Genealogy In Anthropology Research Paper

Anthropologists distinguished pedigree, as a vernacular account of ancestrally defined relationships, from genealogy as a systematic or scientific account of those relationships. The distinction rests upon the genealogical method, whereby the blood and marriage connections recognized by the people being studied could be systematically recorded. The genealogical framework obtained in this way provided the basis for the comparative study of terminological systems of address and reference, which were also sometimes called systems of relationship; for tracing marriage regulations (prescriptions and proscriptions); and for discerning the rules of descent and inheritance. Genealogies, or parts of them, collected in this way were (and are) often presented in graphic form to illustrate how persons or groups are related to one another. Genealogical information was the bedrock of comparative studies of kinship, descent, and marriage that were characteristic of structural-functionalist analyses of social organization during the first half of the twentieth century. Genealogy was also the basis for terminological and semantic studies of kinship, and used by alliance theorists. The use of genealogy to map the kinship system was even more pervasive, however, becoming a routine part of anthropological practice during the second half of the twentieth century.

2. The Intellectual Context Of Genealogy In Anthropology

The genealogical method, developed by W. H. R. Rivers during the Torres Strait Expedition of 1898, was formalized in an article published in 1910 and became an important entry in the 1912 Notes and Queries in Anthropology and subsequent editions. The nineteenth century intellectual context of this addition to the anthropological instrumentarium lay in a rich combination of biblical, philological, heraldic, and evolutionary ideas. Darwinian theories concerning the origin of species and the descent of man had recourse both to linguistic and graphic genealogical imagery. The familiarity of biblical and historical family trees made genealogy a perfect vehicle for translating new ideas about the relationships between all forms of life, and the slow transformation (or evolution) of these forms through the immense abysses of geological time that opened up through the discovery of prehistoric sites and remains during the nineteenth century. Graphic phylogenies, such as those drawn by Haeckel (1874), expressed these evolutionary connections in the form of a tree.

Genealogies are central to the creation story in Genesis, which was a source of inspiration for late eighteenth and early nineteenth century philologists and ethnologists who sought to explain the relationship between the languages (and hence peoples) of the world in genealogical terms. Still earlier, culturally diverse objects brought from the new world to Europe from the sixteenth century onward, were accommodated by cabinets of curiosity within the category pagan, which already housed the classical world and barbarian Europe. Discussions about the origins of Incas and Aztecs, for example, revolved around their identity with lost tribes of Israel, and their being remotely descended from Noah (Shelton 1994).

Philological, biblical and Darwinian genealogical ideas influenced L. H. Morgan, author of Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871), in his kinship and beaver research among the Objibwa around Marquette, which took place against a background of wilderness receding from American farms (Feeley-Harnik 1999). This was rather different from Darwin’s invocation of genealogical imagery in his theory of evolution, which was filtered through the ideas of British animal breeders for whom keeping records was an important means of exercising control over procreation. The fact that the British aristocracy could trace their genealogies, just as they could trace the pedigrees of their favorite animals, such as thoroughbred horses, helped to distinguish them, in terms of descent and breeding, from middle and working-class Britons.

Rivers borrowed and translated the English aristocratic notion of pedigree into the genealogical method. It became a means of organizing fieldwork and written ethnography, despite being later overshadowed by the long-term fieldwork practices of participant observation. The incorporation of pedigree into anthropological methodology for assimilating knowledge about others is a fascinating maneuver by a middleclass intellectual in the context of turn of the twentieth century Cambridge, which was still very much dominated by a few great families. Borrowing pedigree was simultaneously an assertion about being above this sort of hereditary class system, and yet harnessing the power of its connotations in the form of intellectual capital in the comparative study of mankind.

Genealogical thinking informed arrangements of material culture before the advent of public ethnographic museums, and continued to be influential after these collections had been systematized according to geographical provenance, or as evolutionary typologies. Museum collections played a significant role in the rise of disciplinary knowledge, including anthropology, during the nineteenth century. Rivers’ early twentieth century reformulation of the genealogical method scaled down the vast abysses of nineteenth century ethnological time to the more modest temporal requirements of the emerging ethnographic present. In this respect, he made a major contribution to modern ethnographic field techniques by developing an explicitly scientific method for collecting immaterial cultural data, and imbuing it with a distinctive material form.

3. The Genealogical Method Of Social Anthropological Inquiry

Rivers’ genealogical method moved from the concrete level of personal names to the abstract system of relationships. That abstract system was accessed through the terminological categories used by Ego to address and to refer to the persons named as relatives. Rivers explains the steps by which he collected a pedigree (he used the terms genealogy and pedigree interchangeably). First the descendants of the informant’s ‘real’ (as opposed to classificatory) parents were listed, including previous or other marriages, and children listed in order of age, together with their marriages and offspring. The mother and father’s respective pedigrees would be collected according to the same procedure. Rivers claimed that the most extensive pedigrees could be collected using only five terms of relationship: ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘child’, ‘husband’, and ‘wife.’

