Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040131

Authors: Valentina Villafañe Jorge Hugo Villafañe

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.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040130

Authors: Meno Del Picchia

This article analyzes the creative and social practices surrounding batida do gueto (ghetto beat), an emerging Afro-diasporic electronic music genre developed by Lisbon’s peripheral youth. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2025—including participant observation in home studios, semi-structured interviews, and digital netnography—this study explores how young Afro-descendant DJs transform digital music production software, specifically FL Studio, into technologies of postcolonial belonging. The discussion is structured around three main dimensions: first, the emergence of the “Fox clan,” a symbolic kinship network and musical lineage built through peer-to-peer knowledge transmission; second, the analysis of home studio musicking, highlighting the emic category of descompasso (rhythmic micro-displacement) as an esthetic and identity element that encapsulates postcolonial experiences of racialization and displacement; and finally, the urban and transnational circulation of batida do gueto through parties that challenge the boundaries between peripheral neighborhoods and Lisbon’s central neighborhoods. By bringing digital musicking into dialog with contemporary debates on the Black Atlantic and the politics of belonging, this article argues that the sonic subversions embedded in the genre operate as crucial resources of contestation, allowing peripheral youth to claim spatial visibility, citizenship, and historical recognition within contemporary Portuguese society.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040129

Authors: Makamohelo Malimabe Tenson Muyambo Paul Leshota

Burial and mourning practices in Africa have long been embedded in deeply rooted cultural, spiritual and communal value systems. However, these traditions are undergoing significant transformation through modernisation, urbanisation, migration, religious change and economic pressure. This study examines the changing dynamics of burial and mourning practices in Southern Africa, with particular attention to Zimbabwe and Lesotho. Drawing on qualitative insights from existing scholarship, cultural analysis and the researchers’ contextual observations, the paper explores how mourning periods, communal participation, ritual ceremonies, ancestral relations and attachment to burial land are being reconfigured rather than simply abandoned. In both countries, prominent shifts include the professionalisation and commercialisation of funerals, the influence of Pentecostal Christianity, the growing role of funeral assurance schemes and the disruption of expected rites by COVID-19. Using functionalist, symbolic interactionist and African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS) perspectives, the paper identifies a continuing tension between cultural identity and contemporary practical realities. It argues that some indigenous practices have weakened, while others have been adapted or hybridised into new cultural forms. The comparison contributes to debates on cultural continuity, genealogy, identity and social change by showing how communities preserve the social and spiritual functions of mourning even when its outward forms change. The paper is positioned primarily within cultural studies, specifically the interdisciplinary study of religion, ritual and social change. Among the factors considered, Pentecostal reinterpretation and ritual substitution, the professionalisation and commodification of funerals, and migration, together with pressure on burial land, appear most influential. COVID-19 is retained as a historically bounded accelerator rather than the dominant continuing force.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040128

Authors: Canisius Mwandayi

Post-apartheid South Africa continues to grapple with a paradox. Constitutionally, the country is founded on values of human dignity, equality and the advancement of human rights. Socially and politically, however, the country has witnessed recurrent episodes of intra-communal violence, particularly directed at foreign nationals and marginalized groups within its own borders. While scholarship on themes such as justice, Ubuntu, reconciliation and liberation is well developed in South African theology, there remains a need to engage biblical texts that directly address brotherhood betrayal within the rainbow of nations. The Book of Obadiah provides such a resource. Using historical-critical, literary and intertextual exegesis, African biblical hermeneutics and theological reflection, the study seeks to find how Obadiah can be used both as a critique and source of hope in the South African context. The main research question guiding this study is: How can a contextual African reading of Obadiah contribute to theological and ethical reflection on community violence and restoration in contemporary South Africa? From the findings, it is quite clear that the prophetic text resonates with current realities in South Africa, including nationalist gloating, politics of space and xenophobic violence. In light of the message in Obadiah, the study recommends that South Africa needs to rethink kinship, restitution and pan-African solidarity. Just as Edom forgot its shared womb with Jacob, South Africa risks forgetting the assistance it received from fellow African states. The politics of space demands memory work.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040127

Authors: Manuela Fernández Ruiz

This article presents a scoping review of antigypsyism in compulsory education, with particular attention to the Catalan context. Its aim is to map the state of knowledge, identify the main mechanisms through which structural racism against Roma people is reproduced in education, and identify existing gaps in the research. Following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, of the 282 records initially identified across five databases, 48 academic studies and institutional sources meeting the inclusion criteria were analysed. The conceptual framework brings together the definition proposed by the Alliance Against Antigypsyism with critical pedagogy, critical communicative methodology, critical race theory, and intersectionality. The analysis is organised around four levels: discourse, pedagogical practices, school organisation, and educational outcomes. The findings show that educational antigypsyism is a structural phenomenon, with both explicit and implicit manifestations, which produces profound gaps in achievement, graduation, and academic continuity. Its most persistent expressions are school segregation, low teacher expectations, and curricular invisibility. In Catalonia, despite an advanced legal framework, specific research remains virtually non-existent. These findings indicate that educational antigypsyism must be addressed as embedded structural racism, requiring Catalonia-specific research and policies that move beyond deficit-based thinking and recognise Roma agency.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040126

Authors: Johannes Persson Anna Kvist

In this exploratory review and conceptual analysis, we examine cases and debates in the theoretical literature that highlight biodiversity and conservation decision-making contexts in which knowledge systems, and their interactions or lack thereof, are central concerns. A review of scientific articles indexed in the Web of Science reveals a notable trend in the conservation literature: the growing prominence of knowledge systems, particularly Indigenous knowledge systems. Framing knowledge as systems, we suggest, draws attention to both differences and similarities among scientific, Indigenous, and local forms of knowledge. Such discussions are increasingly common in the literature, including recent IPCC and IPBES reports. Against this backdrop, the present paper explores the potential role of multiple knowledge systems in identifying and, where possible, addressing knowledge gaps relevant to biodiversity conservation and environmental decision-making. The paper distinguishes between epistemic and non-epistemic motivations for including different knowledge systems and offers conceptual tools for clarifying both their internal structure and the relationships through which knowledge exchange occurs. Rather than advocating full integration, we argue that selective overlap and dialogical interaction may provide more practical pathways towards inclusive and evidence-informed decision-making. By focusing on how different knowledge systems can contribute to filling specific knowledge gaps, the paper seeks to advance a more nuanced understanding of their role in conservation policy and practice.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040125

Authors: Maria Papandreou Zoe Konstantinidou

This study examined parents’ and grandparents’ perspectives on intergenerational interactions within an innovative school–family partnership in early childhood education (ECE). Drawing on sociocultural concepts of learning and a ‘more-than-parents’ approach to intergenerational learning (IGL), this research project adopted a two-way partnership perspective, encouraging children and their family members to explore and reconstruct local cultural heritage sites together by utilising their lived experiences and cultural resources. A qualitative case study approach was employed, with data derived from an online open-ended questionnaire completed by 20 adult participants (i.e., 14 parents and six grandparents). Inductive thematic analysis revealed five core themes: (a) acknowledging children as capable agents; (b) identifying children’s learning; (c) adults as learners; (d) shared activities as a space for fostering family connection; and (e) challenges and suggestions for future implementation. The findings demonstrate that the shared exploration of cultural heritage can enhance mutual learning and foster vivid intergenerational communication, thereby strengthening family relationships. By observing the active role of young learners in intergenerational activities, participants acknowledged capabilities that they had previously overlooked in their children and/or grandchildren. However, challenges relating to time constraints, available resources and practical issues suggest that schools need to provide families with tailored information about such initiatives. Overall, this study emphasises the pivotal role of early childhood education in fostering IGL through reciprocal school–family partnerships.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040124

Authors: Pa Nhia Xiong Chali Lee

This article examines queer Hmong identity and cultural change in the United States over the past fifty years, a period shaped by refugee resettlement, intergenerational negotiation, and evolving family practice. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with ten queer Hmong individuals and analyzing the findings through two frameworks centering Hmong epistemologies, this article argues that queer Hmong belonging is negotiated through placement: the positioning of queer Hmong children in Hmong genealogical structures. Participants describe acceptance not only through “coming out” or verbal acceptance, but through everyday acts of care, inclusion, and protection that sustain family life. By centering acceptance, obligation, and sacrifice, this article reframes queerness as an act of cultural continuity emerging through intergenerational care, mutual accommodation, and shared responsibility, rather than through the rejection of Hmong tradition. These findings show how Hmong parents and queer children actively negotiate shifting norms while reconfiguring belonging, family cohesion, and cultural responsibility within the diaspora. In doing so, this article contributes to critical Hmong studies, queer of color critique, education, and social work by offering a framework for understanding queer identity formation that is grounded in Hmong genealogical and epistemological terms, rather than measured against Western models of visibility and disclosure.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040123

