Genealogy, Volume 10, Issue 4 (October 2026) – 47 articles

In 1835, rangatira directed in He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni that their aroha be carried to the King of England, the opening act of a relationship between sovereign peoples. This paper begins there. Aroha, usually translated as love, operates as constitutional method: a practice that orders relationships between peoples, settles who decides and on what terms, and binds those arrangements across generations. Aroha is more often read in research and policy as feeling or value, a reading that leaves Māori law invisible and lets institutions treat care as optional. Grounded in kaupapa Māori methodology and the Matike Mai Aotearoa framework for constitutional transformation, the paper offers three movements by which constitutional practice can be told apart from ethical, cultural and caring practice. It then follows aroha through The Tīpuna Project, where wāhine Māori lead constitutional inquiry through wānanga, raranga, rongoā, poetry and community activation. Three mediations of aroha are presented: aroha as decolonising attention, aroha as embodied freedom, and aroha as radical love carried by deadly and fierce aunties. Together they show love functioning as law from below. Full article

Death is one of the most painful realities of life that is inescapable. In African communities, death is not just an individual loss but a collective community loss and suffering. Therefore, the practice of the Ministry of presence is prevalent during funerals by both the community and modern-day church. African funerals are characterised by a heavy presence of family members, relatives, neighbours, and the church. The church has become a key role-player that is always visible when funerals take place. The act of physical presence is significant to provide solidarity as individuals offer physical and emotional support to the bereaved family. The church not only provides spiritual but also practical support, like other community institutions and members do, notwithstanding the challenges of the erosion of certain burial practices due to colonial influence on economic migration and cultural dilution. This was exacerbated by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa. The article grapples with the following question: in what ways does the ministry of presence serve as a means of dealing with grief during African funeral and burial rites? This article explores the role of ministry of presence by the various stakeholders during African funerals. It examines the emotional, spiritual and social implications of the presence of the church, family and community members during funerals in Collins Chabane Local Municipality (CCLM) in Limpopo, South Africa. It also looks at how the ministry of presence was disrupted by the advent of the pandemic, leading to different forms of funeral attendance. Ministry of Presence is a pastoral and theological concept used as conceptual framework supported by the African ethic of unhu/ubuntu as a cultural interpretive framework. This qualitative research is based on primary data collected through interviews and literature analysis. Full article

This paper examines the role of time and space in how humans experience and describe intergenerational memory. Drawing on a variety of disciplines and the humanities, I highlight how memory is context-dependent and shaped by encounters that alter prior experiences. Intergenerational memory can be communicated via literature, music, artifacts, oral stories, and other material objects. As human knowledge and encounters with others multiply, what people know and remember play an important role in how intergenerational memory is understood and communicated. Viewed through the lens of Guattari and Deleuze’s assemblage and rhizome theories, this article argues that a study of memory is complex yet well-suited to analyzing multiple realities. The article also explores the role of technology and artificial intelligence in transmitting intergenerational memory and notes that some AI tools can produce hallucinations and are vulnerable to false memory creation. As intergenerational and memory studies engage with the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its technologies, the article also invites readers to view such technologies as part of the global human experience. Full article

How commemorative school titles coexist with administrative names remains underexplored in critical toponymy. This study examines naming patterns and reported name use in Yan’an, China, to explore how Red Army School designation contributes to revolutionary heritage-making. Documentary analysis and descriptive coding of 34 institutions are supplemented by one interview with a municipal education administrator. Drawing on critical toponymy and critical heritage studies, the framework connects scaling and institutional toponymic layering with hybrid authorization: project designation combined with local administrative acceptance. Revolutionary places and events predominate, and 25 records explicitly pair a commemorative title with an administrative name. The informant describes administrative names serving routine governance and Red Army titles supporting commemoration and moral education, with parallel plaques displaying both identities. These accounts suggest functionally differentiated institutional toponymic layering as a provisional interpretation, while nine single-name presentations indicate variation in naming arrangements and delimit its scope. The study contributes to research on place naming and heritage-making in the Global East by identifying an additive institutional naming arrangement. Comparative research should examine how these naming arrangements are used and interpreted within school communities, and whether they involve tensions. Full article

