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Genealogy
Special Issues
Nations in Time: Genealogy, History and the Narration of Time
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Nations in Time: Genealogy, History and the Narration of Time

A special issue of Genealogy (ISSN 2313-5778).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 July 2018) | Viewed by 56138

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Atsuko Ichijo

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Politics, School of Law, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Kingston University, Thames KT1 2EE, UK
Interests: the issues related to nationalism and modernity including theories of nationalism; nationalisms of the British Isles and Japan; European integration; the normative claims of nationalism; sovereignty; citizenship. She is a member of the editorial team of Nations and Nationalism and has acted as an international expert for the European Commission for several occasions

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Like any other human community, one of the fundamental roles nations play is to embed individuals in a particular point in time and space. In other words, nations and nationalism, an organisational principle of social life, work to provide individuals with a sense of who they are and where they belong. While nations are not the only form of community to serve human kind in this manner, they are the most privileged due to their intricate relationship with the nation-state, the dominant form of political organisation.

The ways in which nations and nationalism give shape to and maintain awareness and consciousness of time to members of nations and the importance of interpretation of the past in maintaining nations have been widely examined in the study of nations and nationalism under various headings including the use and abuse of history, the distinction between official and ‘ethno-‘ history, nations without history and so on. Building on these works, the special issue aims to examine the specificity of genealogy as way of comprehending time in the formation and maintenance of nations and in articulating nationalism. In other words, what does genealogy bring to nations and nationalism that history, chronology, myths or legends do not?

The term genealogy immediately suggests ancestry, which in turn suggests some form of blood relationship. In the study of nations and nationalism, the reference to blood relationship is linked to the understanding of ethnic nationhood, which is often seen as problematic in the liberal democratic normative framework. But is this the only contribution genealogy makes to the study of nations and nationalism? The special issue invites contributions to investigate the relationship between nations and time focusing on the characteristics of genealogy as a way of making sense of time and the past.

There are a number of questions to be addressed including:

  • What does genealogy provide in the formation and maintenance of nations that history and other forms of narrating time and the past do not?
  • Is the significance of genealogy limited to the formation and maintenance of ethnic nations? How would genealogy work in a civic nation?
  • Does the significance of genealogy vary across time? Is its significance eroded with modernisation/democratisation/secularisation?
  • What are the factors that privilege genealogy in narrating the nation’s life? Would genealogy in describing the nation be more important in societies which are heavily influenced by Confucianism, for example? Would the rise of a middle class with interest in family history strengthen the position of genealogy as a main way of understanding the nation’s past?
  • When does genealogy, or family history, of a nation become a history which is shared publicly? Examining genealogies (i.e. critical junctures) of national identity or national political community.
  • How do different paradigms of national community (primordialist, liberal-democratuc, etc.) mobilize the idea of the nation-as-genealogy or family history?
Dr. Atsuko Ichijo
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • nations
  • naitonalism
  • genealogy
  • history
  • dealing with the past
  • ethnic vs civic nationhood
  • time consciousness

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Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

