Prof. Dr. Simon Teuscher, University of Zurich
Project Leader
Tel: +41 (0) 44 634 38 55
simon.teuscherremove-this.@remove-this.hist.uzh.ch

This project investigates conceptualizations of kinship in legal and administrative culture from the Late Middle Ages through the Early Modern period. Project leader Simon Teuscher's current book project examines a number of treatises on kinship by Catholic theologians and lawyers between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries, including those belonging to the genre of explanations of the arbores consanguinitatis and affinitatis. Two doctoral dissertation projects examine how diagrams were used in the legal definition and administrative implementation of social categorizations. They study a phase when these kinship diagrams still stood in the service of prescriptions in religion and law rather than of descriptions of nature. Conceptions of kinship, rather than being a legacy of older stages of society, were actively devised and developed in this period. By following such efforts, we can establish new connections among several key developments of an emergent biopolitics such as incest prevention, the social preclusion of access to the nobilities, and attempts at systematizing status groups and entire populations, also in the new European colonies. In these processes, kinship diagrams were mostly employed to keep the social body free from pollution and illicit mixtures.

Relevant publications by Simon Teuscher

"Bilatéralité vs Conceptions Androcentriques de La Parenté En Europe: Quelques Réflexions à Partir Des Arbores Consanguinitatis de La Fin Du Moyen Âge." Genre & Histoire 21 (Spring 2018).

"Problems of Scale and Mediation in Studies of Kinship in the Past." In Reframing the History of Family and Kinship: From the Alps towards Europe, edited by Albera Dionigi, Luigi Lorenzetti, and Jon Mathieu, 33-46. Bern: Peter Lang, 2016.

Teuscher, Simon, and Margareth Lanzinger. "Editorial. Trennende Verwandtschaft." Historische Anthropologie 22, no. 1 (2014): 1-3.

"Flesh and Blood in the Treatises on the Arbor Consanguinitatis (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries)." In Blood and Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present, edited by Christopher Johnson, Bernhard Jussen, David Warren Sabean, and Simon Teuscher, 83-104. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013.

Teuscher, Simon, and David Warren Sabean. "Introduction." In Blood and Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present, edited by Christopher Johnson, Bernhard Jussen, David Warren Sabean, and Simon Teuscher, 1-17. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013.

Stéphanie Prieto, MA
Doctoral candidate
Tel.: +41 44 634 28 50
stephanie.prietoremove-this.@remove-this.hist.uzh.ch

This project examines Reformed theologians' attempts to rid themselves of the old Catholic tradition of using diagrams to define the range of kin that fell under incest prohibitions. Since the Early Middle Ages, Catholic theologians and specialists of canon law had developed diagrams to define the range of kin that fell under incest prohibitions and used these diagrams to quantify and measure kinship in degrees. For many of the Reformed theologians in England, France, Germany, and Switzerland, the call to return to the sole authority of the scripture (sola scriptura) also implied the rejection of kinship diagrams and the system of quantification developed by the servants of the 'popish church'. While they agreed that the list of prohibited relations in the Old Testament (Leviticus 18) was incomplete, they rejected the use of these diagrams to complete it.

Instead, they discussed alternative methods, experimented with long lists, some of which numbered relationships without attributing degrees to them, and developed complicated textual justifications. The debates about the matter were fervent but ultimately a mere episode of history: by the end of the 16th century, most Protestant scholars had returned to some form of diagrams and quantification -- although not necessarily the ones inherited from the Catholic tradition.

Nevertheless, the case of the Protestant rejection of kinship diagrams is of major interest for the study of historical diagrammatics. The attempt to entirely replace diagrams by texts reveals the extreme interdependence of diagrams and texts. Furthermore, it offers insight into two questions: to what extent did Western conceptualizations of kinship depend on diagrams and quantification, and to what degree were Protestant attempts at (re-)conceptualizing kinship with stronger emphasis on descent contingent on received tools and manners of conceptualizing kinship?

