
Authors: Jenny Lee-Morgan Kim Himoana Penetito Jo Mane Ngahuia Eruera Kaatewairua Evans Luella Linaker Baari Mio Pania Newton Moana Waa Hineamaru Ropati
The supply of, and demand for, housing in Aotearoa, New Zealand, is in a state of crisis. With all other areas of social deprivation, Māori are impacted disproportionately in the housing space, and have been locked out of the housing market. In order to address this crisis, a range of government, community and iwi initiatives have been established in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) to provide various housing interventions, from emergency housing, accommodation supplements and subsidies to transitional housing, home ownership programmes and papakāinga (Māori settlement, village) development opportunities. Marae Ora, Kāinga Ora (MOKO) is a Kaupapa Māori (Māori approach) research project created to explore the role of marae (cultural centre) and kāinga (village, settlement) in supporting the wellbeing of whānau (family group), hapū (extended kinship grouping), iwi (extended kinship–tribal grouping) and communities, which includes the potential provision of housing. Five marae in the South Auckland landscape are partners in this research and bring to life the prospect of their contribution to housing solutions for their local Māori communities. This article presents some valuable insights into the aspirations of each whānau involved with the five marae with regard to their perspectives and developments with marae-led housing provision.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030046
Authors: Robert Scott Davis
Documenting and finding lost family history proves as daunting as locating vital statistics, but the effort to perform such a genealogical feat should be undertaken, for good reason, as the resulting information can prove rewarding. This commentary discusses research methods, effective methods, and materials for finding documentation of family history with a special emphasis on African American genealogy. Commonly used strategies are listed with successful examples and recommended sources. The article concludes with an affirmation of the value of research on ancestors beyond just vital records.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030045
Authors: Ezenwa E. Olumba
The Nigerian Middle Belt is the epicentre of violent conflicts between Fulani herders and sedentary farmers over land and agricultural resources called eco-violence; existing research has not adequately addressed the persistence of these conflicts. Using Social Representations Theory (SRT), this paper examines empirical case studies conducted in April 2018 and May 2022 in Benue State, Nigeria, to determine why these conflicts persist. The paper argues that contending parties anchor, objectify, and socially represent past contestations in pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Nigeria in present-day realities and events in the Middle Belt, leading to the re-experience of collective memories and their consequences on people’s violent collective behaviour. Consequently, people resort to violence to redress present grievances viewed through the prism of past events. To promote sustainable peace when tackling deeply-rooted conflicts, it is essential to comprehend the historical context and the significance of collective memory while employing a comprehensive strategy for conflict resolution. Implementing the Cognitive Reappraisal Technique to address issues related to collective memories is critical to this approach.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030044
Authors: Alejandra Real-Picado Luis Díaz Cláudia Gomes
Different types of disasters, whether natural or human in character, lead to the significant loss of human lives. In the latter case, the quick action of identification of corpses and human remains is mandatory. There are a variety of protocols to identify victims; however, genetics is one of the tools that allows an exact identification of the victim. However, several factors may interfere with this identification, from the biological samples’ degradation not allowing the analysis of nuclear information, to failure to dispose of biological samples from family members. Access to certain family members could be a determinant of the proper choice of genetic markers that allow the identification of the victim, or his/her inclusion in a given genetic maternal or paternal lineage. New advances in the field of genetics are soon expected to allow for the identification of victims from disasters with only their biological postmortem samples; it may also be possible to draw a robot portrait of a victim’s most likely physical characteristics. In all cases, genetics is the only modern tool with universal character and can be used in essentially all biological samples, giving and identification of more or less accurate statistical character, depending on whether nuclear or lineage markers are used.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7030043
Authors: Xing Zhang
Factors leading to racial and ethnic differences in non-marital fertility, which account for nearly 41% of all births in the U.S., are not well understood. This study examines how mother–child relationships and parental control shape the likelihood of having a non-marital birth in adulthood among non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic Asian women from 1994–2009. This paper uses data from Waves I, III, and IV of Add Health (n = 7171) and event-history analysis to find that mother–child relationships are associated with the likelihood of having a non-marital birth, with variation by race and ethnicity. Maternal warmth and communication in adolescence are associated with a decreased likelihood of having a non-marital birth in adulthood, but only among non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic Asian women. Parent–child relationships are dynamic and can have lasting impacts on children’s fertility behaviors across the life course.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7020042
Authors: Orkideh Mohajeri Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero Anita Foeman Bessie Lawton
The recent proliferation of DNA testing in both popular culture and higher education calls to question whether such testing reifies race as a biological construct and, in particular, whether or not it disrupts or reinforces monoracial categorizations. Graduate students, who are often at a point in their educational journeys to further question and critique commonly held ideas, provide a unique lens through which to investigate discourses surrounding DNA testing. In this qualitative study, we analyze data from four focus groups with 22 racially diverse U.S. graduate students who had recently completed an ancestry test. We identify two specific discourses that graduate student participants engaged in, including (a) a biological race discourse and (b) an agentic choice discourse. Together, these discourses produced distinct unsettled subjectivities for Black and White participants. Our findings suggest the need to more critically consider the usage of DNA ancestry testing in and out of higher education and to provide further nuance around the validity of these tests as they relate to the social construction of race.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7020041