Authors: Karen Sasakura

This paper explores the historical relationship between refugee administration and refugees’ negotiations over citizenship through an analysis of Hmong refugees’ experiences in the United States. During the Vietnam War, approximately 50,000 Hmong soldiers were mobilized into the CIA-backed guerrilla unit as part of US anti-communist operations. Following the communist victory in 1975, Hmong refugees from Laos fled to Thailand and were later resettled in the United States. Previous scholarship primarily focused on either the legal dimension of Hmong naturalization or their process of Americanization. Studies on refugee incorporation and military naturalization have likewise interpreted citizenship as a legal status granted by the state. However, recognition as citizens extends beyond a legal membership unilaterally conferred by the nation-state. This article instead inquires how Hmong refugees in the United States negotiated over competing forms of citizenship and social recognition after the Secret War, and how the US government selectively incorporated those claims through militarized and other conditional forms of inclusion. To answer these questions, this paper approaches citizenship as a contested arena negotiated by the state and refugees themselves. Integrating legal and social history, the analysis examines both the top-down citizenship framework promoted through the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act and the bottom-up citizenship practices advanced by Hmong communities. Drawing on archival materials ranging from Congressional records to local organizational documents in Minnesota, this study shows that veterans’ organizations set the basis of belonging on their wartime sacrifice, women’s and community organizations emphasized legal protection and social reproduction, and exile organizations sustained attachments across multiple homelands. This research also demonstrates that the United States eventually recognized Hmong belonging primarily through narratives of military loyalty and geopolitical usefulness. Ultimately, this research enriches the historiography of broader immigration, citizenship, and military studies by reconceptualizing refugee incorporation as a contested process of recognition rather than a linear path to national membership, while relativizing contemporary worldviews surrounding refugee protection, immigrant soldiers, and military naturalization.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040122

Authors: Varshini Narayanan

In this article, I analyze white American performances of South Asian music as concurrent performances of racial identity. I deploy a performance studies perspective that treats the visible and audible manifestations of race as performative agents in the manufacturing of racial structures. Scholars of interracial performance such as Philip Deloria, Eric Lott, and E. Patrick Johnson have long examined the ways white Americans have used the traditional art forms of ethnic Others as a means of understanding their own whiteness in silhouette. Likewise, I argue here that the performance and consumption of Hindustani music in its American diasporic context serves as a sort of funhouse mirror, forcing white practitioners and spectators to confront their own Orientalizing impulses and thereby affording them the opportunity to do whiteness differently. This article is structured in two parts. The first follows ethnographic interviews with a white American sitar player across his interactions with South Asian collaborators and audiences; the second reverses this gaze, this time analyzing a South Asian tabla player’s performance before a white Euro-American audience. I demonstrate the ways the question of authenticity generates a productive anxiety in white practitioners and consumers of South Asian music, one that ultimately leads them to perform their whiteness differently before the brown gaze. In calling this a “performance” of whiteness, I mean that these cross-cultural transgressions go beyond making whiteness visible, as Lott and Deloria suggest, towards actually producing a different kind of whiteness, one that is in dialogue with the perspective and demands of the non-white Other.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040121

Authors: Christoph Baumgartner

This article examines emotional and practical responses to the damaging, demolition, or repurposing of church buildings in contemporary Western Europe. Drawing on research on the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and the repurposing of a neighborhood church in Amsterdam, it explores why even individuals who do not, or no longer, identify as Christians may experience such developments as profound losses. Using Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance and Andreas Reckwitz’s theory of loss, I argue that culturalized religious forms can acquire ethical significance because they become part of the social and material world through which individuals develop their practical self-understanding. This perspective helps explain experiences of belonging, resonance, and loss associated with Christian material forms. However, I also argue that such experiences do not by themselves justify preservation politics or the privileged status of historically dominant religious traditions. The article therefore combines an interpretation of attachments to culturalized Christian forms with a critical reflection on their political ambivalence in contemporary religiously diverse democratic societies committed to political equality and freedom of religion or belief.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040120

Authors: Vasilis S. Gavalas

The 1920s are often described by demographers as a period of “population depression” across Europe. By the end of the decade, many Western and Northern European countries were approaching or had already fallen below replacement level fertility for the first time in recorded history. Greece provides a distinct contrast to the Western European trend, recording volatile but generally ascending fertility rates during the 1920s. This rise in fertility is often attributed to the arrival of over 1.2 million Greek refugees from Asia Minor, which presumably exhibited more prolific reproductive behavior than the native population. This paper examines the reproductive behavior of the Greek population by geographical department and refugee status (refugees and natives), employing established methods of historical demography to overcome interwar data limitations. The findings reveal that the observed rise in fertility was driven both by an increase in marital fecundity and by a shift in nuptiality. The shift in marriage patterns bolstered the Total Fertility Rates (TFRs), while the Total Marital Fertility Rates (TMFRs) followed a proportionally lower increase. Moreover, the regional analysis reveals a finding previously unaddressed in the relevant literature: in the early 1920s, fertility in certain Greek regions had already dropped below replacement level, even though the national average remained above it. These spatial disparities underscore that interwar Greece was a complex demographic mosaic of cultural and social identities, particularly across territories recently annexed into the modern Greek state.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040119

Authors: Nadia Kiwan

This article examines how laïcité (secularism) discourse regarding the need for neutrality in sport acts as an enabler of racialised governance in contemporary France. I first provide a brief contextual discussion of Republican political culture as a ‘perpetual civilising mission’, which is founded on an abstract universalist framing of the concepts of equality and liberty. The article subsequently discusses how the mobilisation of what I call a ‘civilising secularism’ in contemporary France has shifted from a primary fixation on schools, universities and the workplace to sports and sporting practices, thus illustrating how its ‘civilising’ work is never done. However, in the face of sustained efforts to mobilise laïcité as a civilising concept, I also demonstrate how Muslim women are resisting secularist calls for ‘neutrality’ through collective action against their exclusion, notably via campaign groups such as Les Hijabeuses and Basket Pour Toutes. Furthermore, I argue that their resistance needs to be understood not only empirically but also conceptually. My analysis of these two collective campaigns therefore illustrates how they are actively contributing to a re-evaluation of Republican conceptions of equality and liberty. I draw on the work of Étienne Balibar regarding ‘equaliberty’ in order to analyse the campaigns of Les Hijabeuses and Basket Pour Toutes before proposing an extension to his concept that more fully reflects their activism. I propose the concept of ‘sororal equaliberty’ to capture this contribution.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040118

Authors: Schirin Amir-Moazami

Germany’s unconditional support of Israel is encapsulated in the dictum “Israel’s security is Germany’s raison d’état” (Staatsräson). Shaped after World War II and formally articulated by Angela Merkel in her speech at the Knesset in 2008, the confession to Staatsräson has been intensified amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, following the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023. This article conceptualizes the consolidation of this extra- and paralegal doctrine through the lens of Carl Schmitt’s political theology. A politico-theological approach lays bare how modern sovereignty rearticulates divine attributes like omnipotence, supremacy and the power of decision in a secularized form at the heart of liberal constitutional orders. First, the article argues that Staatsräson operates through the selective displacement of legal constraints by subordinating specific international and constitutional norms to a politico-theologically defined superior political commitment. Second, building on the Schmittian premise that the sovereignty of decision is inseparable from the sovereignty of distinction, the article examines how the German–Israeli bond of “friends” is constituted through the designation of enemies. Friend–enemy distinctions appear on the performative level in speeches of state representatives who ritually confess Staatsräson, independently from Israel’s atrocious actions. Moreover, they materialize in directive documents like resolutions or modifications of punitive or citizenship law. In the third step, the paper therefore foregrounds the distinctly racializing components of Staatsräson in its disproportionate target of minoritized populations—above all Palestinians, Arabs, and/or Muslims, as well as anti-Zionist Jews—as threats to the political community. Finally, the article suggests moving beyond conventional framings of Staatsräson solely as a response to the Holocaust by situating it within a longer European genealogy of political–theological friend–enemy distinctions.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040117

Authors: Amy L. M. Hofmeier Judy A. Pickard Annaleise S. Mitchell Alixandra Risi Bevan Nicholas Jane S. Herbert

Existing research highlights continuity across generations in paternal practices and attitudes, often rooted in men’s experiences of being fathered. The psychological processes through which men translate these early experiences into beliefs about fatherhood have received little attention. Understanding how men develop beliefs about fatherhood may help explain the continuity and change in fathering practices across generations. Using reflexive modernisation as a lens, this study examines how men construct beliefs about fatherhood, with particular attention to their experiences of being fathered and the socio-cultural context. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve Australian men (M = 39 years) with varied relationships to fatherhood: non-fathers (n = 6), fathers (n = 3) and grandfathers (n = 3). Participants reflected on their early experiences of being fathered, current beliefs towards fatherhood and intended or current fathering behaviour. Reflexive thematic analysis resulted in four themes, namely: (1) Retrospective meaning-making of fathering experiences, (2) Negotiating fatherhood within a changing landscape, (3) The selective curation of beliefs, and (4) Beliefs as an ongoing project: content and tensions. The analysis suggests that belief formation is an ongoing, active and reflexive process responsive to the social context, reflected in men’s use of evaluation, comparison, negotiation and selective curation to build individualised beliefs about fatherhood. Findings also highlight how social structures sustain traditional norms and inhibit the translation of egalitarian ideals into reality. These findings extend existing understandings of fatherhood beliefs from what shapes them to how they are formed and negotiated, with implications for fatherhood interventions and practice.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040116

