Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community [Hardcover]

Eviatar Zerubavel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 9, 2011

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An erudite treatise about how culture drives human cognition about near and remote relations, Ancestors and Relatives offers lay and academic audiences alike a great read."
-Marta Tienda, Science

"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

"Widely-researched and absorbing ... This book could not be more timely. As Zerubavel points out we need only to look at the popularity of television shows such as Who Do You Think You Are? and the shelves of newsagents and bookstores generously stocked with magazines and books on how to research your family tree to see that there is a tremendous interest in genealogy ... [this is] an engaging and thoroughly enjoyable book." --Turi King, London School of Economics (June 2012)

"Ancestors is a significant contribution to its author's ongoing project, highly original, wonderfully imaginative, overflowing with insight, to develop a distinctive cognitive sociology. And for that, we should be deeply grateful. I, for one, happily await his next book in a long line that grows more venerable with each addition." --ontemporary Sociology

About the Author

Eviatar Zerubavel is Board of Governors Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life, The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, The Seven-Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week, Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology, and Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 9, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199773955
• ISBN-13: 978-0199773954
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.1 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #921,178 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, but well referenced! April 7, 2012

By Penny L. Bloodhart

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

First may I suggest that anybody who wants to read this book to get it in paperback or hardcover. The Kindle books is more than sixty percent footnote and reference material, and somewhat challenging to read in that format due to problems with text editing. I was annoyed that the book cost so much---and was mostly references. I think that the material was of some interest, but did small service to genetics, genealogy and the sociological problems of defining ourselves. We humans are looking for meaning, and finding out who our genetic ancestors were has become a satisfying hobby for some, a religious practice for many, and a health issue for an increasing number of human beings. This book suggests that seeking our ancestors is muddled by past and current race bias, community identities and a lot of misinformation, which is probably true to a certain extent. Modern genetics is increasing our ability to remove those issues from subjective interpretation. I found the material rather dry, and felt that the material in it has been explored in many other books. Sorry---wanted to like it after reading a review in Science...but just couldn't.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Scholar's Reflections on Genealogy December 2, 2012

By Almelle

Format:Hardcover

In contrast to some reviewers, I very much enjoyed the first part of this book.... until it got too deeply into evolutionary theory, which I can read in more engaging ways from other sources.

What I found so interesting were Zerubavel's reflections on what it means as humans that we pick and choose our ancestors, and what value genealogy has for people in the modern world, as well as in historical times. If you're just looking for a genealogy how-to or inspiring ideas on family, there are better books.

But for some sustained scientific/cultural reflections on what it means to be a relative or in a lineage, this is a great book. It is brief, so if you have access to a public lib or uni lib, that would be a great way to get access.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Valuable synthesis January 22, 2012

By Professor X

Format:Hardcover

Admirably clear writing, witty, trenchant and deftly illustrated with erudition and an eye for the telling detail. This book offers a superb overview of kinship and why the question of belonging matters deeply to our species, refreshingly free of jargon and the sterile theorizing all too common in both anthropological and sociological treatments of the subject.