Lo Ta-yu’s 1983 song “Orphan of Asia” has long circulated as a cultural text through which Taiwan’s histories of colonialism, authoritarianism, displacement, and contested political recognition can be heard. This article asks how the song uses lyrical metaphor and musical arrangement to bring political non-recognition, historical displacement, and cultural belonging into relation across distinct historical contexts. Using a qualitative interpretive approach, it combines close reading of lyrics and recorded sound with historical contextualization and analysis of the song’s later circulation. The article argues that the orphan metaphor remains productive precisely because it can travel among different histories while preserving their historical specificity. Its racialized color imagery connects bodily difference to Cold War politics and authoritarian memory, while the recording’s triple meter, changing vocal forces, military-style percussion, suona, repetition, and fading texture make unresolved belonging audible. By distinguishing political non-recognition from cultural identification, the article shows how popular music can mediate competing histories, memories, and attachments through an open-ended language of belonging. Full article

Historical trauma (HT) has left a distinct mark on the experiences of Native Hawaiians (NHs) across generations, yet more work is needed to understand its specific impacts across the lifespan. This qualitative study explored conceptualizations of NH HT using a culturally grounded talk story approach with 41 NH participants, from makua ʻōpio (young adults) to kupuna (elders), across the Pae ʻĀina (Hawaiian Islands). Eight themes and 26 subthemes emerged reflecting manifestations of HT and contemporary stressors, including the central theme Ke ola ʻana ma ka ʻōnaehana kaumaha: Hoʻokele i ka ʻino (Living in an imposed system: Navigating colonial structures). Additional subthemes illuminated pathways of healing and resilience, such as He kāhua ka ʻāina i ka hoʻōla (ʻĀina is central to healing). Findings further highlight the importance of institutionalized mechanisms for NH governance and decision-making to address gaps in existing systems. Despite enduring trauma, NH resilience rooted in ʻāina and community affirm the essential role of Indigenous knowledge systems in advancing collective healing, wellbeing, and equitable policy in Hawaiʻi. Full article

This study examines toponymic dissonance, the systematic semantic asymmetry and translational non-equivalence between Chinese (Cantonese) and Portuguese street names in Macau, as a case of post-colonial heritage governance operating under the “One Country, Two Systems” framework. Drawing on 1255 streets documented in Macau’s official street registries, the study is situated at the intersection of translation studies, critical toponymy, linguistic landscape research, post-colonial urban studies, and heritage governance. The analysis works from two classificatory instruments: (i) a four-dimensional coding system distinguishing anthroponymic, toponymic, functional/descriptive, and abstract/idealistic naming sources; (ii) a four-tier semantic distance evaluation (Levels 0–3) that quantifies the divergence between the official Portuguese name and the locally negotiated Cantonese name. Empirically, 439 of 1255 streets (35.0%) exhibit “complete asymmetry” (Level 3), wherein Chinese and Portuguese names derive from irreconcilably different semantic sources; this paper identifies five principal types of asymmetry, ranging from political commemoration versus functional or geographic description to the de-institutionalisation of colonial administrative references. Crucially, the study also engages the contemporary multilingualisation of Macau’s linguistic landscape, in which English, Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, Burmese, Hindi, and Nepali are increasingly visible alongside Chinese and Portuguese, and traces the post-1999 institutional decision to preserve semantic asymmetry as a deliberate governance strategy: bilingual street signs perform a “Luso-Chinese cosmopolitan” identity that is now economically indispensable to Macau’s tourism and gaming-led economy, institutionally aligned with the Macau Forum and the Portuguese-speaking Countries network, and politically differentiated from the colonial-era renaming strategies seen in Hong Kong and other formerly colonised cities. Drawing upon Shi-xu’s cultural discourse theory, the paper argues that Macau’s bilingual street names constitute a “transcultural cultural field” in which national power, local memory, and international image interact continuously, and that the post-1999 preservation of asymmetry is best understood as a technique of identity management rather than as a passive inheritance of colonial habit. By offering this interdisciplinary synthesis, the paper advances a comparative resource for the study of multilingual cities in the Global East and elsewhere where colonial, national, and local discourses continue to negotiate the urban landscape. Full article

In African societies, death is never viewed as the end of life but as a transition to another life. Among the Zezuru People of Zimbabwe, words such as watisiya, “he has left us”, and waenda, “he has gone”, present death as not the end but a rite of passage to the spiritual life. The same language of hope describes burial. Tamuviga: we have buried him, meaning something hidden will be sought later; tamuradzika: “we have slept him”; lit., we will bring back the spirit of the deceased during the kurova guva ceremony. Because of this hope for the future life, the traditional burial among Zezuru people is characterised by collective rituals such as kugeza mufi, “washing the deceased”, kupeta mufi, “folding the deceased”, kutenderera musha, “going round the home, zvioneko, “farewells”, kutema rukawo, “marking the grave”, and kuviga, ”burial”. Among the Zezuru people, death was a rite of passage in which ancestors were present. Communities conducted death, mourning, and burial rituals to mediate between the world of the dead and the world of the living; however, the church, funeral homes, and urban burials have eroded these burial traditions. This paper reflects on the erosion of burial rites among the Zezuru People of the Chihota area in Zimbabwe. This qualitative study asks: “How are the Zezuru people resacralising burial rites that had been eroded while also maintaining their identity?” Using postcolonial theory, the study collected data through observation of Zezuru burial traditions and interviews with 10 purposively selected participants. This paper concludes that, although Zezuru culture has been and is being eroded, they employ Homi Bhabha’s hybridity theory to maintain a balance between tradition and modernity. Structurally, this paper will present the introduction, the literature review, methods, theory, results, conclusion, and recommendations. Full article