13 pages, 751 KiB  
Article
Forging Common Origin in the Making of the Mexican Nation
by Natividad Gutiérrez Chong
Genealogy 2020, 4(3), 77; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4030077 - 20 Jul 2020
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 5663
Abstract
The Mexican nation was built by the state. This construction involved the formulation and dissemination of a national identity to forge a community that shares common culture and social cohesion. The focus of the article is to analyze the myth of the origin [...] Read more.
The Mexican nation was built by the state. This construction involved the formulation and dissemination of a national identity to forge a community that shares common culture and social cohesion. The focus of the article is to analyze the myth of the origin of the nation, mestizaje, as this is a long-lasting formula of national integration. After more than a century of mestizaje, real or fictitious, Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples have begun to question the capability of this common origin since it invalidates the origins of many other ethnic communities, especially in the current phase of the nation state, which refers to the recognition of cultural diversity. The myth is propagated by official means and is highly perceived by society, due to its high symbolic content that is well reflected in popular pictorial representations. The final part of the article will refer to the mestizo myth in the imagination of some Indigenous intellectuals and students, who hold their own ethnic myths of foundation or origin. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Nations in Time: Genealogy, History and the Narration of Time)
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26 pages, 6539 KiB  
Article
Kyrgyz Genealogies and Lineages: Histories, Everyday Life and Patriarchal Institutions in Northwestern Kyrgyzstan
by Nathan Light
Genealogy 2018, 2(4), 53; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2040053 - 8 Dec 2018
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 9288
Abstract
Uruu patrilineages and genealogical narratives about them are important aspects of Kyrgyz social practice and reflect some tensions and contradictions in contemporary Kyrgyz self-understanding and identities. This article explores the complex relationship of patrilineal kinship to historical knowledge and lived social experience in [...] Read more.
Uruu patrilineages and genealogical narratives about them are important aspects of Kyrgyz social practice and reflect some tensions and contradictions in contemporary Kyrgyz self-understanding and identities. This article explores the complex relationship of patrilineal kinship to historical knowledge and lived social experience in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. The contrasting situations of men and women within patrilineages are analyzed to reveal the shifting relationships of gender, genealogy and patrilineal kinship. Local meanings and uses of genealogy and history are shown to differ from those developed at the national level as part of Kyrgyz nation-building: Narratives about local lineages and their heroes portray different sacred and social worlds than those about the hierarchical world of elite politics and the military feats of national heroes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Nations in Time: Genealogy, History and the Narration of Time)
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23 pages, 286 KiB  
Article
In War Time: Dialectics of Descent, Consent, and Conflict in American Nationalism
by Susan-Mary Grant
Genealogy 2018, 2(4), 45; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2040045 - 22 Oct 2018
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3793
Abstract
The United States, according to sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, was the ‘first new nation’. It may be at least anticipated, therefore, that genealogy, history, and the narration of time would prove more than usually complicated in a political state united across time and [...] Read more.
The United States, according to sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, was the ‘first new nation’. It may be at least anticipated, therefore, that genealogy, history, and the narration of time would prove more than usually complicated in a political state united across time and space solely by a civic idealism, and a people bound together only by what president Abraham Lincoln romantically described as ‘mystic chords of memory’. In order to probe the nationalist lineaments of America’s particular approach to locating the nation in time and in tradition, this paper traces a genealogy of American nationalism by interrogating three specific national discourses that have been of significance to the United States since its colonial beginnings. First, the identification of America as the New Israel in the New World; the attempt to inscribe the nation into spiritual, Biblical time. Second, the racial distinctions that America deployed to sustain a civic version of ethnic genealogical determinants, and to construct a coherent narrative of national lineage that embedded its citizens in time and space. And, finally, the role that conflict played, and still plays as both a central core and historical framework for both the narration, and the collapsing of time in the United States today. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Nations in Time: Genealogy, History and the Narration of Time)
18 pages, 286 KiB  
Article
National Identities: Temporality and Narration
by Carsten Humlebæk
Genealogy 2018, 2(4), 36; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2040036 - 20 Sep 2018
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 4596
Abstract
National identities are social phenomena with concrete—both political and social—effects in society, but a fundamental part of their constitution takes place through narratives about the collective. The existence of collective identities thus depends on drawing boundaries between the collective ‘we’ and the ‘others’, [...] Read more.
National identities are social phenomena with concrete—both political and social—effects in society, but a fundamental part of their constitution takes place through narratives about the collective. The existence of collective identities thus depends on drawing boundaries between the collective ‘we’ and the ‘others’, as well as on disseminating coherent ideas about the fundamental identity of the we-group. These narratives thus constitute a privileged object for investigating how collective identities are constructed and legitimised in a discourse that places the collective in time, that is, with a coherent and logical narrative about the past and a trustworthy projection into the future. This article defends, first, the concept of the ‘master narrative’ as a useful analytical category for investigating how national history is constructed, and, second, the concepts of ‘sites of memory’ and ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ as means of accessing this narrative. These concepts represent instances of creation and rewriting, respectively, of the narrative and are thus useful tools for analysing how a sense of connectedness with the community through time is created: that is, how a sense of continuity with certain distant epochs is conveyed, and how, on the other hand, a sense of discontinuity with other periods is favoured. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Nations in Time: Genealogy, History and the Narration of Time)
15 pages, 218 KiB  
Article
Pan-Africanism: A Quest for Liberation and the Pursuit of a United Africa
by Mark Malisa and Phillippa Nhengeze
Genealogy 2018, 2(3), 28; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2030028 - 14 Aug 2018
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 20586
Abstract
Our paper examines the place of Pan-Africanism as an educational, political, and cultural movement which had a lasting impact on the on the relationship between liberation and people of African descent, in the continent of Africa and the Diaspora. We also show its [...] Read more.
Our paper examines the place of Pan-Africanism as an educational, political, and cultural movement which had a lasting impact on the on the relationship between liberation and people of African descent, in the continent of Africa and the Diaspora. We also show its evolution, beginning with formerly enslaved Africans in the Americas, to the colonial borders of the 1884 Berlin Conference, and conclude with the independence movements in Africa. For formerly enslaved Africans, Pan-Africanism was an idea that helped them see their commonalities as victims of racism. That is, they realized that they were enslaved because they came from the same continent and shared the same racial heritage. They associated the continent of Africa with freedom. The partitioning of Africa at the Berlin Conference (colonialism) created pseudo-nation states out of what was initially seen as an undivided continent. Pan-Africanism provided an ideology for rallying Africans at home and abroad against colonialism, and the creation of colonial nation-states did not erase the idea of a united Africa. As different African nations gained political independence, they took it upon themselves to support those countries fighting for their independence. The belief, then, was that as long as one African nation was not free, the continent could not be viewed as free. The existence of nation-states did not imply the negation of Pan-Africanism. The political ideas we examine include those of Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Maya Angelou, and Thabo Mbeki. Pan-Africanism, as it were, has shaped how many people understand the history of Africa and of African people. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Nations in Time: Genealogy, History and the Narration of Time)
18 pages, 284 KiB  
Article
Time, Kinship, and the Nation
by Steven E. Grosby
Genealogy 2018, 2(2), 17; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2020017 - 29 Apr 2018
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 11217
Abstract
There remains both a great deal of confusion over the nature of kinship and an inappropriate resistance to understanding the nation as one form of kinship, specifically, territorial kinship. Although one finds the relatively early and occasional analysis of the nation in terms [...] Read more.
There remains both a great deal of confusion over the nature of kinship and an inappropriate resistance to understanding the nation as one form of kinship, specifically, territorial kinship. Although one finds the relatively early and occasional analysis of the nation in terms of kinship, for example, by Lloyd Fallers, anthropologists, including paradoxically Ernest Gellner, have avoided understanding nationality in this way. Despite Anthony Smith’s attention to ethnie, those associated with nationalism studies have also generally avoided analyzing the nation in terms of kinship, as can be seen by the ill-informed hostility to the category “primoridal”. This article rectifies this mistake by re-examining the category of kinship, along both its vertical, temporal axis and horizontal, geographical axis, with attention to nationality in general and, in particular, in antiquity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Nations in Time: Genealogy, History and the Narration of Time)
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