Julian Miguez, MA
Doctoral candidate
Tel.: +41 44 634 28 50
julian.miguez@uzh.ch

The project examines uses of the canon law diagrams that had particularly far-reaching, if not terrible political, consequences when used in legal and administrative procedures to determine the purity of descent. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, these procedures spread rapidly and appeared in such different contexts that they seem to be unrelated. Examples include proofs of noble descent (Ger. Ahnenproben) that became a prerequisite for being admitted to collegiate chapters and tournament societies in Germany in particular and tests of "purity of blood," of pure Christian descent (i.e. "untainted" by Jewish or Muslim ancestors). The latter were required to gain access to universities and many urban offices on the Iberian Peninsula. A little later and in close connection, there emerged procedures to assign individuals to racial and mestizo groups in the Spanish Americas and probably also to castes that were of different legal status in East Indian colonies. These innovations have received some attention as new systematizations of social exclusion within their particular contexts, but both the exact testing procedures as such and their interrelations across continents and domains remain as yet unexamined. The project will analyze to what extent these procedures were derived from the diagrams and the methods of measuring degrees of kinship that Catholic theologians had used since the High Middle Ages to define and implement incest prohibitions. They all include examinations of the status of ancestors, of four grandparents, eight great grandparents, or sixteen, thirty-two, or even more ancestors. The logic of these procedures had to prevail, for example, against notions of relatedness that gave precedence to paternal descent in Europe, not to speak of the great range of different native conceptualizations of kinship in the Americas and on the Indian subcontinent. How a particular use of diagrams was adapted to new purposes is an interesting question in the context of a history of diagrams of relatedness, and the engagement with that question will also reveal commonalities between processes as varied as the social closing off of access to Europe's nobilities and racial stigmatization in its colonies.

Prof. Dr. Staffan Müller-Wille, University of Cambridge
Project Leader
sewm3remove-this.@remove-this.cam.ac.uk

Drawing on project leader Staffan Müller-Wille's expertise in the cultural histories of heredity and natural history, the research group based in Lübeck focuses on the longue-durée history of diagrammatic tools employed in the life sciences to depict, analyze, and integrate knowledge about relations of similarity, affinity, and descent among organisms. If genealogy experienced a naturalization of kinship in early modern and modern Europe, the life sciences experienced a genealogization in turn, employing a repertoire of diagrams derived from the domain of human genealogy and history to understand the reproduction and evolution of organic forms. This research group assumes, first, that diagrammatic articulations of relatedness in the life sciences opened  a field of alternative, and often conflicting, ways of addressing biological diversity. A second assumption is that the concepts used in the life sciences to categorize relatedness can only be adequately understood by addressing diagrams as information tools whose primary function is the storage, organization, and mobilization of knowledge.

Relevant publications by Staffan Müller-Wille

"Joining Data Across Cultures: Kinship Analysis and Statistics in Late Nineteenth-Century Anthropology." In Varieties of Data Journeys: Data Processing and Movements Within and Across Practices, edited by Sabina Leonelli and Niccolò Tempini. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, in press.

"Making and Unmaking Populations." Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 48, no. 5 (November 2018): 604-15.

"Names and Numbers: 'Data' in Classical Natural History, 1758-1859." Osiris 32 (2017): 109-28.

"Verfahrensweisen der Naturgeschichte nach Linné." In Akteure, Tiere, Dinge. Verfahrensweisen der Naturgeschichte in der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Silke Fröschler and Anne Mariss, 109-24. Cologne: Böhlau, 2017.

Gregor Mendel (2016). Experiments on Plant Hybrids (1866). Translation and commentary by Staffan Müller-Wille and Kersten Hall. British Society for the History of Science Translation Series. URL=http://www.bshs.org.uk/bshs-translations/mendel.

"Brüche in der Stufenleiter der Natur. Diversität in der Naturgeschichte 1758-1859." In Diversität. Geschichte und Aktualität eines Konzepts, edited by André L. Blum, Nina Zschocke, Vincent Barras, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, 41-59. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2016.

Müller-Wille, Staffan, and Christina Brandt, eds. Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850-1930. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016.

Müller-Wille, Staffan, and Christina Brandt, eds. "Revisiting the Origin of Genetics." In Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850-1930, 367-94. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016.

"Hérédité, race et eugénisme dans le long xixe siècle." In Histoire des sciences et des savoirs. Modernité et Globalisation, edited by Kapil Raj and Otto Sibum, 391-409. Paris: Seuil, 2015.

