Genealogy

The evolution of the Armenian presence in mainland France from 1891 to 1990 is described on the basis of an inventory of more than 7000 family names of Armenian origin extracted from the INSEE surname database. Several surname samplings are proposed, and parameters such as the number of different Armenian names, the number of births with these names and their proportions are used as descriptors for each of the 320 French arrondissements and the four successive 25-year periods between 1891 and 1990. Before 1915, Armenian surnames and births with these names are infrequent and almost exclusively located in Paris and the arrondissements of Marseille. From 1915 onwards, subsequent to the genocide in Turkey, the number of births and the diversity of Armenian surnames rose sharply until 1940, before stabilizing thereafter. The diaspora remains essentially centred in Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, with little regional extension around these poles. Full article

In the closing decades of the 19th century, a wide range of Tamil authors and public speakers in colonial India became acutely interested in the notion of a Dravidian “race”. This conception of a Dravidian race, rooted in European racial and philological scholarship on the peoples of South India, became an important symbol of Tamil cultural, religious, and social autonomy in colonial and post-colonial Tamil thought, art, politics, and literature. European racial thought depicted Dravidians as a savage race that had been subjugated or displaced by the superior Aryan race in ancient Indic history. Using several key works of colonial scholarship, non-Brahmin Tamil authors reversed and reconfigured this idea to ground their own broad-reaching critiques of Brahmin political and social dominance, Brahmanical Hinduism, and Indian nationalism. Whereas European scholarship largely presented Dravidians as the inferiors of Aryans, non-Brahmin Tamil thinkers argued that the ancient, Dravidian identity of the Tamil people could stand alone without Aryan interference. This symbolic contrast between Dravidian (Tamil, non-Brahmin, South Indian) and Aryan (Sanskritic, Brahmin, North Indian) is a central component of 20th- and 21st-century Tamil public discourse on caste, gender, and cultural autonomy. Tamil authors, speakers, activists, and politicians used and continue to use the symbolic frame of Dravidian racial history to advocate for many different political, cultural, and social causes. While not all of these “Dravidian” discourses are meaningfully politically or socially progressive, the long history of Dravidian-centered, anti-Brahmanical discourse in Tamil South India has helped Tamil Nadu largely rebuff the advances of Hindu nationalist politics, which have become dominant in other cultural regions of present-day India. This piece presents a background on the emergence of the term “Dravidian” in socially critical Tamil thought, as well as its reversal and reconfiguration by Tamil social thinkers, orators, and activists in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The piece begins with a brief history of the terms “Dravidian” and “Aryan” in Western racial thought. The piece then charts the evolution of this discourse in Tamil public thought by discussing several important examples of Tamil social and political movements that incorporate the conceptual poles of “Dravidian” and “Aryan” into their own platforms. Full article

Anyone who traces their Jewish ancestors back to the 18th century and even further back in history encounters the challenge of looking for ancestry without the clue that a fixed family name provides. Before the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, when Jews were forced by law to adopt a fixed family name, Ashkenazim Jewish families used patronymic names as last names. A patronymic name changes every generation. Sometimes, in larger cities, various types of nicknames were used as last names. Such a nickname could change within a generation and often indicated the place a person came from, his occupation, or personal characteristics. In this article, I will show, using three case studies, how I have faced the challenge of determining which patronymic names and nicknames my ancestors used as last names before they were forced to adopt a fixed family name. The three case studies are the ancestors of Josef Stern, who lived in the late 18th and early 19th century in Neu Bistritz in southern Bohemia, today Nova Bystrice in Czechia; Julius Strauss, 1883–1939, who lived in the late 18th, 19th, and early 20th century in Frücht and Giessen in Nassau/Hesse, today in southern Germany; and Simon Reiniger, who lived in Prague in the 18th and early 19th century. Full article

The concept of “exposure to migration” helped us understand family dimensions, such as the role of members who remained behind, especially wives, changing gender roles, and changing exposure to remittances. However, most existing migration studies have not examined whether exposure to migration has anything to do with gender dynamics. This has often resulted in women or wives playing a subordinate role in contemporary discourse on gendered migration. Because they have very little to do with remittances compared to male family members, their role in the family is viewed critically by their male counterparts. This research is based on interviews with women from a selection of countries in Asia. Based on the analytical framework of “exposure to migration”, this study contends that the degree of exposure to migration for women depends on the country’s social and cultural milieu. In many cases, this exposure also leads to marital problems and family complications. Full article