Authors: Nelson Paucca Gonzales Rusbel Jhon Rafayle Cuadra Giovanna Sonia Gutierrez Narrea Felix Caceres Galvez Jacqueline Esther Zamudio Ramirez

The research explores the possibility of understanding pre-Hispanic Andean philosophical thought through the use of Quechua terms such as pacha (world, universe, space and time) and pachayachachiq (the world that reveals itself). The aim has been to philosophically analyse how the runas (persons) understood their existence within a dynamic cosmos. Methodologically, the research follows a qualitative approach and hermeneutic method. The documentary recording technique was adopted for the linguistic, historical and ethnographic sources, which enabled a critical interpretation of these sources to be carried out. Furthermore, the results have shown that the term pacha constitutes a complex ontological category that integrates time, space and the generative force of energies, differing from Western conceptions. Pachayachachiq, meanwhile, emerges as a socially constructed knowledge based on the observation of the natural cycle. Andean society is therefore understood through its tetradic structure: (hanan pacha: the world above, kay pacha: the world here, uku pacha: the world within, and kuteq pacha: the changing world); these structures are articulated under principles of complementarity–reciprocity. It is concluded that the exploration of pachayachachiq has made it possible to become aware of a relational ontology that enables the realisation of a life cycle of nature, humanity and the universe. This way of understanding the world calls into question the dualist postulates of the Western worldview and proposes developing a conception of reality in relation to an endless change, thereby enriching lived experience. This way of understanding things calls into question the dualist postulates of the Western worldview and proposes bringing things closer to a conception of reality governed by constant relation, endless change and the enrichment of one’s own vital experience—a contribution to intercultural philosophy.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040115

Authors: Gonda A. H. Van Steen

This introduction accompanies nine articles published in this Special Issue of Genealogy titled “Adoption Is Stranger than Fiction,” over the course of 2025–2026. It draws out common themes and methodologies and reflects on the enduring appeal of identity quests and rootwork. It posits the more productive concept of identity-in-agency, the notion of the continuous development of one’s identity through active work in adoption-related areas, whether through activism, teaching, researching, or committing to literary and cultural activities. Lastly, this introduction reckons with voices denouncing the adoptee’s search for identity, often presented as an overly biological or biogenetic interest that discounts identity components that have been determined by culture or environment, not by birth or genes.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10040114

Authors: Kostas Rontos Dimitrios Antonoglou Panagiotis Giavrimis Pavlos Baltas Georgios Kontogiannis

The mass arrival of Asia Minor refugees following the events of 1922 profoundly altered the demographic and social structure of Greece, but its effects were geographically uneven. Despite extensive scholarship on refugee settlement at the national level, less attention has been given to its demographic consequences in the Eastern Aegean islands, which received particularly large refugee populations relative to their pre-existing populations. This study examines the scale and demographic effects of the refugee influx in Lesvos, Samos, and Chios, compares them with national patterns, and considers local responses and institutional measures related to integration. The study adopts a quantitative historical-demographic approach, complemented by qualitative archival and historical evidence. It draws primarily on the 1920 and 1928 Population Censuses and the 1923 Refugee Census, conducting comparative analyses at national, prefectural, and selected municipal levels. Population change and density are examined with and without refugees, while age and sex structures, sex ratios, dependency and aging indices, marital status, literacy, and population pyramids are used to assess changes in population composition. Archival and historical sources contextualize local responses and settlement and integration processes. The results show that in 1928 refugees represented 20.2% of the population of Lesvos, 17.0% of Chios, and 9.0% of Samos, compared with 17.2% nationally. Refugee settlement reversed otherwise negative population-growth trends in Lesvos and Chios and substantially increased population density. It also altered age and sex structures, although these effects varied among the three prefectures. Historical evidence indicates that initial tensions between refugees and local populations coexisted with socioeconomic integration and institutional support. Overall, national aggregates alone cannot adequately capture the demographic consequences of the 1922 refugee influx, as the Eastern Aegean islands experienced distinct patterns shaped by the scale, composition, and spatial distribution of refugee settlement.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030113

Authors: Linda Naicker

This article addresses the underrepresentation of religion in historical accounts of apartheid’s gendered political economy. It asks how colonial missionary discourse and apartheid law interacted in constructing and regulating Black womanhood, and how intersectionality and Bosadi hermeneutics can expose and contest the theological legitimation of Black women’s labour, sacrifice, and endurance. The study uses a qualitative historical-theological and contextual biblical method. It analyses selected historical scholarship, South African legislation, the Constitutional Court’s Mahlangu judgment, and Proverbs 31:10–31 and Ruth, through the lens of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality and Madipoane Masenya’s Bosadi hermeneutics. The analysis finds that mission Christianity and the apartheid state were neither identical nor uniform, but influential Christian ideals of domesticity, respectability, service, and feminine sacrifice could converge with a racialised system that restricted African women’s land, mobility, residence, labour, and family life. Proverbs 31 and Ruth are therefore treated as contested resources: they can affirm women’s agency and economic intelligence, but they can also be appropriated to moralise overwork and precarious survival. The article contributes an integrated historical-theological account that links law, labour, religion, and biblical reception without reducing African women to passive victims. It recommends that churches and theological institutions audit the distribution of labour and authority, support decent work and shared care, and interpret biblical texts with women whose lives are shaped by racialised and gendered inequality.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030112

Authors: Hongjie Dong Hongmei Feng Chenbai Luo

How do ordinary place names make a major river legible as heritage? This article examines Yellow River toponyms as everyday infrastructures through which hydrological space becomes spatialized memory in contemporary China. The study uses a nested mixed-methods design rather than treating every record as equivalent evidence. Its administrative frame contains 2249 unique current statutory township-level units in 178 county-level targets across all nine Yellow River province-level regions. A record-level audit links 1039 of the original 1314 survey records to 1008 unique current units, while 1215 units contain at least one place-specific interpretive field. Six non-exclusive tags identify hydrological space, multi-ethnic interaction, transport and trade, historical memory, state governance, and cross-cutting heritage activation. An E0–E3 rubric separates administrative identity from externally corroborated explanation, traceable survey narrative, and structural context. Forty-five cases form an evidence-graded pool, but only seven core and eleven qualified cases carry the main qualitative argument. Hydrological and historical narratives are the most widely supported layers, while interpretive coverage remains geographically and evidentially uneven. Place names make river heritage through localization, multilingual translation, mobility, temporal layering, and administrative circulation. Official standardization can preserve recognized forms, but it also produces selective legibility by making some variants, scripts, meanings, and origin accounts easier to retrieve than others. The article contributes to critical toponymy and critical heritage studies by showing how ordinary names mediate between local memory and national spatial infrastructures. It reframes the Global East as a setting where heritage is produced through accretion, translation, and database-mediated standardization, not only spectacular renaming.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030111

Authors: Susan Branco Melanie Espinueva+Aure Alexandra Sosnovskaya JaeRan Kim Grace Newton

This study is a secondary analysis of qualitative research that explored how transracial adoptees experience consciousness using the adoptee consciousness model. The original study involved focus groups in which 23 United States-based, adult transracial adoptee participants discussed their lived experiences of adoptee consciousness. Those focus group transcripts were transcribed, de-identified, and coded by the original research team. The secondary analysis research questions are (1) Who supports transracial adoptees during adoptee consciousness? and (2) How do they support transracial adoptees in the consciousness process? The secondary analysis methodology applied Thematic Analysis to identify patterns and themes from the original dataset transcriptions. Findings shed light on how participants in the study experienced support and/or lack of support. The findings offer guidance on how families, friends, and mental health professionals can provide meaningful support to transracial adoptees as they move through awareness of their understanding of adoption and their identities.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030110

