Fabric of Common Descent

Neolithic Britain, 2018

For traditional societies, by which we mean those peoples whose worlds are permeated by kin relations and obligations, and among whom past societies such as those of Neolithic Britain are mostly to be counted, the most precious inheritance is knowledge. Inherited knowledge is of many kinds, the most overt of which is instrumental knowledge—how to make a rope from fibre, where to look for and how to utilize medicinal plants, and so on. Alongside this, however, is a plurality of less obvious but equally fundamental knowledges that include kinds of behavioural knowledge (in the sense of customs and prohibitions, for example), forms of discursive awareness (how to negotiate the social world; what to recall and recount as story and history), and understandings of esoteric beliefs and their concomitant ‘necessary’ actions. Collective cultural and customary knowledge, then, is a resource that makes possible the sustaining and renewal of human social relationships through time. There is a m...

Journal de la société des américanistes, 2008

Foresight, 2014

Purpose – This paper aims to make the case for continued opportunity for high levels of human well-being under descent conditions characterised by declining economic throughput and socio-political complexity. Design/methodology/approach – Relationships between assumptions about human well-being formed within a modern industrial context, the guiding narratives attending these, and the broader cultural influence of ideas from the evolutionary sciences are examined. Alternative ways of making sense of these relationships are explored. The experiences of societies guided by cultural narratives based on different premises to those most influential in industrial societies are reviewed for their implications for human well-being under descent conditions. Findings – Human experiences of well-being are principally a function of the sources of meaning and associated narratives by which members of a culture make sense of their situation, as these determine the nature of the material and energe...

History of the Human Sciences, 2024

The preferred tool for conceptualizing, determining, and claiming relations of kinship, ancestry, and descent among humans are diagrams. For this reason, and at the same time to avoid a reduction to biology as transported by terms such as kinship, ancestry, and descent, we introduce the expression diagrammatics of relatedness. We seek to understand the enormous influence that especially tree diagrams have had as a way to express and engage with human relatedness, but hold that this success can only be adequately understood by attending to what in fact are broader diagrammatic practices. These practices bring to light that diagrams of relatedness do not simply make visible

Historical Studies on Central Europe

The ruling dynasties quite literally surrounded themselves with their ancestors (real ones, as well as imaginary ones), creating galleries of their predecessors or artifacts, such as scrolls with genealogical diagrams. A lineage represented in such a manner could then be displayed not only for the royal family but also for their courtiers and foreign diplomats, reminding everyone of the position of the depicted dynasty in contemporary political struggles and in the history of Christianity. This argument is underlined by the fact that within the portrayal of the family, the prophecies of the end of the world and the approach of the Kingdom of Heaven were included as well. The paper examines how the members of two great European dynasties (Luxembourg and Plantagenet) used pedigrees, which real members they emphasized in them, and which imaginary characters they incorporated into their lineage. Two presented case studies consist of an ancestral gallery of Luxembourg from Karlštejn Cast...

Zeitschrift für Technikfolgenabschätzung in Theorie und Praxis 30, 2, 2021

Genetic ancestry is seen as an alternative to the problematic concept of race and is positioned against abusive racist and nationalist perspectives. The concept of genetic ancestry is nevertheless not free of racial categorisation. Increasingly, it is becoming an integral part of identity politics. Genetic ancestry is promoted as a way to attribute identity and visibility to marginalised groups but is also rejected as a form of biocolonialism. In xenophobic and racist discourses of right-wing groups, the concept has found a fertile ground. The field of genetics is partly to blame for this, since it opens the door to problematic identity discourses through a careless use of archaeological, ethnic and genetic categories.

The American Journal of Human Genetics, 2004

Traditional societies are often organized into descent groups called "lineages," "clans," and "tribes." Each of these descent groups claims to have a common ancestor, and this ancestry distinguishes the group's members from the rest of the population. To test the hypothesis of common ancestry within these groups, we compared ethnological and genetic data from five Central Asian populations. We show that, although people from the same lineage and clan share generally a recent common ancestor, no such common ancestry is observed at the tribal level. Thus, a tribe might be a conglomerate of clans who subsequently invented a mythical ancestor to strengthen group unity.

2021

Mestizo Genomics, 2014