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Books > History > History of specific subjects > Genealogy, heraldry, names and honours
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Ancestors and Relatives - Genealogy, Identity, and Community (Paperback)
Loot Price: R886
Discovery Miles 8 860
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Ancestors and Relatives - Genealogy, Identity, and Community (Paperback)
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Genealogy has long been one of humanity's greatest obsessions. But
with the rise of genetics, and increasing media attention to it
through programs like Who Do You Think You Are? and Faces of
America, we are now told that genetic markers can definitively tell
us who we are and where we came from. The problem, writes Eviatar
Zerubavel, is that biology does not provide us with the full
picture. After all, he asks, why do we consider Barack Obama black
even though his mother was white? Why did the Nazis believe that
unions of Germans and Jews would produce Jews rather than Germans?
In this provocative book, he offers a fresh understanding of
relatedness, showing that its social logic sometimes overrides the
biological reality it supposedly reflects. In fact, rather than
just biological facts, social traditions of remembering and
classifying shape the way we trace our ancestors, identify our
relatives, and delineate families, ethnic groups, nations, and
species. Furthermore, genealogies are more than mere records of
history. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Zerubavel introduces
such concepts as braiding, clipping, pasting, lumping, splitting,
stretching, and pruning to shed light on how we manipulate
genealogies to accommodate personal and collective agendas of
inclusion and exclusion. Rather than simply find out who our
ancestors were and identify our relatives, we actually construct
the genealogical narratives that make them our ancestors and
relatives. An eye-opening re-examination of our very notion of
relatedness, Ancestors and Relatives offers a new way of
understanding family, ethnicity, nationhood, race, and humanity.
"An erudite treatise about how culture drives human cognition about
near and remote relatives, Ancestors and Relatives offers lay and
academic audiences alike a great read."-Science "The author
examines how genealogical structures have been used to organize not
only kinship, but also other domains ranging from Supreme Court
justices to religions. Genealogy is 'first and foremost a way of
thinking' and not simply a way to represent biological
ancestor-descendant relations."-CHOICE "In Ancestors and Relatives:
Genealogy, Identity, and Community, Eviatar Zerubavel, a
sociologist at Rutgers, pulls back the curtain on the genealogical
obsession. Genealogies, he argues, aren't the straightforward,
objective accounts of our ancestries we often presume them to be.
Instead, they're heavily curated social constructions, and are as
much about our values as they are about the facts of who gave birth
to whom."-The Boston Globe "Making the world seem strange is the
first step to understanding it anew. Eviatar Zerubavel is a genius
at doing this. Here he takes on kinship and shows us the profound,
politically fraught, sometimes frightening, and often funny ways in
which we take the biological fact that life creates life and
fashion genealogy from it. This is a brilliant, witty, effortlessly
well-informed book that anyone with ancestors or anyone who worries
about ethnicity, race, and nationalism will read with pleasure and
surprise."-Thomas Laqueur, University of California, Berkeley
"While ancestors and relatives are genetically given, the genetics
give us no clue how we should measure their relative importance to
us. In this lively and well-written book, Eviatar Zerubavel avoids
the aridity of technical kinship analysis and uses a personal
perspective to show how humans fabricate, in the literal sense,
their relatives, by a creative process of elimination and selection
in the generation of rules. It is easily the most engaging
introduction to kinship for the general reader that I have read,
and a contribution in its own right to a wider understanding of our
place in evolution."-Robin Fox, author of Kinship and Marriage and
The Tribal Imagination "Kinship is a perennial staple-necessary but
ordinarily dry as dust-of anthropology, sociology, and demography.
In Ancestors and Relatives, Eviatar Zerubavel makes the topic new,
bringing to it an encyclopedic knowledge and a powerful
sociological imagination that brings to life the deeply social and
cultural ways in which we talk about, imagine, and understand our
ancestors and relations. Never has kinship been more interesting
and never has it been as much fun."-Paul DiMaggio, Princeton
University
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