Authors: Zhilong Yan Manyi Pei

Based on three years of sustained personal observations and extensive on-site interviews, this study is the first to investigate the bird totem worship customs of the Dong ethnic minority in southeast Guizhou, China. The Dong-inhabited regions of southeast Guizhou possess a long-standing tradition of bird totem worship, which has permeated every aspect of local people’s daily life, serving as a living museum where ancient bird totem worship continues to thrive in the present day. Through investigation and research, we can clearly perceive that bird totem worship here is no longer merely evidence of primitive thinking as previously discussed in academic circles, nor is it an endangered intangible cultural heritage. Instead, it represents emotional resonance with a more modern spirit and open-ended identity construction. Faced with the era of the internet and new media, they have broken free from the constraints of totem concepts and taboos, instead embracing creative totem will, totem activities, totem behaviors, and intelligent totems, thereby endowing totems with new belief content and forms of expression. They have transcended the preconceived concepts and fixed thinking about totems in academic discourse, making it an important vehicle for maintaining community relations, strengthening ethnic solidarity, inheriting ethnic culture, and continuing local civilization. Through the contemporary reconstruction of collective behavior, the traffic empowerment of internet short videos, and complex functional transformations, they have constructed a brand-new totem value system in the context of the internet and new media era, organizing a multi-dimensional, comprehensive social ecological view and civilizational value system. It is precisely through this continuous evolution, expansion, and activation in response to changing times that totems have acquired sustained vitality and creativity, providing a vivid case study for the contemporary transformation and creative development of ancient totemic beliefs. This is also the significant importance of field investigation—it enables us to gain entirely new value cognition and different theoretical perspectives from the living site of totem practices.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030109

Authors: Corrinne T. Sullivan Kim Spurway Karen Soldatic

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that centres Indigenous queer (henceforth, Indigiqueer) and Indigenous older people and Elders’ voices to explore the everyday tensions between protecting Indigenous cultural protocols against colonial incursions and the challenges presented by shifts in essentialist understandings of gender in the country now called Australia. There is to date very little written that address this topic, although there are two seminal works that investigate the matters more broadly, one by leading Aboriginal scholar Professor Bronwyn Carlson, and another by Noongar Wardandi scholar Professor Braden Hil. Our study uses a set of vignettes based on two interviews with Indigiqueer people and a yarning circle with Indigenous older people and Elders. The interviews and yarning circle are structured as a discussion between community members to provide some preliminary analysis about contemporary dynamic intergenerational debates within Indigenous communities in which competing understandings of culture, gender, safety, and responsibility coexist. For participants, intergenerationality is seen as central to both harm and healing, feelings of belonging and ostracism and ultimately to current and future Indigenous and Indigiqueer survivance and thrivance. Indigenous older people and Elders demonstrate an openness to different sexualities and an acceptance of sexuality-diverse people but are hesitant to allow gender-diverse people to participate in gendered community activities such as playing the didgeridoo (yidaki). To the contrary, Indigenous queer (henceforth Indigiqueer) participants articulate their fears regarding safety, exclusion, care and social isolation emerging from exclusionist gendered binary protocols. Younger generations are seen by all participants as sites of potentiality, that in combination with the power of shared storytelling and mutually constructed understandings, enable a shift towards greater acceptance, openness, and visibility. The paper also reveals the ways in which Indigiqueer people navigate spatial, cultural and social differences between regional and urban spaces, that are seen as differentially accepting of either their Indigeneity or their gender and sexuality diversity. The study’s findings also demonstrate the importance of Indigiqueer-controlled spaces and culturally safe organisations, that are grounded in community-led practices of care, belonging, and self-determination.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030108

Authors: Ratidzai Shoko Beatrice Ngulube

Entrepreneurship in South Africa is widely recognised as a critical driver of economic inclusion and job creation. While existing research highlights the role of formal education in enhancing entrepreneurial capability, less attention has been given to how entrenched gender norms, historical inequalities, and informal learning processes shape entrepreneurial visions. This study aims to investigate how gender dynamics shape entrepreneurial visions beyond formal educational attainment, particularly in contexts of persistent structural inequalities and high unemployment. The study adopts a qualitative research design. Using purposive sampling, 60 participants were selected and organised into three focus groups. Guided by Social Feminist Theory, the analysis foregrounds gendered social structures as central to the formation of entrepreneurial visions. Data were analysed thematically to explore recurring patterns related to structural uncertainty, informal learning, gendered perceptions of risk and confidence, and the reframing of entrepreneurial aspirations. The findings reveal that entrepreneurship often emerges in response to structural uncertainty rather than purely from opportunity-driven motives. Informal learning through community networks, lived experiences, and adaptive strategies constitutes a central source of entrepreneurial knowledge, particularly for women. Women participants frequently reported constrained growth aspirations shaped by structural barriers and questioned their own legitimacy, while men tended to benefit from broader institutional networks and greater perceived entrepreneurial confidence. The study highlights the need for policy interventions that extend beyond formal education. It recommends recognising informal competencies, addressing structural constraints, and developing gender-responsive support systems that validate diverse entrepreneurial pathways. Such interventions are essential for fostering inclusive entrepreneurship and reducing inequality in South Africa. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by foregrounding the role of gendered social realities in shaping entrepreneurial visions. It further demonstrates how informal learning processes inform these visions beyond formal educational attainment.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030107

Authors: Sarel Marais

This article argues that Foucault’s work demonstrates a historical trend moving towards an exclusion from space. This exclusion is predicated on a gaze that has systematically moved further away from the corporeal body to include the digital realm. This study deploys Foucault’s conceptualisation of ‘heterotopia’ as a tool for analysing the transformations in the relations between spaces and bodies. The article investigates Foucault’s work on space throughout his oeuvre to demonstrate that such an investigation reveals an emergent focus on bodily surveillance in relation to space, emerging with disciplinary power. Foucault’s analysis reveals that the emergence of biopolitics and regulatory controls allowed for the emergence and proliferation of exclusionary practices from spaces and institutions beyond the body. His later work on liberal governmentality and security reveals an even more dramatic reorganisation in power’s approach to space, which allows for a hyper-specific approach towards determining the inclusionary and exclusionary criteria from space. Foucault’s contemporary interlocutors demonstrate that this trend towards exclusion has been exacerbated and expanded even further beyond the body by the turn towards digital criteria for inclusion/exclusion from heterotopic space. The relation between Foucault’s spatial analyses and the emergence of digital ‘spaces’ provides new insight into the analysis of the contemporary relation between digital data, corporeal bodies, and heterotopic spaces.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030106

Authors: Tshenolo Jennifer Madigele Bakadzi Moeti

Bereavement in Southern Africa is not a private event. It is rather a shared and communal experience, shaped by rituals, faith, and relationships. In Botswana, mourning is influenced by Botho, a way of life that says, “I am because we are,” where a whole community carries the pain of loss together and takes responsibility for the bereaved. These communal rituals bring comfort, meaning and a sense of belonging, helping families accept death and move towards healing. Yet research also shows a harder side: many mourning practices are gendered and favors male gender. Widows often face long, strict rituals, social isolation and suspicion, rooted in patriarchy and ideas about impurity or danger, which can harm their emotional, social, and economic well-being. This article uses conceptual/theological analysis within pastoral theology and African relational ethics to examine these practices and to explore how churches and caregivers can honor culture while resisting injustice. Drawing on work of Botho African pastoral care and gender, it shows that the same communal systems that care can also exclude and marginalize widows. The article proposes a Gendered Botho Pastoral Care Model that calls Christian communities to sustain communal solidarity and shared mourning, challenge patriarchal and violent widowhood rites, reinterpret rituals in life-giving ways, and build resilience, dignity and agency for widows, so that mourning spaces become places of healing, justice and restored humanity Pastors for widows in Botswana and across Southern Africa.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030105

Authors: Shuo Wang Canglong Wang

The scholarship on Chinese womanhood has highlighted a split female subjectivity and fostered an enduring image of Chinese women as victims. Going beyond this image, the current study sought to explore how Chinese female doctors construct a polyphonic individual selfhood through flexible practices of coordination and adjustment on the continuum between work and family commitments. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 female physicians working at a private hospital in Shanghai. Analysis of the data revealed that these professional women presented themselves as individuals striving for career development who also had to address gender stereotypes in their workplaces. Based on our findings, we argue that female medical workers in China shape an inclusive notion of the gendered self by mediating work and family commitments and integrating them into a polyphonic form of subjectivity.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030104

Authors: Nomatter Sande

African immigrant men in the United Kingdom (UK) experience forms of suffering that transcend both the clinical framework of acculturation stress and the political narrative of racial victimhood. Existing scholarship frequently overlooks how race, religion, and gender historically entangle to construct diasporic identities. This paper investigates how African immigrant men in the UK navigate the constitutive forces of race, gender, and religion in constructing and resisting diasporic identities. The paper develops “Ntu Fracture” as a theological–anthropological framework to diagnose the wounding of diasporic masculine personhood at the level of vital relationality. The framework draws upon Bantu philosophy (Ntu, ubuntu) and Yoruba cosmology (àṣẹ), placing them in critical dialogue with Fanon’s sociogeny and Butler’s concept of precarity. Utilising a qualitative desktop methodology, the findings suggest a fractured subjectivity among African men in the UK driven by three main mechanisms: (1) institutional racism as recognition-severing, (2) immigration enforcement as obligation-interruption and (3) parenting surveillance as domestic colonisation. The paper concludes that the lived experiences of African religious communities within the UK’s hostile environment stem from historical constructions of race, religion, and gender, categories experienced as unified entities that collapse conventional distinctions between the sacred and the secular.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030103