Career choice is ordinarily studied as a decision. This article treats it as an inheritance. Drawing on survey data from 369 students at a South African university of technology, it examines gender and locality differences in career interests, world-of-work awareness, career adaptability, and perceptions of complying with employer competency expectations, and reads those differences through African gender scholarship and ritual theory, using genealogy as an interpretive framework rather than as a method. Mann–Whitney U tests showed that male students scored significantly higher than female students on specialised creativity and problem-solving, general managerial autonomy, entrepreneurship, overall career interests, business and entrepreneurial skills, and overall employer competency expectations, with small practical effects (d = 0.23 to 0.33). Students from rural areas scored higher than urban students on job and occupation fitness and on the perceived contribution of their studies to work-world awareness. This article argues that the gendered gaps cluster within a single domain, that of proprietary and directive authority, and that this clustering may be read as the statistical residue of ritual and institutional processes through which public authority was progressively masculinised. Small effects are consistent with an ordering that is socially maintained rather than dispositionally fixed, although this study did not measure ritual participation or cultural transmission directly, and the reading offered here is interpretive. Implications are drawn for a career-guidance framework that engages cultural formation directly instead of routing around it. Full article

Mahé (Mayyazhi), a French enclave on India’s Malabar coast, remained under French administration from 1721 to 1954, and its French-Indian families have carried the legal and cultural consequences of that rule across generations ever since. This study examines how colonial-era intimacy was configured within the broader structures of colonial governance in a small, decentralised enclave largely absent from mainstream accounts of empire. Combining a structured literary analysis of M. Mukundan’s novel On the Banks of the Mayyazhi with ethnographic fieldwork among Mahé’s French-Indian families, the study applies a four-phase Historiographic Narrative Analysis Framework (HNAF) to trace how face-to-face contact, bilingual schooling, and household ritual mediated colonial authority and shaped patterns of loyalty, mimicry, and inherited identity across generations. Fiction and lived testimony reveal overlapping but non-identical traces of an affectively saturated, person-to-person contact zone whose effects outlasted formal decolonisation by decades and continue to shape Franco-Indian family memory and commemorative practice today. The findings suggest that genealogical continuity, rather than political rupture alone, offers a productive lens for understanding how colonial subjecthood is inherited, reworked, and lived within families long after an empire’s formal end. These findings carry implications for the study of other small, materially thin colonial enclaves and for broader methodological debates about using literary sources genealogically. The study also speaks to SDG 10, particularly its emphasis on social, economic, and political inclusion and on reducing inequalities rooted in origin and status, by showing how colonial hierarchies can persist through citizenship, family memory, and inherited forms of belonging. Full article

Earlier studies on Bekwarra names have focused on cultural and syntactic perspectives, with limited attention to how the Bekwarra naming culture transmits family history and serves as a cultural archive in which the experiences, struggles, and social roles of departed relatives are encoded. This study, therefore, takes a different direction by showing how name bearers become living extensions of ancestral memory, thereby strengthening and reinforcing kinship ties within the community. Ethnopragmatic theory was adopted as an analytical framework to uncover the cultural meanings embedded in these names. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with 25 participants in Nyanya and Abuochiche Wards, Bekwarra Local Government Area, Cross River State, southeastern Nigeria. The findings reveal that Bekwarra people use naming practices to retain memory, sustain lineage consciousness, and maintain intergenerational connections. Beyond functioning as linguistic labels, Bekwarra names constitute an active social process through which the past informs present identities. To conclude, this study deepens the understanding of the intricate relationship between names, memory, and the ways in which naming acts as a repository of cultural knowledge. Full article

