Ancestors and Relatives:Genealogy, Identity, and Community

by Eviatar Zerubavel

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

The problem, writes Eviatar Zerubavel, is that biology does not provide us with the full picture. After all, he asks, why do we consider Barack Obama black even though his mother was white? Why did the Nazis believe that unions of Germans and Jews would produce Jews rather than Germans? In this provocative book, he offers a fresh understanding of relatedness, showing that its social logic sometimes overrides the biological reality it supposedly reflects. In fact, rather than just biological facts, social traditions of remembering and classifying shape the way we trace our ancestors, identify our relatives, and delineate families, ethnic groups, nations, and species.

Furthermore, genealogies are more than mere records of history. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Zerubavel introduces such concepts as braiding, clipping, pasting, lumping, splitting, stretching, and pruning to shed light on how we manipulate genealogies to accommodate personal and collective agendas of inclusion and exclusion. Rather than simply find out who our ancestors were and identify our relatives, we actually construct the genealogical narratives that make them our ancestors and relatives.

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

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Biology

236 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 12, 2011

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I stumbled across this book whilst doing some browsing on the web, and the summary got my interest. There are two main things to be aware of though. Firstly it’s very short. My Kindle edition suggested 237 pages, but over a hundred of these were taken up with references, meaning the actual text was distinctly on the thin side. Secondly, much of the ground covered was very basic – very, very basic. If I tell you that early on the author explains the concepts of familial ancestry and descent with a diagram showing that a child is the descendent of its parents whilst a parent is the ancestor of their child, then you get my drift. Later on he tells us that siblings are considered closer relatives than second cousins because the former need only go back one generation to their common ancestry rather than three in the case of second cousins. I can’t say as I found any of this exactly revelatory. At one point I began to wonder whether I had mistakenly purchased a textbook aimed at high school students.

The book does get better in the last fifty pages or so. The author poses some interesting questions about the tendency of society to assign more importance to some parts of a person’s ancestry than others, (and indeed, the tendency of people to do this themselves). Very often society seems to have great difficulty with the idea of people being of mixed heritage, and tries to assign people to one group or another. The last chapter looks at the future of genealogy in a world of rapid social and technological change, for example the growth of combined families introducing new relationships; or future fertilisation techniques raising the prospect of siblings being born centuries apart, or people having the DNA of more than two biological parents (or of just one).

Overall though, there wasn’t enough in this for me to recommend it to others.

[Roxann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not at all what I expected and I think the impression that it informs one about the hobby of genealogy is misleading. There is information about sociology and anthropology and evolution--all somehow related to how we tell the story of historical connections--society and religions, etc--not very much about personal reflections. So I suppose I misunderstood the point of the book. And it's short. You can read it in about two hours.

[Liam Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

The bridge between the analytical perspectives of race and the experiential perspectives of race seemed a little underplayed in the discussion, but otherwise a Fine read.
Really interesting and significant comments regarding the extreme limitations of genetic ancestry testing.

The first half of the book could probably have been covered in a quarter of the number of pages used here.

A slightly begrudging 3.5

[Mike Niebrzydowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

It redeemed itself a little in the last two or three chapters. Other than that, the first few pages were the most interesting. I was initially expecting much more of a sociological perspective, but he seemed to talk mostly about taxonomy and how we are cousins to frogs if we go back far enough. I thought for most of the book he just wanted to use a bunch of big words and scientific terms without saying much. The good parts:
1. I've never thought about applying "genealogy" to other things, even inanimate objects or abstract ideas.
2. The future of how we determine "relationship" is becoming more and more interesting with surrogates, multiple marriages, etc.
3. He talks about "race" and how we define that - and how with intermarriage, we are - in a sense - creating a new "race" which I guess makes sense...interesting!
Also, it's really only half the length, because there's like 90 pages of notes, bibliography, and index!

[Megan Smolenyak · Rating 2 out of 5]

My impression after reading this book is that the author had neglected to speak to any genealogists, a bit of a shortcoming given the topic.

[Justine · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look into what does Genealogy really means.