Authors: Karansupamas Engchuan

Indigenous languages in Southern Thailand are increasingly affected by modernization, digital communication, and language contact, yet the relationship between kinship terminology, social organization, and linguistic sustainability among Indigenous Austroasiatic-speaking communities remains insufficiently explored. This study addresses three research questions: (1) how Tan’ean and Jaahaai kinship systems differ in their semantic structures and classificatory patterns; (2) how kinship terms reflect cultural worldviews, social organization, and relational values of the Manni and Mueng’ra communities; and (3) what challenges influence the transmission and sustainability of kinship-related linguistic knowledge. This study aims to comparatively analyze consanguineal and affinal kinship terminology in the Tan’ean language of the Manni ethnic group and the Jaahaai language of the Mueng’ra ethnic group, focusing on how kinship systems encode cultural worldviews, social relations, and adaptive strategies under contemporary change. Guided by Componential Analysis and Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory, this study employed a qualitative ethnolinguistic approach. Data were collected through genealogical elicitation, in-depth interviews, and participant observation with 40 key informants from Trang, Phatthalung, Satun, Songkhla, Yala, and Narathiwat provinces. The data were analyzed through semantic feature identification and comparative interpretation of kinship structures. The findings demonstrate that, despite shared Austroasiatic heritage, Tan’ean and Jaahaai exhibit distinct kinship systems reflecting different cultural logics. In response to the first research question, the findings reveal that the Manni system resembles the Hawaiian type, emphasizing egalitarian relations, generational categories, and inclusive incorporation of affinal relatives, whereas the Mueng’ra system shows Crow–Omaha characteristics, including generational skewing, gender-specific markers, hierarchical classification, and stronger influence from dominant regional languages. Regarding the second research question, the findings demonstrate that kinship terminology functions as a cultural mechanism for organizing social relationships, identity, and intergenerational obligations, reflecting different models of Indigenous social organization. For the third research question, the study identifies language contact, changing social conditions, and reduced intergenerational transmission as challenges affecting the continuity of Indigenous kinship knowledge. Therefore, the study recommends community-based orthographies, participatory digital learning platforms, and policies supporting Indigenous linguistic rights to strengthen language revitalization, cultural continuity, and Indigenous communities’ capacity to adapt to social transformation.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030102

Authors: Tahir Rashid

Immanuel Kant is synonymous with modernity, enlightenment and secularity. This reputation is earned through the incredible influence of his three weighty critiques, which have laid the intellectual, moral and aesthetic foundations for modern philosophical thought. Despite this reputation, many scholars in recent years have argued that Kant’s intellectual contribution to secularism, moral universality and political republicanism ought to be approached more critically. The ‘other’ Kant is also one of the progenitors of the modern concept of race. Kantians have defended Kant against charges that race is essential to his entire critical project. This essay moves beyond the stalemate between race scholars and Kantians by reading his concept of race together with his philosophy of religion. Drawing on critical approaches to religion, race and secularism, this essay argues that race is constitutive of his philosophy. More specifically, it demonstrates how race and religion are deeply entangled in Kant’s construction of Jews and Judaism as the constitutive outsiders of Euro-Christian modernity.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030101

Authors: Mehmet Nuri Şanda Doğan Gün

In the original publication (Şanda and Gün 2026), the Acknowledgments section was inadvertently omitted during the publication process, and the author would like to add the following acknowledgement: [...]

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030100

Authors: Ikenna Kamalu Ngozi Georginia Ugochukwu Chisom Paula Ogamba

Names and naming are some of the ways by which Igbo families and communities of Southeastern Nigeria construe and express ideation about their origins, kinship, intergroup relations, social and spiritual roles, and identity. The names that most Igbo families and communities bear provide information about their ancestry, historical ties, and the experiences and circumstances that define their existence as a distinct people. Among the Igbo, names are not merely a means of identification; they are perceived as carriers of history and social experiences. Igbo communities and families use names to identify the descendants (umu—children) of a particular progenitor, indicate the specific number of in-group members that share common ancestry or social bond (name + number marker), indicate the spatial location of a community, and indicate the spiritual roles of a community or family. Igbo families in particular use the names they bear to frame the social experiences and situations that surround the birth of a child (nwa), peculiar professions associated with a family, and peculiar social, economic or spiritual roles associated with some families, among other uses. Thus, based on the tenets of anthropological/cultural linguistics, this study will examine the social and cultural–cognitive factors that shape how the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria derive community and family names. While insights from anthropological linguistics provide the framework for the study of the names in the social and cultural contexts, the cognitive dimensions of this study derive from the framework of Cultural Linguistics (CL). This ensures that the cognitive aspects of the names are integrated into the analysis. Many of the existing studies on Igbo names and naming practices have centred chiefly on personal names, while only a handful have focused on community and family names among the Igbo. This study, which draws chiefly from anthropological linguistics (AL) and Cultural Linguistics (CL), aims to address this lacuna.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030099

Authors: Barbara Ann Mitchell Asli Evrim Ozer Boah Kim

There has been a significant rise in the number of individuals searching for genetic relatives using home-based DNA kits alongside online historical records, archival sources, and family stories. Initial studies suggest that these experiences can have profound psycho-social and emotional impacts on self and identity. However, research to date has not examined the experiences of older adults who uncover previously unknown relatives and how these discoveries influence their identities in later life. To address this gap, this study draws on life course and identity theories. We conduct three ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses to examine how age, the context of discovery, and the subsequent relationship with the newly discovered family member (or proxy) affect three conceptual identity domains: familial belonging, cultural identity, and sense of self/uniqueness. Data are drawn from an international online survey of 293 amateur genealogists aged 55 years and older who located a previously unknown close genetic relative within the past five years using DNA testing. We also synthesize and integrate emergent themes from 50 in-depth qualitative follow-up interviews. Findings show that reported identity changes are associated with stronger relationship quality, more frequent contact, emotionally driven motivations (compared to curiosity), and more complex searches, net of covariates. Qualitative data elucidate the expansive, fluid, and sometimes ambiguous nature of identity reconstruction following unexpected family discoveries today.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030098

Authors: Michelle Lynne Finley

Books play an important role in supporting identity, yet inaccurate or incomplete metadata in library catalogs can limit the discoverability of culturally representative works. This qualitative instrumental case study examined how metadata assigned to juvenile fiction books featuring Black characters, purchased from 2017 to 2021 in a regional comprehensive public library, reflected book content and influenced discoverability. The following research question was derived from the research problem and the purpose of the study: What is the metadata searchability of juvenile books that feature Black characters in a regional comprehensive public university library catalog in the southeastern United States? This study used document analysis to compare bibliographic metadata with thematic content of the chosen books to identify gaps in the catalog. Findings indicated that metadata frequently captured broad topical content while omitting deeper themes related to Black identity, possibly reducing the discoverability of these works through catalog searching. The results demonstrate the need for more representative metadata practices to improve access to culturally significant literature and provide librarians with a framework for evaluating and strengthening metadata assignment to support visibility in library collections.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030097

Authors: Vathiswa Papu-Zamxaka

The claim that gender diversity is a leadership issue rather than a women’s issue circulates widely in transformation policy and university planning, yet it is rarely given historical or epistemic grounding, and almost never an African one. This article asks how ceremonial and ritual authority was gendered in selected African cultural institutions, through what mechanisms colonial rule reconfigured that gendering, and what follows for contemporary leadership theory and for African higher education and public governance. The study is conceptual and qualitative. It applies genealogical documentary analysis to a purposively assembled corpus of forty scholarly and policy texts published between 1976 and 2026, analysed in three phases of descent, emergence and residue. The framework combines the coloniality of gender, Foucauldian genealogy, Weberian authority and relational leadership read alongside Ubuntu, and it operationalises two constructs defined at the outset: authority as an installed position and authority as a relational function. Six findings are reported. Authority was installed rather than possessed, distributed across complementary gendered offices, and carried by statuses detachable from anatomy; ritual office formed a distinct register; colonial indirect rule masculinised public office and bureaucratised what had been relational; and the women’s-issue framing is the residue of that sequence. Seven recommendations follow, centred on measuring the distribution of authority rather than headcounts alone.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030096

