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'Pedigree of Galton-Darwin-Wedgwood Family', 3rd International Eugenics Conference 1932 (Truman State University, Pickler Memorial Library Special Collections and Museum Department, Harry H. Laughlin Papers, HQ 750 A3 I6 1932D pt. 1).
Source publication
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...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... the ambition to capture whole networks of kin relations for several generations, the resulting diagrams resembled electrical circuits more than trees (Gausemeier, 2014;Germann, 2016: 183-307;Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, 2012: 120-3). This can be illustrated with the Darwin-Wedgewood-Galton 'family tree' that charted 'genius' and 'scientific ability' and that became iconic for the eugenics movement: the inclusion of the female line produced a 'loop' caused by cousin marriage (see Figure 2). Indeed, ancestral charts and family trees were structurally unfit for the statistical examination of Mendelian ratios, which were based on a combinatorial logic and thus sought to trace relations between gametes and zygotes, that is, the descent of genetic dispositions rather than of individuals or taxa. ...
Citations
This is the first book that engages with the history of diagrams in physical, evolutionary, and genetic anthropology. Since their establishment as scientific tools for classification in the eighteenth century, diagrams have been used to determine but also to deny kinship between human groups. In nineteenth-century craniometry, they were omnipresent in attempts to standardize measurements on skulls for hierarchical categorization. In particular the ’human family tree’ was central for evolutionary understandings of human diversity, being used on both sides of debates about whether humans constitute different species well into the twentieth century. With recent advances in (ancient) DNA analyses, the tree diagram has become more contested than ever―does human relatedness take the shape of a network? Are human individual genomes mosaics made up of different ancestries? Sommer examines the epistemic and political role of these visual representations in the history of ‘race’ as an anthropological category. How do such diagrams relate to imperial and (post-)colonial practices and ideologies but also to liberal and humanist concerns?
The Diagrammatics of 'Race' concentrates on Western projects from the late 1700s into the present to diagrammatically define humanity, subdividing and ordering it, including the concomitant endeavors to acquire representative samples―bones, blood, or DNA―from all over the world. Contributing to the ‘diagrammatic turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, it reveals connections between diagrams in anthropology and other visual traditions, including in religion, linguistics, biology, genealogy, breeding, and eugenics.