A rapidly rising number of people are engaging in family genealogical research and have purchased home-based DNA testing kits due to increased access to online resources and consumer products. The purpose of this systematic scoping review is to identify and elucidate the motivations (i.e., pathways, reasons for conducting family history research) and the consequences (i.e., psychosocial impacts) of participating in this activity by amateur (unpaid) family genealogists. Studies published from January 2000 to June 2023 were included in our review, using the PRISMA methodology outlined by the Joanna Briggs Institute’s (JBI) Reviewer Manual. A total of 1986 studies were identified using selected keywords and electronic databases. A full-text review was conducted of 73 studies, 26 of which met our eligibility criteria. The multiple dominant themes that emerged from the data analysis are organized into five categories: (1) the motivations for practicing family history research, (2) emotional responses to family secrets and previously unknown truths, (3) impacts on relationship with the family of origin and other relatives, (4) impacts on personal identity (including ethnic/racialized and family/social), and (5) identity exploration and reconstruction. Finally, these themes are connected to broader theoretical/conceptual linkages, and further, an agenda for future research inquiry is developed. Full article

As an essential prerequisite to the genealogical study of Jews, some elements of Jewish demographic history are provided in a long-term transnational perspective. Data and estimates from a vast array of sources are combined to draw a profile of Jewish populations globally, noting changes in geographical distribution, vital processes (marriages, births and deaths), international migrations, and changes in Jewish identification. Jews often anticipated the transition from higher to lower levels of mortality and fertility, or else joined large-scale migration flows that reflected shifting constraints and opportunities locally and globally. Cultural drivers typical of the Jewish minority interacted with socioeconomic and political drivers coming from the encompassing majority. The main centers of Jewish presence globally repeatedly shifted, entailing the intake within Jewish communities of demographic patterns from significantly different environments. During the 20th century, two main events reshaped the demography of the Jews globally: the Shoah (destruction) of two thirds of all Jews in Europe during World War II, and the independence of the State of Israel in 1948. Mass immigration and significant convergence followed among Jews of different geographical origins. Israel’s Jewish population grew to constitute a large share—and in the longer run—a potential majority of all Jews worldwide. Since the 19th century, and with increasing visibility during the 20th and the 21st, Jews also tended to assimilate in the respective Diaspora environments, leading to a blurring of identificational boundaries and sometimes to a numerical erosion of the Jewish population. This article concludes with some implications for Jewish genealogical studies, stressing the need for contextualization to enhance their value for personal memory and for analytic work. Full article

The concept of genealogical memory is commonly presumed to be synonymous with family or intergenerational memory. However, this paper asserts the necessity for a more detailed examination, seeking to refine and contextualize these notions from a genealogist’s perspective. Exploring the focal point of this study, genealogical memory unveils distinctive characteristics that warrant meticulous scrutiny. Foremost among these characteristics is its intentional nature and inherently reconstructive essence, enabling the recollection of long-deceased ancestors and contemplation of their fates. Consequently, genealogical memory proves invaluable in bridging the ‘floating gap’ between communicative and cultural memory, as posited by Jan Vansina’s conceptualization. The primary objective of this article is to comprehensively explore and structure the concept of genealogical memory, with a particular focus on the genealogist’s role as a memory-maker. Full article