Authors: Chiang Wan Ling Shamim Akhter Tribhuwan Kumar Musarat Shaheen

Educational practices in primary schools are not formed in isolation from social and cultural heritage. In Malaysia’s multi-ethnic society, shaped by colonial history, diverse migration genealogies, and intergenerational transmission of familial and community values, the pedagogical orientations of teachers and the learning dispositions of students are deeply embedded in historical and cultural processes. This study examines how family–community genealogies, cultural heritage, and intergenerational educational narratives intersect with teacher training practices, specifically learner autonomy promotion, teacher-as-facilitator orientation, and flexible learning environment creation, to shape pedagogical practice in a multi-ethnic primary school in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia. A qualitative interpretive research design was employed. Eight participants, seven experienced primary school teachers and one student representative were purposively selected from a multi-ethnic primary school in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews guided by four thematically organised dimensions drawn from the genealogy of education framework and analysed using Braun and Clarke’s six-phase thematic analysis. Four interconnected themes emerged: (1) convergent cross-genealogical endorsement of learner-centred pedagogy despite diverse ethnic community educational inheritances; (2) the teacher-as-facilitator role as the most genealogically resonant pedagogical shift from colonial transmission traditions; (3) flexible learning environments as inspirationally valued but materially constrained sites of genealogical negotiation; and (4) the perceived inseparability of facilitative practice and positive student learning outcomes. The findings illuminate how historically situated family–community genealogies shape the reception and enactment of contemporary pedagogical practices in Malaysia’s post-colonial, multi-ethnic primary school context.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030095

Authors: Betty Bacon

Senior leadership turnover in Christian Higher Education Institutions (CHEIs) necessitates the identification of effective self-leadership practices that preserve intergenerational memory and Reformed traditions. Using a qualitative interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), this study explored the lived experiences of five senior-level administrators averaging 22.2 years of leadership experience in CHEIs. The findings identified five core themes shaping their leadership: (1) efficiency and Self-Awareness, characterized by the use of digital boundaries and organizational systems; (2) fulfillment, derived from a deep sense of “calling” and the institutional mission; (3) fortitude, built on theological principles of God’s sovereignty to navigate administrative stress; (4) applicability and Intellectualism, rooted in the Reformed confessional heritage and “treasure trove” of creeds; and (5) integration, where spiritual practices, such as breath prayers and scripture-based cues, are woven into professional routines. Crucially, the research revealed a significant disconnect where leaders utilized robust self-leadership strategies for professional growth but often struggled to apply parallel techniques (such as goal setting or self-observation) to their personal spiritual disciplines. The study concludes by proposing a Spiritual Self-Leadership Framework that integrates the Five Solas of the Reformation with self-leadership theory to provide a roadmap for individual sanctification and institutional flourishing.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030094

Authors: Mboni Collins Makamu Ntsieni Mawedzha

Marriage remains a central social institution among the Vatsonga, functioning not merely as a union between individuals but as a cultural institution through which gender identities, kinship relations, ritual obligations, and communal belonging are constructed and transmitted across generations. While scholarship has extensively explored marriage and gender in African societies, limited attention has been paid to the genealogical processes through which Vatsonga marriage rituals have historically shaped gender identities within changing social, political, and religious contexts. This article examines marriage as a site of gender construction by analysing the relationship between ritual practices, identity formation, and social belonging among the Vatsonga of Southern Africa. Using the genealogical approach of Michel Foucault and the theories of African feminists and decolonials, this study employs interpretive qualitative methodology, which entails the analysis of interdisciplinary literature in African philosophy, anthropology, gender studies, theology, and ritual studies. As a result of this analysis, it becomes evident that marriage rituals continue to play a great role in constructing masculinity and femininity, as well as kinship and community. At the same time, however, these rituals are dynamic and have undergone changes in light of colonialism, Christianity, urbanization, migrations, constitutional democracy, and modern concerns regarding gender equality. This article does not present marriage rituals of Vatsonga as static and monolithic practices, but rather shows their historical contingency, cultural dynamism, and continuous negotiation amid social change. Therefore, this study calls for critical engagement with marriage rituals in order to protect culture as well as to ensure gender equality and the dignity of all parties involved. With regard to the application of genealogy to marriage practices of Vatsonga, this article brings new perspectives to current debates on ritual, gender construction, African epistemologies and the decolonisation of marriage studies.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030093

Authors: Tasneem Rashed Shahwan Shanthini Pillai Suziana Mat Saad

The classical Chinese poem The Ballad of Mulan and Riyoko Ikeda’s iconic shōjo manga series The Rose of Versailles are two important East Asian cultural texts that are compared in this article to examine feminist resistance and gender negotiation. The protagonists of both stories are women who work in very patriarchal environments while also opposing, subverting, and eventually overcoming traditional gender norms. This paper argues that both texts enact what could be called a “dialectics of compliance and resistance”—that is, a simultaneous negotiation between conformity to institutional norms for survival and resistance through exposing and challenging those same norms in which heroines must adopt masculine codes to survive institutional structures, but in doing so reveal those structures as arbitrary and historically contingent—through the analytical lenses of feminist literary criticism, queer theory, postcolonial gender studies, and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. The article explores the mechanics of cross-dressing as a political act, the ideological ambivalence ingrained in narrative closure, the construction of female heroism, and the divergent yet convergent ways in which each text positions itself relative to its own socio-political moment. They do this by drawing on close textual reading and cultural-historical contextualisation. In the end, the paper argues that The Ballad of Mulan and The Rose of Versailles share a feminist imaginary that resonates strongly with current discourses on gender, identity, and resistance, even though they come from different cultural and generic traditions and are separated by more than fourteen centuries.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030092

Authors: Lucy Mishina Ushuple Lucas Nkwetta Afutendem

This study investigates how personal and family names function as systems of heritage transmission in communities of South West Region, Cameroon and Cross River State, Nigeria. While African onomastics has documented naming traditions, cross-border comparative research on naming as a linguistic–anthropological system remains limited. Using qualitative methods—interviews, participant observation, and ritual documentation—the study analyses the semantic, morphological, and socio-cultural dimensions of indigenous names. The findings show that naming practices operate as structured cultural mechanisms that encode lineage affiliation, birth circumstances, moral expectations, spirituality, and social belonging. The study develops a motivational classification framework demonstrating how names sustain intergenerational knowledge and social cohesion while adapting to religious change, migration, and modernization. By linking linguistic form to social function, the article contributes a comparative perspective to African onomastics and highlights naming as a key resource for cultural continuity in borderland societies.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030091

Authors: Drasko Acimovic

This paper seeks to illuminate the historical and biological intersections between Druze traditions and the silent architecture of Freemasonry within the Balkan milieu, a region historically defined by a constellation of preeminent scientists, writers, and artists whose legacies were forged within the crucible of Masonic thought. Central to this inquiry is the reconstruction of a familial intellectual lineage and genealogy of the author’s ancestor that maintained, for generations, a quietude of profound exchanges with esoteric custodians in France. These subtle conduits suggest the operation of “invisible networks” bound by an unstated ethical and philosophical cipher. To probe the biological currents beneath these traditions, the study unveils genetic evidence of the K1a5a haplogroup, a Levantine signature found within the domestic sphere. By examining this familial case study, the work suggests that the preservation of “the Secret” is not merely an intellectual endeavor, but a biological inheritance, where genetic markers and initiatory silence converge across centuries. The continuity of these invisible networks is historically evidenced by the 1926 Belgrade Masonic Peace Congress, led by French and German Grand Masters. This Legacy directly connects to its centennial peace declaration scheduled in Belgrade for late Juni 2026, showcasing the enduring role of the region in trans-regional diplomacy.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030090

Authors: Funda Taş Çetin Ayşe Mermutlu

At no time in history has social change been as rapid as it is today. Developments in digital technologies have profoundly transformed everyday life, including motherhood experiences. This study examines intergenerational continuity and change in motherhood experiences related to pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare in Mardin, Türkiye, a culturally diverse region where long-standing traditional social relations coexist with rapid social transformation driven by modernization, urbanization, educational expansion, digitalization, and changing gender relations. This socio-cultural context provides a valuable setting for exploring how motherhood has both persisted and changed across generations. The study employed a qualitative phenomenological design based on subjective experiences. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 60 women from two generations (mother–daughter pairs) using purposive and snowball sampling methods. The interview data were analyzed using MAXQDA 24 through thematic analysis. The findings indicate that motherhood continues to be shaped by enduring patriarchal norms while simultaneously being redefined through medicalization, professional expertise, digitalization, and the ideology of intensive mothering. Important continuities remained, particularly regarding maternal responsibility and gendered divisions of care, whereas substantial changes emerged in digitalization, medicalization, parental roles, family planning, anxiety, child-centeredness, and sources of parenting knowledge.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030089

Authors: Ye Tian

Place names do more than label streets—they encode the priorities of the institutions that assign them. This article examines how urban naming practices and heritage governance interact in Changchun, Northeast China, a city whose built environment bears the accumulated imprint of the late imperial era, the Manchukuo colonial period, socialist construction, and contemporary heritage tourism. Drawing on the concept of “place genealogies,” we bring critical toponymy and critical heritage studies into dialogue to analyze how these historical layers have been preserved, transformed, or marginalized in the city’s official commemorative record. Using a mixed-methods design combining archival research, critical discourse analysis, GIS-based toponymic mapping, and semi-structured interviews across three generational cohorts, we identify a pattern we term the functional prioritization of memory: historical periods are foregrounded in heritage development in proportion to their present-day utility, while others are systematically underrepresented. Situating Changchun within the “Global East” framework, we argue that this selective approach reflects a distinctive mode of heritage governance—characterized by pragmatic curation and continuity rather than the sharp commemorative reversals observed in other postsocialist contexts. The findings advance an integrative analytical vocabulary—place genealogies, functional prioritization of memory, genealogical management—that extends critical toponymy beyond its current concentration on Central and Eastern European contexts and contributes to a more globally comparative framework for studying urban memory governance.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030088

