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Ahnentafel und Stammbaum. Zwei genealogische Modelle und ihre mnemotechnische Funktion bei frühneuzeitlichen Dynastien
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.
This preliminary overview aims primarily to make plausible that kinship is an attribution, that is, that it is tied to observations as uses of distinctions. However, observation is contingent, not arbitrary, and it both requires and generates ontologies on a case-by-case basis. The claim that kinship is resolvable into ‘relatedness’ runs into this very impasse of the notion of indifferent arbitrariness. For if kinship were indeed merely a synonym for relatedness, i. e., for inclusions, the question would arise as to what is excluded and what is not excluded concerning which arrangement. However, if one follows the suggestion made here that kinship is a medium of communication in which forms, i. e., distinctions, can be inscribed, one can turn to the classical functionalist question of how these forms have been deployed culturally and across social-evolutionary ruptures, and perhaps functionally equivalently. If it is the case that kinship is based on distinctions, the question of their respective social environments also becomes interesting for the observers of these observations. Therefore, the sketch also refers to attributions and contextures as conditions of the possibility of distinctions in this case. Thus, patronage can be brought into play as a phenomenon in the environment of kinship. As a hypothesis, it is formulated that patronage parasitically participates in the genealogical and functional forms of differentiation of pre-modern and modern societies, respectively.
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