Authors: Jo Anne Rey
As a means of opening the lid on transgenerational silencing—which was a survival strategy for thousands of Indigenous families against intended cultural genocide—while balancing the place of auto/biography in that journey, this paper focuses on the impact of Ancestors’ hidden histories and how the discovery of those histories drives complex identifications when woven with Presences, places, and people on Dharug Ngurra/Country. Using my own family’s recently uncovered early colonial Ancestral storying, histories that involve Dharug traditional custodian, African slave, and Anglo characters, some as First Fleet arrivals, the paper considers the place of auto/biography as a form of agency that brings past into presence, and which, in turn, opens opportunities to heal, decolonise, and transform Dharug and, more broadly, Indigenous communities, their knowledges, practices, and ontologies. When this activation involves most of the metropolis known as Sydney, Australia, we recognise its transformative potential to change non-Indigenous people’s perspectives. When we recognise auto/biography as a form of ‘truth-telling’, it allows a space to re-story relationality, both human and other-than-human, and restores Indigenous presence into Ngurra for biodiverse justice in a climate-changing world. Addressing these matters through poetic multimedia allows a place of safety between the pain and the healing.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7020040
Authors: Jay Song Ryan Gustafsson
Approximately 3600 Korean children have been adopted to Australia, as of 2023. Existing studies have tended to approach transnational or intercountry adoption from child development, social welfare, or identity perspectives. Research on Korean adoption to Australia is relatively scarce. The current article approaches the population from a migration perspective, building on Richard Weil’s conceptualization of transnational adoption as “quiet migration.” Drawing on both Korean-language data from South Korean governments and Australian data, the authors analyse Korean adoption to Australia as a state-sanctioned transnational migratory mechanism that facilitated the orderly movement of children from so-called “deficient” families of predominantly single mothers in South Korea to adoptive families in Australia. Situating adoption practices within the socio-political contexts and larger migration trends of both countries, the authors identify multiple enabling factors for channelling the ‘quiet’ flow of Korean children for adoption and argue the very ‘quietness’ of the adoption system is a source of concern despite Australia’s relatively stringent regulations. A migration perspective and analysis of these enabling factors contributes to the conceptualization of adoption as a socio-political state-sanctioned phenomenon, rather than a solely private family affair.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7020039
Authors: Vicki G. Mokuria Alexia Williams
As schools and universities are under attack for educating students about race, racism, and other topics with deep roots that directly link to our current societal challenges, we must find and utilize meaningful tools of resistance. This article is a collaborative auto-ethnographic narrative inquiry that presents the stories of two professors and two students who engaged in the reflective work of critical family history (CFH). Currently, merely mentioning the word racism is so troubling to many politicians whose ideas are rooted in White supremacist ideology that laws are being passed in the U.S. to ban books on certain topics about race and LGBTQIA+ issues so that students cannot even read about these topics. A Tennessee law recently passed in both the state House and Senate seriously diminishes and limits how professors teach putative “divisive topics” related to race and its societal impact at the college level. A valuable teaching tool, critical family history, offers an impactful approach for us, especially for educators, to face the truth about the complexity of our lives and our ancestors, specifically in relation to issues of race—in a subtle, yet powerful way that is grounded in courage, wisdom, and compassion. The findings in this article are both surprising and troubling, which points to why educators need to seek ways to incorporate CFH in their work to dismantle racism.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7020038
Authors: Manuel Lozano-García Cláudia Gomes Sara Palomo-Díez Ana López-Parra Eduardo Arroyo-Pardo
This review aims to establish criteria for identifying an adoption process in an archaeological context. We define adoption as raising an individual who does not belong genetically to the family. Adoption appears in different moments of past societies, and when establishing a “family” nucleus burial place we must consider certain social behaviors, such as burials under the houses, collective burials, or laying bodies in specific positions. After observing these signs, we are carrying out a genetic analysis, in order to confirm a biologically related family nucleus. These traces have been traditionally linked to family nuclei because they have been found previously in burials where biological kinship was confirmed. However, there can be cases where, after carrying out the genetic analyses, it is confirmed that certain individuals are not genetically related. In such cases, an adoption case cannot be ruled out. These cases are not easy to identify due to the differences between societies and cultures, so more in-depth studies should be carried out on the type of funeral practice in which these human remains are found to be able to discriminate an adopted individual from one who was not adopted. Therefore, the study of adoption should be carried out based on an in-depth knowledge of the cultural background, before using a powerful tool such as ancient DNA technology.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7020037
Authors: Brittany Aronson Hannah R. Stohry