Authors: A. K. M. Ahsan Ullah Diotima Chattoraj

This article theorises Hmong migration through the concept of resettled histories, understood as the social and political processes through which histories of war, flight, loss, survival, and belonging are carried into new places, translated into new institutional languages, and contested across generations. Rather than approaching Hmong mobility as a linear movement from Southeast Asia to Western resettlement countries, the article situates Hmong migrations within longer histories of upland mobility, imperial and colonial governance, Cold War militarisation, refugee camps, and contemporary diasporic reconstruction. In response to scholarship on collective memory, postmemory, diasporic memory, refugee critique, digital diaspora, and Asian American studies, the article clarifies that resettled histories are not simply memories preserved after migration. They are histories that become socially active after resettlement through community organisations, veteran memorialisation, Hmong New Year celebrations, oral-history projects, clan networks, digital platforms, political mobilisation, and intergenerational debate. The article also foregrounds differences among Hmong communities by gender, generation, religion, class, political position, national location, and relations to Laos, China, Thailand, France, Australia, and the United States. By engaging contemporary Hmong scholarship and Hmong-produced archives alongside foundational migration and memory theory, the article shows how displaced communities do not merely adapt to host societies; they also struggle to have their histories recognised, narrated, and transmitted. The Hmong case demonstrates that resettlement may provide legal security without ending the historical life of displacement. It therefore offers a lens for rethinking migration as the movement and reconstruction of histories, not only the movement of people.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030087

Authors: Ulugbek Ochilov Utkirbek Ochilov Shohida Karamova Bahodir Absamadov Gulshod Khushmanova Feruza Kurbanova Bakhtiyor Gafurov Abdugappor Insopov Sadokat Makhmudova

Scholarship on Nazar Eshonqul has primarily interpreted his fiction through the frameworks of absurdism, symbolism, and postmodern alienation. In this article, I make a different claim: that his title story, Maymun Yetaklagan Odam (“The Man Led by a Monkey”), and the stories that cluster around it in the 2008 collection can best be read as a sustained meditation on genealogical rupture: what happens to a family and a community when the lines along which memory, value, and identity are supposed to pass are broken. The study is based on memory studies (Halbwachs, the Assmanns), postmemory theory (Hirsch), cultural trauma theory (Alexander, Caruth), and theories of narrative identity and habitus (Ricoeur, Bourdieu, Hall) and reads these in conjunction with recent work on post-Soviet narrative and inherited trauma in similar literary works in order to interpret the painter, his monkey-led-man canvases and his estranged son in close detail. The study argues that the monkey functions as a symbol of inheritance detached from its origin, a transmission that lives on mechanically, without meaning. The narrative fictionalises the violent social changes that were part of twentieth-century Central Asian life and which emptied the spaces of familial and cultural continuity, resulting in alienation, social amnesia and an identity that no longer knows how to tell itself. This reading situates Uzbek modernist fiction within broader debates on genealogy and memory, showing how literary narrative can more effectively illuminate disruptions in cultural inheritance than discursive analysis alone.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030086

Authors: Emma Shaw

This paper reports on the findings of a large-scale survey (N = 1406) in Australia examining what ‘history’ means to practising family historians. Using the Typology of Historical Consciousness as a second-level analytical framework, the study identifies and categorises the diverse ways in which family historians conceptualise and define the discipline. Findings reveal that the majority of respondents articulate a traditional historical consciousness (50.5%), characterised by identity-seeking, generational connection, and a conception of history as inherited continuity. A substantial proportion (27.3%) demonstrate genetic historical consciousness, framing history as a dynamic developmental process linking past, present, and future. Exemplary and critical historical consciousness each account for approximately eleven percent of responses, indicating that lesson-extraction from the past and epistemological scepticism toward inherited historical narratives are minority, though analytically significant, orientations within this population. The study contributes empirical data to ongoing international conversations around the definitions, meanings, and purposes of history, and has implications for how academic historians and heritage institutions engage with the large and historically active community of non-professional historians.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030085

Authors: Te Aorere Ngātai-Tautuku Moana Murray

This article is a conversation-style paper between two takatāpui weaver-scholars presenting the creative praxis behind the 2026 exhibition in Kirikiriroa, Aotearoa, titled Whatua He Whiringa Takatāpui. The exhibition included five takatāpui weavers across Aotearoa who wove together queer Māori communities to reject the colonial binaries of traditional and contemporary, art and craft, and male and female. With multiple activations and ceremonies held in the gallery space, Whatua He Whiringa Takatāpui fostered mana takatāpui, and takatāpui community and thrivance from the harakeke roots in Kirikiriroa. Some of the taonga created in this exhibition are inspired by taonga tawhito, or Māori ancestral treasures, which collapse space–time and allow descendants to connect to the ancestors of generations past. With two such taonga, a kuia’s kete and an 18th-century kaitaka, the authors meet their respective elders to share kōrero that could not—and did not—happen in their lifetimes. How does our creative practice allow us to theorize alongside our grandmothers and generations past?

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030084

Authors: God’sgift Ogban Uwen Maxwell-Borjor Achuk Eba Felix Tabi Okorn Kalu Obasi Kalu Edadi Ilem Ukam

This paper adopts a multisemiotic perspective to examine the significations of monuments in city spaces in Calabar, Nigeria. Data were generated through photo documentation, participant observation and semi-structured interviews in a three-year fieldwork involving 34 participants. Drawing from interactions between the designers, the monuments and the social audience, findings present the monuments as multisemiotic significations of the benefits derived from Western education, gains from missionaries’ activities and their interface with the locals, abolition of the slave trade, sociocultural heritage, histories and identity, potential in tourism and carnivals, and an emerging shift from African traditional religion to Anglo-Christian beliefs. These representations are dialogic expressions of lived experiences and histories of residents that (re)construct memorials of their past and provide a guide for the present and project expectations of the future. The symbolic images integrate localised intentions of the designers drawn from the environment and the people, with appropriate interpretations by the social audiences to situate their indigenous significations within varying global discourses on monuments.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030083

Authors: Hulkar Salimova Ulugbek Ochilov

The novel Mehrobdan Chayon by Abdulla Qodiriy has been studied mostly as a historical, social and literary text, and its representation of motherhood and women as agents of cultural transmission has received little scholarly attention. This article suggests that Qodiriy presents motherhood not primarily as a biological relationship but as a cultural institution, in which Uzbek society is reproduced across generations in terms of literacy, religious and literary canon, comportment and marital expectation. The analysis, based on close reading of three figures, i.e., the neighbourhood girls’ teacher, Nigor oyim; the educated daughter, Ra’no; and the marital-futures-managing woman, Mohlar oyim, and an interdisciplinary cultural-studies approach, demonstrates that the maternal line functions as the novel’s mechanism of cultural continuity, transmitting both knowledge and social constraint. The article adds a Central Asian case to the study of motherhood and rethinks Qodiriy’s domestic scenes as the place where Uzbek womanhood is reproduced and reformed.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030082

Authors: Efnan Dervisoglu Tuncay Bilecen

A Orhan Pamuk’s first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons (Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları), published in 1982, follows three generations of an Istanbul bourgeois family from the late Ottoman period to the 1970s. Set during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey, the novel explores the social and cultural tensions accompanying Turkish modernization. This article examines father–child relationships in the novel through the theoretical framework of multiple modernities. Rejecting the assumption that modernization follows a singular Western model, the study approaches Turkish modernization as a historically specific and layered experience shaped by local social and cultural dynamics. Within this context, the article focuses on paternal authority, masculine identity, intergenerational expectation, and memory across three generations of the family. The study further analyzes how photographs, domestic spaces, rituals, and everyday narratives preserve the symbolic presence of the father after death, allowing paternal authority to persist across generations. The article argues that the novel presents a representative portrait of an Istanbul bourgeois family negotiating the tensions between tradition and modernity during the Ottoman–Republican transition.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030081

Authors: Ulugbek Ochilov Shuhrat Sirojiddinov Rano Kasimova Muborak Khamidova Obodon Adizova Akmal Ziyodullayev Malohat Jabborova Akhmad Rakhmatov Bakhtiyor Adizov Rahmanovich Gulomjon Kholov Nozima Djuraeva

