Eviatar Zerubavel: Why Do We Care About Our Ancestors?
Eviatar Zerubavel is Board of Governors Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous books, most recently “The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life” and “Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past.”
Why do we consider Barack Obama a black man with a white mother rather than a white man with a black father? What are the implications of knowing, as we now do, that chimpanzees are genetically closer to humans than they are to gorillas? Why did the Nazis believe that unions between Germans and Jews would produce Jews rather than Germans? Are sixth cousins still family?
In order to even address, let alone answer, such questions, we must first examine our unmistakably social visions of genealogical relatedness. What we need, in other words, is a sociological understanding of ancestry and descent.
As evident from the wide popularity of the television series “Who Do You Think You Are?” and the dozens of websites (such as Ancestry.com, Family Tree DNA, and FamilySearch) and software programs designed to help people construct their family trees and discover hitherto unknown ancestors and relatives, we certainly have a tremendous fascination with genealogy. Every day thousands of “root seekers” comb libraries, cemeteries, and the Internet in an effort to quench their seemingly insatiable “thirst for tracing lineages.” Genealogy may indeed be “the second most popular American hobby after gardening and the second most visited category of Web sites after pornography.”
Such deep obsession with ancestry (“progonoplexia”) is by no means a distinctly modern fad. Indeed, it goes back thousands of years to Hesiod’s Theogony and the Bible. Nor is it a peculiarly Western phenomenon, as evident from various forms of ancestor worship all over the world. Traditionally aristocratic, however, it is nevertheless becoming increasingly democratized. Over the past several decades, the range of Americans exhibiting interest in genealogy, for example, has clearly expanded “from those claiming descent from the Mayflower or from Southern aristocrats, to include the descendants of African slaves and immigrants.” Our current fascination with genealogy has also been getting a tremendous boost from the growing popularity of genetic ancestry testing.
Not only does genetics enhance our awareness of hereditary disease risk as well as the ability to reconstruct national histories and establish paternity, it has also prompted the rise of recreational genomics. Dozens of companies now offer genetic ancestry tests that allow us to measure our genealogical proximity to distant relatives, define ourselves ethnoracially in terms of fractional, seemingly precise amounts of Europeanness, Africanness, and Asianness, as well as trace the Paleolithic ancestor or ancestress from whom we supposedly descend. Indeed, genetics can now essentially “demolish or affirm a family’s most cherished beliefs and stories with just a bit of saliva and a cotton swab.”
As manifested in identity labels such as “an Italian American” or “a Kennedy,” despite the modern meritocratic rise of the self-made individual, who we are still depends at least partly on whom we descend from. Thus, throughout the Muslim world, for example, descendants of the Prophet still bear the honorific title sayyid or sharif. By the same token, in the United States, a so-called Indian blood quantum formally indicating a person’s degree of Indianness in terms of a fractional amount of Native American ancestry still constitutes the official basis for federal recognition as an “Indian” as well as the main criterion of membership in particular Native American tribal nations. This is the context within which a person is officially defined as being “seven thirty-seconds Cherokee, two thirty-seconds Kiowa, and two thirty-seconds Choctaw,” and words like pureblood, mixed-blood, full-blood, and half-breed are still commonly used as nounlike identifying labels....