"Linnaeus and the Four Corners of the World." In The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900, edited by Kimberly Anne Coles, Ralph Bauer, Carla L. Peterson, and Zita Nunes, 191-209. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Charmantier, Isabelle, and Staffan Müller-Wille. "Carl Linnaeus's Botanical Paper Slips (1767-1773)." Intellectual History Review 24 (2014): 215-38.

Charmantier, Isabelle, and Staffan Müller-Wille. "Worlds of Paper: An Introduction." Early Science and Medicine 19, no. 5 (2014): 379-97.

"Epigenese und Präformation: Anmerkungen zu einem Begriffspaar." In Kulturen der Epigenetik: Vererbt, codiert, übertragen, edited by Vanessa Lux and Jörg Thomas Richter, 237-44. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014.

"Race and History: Comments from an Epistemological Point of View." Science, Technology and Human Values 39 (2014): 597-606.

"Reproducing Difference: Race and Heredity from a Longue Durée Perspective." In Race, Gender and Reproduction: Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences in Context, edited by Susanne Lettow, 217-35. New York: SUNY Press, 2014.

"Systems and How Linnaeus Looked at Them in Retrospect." Annals of Sciences 70 (2013): 305-17.

Andrea Ceccon
andrea.cecconremove-this.@remove-this.gmail.com

This project deals with a period that historians of biology have identified as a crisis and the eclipse of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection (e.g. Bowler 1983; Gayon 1998). At that time, an increasing number of biologists adopted theories of heredity that did not conceive of organismic variation as continuous, but as saltational and combinatorial. It is against this theoretical background that the rapid rise of Mendelian genetics at the beginning of the twentieth century took place, which was notably accompanied by a sustained critique of common conceptions of relatedness in terms of direct causal connections between ancestors and descendants. Instead, important contributors to the debate about heredity around 1900, such as F. Galton, H. de Vries, and W. Johannsen, argued that inheritance worked through the transmission and permutation of invisible dispositions, or later 'genes', in the germ line. "Ancestry by itself is irrelevant; dispositions are decisive", as Johannsen put it forcefully to his students in lectures held in 1905, with intended anti-aristocratic undertones (Müller-Wille 2007, 800).

As intuitive as the combinatorial logic of Mendelians appears to anyone familiar with the foundations of genetics today, it took considerable time and effort to make it prevail over more traditional conceptions of heredity and kinship, since it built on a unique and highly counterintuitive integration of mathematical and biological skills - in essence, combinatorial analysis and artificial crossings. This subproject will look at how diagrams were integral to this process and how their canonization and popularization eventually enabled reconceptualizations of kinship in terms of probabilities (and "eugenic" risks) of sharing the same genetic disposition. For this, two sets of sources will be investigated. The first set comprises textbooks such as E. von Tschermak's 1901 edition of Mendel's papers, R. C. Punnett's Mendelism (1905), Johannsen's Elemente der exakten Erblichkeitslehre (1909), or W. E. Castle's Genetics and Eugenics (1916), which employed a wide variety of graphs and diagrams to teach the basics of Mendelian genetics. While one of the rediscoverers of Mendelian genetics, C. Correns, initially experimented with tree-like diagrams (Segregationsbäume) in order to visualize Mendel's laws (Rheinberger 2005), it was especially the binomial distribution illustrated in the so-called Punnet square that became central for genetic practices and understandings of relatedness (Edwards 2012). In particular, copies of textbooks, to be found in libraries in Copenhagen and Berlin and on Internet Archive, will provide evidence of the actual use of diagrams, e.g. in the form of readers' annotations. The second set of sources consists in the large collection of pedagogical slides and exhibition documents preserved at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden that allows insights into the popularization of Mendelian reasoning (Nikolow 2015).

References

Bowler, Peter (1983). The Eclipse of Darwinism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Edwards, Jeanette (2012). Ancestors, Class, and Contingency. Focaal. Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 62, 70-80.

Gayon, Jean (1998). Darwinism's Struggle for Survival: Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Müller-Wille, Staffan (2007). Hybrids, Pure Cultures, and Pure Lines: From Nineteenth-Century Biology to Twentieth-Century Genetics. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38, 796-806.