The fact that Rivers treated some categories— ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘cousin’, ‘uncle’, and ‘aunt’—as problematic, gave the entire method a lineal bias. Later commentators have argued that lineal relation- ships were seen as less ambiguous than either collateral or affinal ones (Barnard and Good 1984). Information concerning social condition, residence, totemic, and other group affiliation, along with other relevant facts, were to be recorded for each person on the pedigree as far as possible. An extraordinarily wide range of topics could be studied by collecting information in this way. Kinship was about the social recognition of certain genealogical relationships; and genealogy was assumed to be about biology.

Despite Malinowski’s (1930) critique of the over-abstraction of kinship studies and his emphasis on the importance of long-term participant observation, the genealogical method proved to have remarkable staying power as a technique for structuring this kind of fieldwork.

4. From Corporate Descent Groups To Critique

One of the main uses of genealogies for Rivers and for subsequent (especially, but by no means exclusively, British) anthropologists lay in studying social organisation. This concern was sometimes connected with colonial administration, seeking to identify and use indigenous social structure for governmental purposes. Interest in descent, in studying ancestral connections reckoned through the female (matrilineal), or male (patrilineal), or both (bilateral) lines, gradually emerged as a dominant theoretical concern by the 1940s. The juridico-political importance of unilineal descent, especially in the African societies to which anthropologists turned their attention after an earlier interest in the Pacific, led Fortes to distinguish between domestic (internal) and political (external) social domains.

Fortes’ (1945) ‘Paradigm of the Lineage System’ diagram is a particularly striking use of a genealogicalstyle diagram to represent the all-male lineage structure. Despite Leach’s (1961) critique of the paradigm, and his insistence on the ideological rather than empirical nature of corporate lineage groups, he himself made extensive use of genealogical evidence to back up his argument. The continuing recourse to genealogy, despite the eclipse of kinship from center stage after the 1960s, helped to maintain a notion of biology as something separate (like nature) from society, until almost the end of the twentieth century. It is therefore remarkable that Barnes (1967) refers to the collection of genealogies as part of the ethnographer’s stock-in-trade, and genealogical diagrams as part of the ‘minimum obligation’ for making fieldwork intelligible. He did, however, recommend recording the way informant’s talked about their kin before embarking on formal questioning.

The ethnologists of France, who set out to study kinship at home in the same way that their colleagues did abroad, developed the technique of talking family, as a complement to genealogy, much more explicitly than their Anglo-Saxonic counterparts. Firth and his colleagues’ 1960s study of middle-class kinship in north London collected and made use of genealogies only to discover that these were often part of oral knowledge—as in peasant societies. Schneider, too, constituted genealogies in his studies of American kinship (Schneider 1968), although he engaged in more open-ended questioning.

Bourdieu called for a social history of the genealogical tool, with particular attention to the functions that have produced and reproduced the need for such an instrument (Bourdieu 1977). Schneider (1984) was to criticize ‘the doctrine of the genealogical unity of mankind’, arguing that all comparative studies of kinship are rooted in our own beliefs about biology, and the enormous value attributed to human sexual reproduction in (what he variously called) Western European American cultures. Schneider’s critique proved to be the catalyst for a number of new directions taken in the study of kinship. Strathern developed the argument that nature no longer serves to ground the understanding of society, which means that interventions such as the new reproductive technologies are an integral part of both English kinship and wider (political) society. Bouquet (1993) analyzed the cultural specificity of the genealogical method, arguing that it was infused by English notions of pedigree so specific that it bears little resemblance to the Portuguese notions of relatedness, which were used to problematize English middle-class kinship. Although the genealogical diagram, with its more ramifying cultural-historical roots, simplified and facilitated the divulgation of genealogy in anthropology, it did not cancel the complexities and contradictions of genealogical ideas even within Europe (Bouquet 1996). Franklin (1997) has elucidated the effects of new reproductive technologies on the meaning of genealogy, understood as life’s progression and as a way of making knowledge, among prospective parents in northern England. She coined the notion of postmodern genealogy to capture the way technology has come to stand in for and improve upon the natural process of procreation, despite all its attendant uncertainties.

5. The Future Of Genealogy

Critical reappraisal of the assumptions implicit to genealogy in anthropology is likely to play a significant role in future studies of kinship. Genealogical thinking is certainly not universal, which renders problematic the anthropological attempt to use genealogy as a standard. Yet anthropologists have already been struck by the growth of popular genealogy in different parts of the world, and through the Internet (Segalen and Michelat 1991), both of which are subjects deserving further empirical study. Indigenous peoples’ uses of historically collected genealogies in establishing land claims, constitute another highly significant development: for example, among Torres Strait and Australian Aboriginal communities. The impact of new technologies on genealogy, and new uses to which genealogies collected in the past by anthropologists may be put in the future, are but two examples suggesting that despite recent critical work, genealogy has by no means had its day in anthropology.

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