This article delves into the history of one of the most infamous internment facilities in Korea’s recent past—Hyungje Bokjiwon (형제복지원), or Brothers Home. The article outlines the history of Brothers Home, its biopolitical production of ‘vanished lives’, and what enabled it to come into existence—arguing that this is an essential context for understanding the history of international adoption from Korea. Located in Busan, South Korea, Brothers Home began as an orphanage in the early 1960s but developed into a ‘social welfare institution’ in the early 1970s. The events that transpired from the early 1970s until the facility shut down in the late 1980s—a period which aligns with the height of international adoption from Korea—have led to some referring to this place as Korea’s ‘concentration camp’. Inmates died in the hundreds, predominantly due to malnutrition and illness, while many suffered brutal deaths through physical abuse and torture. Some of the children from Brothers Home were relocated to Western nations for adoption. The history of Brothers Home embodies the biopolitical process of bodies and lives simultaneously enveloped in and, at the same time, kept outside socio-legal frameworks to invalidate those lives or render them insignificant or invisible; to erase them from any meaningful, socio-legal context and thereby reducing those lives to bare life. The article will focus on three main areas: the history of Brothers Home, the biopolitical production of vanished lives, and how the latter resonates with specific instances depicted in testimonies written by people returning to Korea to uncover details about their adoption circumstances, that is, moments encapsulating this ‘production of vanished lives’. The central concern here is less to draw a direct line between international adoption and the events at Brothers Home, but rather to outline a crucial biopolitical context—epitomized in the history of Brothers Home—that precedes the adoption process and thus constitutes its condition of possibility. By juxtaposing this biopolitical context with autobiographical testimonies of people searching for information about the circumstances of their adoption, the article seeks to understand what it means to bear witness to the existence of a life whose desubjectivization—or disappearance—at the same time constitutes the witnessing subject’s condition of possibility. Full article

This article will cover the different types of migration in Macedonia and its Prespa region at the end of the 19th and 20th centuries through the Jonovski family from the village of Orovo. Poverty and wars caused many men to look for work and to earn money in distant places. Joshe, who was born around 1766, was first an economic migrant with his father, Marko, internally within the Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor (1880–1890). Later, he immigrated to the USA (1914–1918), before returning home to his family. However, after WWI, with the harsh attitude of the Greek government toward the Macedonian minority, this turned into permanent migration. His sons would be migrant workers in the USA, France, and Australia, while their wives and children stayed in Orovo. The village was destroyed and depopulated at the end of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). Joshe and the remaining family reunited in Wroclaw, Poland, where in the 1950s Joshe died, and his daughters-in-law finally joined their husbands in the USA and Australia. His son Boris, with his family, moved to Skopje, Macedonia, Yugoslavia in 1968. We will look at the life and migrations of Joshe, his four children, and four grandchildren. Full article

As immigration is one of the dominant issues in contemporary public discourse, it is important to explain the mechanism of prejudice against immigrants from a cultural psychology perspective. Several studies in the literature have confirmed a significant relationship between perceptions of the estimated size of the immigrant population and negative attitudes towards them. This study aims to investigate whether this relationship is moderated by symbolic universes, i.e., affect-laden generalized worldviews. The study involves a representative sample of 3020 Italians who participated in a computer-assisted web survey and completed a questionnaire containing items measuring their estimates of the size of the migrant population in Italy, political orientation, cultural worldviews (symbolic universes), and the perceived threat posed by migrants. The results confirm that the relationship between the estimated size of the migrant population and the perceived threat is moderated by symbolic universes, being stronger for participants who hold both pessimistic and idealizing symbolic universes. The results are interpreted within the framework of semiotic cultural psychology theory. Full article

What is philosophical genealogy? What is its purpose? How does genealogy achieve this purpose? These are the three essential questions to ask when thinking about philosophical genealogy. Although there has been an upswell of articles in the secondary literature exploring these questions in the last decade or two, the answers provided are unsatisfactory. Why do replies to these questions leave scholars wanting? Why is the question, “What is philosophical genealogy?” still being asked? There are two broad reasons, I think. First, on the substantive side, the problem is that genealogical models will get certain features of the method right but ignore others. The models proffered to answer the first question are too restrictive. The second reason is that the three essential questions to ask regarding the nature of genealogy are run together when they should be treated separately. In the following paper, I address these problems by attempting to reconstruct genealogy from the ground up. I provide what I hope is an ecumenical position on genealogy that will accommodate a wide variety of genealogical thinkers, from Hobbes to Nietzsche, rather than a select few. Therefore, I examine two of the three questions above: What is philosophical genealogy and its purpose? I argue there are seven main features of genealogy and that these features may be used as a yardstick to compare how one genealogist stacks up to another along the seven aspects I outline in the paper. Full article