Nikolow, Sybilla (2015). "Wissenschaftliche Stillleben" des Körpers. In Sybilla Nikolow (ed.). "Erkenne Dich selbst!". Strategien der Sichtbarmachung des Körpers im 20. Jahrhundert. Cologne: Böhlau, 11-45.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg (2005). Eine Randnotiz zur Repräsentation von Generationen in Mendels Vererbungslehre. In: Sigrid Weigel et al. (eds.). Generation: Zur Genealogie des Konzepts - Konzepte von Genealogie. Munich: W. Fink, 261-266.

Amos Kuster, MA
Doctoral candidate
a.kusterremove-this.@remove-this.unibas.ch

Psychiatric institutions and their assiduously systematic collection of patient data played an essential role in the formation of nineteenth-century conceptions of inheritance. Empirical and statistical evidence pointing towards the heritability of psychic pathologies in families grew throughout the 19th century (Porter 2018). By 1900, recently rediscovered Mendelian rules seemed to provide a mechanism for the transmission of properties and even promised to allow for prognoses (Gausemeier 2008). But what did it mean to be pathologically related to fellow human beings? How would parent and child become companions in disease?

This project concerns the previously unexplored topic of pathological kinship. This gap is both historiographic and historical—historiographic in so far as among the vast research on concepts of heredity there are hardly any studies that treat “kinship” as an epistemological category within the sciences of heredity; historical in the sense that the psychiatric science of heredity did not critically reflect on “kinship” as a subject but assumed it as given in nature. Thus, building on the findings of new kinship studies, one can argue that “kinship” cannot be presupposed precisely where that concept is in use (Carsten 2004).

A case study from around 1925-1928, when Ernst Rüdin directed the psychiatric clinic in the city of Basel, will show that exactly in this presumed gap were an abundance of practices to negotiate and especially produce supposedly unproblematic “kinship.” The central source base consists of patient dossiers from the Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Friedmatt, which contain admission forms including a family history and detailed genealogical questionnaires.

Such sources raise questions of the reciprocity between knowledge of psychiatric inheritance and retrospective narration; of objectivization and the production of relationships and kinship structures; and especially of the informing of medical personnel through Mendelian and genealogical diagrams of families and heredity. This project will analyze the diagrammatic dimensions of psychiatric research programs on heredity, genealogical work, and popular conceptions of kinship. This historical-diagrammatic perspective will be supplemented by historical-anthropological questions concerning both the occurrence of such icons and their absence.

References

Carsten, Janet. 2004. After Kinship. New Departures in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gausemeier, Bernd. 2008. “Pedigree vs. Mendelism: Concepts of Heredity in Psychiatry before and after 1900.” In Conference : Heredity in the Century of the Gene (A Cultural History of Heredity IV), Preprint 343, 149–62. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Porter, Theodore M. 2018. Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fiona Vicent, MA
Doctoral candidate
fiona.vicentremove-this.@remove-this.unibas.ch

This project examines the crafting of family trees by bourgeois families in the city of Basel during the 19th and early 20th century, most of whom descended from the old patriciate and formed close-knit networks of economically and symbolically powerful kin groups (Sarasin 1997). These bourgeois kin groups were a crucial “mover of modernity,” a modernity that has long been falsely associated with the declining importance of kinship (Sabean & Teuscher 2007). Their tendency to adopt the genealogical enterprise of a bygone nobility, while purging it of its mythical contents (Timm 2016), constituted a historical bridgehead between ‘old’ noble and ‘new’ generalized forms of genealogy (Bouquet 1996).

As the project is interested in the genealogical practice of “family treeing” (Edwards 2018, title), it will focus on the actors, work, and technologies that went into the production of bourgeois family trees, as well as the uses of those diagrams, for example in the context of socialization. Additionally, it will also concentrate on the forms of relatedness such diagrams express, their design and arrangement of genealogical information in a diagrammatic form and the interplay of lines, texts and images.

At the basis of the study are two different sets of sources, both held by the public records office of Basel (Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt): 1) The large collection of representative family trees dating from the late 18th up to the middle of the 20th century, and 2) the documentation of their making as preserved in family estates. The latter consists of folders with transcriptions of parish registers, sketches, templates, tables of marriage alliances, newspaper articles, and diaries. These source materials lend themselves to the analysis of how the various familial documents relate to the family trees. This involves questions of whether these sources contradict each other (e.g. in regard to who is in- und who is excluded) or whether complimentary sets of information or successive steps of data gathering and presentation can be detected. In this context, the project will also specifically pay attention to the gender aspect by not only analyzing how women and men and the patrilineal order are diagrammatically (re-) presented, but also by asking how the production of diagrams negotiated the (possibly contentious) gendered structure of descent and transmission.

