Description
Book SynopsisGenealogy 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 ar
Trade ReviewAn 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. * Marta Tienda, Science *
Table of ContentsList of Figures ; Preface ; The Genealogical Imagination ; Ancestry and Descent ; Co-Descent ; Nature and Culture ; The Politics of Descent ; The Genealogy of the Future ; The Future of Genealogy ; Bibliography