This article examines the historical expansion of the halakhic doctrine of piku’aḥ nefesh from its classical association with the preservation of biological life to its application in cases involving apostasy, religious identity, and communal continuity. Beginning with talmudic formulations in Yoma 85b, the study traces the development of the concept through responsa and legal writings from the medieval and early modern periods, focusing on the dispute between the Rashba and Rabbi Joseph Karo regarding the permissibility of violating Shabbat to prevent conversion. It argues that later authorities gradually reconceptualized apostasy not merely as transgression but as an existential threat warranting extraordinary legal intervention. This process culminated in descriptions of apostasy as mitah nitzḥit (“eternal death”) and, ultimately, as a form of piku’aḥ nefesh itself. Methodologically, the article combines legal history with theories of collective memory, drawing particularly on the work of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and subsequent scholarship on cultural memory. It contends that historical experiences of forced conversion, martyrdom, expulsion, and communal loss during the Crusades and the Iberian persecutions became embedded within Jewish collective consciousness and were transmitted through halakhic discourse. The article proposes that halakhah functioned not only as a legal system but also as a medium of cultural memory. By examining the emergence of spiritual piku’aḥ nefesh, it demonstrates how collective memory can reshape legal concepts and redefine the meaning of life, danger, and survival within a religious tradition. Full article

Recent advances in archeogenetics offer vital biological data to complement traditional anthropological approaches. This study presents a global archeobiological and arcaheogenetics study, focused on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis of five individuals from the 7th-century CE church and subsequent medieval phases at El Rebollar (El Boalo, Madrid) to reconstruct population dynamics and maternal lineages. Hypervariable regions I and II were analyzed from three high-status sarcophagi adults and two subsequent perinatals. Results reveal a highly diverse population mosaic: adults harbored distinct lineages, including European haplogroups H2a2 and T1a, alongside a remarkable trans-Mediterranean signal (haplogroup L3h2) linked to the Horn of Africa. Conversely, both perinatals shared the autochthonous Iberian haplogroup HV0, confirming long-term demographic resilience of the local substrate. Pop-wide comparative analyses (AMOVA and F_ST distances) show significant micro-regional genetic discontinuity, isolating El Boalo from immediate peninsular neighbors while aligning it with cosmopolitan mixed sites (Pla de l’Horta, Girona) and Central Europe, but discarding direct Eastern European (Viminacium) Gothic flows. We conclude that El Rebollar’s profile reflects the accumulation and fixation of ancestral gene flows during the 5th and 6th centuries CE, challenging traditional paradigms of Late Antique rural isolation in central Iberia. Full article

Hmong people fleeing Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War carried with them their knowledge of medicinal plants and healing practices. As the refugees resettled into a global diaspora, this knowledge crossed geopolitical, linguistic, and cultural borders, transforming in each new context where it was practiced. These traditions reinforced the health sovereignty of diasporic Hmong communities while helping them navigate the traumas of war and displacement. Over time, the circulation of plants and knowledge through transnational family networks has helped Hmong herbalism emerge as a global phenomenon. The internet and social media have facilitated knowledge exchange, enabling both the transmission of traditions and the adoption and diffusion of new practices and remedies. The dynamism of healing traditions was showcased during the COVID-19 pandemic, as communities acquired new plants and repurposed existing practices to deal with a novel health threat. The currents of change and conservation in medical practices reflect contrasting aspects of the ongoing process of formulating a transnational Hmong identity. Drawing on fieldwork in the U.S., France, French Guiana, and Thailand, I explore the transformations of Hmong healthcare practices as they have become globalized traditions and analyze their links with community resilience and identity. Full article

This article examines the transformation of rabbinic authority in Eastern European Jewish society through the prism of dybbuk possession and exorcism. While the phenomenon of the dybbuk has often been studied in its theological, folkloristic, or psychological dimensions, this study proposes to analyze it as a site in which models of rabbinic authority were articulated, contested, and reconfigured. The analysis focuses on the contrasting responses of two central figures of the mitnagged elite: the Vilna Gaon (1720–1797) and Rabbi Yisrael Meir ha-Kohen Kagan, the Ḥofetz Ḥayyim (1838–1933). Drawing on narrative and halakhic sources, it argues that their divergent attitudes toward dybbuk exorcism cannot be explained solely in terms of belief or disbelief in the phenomenon. Rather, they reflect distinct approaches to the legitimacy of mediated engagement with the supernatural. While the Vilna Gaon refused to participate in exorcism, despite evidence that he did not categorically deny the efficacy of esoteric practices, his position is interpreted as a principled rejection of the role of the rabbinic figure as a mediator between ontological realms. By contrast, the Ḥofetz Ḥayyim allowed for the controlled incorporation of exorcistic practices, in which his authority was affirmed symbolically and extended into the supernatural domain. The article further argues that the emergence of the concept of Da’at Torah represents a subsequent stage in this development. In this model, rabbinic authority no longer requires performative validation through engagement with supernatural forces, but is instead conceived as inherently endowed with comprehensive insight extending beyond the halakhic sphere. The trajectory from the Vilna Gaon, through the Ḥofetz Ḥayyim, to Da’at Torah thus reflects a broader shift from mediated to internalized forms of authority. By situating dybbuk exorcism within this historical and conceptual framework, the study contributes to a re-evaluation of the relationship between halakhah, Kabbalah, and authority in modern Jewish thought, and highlights the role of the supernatural as a dynamic element in the construction of religious leadership. Full article