Regarding the rise of genealogical societies in the 19th century (Sabean 2010) and the contemporary discourses in genealogical handbooks on the designs and configurations of genealogical diagrams (Teicher 2014), the study should also explore how the designs and meanings of genealogical diagrams evolved over the course of the “long 19th century”: Can we, for example, trace a transformation of the genealogical diagrams from arboresque, “esthetic” designs to more abstract, “scientific” ones?

References

Bouquet, Mary (1996). Family Trees and their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (1), 43-46.

Edwards, Jeanette (2018). A Feel for Genealogy: “Family Treeing” in the North of England. Ethnos 83 (4), 724-743.

Sabean, David W. & Teuscher, Simon (2007). Kinship in Europe: A New Approach to Long-Term Development. In: David W. Sabean, Simon Teuscher & Jon Mathieu (eds.). Kinship in Europe. Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300–1900). New York: Berghahn, 1–32.

Sabean, David W. (2010). Constructing Lineages in Imperial Germany: eingetragene Familienvereine. In: Fenske Michela (ed.). Alltag als Politik – Politik im Alltag. Dimensionen des Politischen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Ein Lesebuch für Carola Lipp. Berlin: Lit, 143-157.

Sarasin, Philipp (1997). Stadt der Bürger. Bürgerliche Macht und städtische Gesellschaft. Basel 1846–1914, 2nd ed. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Teicher, Amir (2014) “Ahnenforschung macht frei“ On the Correlation between Research Strategies and Socio-Political Bias in German Genealogy, 1898-1935. Historische Anthropologie 22 (1), 67-90.

Timm, Elisabeth (2016). Reverenz und Referenz. Zwei Weisen der popularen Genealogie seit dem 19. Jahrhundert und ein neuer genealogischer Universalismus? In: Christine Fertig & Margareth Lanzinger (eds.). Beziehungen - Vernetzungen - Konflikte. Perspektiven Historischer Verwandtschaftsforschung. Cologne: Böhlau, 209–231.

Prof. Dr. Marianne Sommer
Project Leader
T +41 41 229 56 15
marianne.sommerremove-this.@remove-this.unilu.ch 

The research group based at the University of Lucerne focuses on diagrams of relatedness in subfields of biology, anthropology, and ethnology. The group builds on work by Marianne Sommer on the phylogenetic tree and the controversies around it in the human origins sciences – the practices, technologies, assumptions, and politics behind the construction as well as the cultural power of different renderings of human descent and kinship, such as the line, the tree, the map, and the network. The group aims at a longue-durée view of diagrams that have played important roles in the identification and the establishment of relations between peoples globally from the 19th century up until today.

Relevant publications by Marianne Sommer

History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Evolutionäre Anthropologie zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, 2015.

“(Net)Working a Stone into a Tool: How Technologies of Serial Visualization, Arrangement, and Narration Stabilized Eoliths as Archeological Objects.” In Historiographical Approaches to Past Archaeological Research, edited by Gisela Eberhardt and Fabian Link, 15–45. Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2015.

Marianne Sommer and Veronika Lipphardt (eds.). History of the Human Sciences 28, no. 5 (2015) - Special Issue 'Visibility Matters: Diagrammatic Renderings of Human Evolution and Diversity in Physical, Serological and Molecular Anthropology.'

Marianne Sommer and Veronika Lipphardt. “Visibility Matters: Diagrammatic Renderings of Human Evolution and Diversity in Physical, Serological and Molecular Anthropology.” History of the Human Sciences 28, no. 5 (2015): 3–16.

“Population-Genetic Trees, Maps and Narratives of the Great Human Diasporas.” History of the Human Sciences 28, no. 5 (2015): 108–45.

“Biology as a Technology of Social Justice in Interwar Britain: Arguments from Evolutionary History, Heredity, and Human Diversity.” Science, Technology and Human Values 39, no. 4 (2014): 560–85.