The image of the Apsara, a celestial dancer in Cambodian myth, is closely associated with Cambodian cultural preservation practices like Cambodian classical dance. The Apsara, its aesthetic features and its association with Cambodian cultural preservation have taken on new meaning in Cambodia’s diasporic communities. In the diaspora, Apsara aesthetics have come to symbolize Cambodian heritage, history and identity, becoming a major feature of performances by Cambodian diasporic artists. However, orientalist expectations of Asian performers in the diaspora, paired with both the forgotten history of colonial intervention in Cambodian arts and state-sanctioned initiatives towards Cambodian nationalism, contributes to orientalist (and thus racialized) expectations of Cambodian diasporic performance. Mixed-race artists fail to fit neatly into the dominant narratives of Cambodian performance and have been marginalized by the Cambodian diasporic community’s dominant conceptions of performance that are rooted in cultural preservation. As people that sit outside of the aestheticized markers of Cambodian-ness, mixed-race artists often struggle to have their work and their subjectivities recognized by their communities. To circumvent questions of their racial legibility, mixed-race Cambodian American artists construct performances that are strategically padded with markers of Khmer identity by engaging with Apsara aesthetics. This article will explore how three different SoCal-based artists have negotiated their Cambodian American identity and cultural politics through performance and/or performance related materials (ads, images, etc.). I will be using examples from the work of music artist and violinist Chrysanthe Tan, theater practitioner Kalean Ung, and autoethnographic engagement with my own creative projects to show how examining the work of multi-racial Cambodian American performing artists can bring forth the complex dynamics of Cambodian diasporic cultural politics and belonging. Full article

Name change can only take place in the Netherlands under strict conditions and according to patronizing regulations. At the moment, an amendment of name law is being drafted that would give descendants of Dutch citizens whose ancestors lived in slavery an exemption. If they have a family name that their ancestors received upon their release, they may change it free of charge. It remains to be seen, however, whether the desire to adopt new names in keeping with a reclaimed African identity can also be granted. After all, that would conflict with the general regulations when creating a new name. The whole issue shows political opportunism. First, it would be useful to get a good picture of name adoption in light of surnaming in general. Is it right to consider the names in question as slave names? Are they really that bad? It is more likely that precisely the exceptional position now obtained leads to undesirable profiling. In fact, the only solution to embarrass no one is a wholesale revision of the name law that does away with outdated 19th century limitations. Why should anyone be unhappy with their name? Why should someone who insists on having a different name be prevented from doing so? This essay examines the announced change in the law against the background of surnaming in general and the acquisition of family names in Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles in particular. Full article

The most prominent social effects of the drug war in Mexico are the criminalization of poverty and increased rates of feminicide. Feminist academics and community leaders have been developing and working hand in hand to find the most appropriate methods to document gender-based violence and feminicide to shed light on the impunity that hides the systemic dismissal of women’s lives. This essay presents a critical analysis of my own positionality as a feminist and academic ally in building a collaborative research alliance with indigenous women leaders who are politically engaged in the production of knowledge from an intersectional perspective that adequately reflects the matrix of violence that affects the lives of indigenous women in urban and rural areas. This process has been fruitful and promising, although it has also entailed challenges and contradictions arising from disparate meanings of gender justice and the lack of encounter of feminist/indigenous politics of resistance. Full article

This study constitutes a preview of a broader research project on kinship, family, and society in colonial La Rioja. In this context, the results obtained from the study of five generations of the Villafañe and Guzmán family are presented. Various aspects such as family organization, inheritance system, conflicts between families, the construction of a distinct identity, and the strategies that allowed this family to preserve its heritage and maintain a prominent status in the local elite are examined and analyzed in detail. Full article

Representations of adoptions tend to concentrate on normatively conceived forms of identity, which prioritize the genetic lineage of adoptees. In contrast, scholarship on autobiographical writing emphasizes that identities are not fixed but are always in process and intersectional because they are formed in within inequal power relations. Kay’s experimental, autobiographical narrative Red Dust Road (2010) tackles the themes of adoption, the search for close relatives, and reunion. Many scholars of her autobiographical writings describe the fluidity of the diasporic adoptee identities created by her. My aim is more specific: I examine what I call Kay’s continuously mobile, processual identity construction as a transracial adoptee in Red Dust Road. I argue that her identity formation, which is also intersectional, is interconnected with her multidirectional networks of attachments and the experimental form of her adoption narrative. In addition to an intersectional approach and autobiographical studies, I draw on insights from adoption studies. In my reading of Kay’s work, I pay special attention to the inequalities derived from the intersecting vectors of adoption and race, which also intersect with other dimensions of difference, such as nation, gender, class, and sexual orientation. I employ the notion of the multidirectional in the sense in which McLeod applies it to the study of adoption writing. As I demonstrate, multidirectionality and the complex form of Red Dust Road provide versatile means of conveying Kay’s fragmented acts of memory, which assist her ongoing mobile, processual identity construction. Her multidirectional lines of transformative attachments finally bond her to her adoptive and biogenetic families as well as other affective connections. While Kay’s socially significant narrative indicates, amongst other adoption issues, that transracial adoptions can be successful, it is significant that it has no closure. The last chapter gestures toward potential new beginnings, which indicates that the story of adoption has no end. Full article

