ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Genealogy & Inheritance between Passion, Law, and Science, I

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

These two panels investigate how transgenerational continuities have been imagined, codified, and contested across time. Bringing together ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern perspectives, we ask how genealogical media—texts, images, diagrams, pedigrees—created specific forms of connectivity between living beings, both human and animal. We proceed from the premise that a wide range of “contents” could be conceived as transmissible through genealogical links: not only blood and biological traits, but also legal titles, religious authority, social privileges, and cultural capital.

By studying genealogy as a practice of mediation, selection, and imagination, the panels highlight its power to structure societies and to order relations between humans, animals, and nature. Genealogical knowledge was never purely descriptive: it asserted claims to legitimacy, codified obligations, and framed possibilities for future generations. In dialogue with contemporary biological understandings of heredity, we seek to situate genealogical thinking within a broader cultural-historical framework—one that crosses disciplines and epochs, and that reveals genealogy as a shared technology of passion, law, and science.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Anna Bonnell Freidin, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• Divine Institutions: Genealogical Thinking and Social Organization in Ancient Greece - Calloway Scott, University of Cincinnati

• Apologies to Sahlins: Aristotle and the Anthropology of Kinship - Malina Buturovic

• Systems of quantifying kinship and descent in Western Europe, ca. 1100 and 1600 - Simon Teuscher, University of Zurich

• Affinity: A Genealogical Metaphor at the Centre of Eighteenth-Century Sciences - Staffan Mueller-WIlle, Cambridge University

Session Organizers

• Mackenzie Anne Cooley, Hamilton College

• Markus Friedrich, Universität Hamburg