“History in the Gene: Negotiations between Molecular and Organismal Anthropology.” Journal for the History of Biology 41, no. 3 (2008): 473–528.

Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.

“Ancient Hunters and Their Modern Representatives: William Sollas’s (1849-1936) Anthropology from Disappointed Bridge to Trunkless Tree and the Instrumentalisation of Racial Conflict.” Journal of the History of Biology 38, no. 2 (2005): 327–65.

lic. phil. Lea Pfäffli
Postdoc
lea.pfaeffliremove-this.@remove-this.unilu.ch

While the importance of visual technologies like cartography, photography, and film for the history of ethnography has been widely and critically discussed, the great epistemological significance of diagrams has as yet to be recognized. The project addresses this vacuum through a reconstruction of the role of diagrammatic techniques in the formation, stabilization, and development of kinship studies. It investigates how diagrams — at the beginning mostly pedigrees — helped to render ethnographical knowledge comparable, amenable to accumulation and standardization.

At the center are two case studies. The first concerns the emergence of kinship studies in the mid-19th cen. In collaboration with the native American E. S. Parker, the lawyer H. L. Morgan developed a questionnaire on kinship terminology, which he sent to missionaries and colonial officials (who worked with indigenous experts on kinship, see Gardner 2016 on the Australian region). Morgan first translated the standardized data from the questionnaires into tabular overviews. As a second step, and using diagrammatic techniques of Canon law, he transferred the tables into different tree diagrams, each standing for a particular system of kinship. Influenced by the theories of evolution and matrilineality by the Swiss legal historian J. J. Bachofen, Morgan interpreted these kinship systems as successive stages in the development from barbarism to civilization. Morgan’s global project resulted in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family and Ancient Society, with which his extremely influential ideas circulated beyond ethnography and were for example incorporated by F. Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and S. Freud in Totem and Taboo.

The second case study is the British Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits (1898–99). As a member of this expedition, anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers investigated the pedigrees of islanders, originally to examine the heredity of eye diseases. In the course of his work, however, family-ethnological questions became Rivers’s main interest. It is documented that indigenous experts used branches and sticks to communicate genealogical knowledge to the anthropologist and that they drew pedigrees in his field book. Rivers eventually contributed significantly to the standardization of diagrams as a vital epistemological tool in kinship studies and as a warrant of ‘objectivity’. His method was crucial for the formation of the Cambridge Anthropological School, as is documented, for example, in the textbook Notes and Queries on Anthropology. Thus, in both of these fundamental cases, pedigrees became the central tool of data formation during fieldwork, and pedigrees as specific two-dimensional, schematic arrangements of lines and signs facilitated the communication of knowledge within different fields of thought.

References

Gardner, Helen (2016). The Genealogy of the Genealogical Method: Discoveries, Disseminations and the Historiography of British Anthropology. Oceania 86 (3), 294–319.

Ruth Amstutz, MA
Doctoral candidate
ruth.amstutzremove-this.@remove-this.unilu.ch

The project opens a window on the present by engaging with two fields in which recent developments have been shaped by diagrammatic conceptualizations of “race”—human population genetics and critical race theory. That knowledge from human population genetics, especially since the revolution in DNA and computer technologies transformed the field in the 1980s, enters public debates about the ‘genetics of race’ is currently exemplified by the controversies surrounding the geneticist D. Reich’s claim that scientists understate the genetic differences between populations due to issues of political correctness (Reich 2018). While there is a growing corpus of literature on the history and social impact of human population genetics (e.g. Reardon 2004; Abu El-Haj 2012; Nash 2015), the role of this science’s abundance of diagrams that convey individual and group relatedness on the basis of genetic data begs further investigation (Sommer & Lipphardt 2015; Sommer 2016, 249–384). Also in the 1980s, critical theory introduced the diagrammatic conception of “intersection” (Crenshaw 1989, 82–83). Intersectionality stands for complex interlinkages and interdependencies of power structures with regard to “race,” class, and gender, among other factors of discrimination. Intersectional research and arguments have gained momentum in different academic fields as well as in public discourse and activism (Meyer 2017). The project brings this explicitly diagrammatic conceptualization of “race” into communication with the diagrammatic thinking and imaging of “race” in human population genetics.