This article examines state-level COVID-19 policy and social reproductive care in the United States through theoretical, policy-genealogical, and empirical lenses. It reworks the early “COVID moment,” from March to November 2020, as a policy opportunity moment in which states were compelled to make unusually explicit decisions about the relationship among work, markets, care, households, and state responsibility. The article situates this state-level moment within the longer genealogy of American national policy paradigms governing social reproductive care, from the beginnings of national policy attention in the early twentieth century to the late-twentieth-century marketization and privatization of care. Using interpretive and statistical methods, the article analyzes an original dataset of more than 150 stay-at-home orders and reopening plans from all fifty states, alongside governors’ messaging and executive orders. The analysis finds that state responses clustered into three distinct COVID governance paradigms that differently allocated social reproductive care, state responsibility, and work coercion: a care-focused paradigm, which most substantially recognized the public value of care and the interdependence of productive and reproductive labor; a market-restoration paradigm, which largely reproduced the inherited prioritization of productive work, economic reopening, personal responsibility, and privatized care; and a regulated hybrid paradigm, which modified the inherited approach by combining care governance and market-restoration orientations. The article argues that states’ divergent approaches were shaped by political context and by varied alignment with an inherited, market-centered logic that privatized responsibility for social reproduction. Neoliberalism is treated as a historical source of the prevailing governing logic of privatized care. Although care governance states most clearly recognized care and interdependence as matters of public concern, they did not establish a public care system; all three paradigms operated within a predominantly private, household- and market-based, care infrastructure. COVID-19 therefore temporarily unsettled, but did not displace, the inherited privatized-care logic. By tracing these patterned state responses historically and empirically, the article suggests that the COVID moment generated policy alternatives whose significance may extend beyond the crisis itself. Although they did not produce a durable paradigm shift, some state-level COVID responses offer care-focused policy models that may be revived under different political circumstances, while also revealing a nascent political willingness to expand public responsibility for social reproductive care. In so doing, the article contributes to American political development, public policy, and feminist care scholarship. Full article

This paper examines the transnational lives of undocumented migrant children born to Vietnamese labour migrants in South Korea who are subsequently compelled—or choose—to “re-turn” to Vietnam, a country many have never known. Drawing on an integrative review of existing scholarship on Korean immigration policy, Vietnamese transnational migration, and child welfare frameworks, the study analyses three interrelated dimensions: the structural conditions producing undocumented childhoods in Korea; the legal and social precarity accompanying re-turn; and the resettlement challenges encountered in Vietnam. The findings reveal a critical protection chasm at the intersection of Korean immigration enforcement, Vietnam’s limited resettlement infrastructure, and the absence of a bilateral child-welfare protocol. Children who are born and raised in Korea typically lack Korean citizenship, Vietnamese registration, or any meaningful state protection in either country. Their re-turn is rarely voluntary, and their resettlement in Vietnam is characterised by linguistic estrangement, educational marginalisation, and ambiguous legal identity. The paper argues that addressing these transnational harms requires a Korea–Vietnam policy framework grounded in the best interests of the child, incorporating bilateral birth registration arrangements, conditional regularisation pathways, and coordinated resettlement support. The study contributes to wider debates on child-centred migration governance in East and Southeast Asia. Full article

Official statistics treat ethnic self-identification as a fixed trait. This study examines which youths do not reproduce the ethnic category of their household of origin and instead identify as mestizo, the unmarked category of Ecuador’s national ideology of mestizaje. Using the 2025 Encuesta Nacional de Empleo, Desempleo y Subempleo (ENEMDU; National Survey of Employment, Unemployment, and Underemployment), we link youths aged 18–29 who reside with a non-mestizo household head and with the head’s spouse, so that the categories of both coresident parental figures are observed (n = 3960), and estimate survey-weighted logit models with complex-design inference. Living in an interethnic household is the strongest correlate of mestizo identification, with an average marginal effect of 31.93 percentage points. Most of this association is attributable to transmission: 88.1% of interethnic households include a mestizo spouse, and 86.8% of their youths identify as mestizo. In interethnic households where neither parental figure is mestizo, 39.3% of youths identify as mestizo, a figure that falls to 8.0% in homogeneous households; this reclassification, however, is not evident among the minority of youths who answered the survey question themselves, most of whom also reported their parents’ categories. Youths follow a mestizo mother more often than a mestizo father (89.2% versus 69.2%). Socioeconomic status does not jointly predict reclassification. Declared ethnic identification is therefore a porous measure: the population that declares a category does not coincide with the population that shares it by family origin. Full article

