Ancestors and Relatives

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 <em>Who Do You Think You Are?</em> and <em>Faces of America</em> we are now told that genetic markers can definitively tell us who we are and where we came from. <p/>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. <p/>An eye-opening re-examination of our very notion of relatedness <em>Ancestors and Relatives</em> offers a new way of understanding family ethnicity nationhood race and humanity.<br>