Two points are of particular interest: First, the development of human population genetics as well as of intersectionality is marked by a tension between their own discourses and diagrams. Contrary to the anti-racist, humanist discourse of population genetics, the tree has been the main icon to visualize the phylogenetic relationship between human groups, although the branches of human population genetic trees might be read as conveying separately evolving, isolated races (Sommer 2015, 135). Intersectional theory, on its part, has contested that social categories work additively, but the diagrammatic concept of intersection suggests that discrete and independently developing axes of discrimination cross in an individual. Secondly, in both fields, alternatives have been introduced. In race critical theory, we find conceptualizations of social structures in terms of the matrix (Butler 2004), the assemblage (De Landa 2006), interdependency (Walgenbach et al. 2007), or multi-dimensionality (Demirović & Maihofer 2013, 40; see also Hall 2000; Erel et al. 2007). In human population genetics, a variety of diagrammatic visualizations of human genetic relations were developed in tandem with technological innovations. Since 2000, for example, visualizations based on the computer programs Structure and Frappe have emphasized the genetic ethnic admixture of individuals and thus populations.

Through a diagrammatic approach, the project will bring concepts of, and debates on, “race” in race critical theory and genetics into a common analytical framework. How can the experimentation with diagrammatic conceptualizations of “identity” in race critical theory inform the reading of human population genetic diagrams? Can parallels be established in the histories of diagrams in both fields? And how do they relate to discourses on “race”?

References

Abu El-Haj, Nadia (2012). The Genealogical Science. The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Butler, Judith (2004). Undoing Gender. London: Routledge.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum (1), 139-167.

De Landa, Manuel (2006). A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum.

Demirović, Alex & Maihofer, Andrea (2013). Vielfachkrise und die Krise der Geschlechterverhältnisse. In: Hildegard M. Nickel & Andreas Heilmann (eds.). Krise, Kritik, Allianzen. Arbeits- und geschlechtersoziologische Perspektiven. Weinheim/Basel: Belz/Juventa, 30-48.

Erel, Umut et al. (2007). Intersektionalität oder Simultaneität? - Zur Verschränkung und Gleichzeitigkeit mehrfacher Machtverhältnisse - eine Einführung. In: Jutta Hartmann et al. (eds.). Heteronormativität. Empirische Studien zu Geschlecht, Sexualität und Macht. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 239-250.

Hall, Stuart (2000). Postmoderne und Artikulation. In: Nora Räthzel (ed.). Cultural Studies. Ein politisches Theorieprojekt. Ausgewählte Schriften 3. Hamburg: Argument, 52-77.

Meyer, Katrin (2017). Theorien der Intersektionalität zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius.

Nash, Catherine (2015). Genetic Geographies. The Trouble with Ancestry. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Reardon, Jenny (2004). Race to the Finish. Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Reich, David (2018). How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of "Race". The New York Times, March 23, 2018. www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html (accessed May 10, 2018).

Sommer, Marianne (2015). Population-Genetic Trees, Maps and Narratives of the Great Human Diasporas. History of the Human Sciences 28 (5), 108-145.

Sommer, Marianne (2016). History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sommer, Marianne & Lipphardt, Veronika (eds.) (2015). Visibility Matters: Diagrammatic Renderings of Human Evolution and Diversity in Physical, Serological and Molecular Anthropology. Special Issue: History of the Human Sciences 28 (5).

Walgenbach, Katharina et al. (eds.) (2007). Gender als interdependente Kategorie. Neue Perspektiven auf Intersektionalität, Diversität und Heterogenität. Opladen: Barbara Budrich.

Dr. Eric Hounshell, PhD
Postdoc/Coordinator
eric.hounshellremove-this.@remove-this.unilu.ch

Philosophical and theoretical reflections on classification have long been closely intertwined with scientific practices for studying relatedness. The social sciences exhibited a particular kind of reflexivity as they classified, debated the proper logic and methods for doing so, and puzzled over the human capacity to classify in the first place. Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss observed in Primitive Classification (1903) that the very terms of relatedness used in logical classifications had an “extra-logical origin” drawn from the social order itself, stressing in particular relations of kinship. Their argument drew on studies of “primitive” societies in Australia, North America, and China. Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Desrosières extended their insights to modern states and societies—in Bourdieu’s words, “logic itself has a genealogy,” and states produce the principles of classification. In fact, the fin-de-siècle sociologists could already have looked back on decades of state-sponsored projects that aimed to classify European and North American populations.