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America represents his exploration of the psychological influence of prejudice—in this case anti-Semitism—upon a young boy. Roth varies his narrative approach, sometimes allowing the older Philip Roth to comment on events but for the most part working through indirect discourse to allow the reader to see into the mind of Young Philip as he tries to absorb the impact of anti-Semitism on his family. Roth reveals the emotional response of his characters as they experience individual events involving anti-Semitism, with Young Philip experiencing mostly fear and humiliation, his father overwhelmed by indignation. Full article

Social scientists and scholars of high-tension religious groups (often referred to as new religious movements or emergent religious groups) have spent nearly half a century debunking the social psychological theory of “brainwashing.” But there is now a veritable brainwashing legal renaissance in child protection guidelines in Japan, several US states, and the UK through the concept of “coercive control.” In this exploratory perspective piece, we trace the ideological lineage of mid-century anti-cult rhetoric into twenty-first-century childcare and child protection frameworks. We argue that the legal doctrine and cultural logic of parens patriae, one means by which the state regulates and mandates the construction of care, is increasingly weaponized to regulate parental religious socialization under the guise of psychological safeguarding, building upon Japanese anti-cult educational guidelines and the American OneTaste trafficking legal case precedent. We hope that this brief discussion pushes back on recent international appetite for the suppression of “deviant” religious liberty within the family unit. Full article

What makes an African man, and who determines the boundaries of African manhood? In this article, I interrogate the making of African manhood through the isiXhosa question Yintoni indoda? (What is a man?) with particular attention to queer African men and their cultural belonging. Rather than revisiting whether queerness is compatible with Africanness, I turn the analytical gaze towards manhood itself and ask what happens when a queer African man satisfies culturally recognised dimensions of manhood while transgressing heteronormative expectations of masculinity. Positioned as a conceptual study, I critically bring scholarship on amaXhosa manhood and ulwaluko into conversation with African masculinities, queer theory, belonging, and decolonial thought to examine indoda (man) as a culturally negotiated status shaped by social recognition, responsibility, kinship, cultural participation, and communal belonging. I interrogate the privileging of heterosexuality, marriage, and reproduction as markers of legitimate African manhood and question whether these expectations can be understood outside histories of colonialism and their reconfiguration of African gender and sexual relations. I advance conditional cultural belonging as a conceptual lens for understanding how queer African men can belong to cultural communities even as their recognition as legitimate men remains contingent on heteronormative conformity. Ultimately, I use Yintoni indoda? to rethink the boundaries through which African manhood is culturally produced, policed, and recognised. Full article

This article introduces “experiential memory” as a new theoretical construct to explain a paradox in Israeli remembrance culture: why ancient Jewish days of commemoration (Passover, Tisha B’Av, Purim, Chanukah) retain their power after millennia, while Israel’s national memorial days—especially Holocaust Remembrance Day—show signs of weakening despite being far more recent. Building on, and moving beyond, Halbwachs’ concept of collective memory and Carver and Kolb’s theory of experiential learning, the article defines experiential memory as a commemoration mechanism combining four dimensions simultaneously: a textual dimension (a fixed, communally read text), a physical-sensory dimension (embodied acts such as eating, fasting, or lighting), a communal dimension (shared enactment rather than passive observation), and a dimension of cyclical recurrence (annual repetition that renews rather than becomes routine). Through the analysis of Seder Night, Sukkot, Chanukah, Purim, and Tisha B’Av, the article shows how Jewish tradition integrates all four dimensions to embed memory in the body rather than merely in consciousness. It then diagnoses Israel’s national memorial ceremonies as structurally deficient—textually fragmented, physically passive (the siren rather than embodied action), and communally observational rather than participatory—which explains the repeated failure of efforts, such as Shinan’s Holocaust Scroll, to institutionalize a shared commemorative text. In its applied section, the article proposes principles for building an experiential mechanism for Holocaust remembrance as the last survivors disappear: shifting from observing to doing, establishing a shared constitutive text, introducing a mandatory physical-sensory ritual such as synchronized home candle-lighting, and relocating commemorative action to smaller communities such as classrooms and families. Particular attention is given to the education system as the most viable arena for implementation, and to broadening the Holocaust narrative to include Mizrahi and Sephardi experience, addressing the ethnic disconnect some parts of Israeli society feel toward the Holocaust. The article closes by framing the central challenge as sustaining living memory once eyewitnesses are gone, and suggests that Holocaust remembrance may eventually adopt the same experiential logic long applied to the Exodus: “in every generation”. Full article