Names are increasingly recognised in sociology as important routes for understanding family relationships, as well as familial and individual identities. In this article, we use qualitative ‘name story’ data to examine the meanings of surnames for adults who were adopted as a child and for adults who have adopted a child. Our findings suggest that adult adoptees and adopters can feel differently about surnames and how these connect them—or otherwise—to familial identities of belonging and to their own individual identities. Especially for adopters, shared surnames are understood as important for ‘family-making’ through the way they cement and display familial belonging. Adult adoptees’ feelings about belonging, birth surnames and adoptive surnames appeared more complicated and often changed over time. For some, adoption enabled a flexibility in the choice and use of different surnames. Cultures of patronymic and patrilineal surnaming meant that women adoptees and women adopters also faced an additional layer of complexity that shaped decisions made about surnames and family belonging. Through examining experiences of and feelings about family names in adoption, our article highlights the complexities of surname praxis in identity construction, adoptive family life and lineages. Full article

This paper examines the structure, message, and content of biblical genealogies in light of literary analysis and social anthropology. In particular, the focus is on the so-called “Table of Nations” in Genesis 10. My basic assumption is that most biblical genealogies are a literary genre employing various devices that carry a message using symbolic numbers, chiastic structure, and anticipation. These lists interact and supplement the narrative, sometimes as a foil to the story line. They are inserted at relevant points of change in the story of mankind from Adam and Eve to Joseph and his brothers. I even propose that these insertions are the earliest form of dividing the book of Genesis into installments, a precursor to weekly Torah readings and to the later division into chapters as in the printed text. The underlying message of this chapter is the value concept of the brotherhood of mankind stemming from one father—Noah. This innovative idea of universal kinship breaks with the common pagan view prevalent in antiquity that man’s place is to serve the gods and to have little or no personal identity. Note that the great urban cultures of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia have left us no real records of family lineage other than the long king lists that reflect dynastic power. No doubt the importance of oral and written lineage stems from a tribal culture like that of the ancient Hebrews and their kindred. This overriding view even shaped the Nimrud pericope, describing his founding the urban centers of Babylon and Assyria. Genealogy became the natural medium expressing this message of universal kinship. Basic to understanding biblical genealogies is discerning two patterns of kinship, one, linear, stretching up to ten generations, and two, segmented genealogies, noting an eponymous “father” and his segmented offspring or wives. Our understanding of these structures in the Bible is shaped by the research of social anthropologists who studied oral genealogy among analphabetic tribes in Africa and the Middle East. I apply these observations and methodology in a detailed commentary on the Table of Nations. Full article

Background: Diasporic Indigenous peoples of Mexico living in the United States continue to survive and reclaim their cultures despite multiple disruptions to identity formation resulting from systematic violence and cultural silencing enacted through white settler colonialism in the United States and Mexico. Honoring Indigenous survivance, the authors present a conceptual model of Indigenous identity healing and reformation that mirrors the dynamic qualities of water for Indigenous Mexican peoples living in the United States. Methods: The conceptual model arose from a ceremony-based, participatory, digital archiving project documenting Indigenous oral histories. The model is illustrated through case analysis of three Indigenous Mexican individuals living in the United States whose stories holistically represent the model’s components. Results: The case narratives illustrate how Indigenous Mexican identities are (re)formed by moving through the model components of Rift (disconnection from land, culture, and community), Longing (yearning to find what was lost), Reconnecting (reclaiming cultural practices), and Affirmation (strengthening of identity through community), via Reflection (memory work which propels movement through each stage). Conclusions: Findings suggest that identities can be (re)formed through reclaiming cultural practices and reconnecting with the community. This conceptual model may be useful for further understanding Indigenous Latinx identity development and healing. Full article