This project examines the special relationship between relatedness and social classification, starting with two comparative case studies of linguistic and ethnic classification in the United States and Austria-Hungary in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both cases show an exchange of classificatory logics and methods between the human sciences and natural history.

John Wesley Powell, best known for his geological surveys the American West, led a project of American Indian linguistic classification at the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. While Powell’s interest was in uncovering the historical relatedness and migrations of American Indian tribes through their living languages, the US state wanted to delineate the tribes with whom it had entered treaties. Powell’s classification transformed a vast trove of word lists into a single map (1891) that fixed discretely defined peoples with specific territories.

While American Indian linguistic classification culminated in a map, Austrian classification began with a map and detailed “ethnography” by the high civil servant Karl von Czoernig published in the 1850s and grew into a generations-long project of ethnic classification from “above” (by bureaucrats and academics in the imperial center) and “below” (by nationalist agitators). Here linguistics also played a central role, both for its promise of revealing the historical relatedness of populations in the vast multiethnic empire and for inspiration given the field’s rigorous classificatory practices. For Czoernig ethnicity, indicated by language, was a fact to be ascertained by census and plotted onto the map. After Czoernig, others took much greater pains to study languages, dialects, and all manner of ethnographic phenomena and arrange them in genealogical trees or other classificatory forms.

References

Pierre Bourdieu, On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989 - 1992 (Cambridge Malden, MA: Polity, 2015)

Karl Czoernig, Ethnographie der Österreichischen Monarchie (Vienna: Kaiserlich-Königl. Hof- u. Staatsdruckerei, 1857)

Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998)

Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification, trans. Rodney Needham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963)

J.W. Powell, “Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico” in Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Smithsonian Institution 1885-86 (Washington, 1891)

Petter Hellström, PhD
Research Collaborator
petter.hellstromremove-this.@remove-this.idehist.uu.se

Family trees have become so fundamental to the way we think about evolution that we barely notice them. Still their introduction into the modern sciences preceded the rise of evolutionary theory, and had nothing to do with it. Before the family tree was generally adopted as a metaphor and model of evolutionary development, it served scientists and scholars as an image of natural hierarchy and perfect order.

While there is a rich literature concerned with tree diagrams in the history of science, the early part of this history has largely gone unnoticed. Privileging those fields of knowledge where trees subsequently prevailed, most historical accounts have instead focused upon the canonized authors of the late nineteenth century, their iconic designs, and their potential sources of inspiration. Where earlier tree diagrams in natural history and language studies occasionally feature in the literature, they are typically presented as imperfect revelations on the road to discovery. Trees produced within other fields of learning have, for their part, been generally overlooked.

In my doctoral dissertation, I turned my attention to post-revolutionary France, when family trees were first set to work in natural history and language studies. The significance of the time and place can hardly be overstated; the Revolution had just brought an end to the old regime of inherited privileges. In the final decade of the eighteenth century, revolutionaries were literally burning the genealogical records of the nobility. Yet a few years later, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, scholars across a range of disciplines appropriated the shape of genealogy to visualize the order of things. In disentangling these early employments from the expectations of the present, and in re-entangling them with their own time and place, my dissertation argued that early family trees were not genealogical in the sense that we understand the term today. Hierarchy – not history – was at stake, as genealogical trees were re-purposed to offer a vision of natural and perfect, even divinely instituted order.

In this the new project, I address the implications of my earlier findings. For even as Charles Darwin explicitly stated that others before him had employed tree images to visualize natural order, the fact that family trees were around in the sciences before the rise of evolutionary theory has not yet been properly considered. What is the relation between early employments of family trees by lesser-known scientists and scholars, and later employments at the hands of canonized authors? What role, if any, did the family tree play in the shaping of evolutionary theory?

An ambitious study of scientific metaphors, visual culture, and historical epistemology, this project fundamentally rethinks the place of tree diagrams and genealogical metaphors in the history of science. It offers not only a very different account of the rise of tree thinking in the modern sciences, but also a generalizable approach to the interplay of metaphors, visual culture and knowledge production in the history of science.