The authoritarianism of the Modern/colonial (Western) one-world ontology includes an insistence on the nature of time, and this dogmatism persists in the face of other temporalities. The normative status of coloniality is evident in the ways trans and takatāpui communities are compelled to operate on straight, Settler time, from research ethics and sexualities education to medical wait times and parliamentary submissions. To begin, we outline the research on which this claim is based, which employed wānanga as a mode of co-designing decolonising, gender-affirming (sexualities) education, and how deviations from the intended approach allowed the study to centre what was important to the participants. Next, we unpack the predicaments of resistance as we sought to embrace temporal multiplicity and the need for an alternate strategy for holding spacetime. This strategy emerged through Waitī’s whaikōrero and poem, which construe the participants’ contributions as seeds to be cultivated in their own time. Across the three wānanga, three seeds emerged. Whakataukī and pūrākau are employed to unpack these seeds from the wānanga, illustrating the importance of valuing all contributions, both absent and present, and how whanaungatanga offers a strategy for meeting participants on their own terms and in their own time, kanohi ki te kanohi. Full article

Despite its significance, ulwaluko has continuously faced challenges, including, inter alia, fatalities, botched circumcisions, and psychosocial distress, which have often been linked to inadequate support. The enactment of the Customary Initiation Act No. 2 of 2021 represented a legislative effort to regulate, enhance safety, and create space for professional interventions, while explicitly excluding social workers. This qualitative study used focus group discussions with traditional leaders, medical practitioners, parents, recent initiates, and COGTA representatives in OR Tambo, Amathole, and Alfred Nzo districts of the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Six themes emerged: stakeholder roles and responsibilities; preparation and permission processes; psychological and mental health assessment; gender considerations in social work involvement; challenges, fatalities, and government interventions; and cultural competence and collaboration. The findings revealed support for the Act but identified limitations in its emphasis on medical assessments without corresponding psychosocial assessment. The study demonstrates the importance of integrating social workers to provide holistic, culturally sensitive psychosocial support within ulwaluko. Full article

Over the past few decades, Canada has witnessed a profound shift in how individuals relate to religion—not simply in terms of declining affiliation, but in how meaning, identity, and belonging are negotiated beyond traditional religious institutions. While previous research has identified key factors that support intergenerational religious transmission, less attention has been paid to how individuals negotiate challenges to their religious identities at critical moments across the life course. Drawing on select qualitative interviews from the Transmission of Religion Across Generations project in Canada, this article examines how individuals make meaning with and from religion when their beliefs are stressed or challenged. Focusing on autobiographical narratives of participants socialized into Christian and Muslim traditions, it explores how religious identities are maintained, transformed, or abandoned at critical touchpoints and turning points. The findings suggest that participants’ trajectories varied according to social supports and interpretive resources available to them, as well as the degree of institutional flexibility within their religious traditions. By examining the processes and conditions of meaning-making, this article offers a framework for understanding how religious identities are negotiated and supported at key moments across the life course, shaping patterns of religious continuity, transformation, and decline. Full article

The forced displacement of Hmong communities following the Secret War in Laos in 1975 transformed the conditions under which Hmong language and cultural knowledge were transmitted from one generation to the next. Subsequent migration and resettlement dispersed Hmong communities across the globe, particularly in the United States. Although research has documented language shift, revitalization efforts, intergenerational learning, and educational responses, less attention has been given to the individuals who sustain Hmong language continuity and the conditions that make this continuity possible. Drawing on a portraiture study of six Hmong cultural practitioners in California and Minnesota, this article asks: Who sustains Hmong language continuity after displacement, and what makes continuity possible? Across portrait narratives, practitioners sustained Hmong language and cultural knowledge through everyday cultural labor, relationships, mentorship, ceremonial practice, documentation, interpretation, and adaptation. Their pathways into cultural practice differed, yet their work also created conditions through which others could access, learn, participate in, and carry cultural knowledge forward. This work is conceptualized as condition-making, the ongoing and deliberate cultural labor through which practitioners keep Hmong language and cultural knowledge available and meaningful beyond isolated opportunities for cultural participation. By shifting attention from opportunities to conditions, this article broadens understandings of intergenerational language continuity in diasporic communities, expands recognition of who can be considered a Hmong language and cultural practitioner, and demonstrates how culturally grounded reconstruction can create pathways for future practitioners. Full article

