Genealogies comprise verbal or diagrammatic representations of people’s kin, and sometimes affinal, relationships. Their study, especially in relation to other aspects of kinship, has long been important in anthropology.
Interest in genealogies is most strongly associated with W.H.R.Rivers (e.g. 1914). In his fieldwork in the Torres Straits, in India, and in the Pacific, they provided him with both a ready means to understand the relationships between individuals and a means to work out the complexities of relationship terminology usage. The latter was important because of his belief in the conservative nature of relationship terminologies. He believed that embedded in their structures would be clues to the social organization of earlier times, and late in his life he also looked to such terminological structures for clues as to the connections between ethnic groups.
It is important to distinguish genealogical relationship from biological relationship. In anthropology, genealogies are always taken to indicate social relationships, which may or may not be truly biological. They may include, for example, presumed relatives, adoptive relatives, or even fictive relatives. Their extent is determined by what is culturally relevant, but they always include relatives on both sides of a given family; it should be possible to match one person’s genealogy up with another to produce a ‘map’ of kin relationships which connect family to family. It is thus also important for a fieldworker to distinguish a person’s genealogy from his or her pedigree. The latter is a subjective account provided by an informant and often emphasizes important kin relationships (such as descent from a unilineal ancestor) over other genealogical ties (Barnard and Good 1984). Thus, genealogies, as anthropologists usually understand the term, lie somewhere between the biological facts of reproduction (whose objective truth is anthropologically irrelevant) and indigenous statements of how individuals are related. The collection of genealogies both employs and helps to verify the truth of the latter.
There are a number of common problems in the collecting of genealogies. Informants ‘collapse’ them (forgetting unimportant ancestors), treat sibling relationships as genealogically equivalent (especially if they are terminologically equivalent), or claim ties which are not recognized by other members of the community. Where marriages are between close kin, the same person may legitimately be traced as a relative through more than one genealogical tie, and one of these ties (not always the closer) may be given precedence. Widespread adoptions, fictive egocentric kin relationships (like godparenthood), or culturally-specific equivalents to ‘kinship’ (like namesake-equivalence or age-mate equivalence) may complicate things further. However, in spite of all this, anthropologists generally agree that there is something universal about the ‘genealogical grid’, which consists of all (or all culturally-significant) relationships through parenthood and marriage, whatever the specific meaning of parenthood and marriage in any given culture. Without the recognition of such a device, the comparative study of relationship terminologies would be impossible.
There is little doubt that genealogies are useful for understanding social structure, and also simply for getting to know the individuals among whom an ethnographer works. Almost invariably, genealogies are more important in the cultures which non-indigenous anthropologists study than in the cultures from which those anthropologists come.
Alan Barnard
University of Edinburgh
References
Barnard, A. and Good, A. (1984) Research Practices in the Study of Kinship, London.
Rivers, W.H.R. (1914) Kinship and Social Organisation, London.
Further reading
Barnes, J.A. (1967) ‘Genealogies’, in A.L.Epstein (ed.) The Craft of Social Anthropology, London.