We live in a world that desperately wishes to ignore centuries of racial divisions and hierarchies by positioning multiracial people as a declaration of a post-racial society. The latest U.S. 2020 Census results show that the U.S. population has grown in racial and ethnic diversity in the last ten years, with the white population decreasing. Our U.S. systems of policies, economy, and well-being are based upon “scientific” constructions of racial difference, hierarchy, Blackness, and fearmongering around miscegenation (racial mixing) that condemn proximity to Blackness. Driven by our respective multiracial Latinx and Asian experiences and entry points to anti-Blackness, this project explores the history of Latinx and Asian racialization and engagement with anti-Blackness. Racial hierarchy positions our communities as honorary whites and employs tactics to complicate solidarity and coalition. This project invites engagement in consciousness-raising in borderlands as sites of transformation as possible methods of addressing structural anti-Blackness.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7020036
Authors: Josep M. Oller Albert Satorra Adolf Tobeña
The secession campaign in Catalonia created a political fracture into two sizeable and opposing citizenry segments, those who favored secession from Spain and those who were against it. In a series of longitudinal studies covering the entire period of regular surveys made by the official polling agency of the Regional Government (2006–2019), we showed that this fissure operated mainly through an ethnolinguistic cleavage based on family language and ascendancy origins. Media outlets linked to successive pro-secession Regional Governments accentuated the division. Here we extend these analyses till 2022, to capture potential variations in such a division across the five years following the failed secession attempt of October 2017. Present findings confirm the persistence of the fissure along similar lines: family language interacts with the influence of regional partisan media to keep the fracture alive, though with trends denoting an attenuation of antagonistic identity alignments. We detected, as well, a turning point for the attenuation of both political confrontation and social division, within a conflict that has not been solved, albeit it appears mitigated. We discuss how elapsed time after secession failure and the effects of several political and non-political events might have helped to dampen down divisive tensions and repair a serious fracture produced by the secession push.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7020035
Authors: Veronica Cloonan Tammy Hatfield Susan Branco LaShauna Dean
This research aimed to understand the process adult Colombian adoptees raised in the United States of America go through to define themselves in the context of race and ethnicity. The research followed a qualitative narrative methodology, in which six participants were interviewed twice regarding their experiences with transracial and transnational adoption and their ethnic and racial identity process. The results suggest that identity is a dynamic process. Our research also confirms Colombian’s history of unethical adoptions and its influence on the complexity of identity and loss of adult Colombian adoptees. Throughout the article, the researchers use the term biological family referring to Colombian birth families. However, we acknowledge that other terms (i.e., first, natural, original, etc.) are also used in the adoptee community.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7020034
Authors: Jamie Lee Wraight
This article seeks to investigate the design and creation of several models and dioramas of Holocaust death camps as spatial and historical representations of Holocaust memory. It broadly discusses their use as pedagogical tools, forms of art, testimonial expression and memorialization. It also addresses questions concerning the intention of their designers and creators, as well as the ethical considerations of recreating these spaces.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7020033
Authors: Ahmad Al Ajlan
In forced migration literature, there is a lack of studies on the impact of war trauma on interpersonal mistrust among refugees and their interpersonal trust in members of the host society. To contribute to filling this gap, the author studied the impact of war trauma on interpersonal mistrust among Syrian refugees in Germany and their interpersonal trust in Germans. The data are based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with 20 Syrian refugees and asylum-seekers conducted in 2018 and 2019. The author argues that because traumatised refugees are powerfully influenced by past traumatic events experienced in their home country, they tend to mistrust people who can be associated with the place where these traumatic experiences occurred. In contrast, they are inclined to trust people who cannot be linked to the geographical location of the traumatic experiences. The main result of this study is that similarity—that of war-traumatised refugees sharing the same socio-cultural backgrounds—leads to interpersonal mistrust, while dissimilarity leads to interpersonal trust. The author of this paper calls for considering trust-building among war traumatised refugees, which has significant importance for refugee integration.
]]>Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy7020032
Authors: Alexander Montasem Teuta Gjuladin-Hellon Hassan Awan Brian Aine Julian Whyte Norah Alqadah Chukwuemeka Ibeachu
Background: Discrimination, racism, harassment, stereotyping, and bullying are a significant issue for medical students as they create a hostile environment with detrimental effect on student wellbeing and educational experience. Findings suggest that though prevalent, reporting of these experiences is rare and perceived as ineffective. Objectives: This scoping review aims to map the trends, types, and nature of discrimination, harassment, bullying, stereotyping, intimidation, and racism reports in undergraduate medical education in the UK since 2010 and to determine areas of focus for undertaking full systematic reviews in the future. Method: A search was conducted using the MEDLINE, AHMED, CINHL, and EMBASE electronic databases from 2010 up to February 2022 in English. Only primary research papers (e.g., cohort studies, cross-sectional studies, and case series) that report the words/phrases discrimination (including gender and racial), harassment (including verbal, sexual, academic, and physical), bullying, stereotype, intimidation, and racism within medical education in the UK after 2010, following the Equity Act 2010, were eligible for inclusion. Results: Five relevant articles relating to discrimination, harassment, bullying, stereotyping, intimidation, and racism in medical schools in the UK were included. Three themes were identified across these studies. Conclusions: The data suggest that there is a high prevalence rate of discrimination, harassment, and stereotyping being experienced by ethnic minority undergraduate medical students in the UK. There is underreporting due to perceived and structural barriers. The identified studies suggest that less progress has been made in these areas.
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