Botswana provides a setting in which to examine pastoral power. Customary authority, Christian institutions, public-health programmes, and state law have each helped to shape the social regulation of gender and sexuality. This systematic review brings together Botswana-specific scholarship on the ways care, counselling, scriptural interpretation, and institutional support affect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and other gender- and sexually diverse people. The review followed PRISMA 2020. Web of Science, Scopus, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, and Google Scholar were searched from database inception to 15 May 2024, and a supplementary search of publisher sites, indexes, and citation networks was updated to 31 July 2026. Five independent sources met the eligibility criteria: one qualitative interview study, one field-informed country report, and three documentary, legal, church-historical, or biblical analyses. The CASP qualitative checklist and the JBI text-and-opinion checklist were used for design-appropriate appraisal. Across this small and varied literature, four patterns recurred: the moral authority assigned to scripture and culture; care that was conditional or incomplete; interaction among religious, health, legal, and civil-society institutions; and dialogical alternatives to exclusion. Evidence is strongest for public discourse, institutional positions, and reported counselling experiences; no included source directly observed a pastoral ritual. Religious care may offer belonging and support, but it may also carry expectations of conformity. Broader claims will require ethnographic and participatory research developed with, and responsive to, LGBTIQ+ Batswana. Full article

This article asks how Basarwa communities of Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) came to be represented as populations requiring protection, development, conservation management and relocation, and what those shifts meant for land, gender and cosmological life. It presents a critical genealogical review of a purposively assembled corpus of 45 legal, policy, ethnographic, historical and theological sources. The analysis traces four formations: colonial protection, post-independence development and sedentarisation, conservation-led relocation, and rights-based recognition accompanied by administrative restriction. CKGR-specific evidence documents the loss of access to land, water, hunting and services even after important court victories. Evidence on gender is narrower. Studies of New Xade and other Botswana San communities suggest that relocation could devalue women’s foraging knowledge and reduce autonomy, but comparative research also shows that sedentarisation alone does not determine gender inequality. Missionary discourse is therefore treated as part of a longer representational archive, not as a proven direct cause of contemporary relocation policy. The article argues that “exile in ancestral lands” is best understood as an interpretive description of material and relational estrangement. A decolonial theological reading makes visible the moral and spiritual significance of land while avoiding claims that all Basarwa communities share a single cosmology. Full article

Artificial intelligence is being adopted across African public administration; health; education and finance; and the systems concerned act on a recorded or inferred gender value before they deliver anything at all. The problem this article addresses is that the categories operating in digital identity registers; automated facial analysis; biometric enrolment for social grants and language technologies are binary; anatomically grounded and administratively fixed; and that this specification reached the continent as a colonial import rather than as a description of how gendered standing is actually held. The article traces the descent of that binary; recovers from one southern African site a documented account of how gendered personhood is conferred and revised; and converts that account into design requirements. The design is conceptual and genealogical, reading three corpora against one another: the ethnographic record of the Balobedu of Bolobedu in Limpopo, South Africa; principally the Krige corpus and later commentary upon it; the technical and audit literature on gender classification; and South African identification law. Yoruba and Igbo scholarship is retained for comparison. Standing at the site is shown to be conferred through office; seniority; cattle and marriage rather than read from the body; so that a woman may hold the position of husband and a queenship may pass through a line of women. Systems in current use represent none of the properties by which such standing is held; and the article specifies thirteen changes to datasets; taxonomies; interfaces and procurement through which they could do so. Full article

This study examines the role of genealogy in the construction of noble identity and social legitimacy through the case of the Villafañe lineage between the Kingdom of León and Spanish America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing upon archival documentation, genealogical records, heraldic sources, and colonial evidence from León (Spain), La Rioja, Tucumán, and Córdoba (present-day Argentina), the article combines historical genealogy, social history, and Atlantic studies to reconstruct the trajectory of the lineage and its transregional networks. The findings indicate that the continuity of the Villafañe family was sustained through the interaction of documented descent, kinship alliances, municipal participation, Atlantic mobility, and the preservation of genealogical narratives that reinforced lineage identity and noble status across geographically distant settings. Migration to Spanish America did not represent a rupture with Leonese origins; rather, it facilitated the adaptation and projection of pre-existing forms of social organization and collective identity within colonial environments. The study argues that genealogy functioned simultaneously as a documentary practice and as a mechanism through which noble memory, social distinction, and historical continuity were articulated and reproduced. More broadly, the Villafañe case illustrates how family networks connected local Iberian societies with colonial elite environments, contributing to the formation and persistence of noble identities across the Atlantic world. Full article