Genealogy is about the things that are transmitted from one generation to the next: blood, name, property but also grief, guilt, belief and dread. A genealogical reading of Stephen King’s fiction suggests that this is the last category of inheritance that preoccupies the writer’s imagination and that the entire oeuvre is more concerned with the transmission of fear and supernatural power through kinship, community and place than with the terror of the haunted subject alone. In King’s fiction, fear is inherited rather than merely experienced, supernatural power is transmitted rather than acquired and horror is reproduced through families, communities and social institutions. This study, which uses King’s novels as evidence rather than as objects of close reading and draws on genealogy studies, cultural and collective memory theory, trauma studies and family-systems thinking, traces four recurrent genealogical structures: the family lineage of fear; the inheritance of supernatural capacity as a form of cultural transmission; the ancestral burden carried by communities and reproduced through their memory; and the consolidation of these into durable genealogies of identity, power and trauma. King’s fiction thus provides an underutilized archive for genealogy studies: a popular genre in which cultural fears of lineage, descent and social reproduction are performed at the interface of the affective and the supernatural. In all these novels, the struggle to break free from what one has inherited is hard and it is this struggle that the present study examines.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030080

Authors: Masiiwa Ragies Gunda

Encounters between Africa and Europe have occurred since ancient times, yet a decisive turn in these relations occurred during the height of European imperial and colonial expansionist explorations from the 15th century. The central question behind this article is how did Europe succeed in emasculating Africans and Africa? Through a multi-focal analysis combining systems-thinking and intersectionality approaches to analyzing these encounters, this article makes the following findings—Europe constructed an asymmetrical relationship in which race, gender, religion, and class were instrumentalized and weaponized, erasing or blurring the distinctions between the sacred and the secular to achieve the total domination and control of Africans while assuring themselves of access to all African resources.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030079

Authors: Eunice Kingsley Ukaegbu Kwita Ojong Adomi Genevive Chimezie Osuji

Traditional namesake practices are indisputable naming conventions among the Bende people, through which old names are maintained without infiltrating the community with new ones. It is believed that, when a person who had lived earlier on, had led an impactful life, there is the need to keep their memories immortalized in the life of another, rather than creating an entirely new one. Thus, the Bende people in Abia State have been consciously identified by the recurring naming identity pattern in which as many as qualified people can bear a particular name in a particular extended family. This peculiar onomastic practice has been so misunderstood by others that it has become imperative to study and investigate why certain names are repeated, by whom, and to also identify the cultural events that herald such processes. To achieve this, this study adopted a descriptive qualitative research design to investigate the linguistic and cultural significance of namesakes. Forty participants were selected, using purposive sampling from the area of study, through whom data was elicited. Participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions were primarily used for data collection. The collected data were translated and analysed using thematic analysis to identify and categorise patterns. This study was based on socio-onomastic theory, and revealed the names recycled, the reasons behind them, the cultural significance of this onomastic practice, the conditioning of names in Bende, the namesake ritual, and the perceptions of the namesake pattern by the community.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030078

Authors: Berivan Can

This study examines the rituals and identity formation processes of a women’s motorcycle group in Adana (Türkiye) through an autoethnographic perspective. While motorcycles are often associated with male-dominated cultures, women riders have increasingly established their own communities and collective practices. Drawing on participant observation, the study introduces the concept of “ethnomotography” to describe autoethnographic research conducted within motorcycle culture. Data were collected through long-term participation in group activities, meetings, rallies, and everyday interactions as a member of the group between September 2022 and June 2024. The findings demonstrate that group identity is constructed and maintained through a series of rituals that resemble “rites of passage”. These rituals include initiation processes, the symbolic use of club insignia and vests, participation in weekly meetings and rallies, collective social responsibility projects, and mechanisms regulating membership continuity. The findings demonstrate that these rituals function as cultural mechanisms through which belonging, solidarity, and collective identity are produced. At the same time, the study shows that while the women’s motorcycle group provides an important space for mutual support, visibility, and empowerment within a predominantly male motorcycle culture, it also selectively reproduces organizational norms commonly associated with motorcycle clubs. Finally, the study suggests that belonging may persist beyond formal organizational membership, indicating that ritual participation produces identities that extend beyond institutional boundaries. By introducing ethnomotography as a perspective for studying motorcycle cultures from within, this research contributes to discussions of ritual, gender and identity.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030077

Authors: Gerald Mandisodza

For over a century, the South African secular state refused to legally recognise Islamic marriages (nikah), primarily due to their potentially polygynous nature. This statutory exclusion left Muslim women without civil legal protections during marriage, upon divorce, and at the death of a spouse. This article examines the fifteen-year strategic litigation campaign led by the Women’s Legal Centre (WLCT), which culminated in the landmark 2022 Constitutional Court judgment. Utilising a qualitative analysis of public court filings, legal pleadings, and judicial decisions, the author explores how marginalised Muslim women used civil courts to bypass and challenge the exclusive authority of conservative male clerical councils (ulama). The article analyses this legal trajectory through two primary theoretical lenses: Robert Cover’s concept of jurispathy (the state’s suppression of a community’s laws) and Afro-feminist frameworks. The findings reveal a critical tension in state-led legal reform. While the 2022 judgment secured vital financial and proprietary protections for women, it simultaneously introduced the limitations of ‘state feminism’ by replacing informal religious control with a rigid state bureaucracy. The paper argues that developing an authentic decolonial family law requires a jurisprudence that enforces the material and financial rights of African Muslim women without forcing their religious unions to conform entirely to Western, secular concepts of civil marriage.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030076

Authors: Lynette Hammond Gerido

Family health history (FHH) is an important tool for cancer risk assessment, yet its clinical utility is undermined by incomplete data, particularly among historically marginalized communities whose family records have been systematically disrupted by slavery, forced displacement, and undocumented status. I conducted a cross-sectional online survey of 1885 US adults affected by cancer to examine associations between genealogy engagement and FHH confidence and to assess variation across sociodemographic subgroups. Genealogy research was the single strongest modifiable predictor of FHH confidence, with participants reporting genealogy research more than twice as likely to report high confidence compared to those who did not (OR = 2.07, 95% CI 1.72–2.50), a relationship that persisted after full adjustment for age, sex, race, income, and education. Despite comparable rates of genealogy engagement, Black and Hispanic respondents reported substantially lower FHH confidence than White respondents. These findings suggest that while interest in genealogy is already widespread and self-motivated in the population, current clinical tools for FHH collection are inadequate to leverage this interest equitably. Next-generation FHH tools should be designed to reflect the dynamic, collaborative features of genealogy platforms rather than static medical forms, and their development must be grounded in community-centered design principles that prioritize populations for whom incomplete family history poses an added burden.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030075

Authors: Ndidzulafhi Mudau

This study analyses the Reformed liturgy as a site of ritual contestation that both shapes and facilitates the reconstruction and transformation of gender roles and identities in African contexts. Rooted in genealogical and decolonial scholarship, it examines how a ministry, long-reformed yet fundamentally integral to African-congregational communities, continues to express masculine forms of agency already present in reformed worship that influence perceptions of power, belonging, and identity. The emphasis is on Reformed communities in Southern Africa, where the arrangements of liturgical practices, preaching, eldership, sacramental administration, and life-cycle rites persist in grappling with a colonial past from an African epistemological perspective. This study examines the intersections of baptism, marriage, funerals, and ordination with customary rites such as lobola (bridewealth), initiation, and ancestor veneration, drawing on liturgical theology, ritual studies, and African gender scholarship to reveal both reproductive and resistant dynamics while simultaneously reshaping a new order within these practices. This article examines the ways in which worship facilitates continuity, rupture, and transformation within African gender identities, while seeking to situate Reformed liturgy within an African context of ritual ecologies rather than to contrast them. This approach may enhance decolonial discourse by illuminating contemporary discussions on liturgical studies and gender.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030074

Authors: Muchativugwa Liberty Hove

Neither women’s studies nor lesbian and gay studies offers an adequate theoretical or political base for disruptive scholarship. Reading and interpreting Southern African writers, especially Sindiwe Magona and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, promotes women’s studies as an academic and political approach to both gender and the erotic. Drawing on genealogies of rupture and intergenerational studies, we argue that the feminist is a positionality that must be widely available to challenge heterosexual perspectives and become a catalyst for audiences to engage in nuanced analyses of discourses on places and genres—narrative in particular—where memories are rearticulated and elaborated. This article explores how the narratives of Magona, Ngugi, and Soyinka inform and complicate the erasure, erosion, and amnesia that accompany contemporary imaginaries of what is re/membered. We challenge the tendency to evaluate African feminisms as only either oppressive or empowering and read the selected texts and their prototypical characters as dynamic embodiments that inform gendered spaces across both the attachments that people hold to particular gender identities and styles and recognising the punitive realities of dominant gender expectations. The article takes a positionality on the often troubled relationship between feminism and femininity, a critical but generous reading that highlights the potential for an affirmative orientation towards identity politics. This study utilises the theoretical lenses of border thinking and decolonial and African feminisms to interrogate matrifocal borderlands and the sociohistorical and cultural dis/continuities of being and becoming. We explore notions of the entanglement of motherhood, daughterhood, wifehood, and sisterhood as morphing identities. These are identities at the margins of political, sociocultural, and gender normativities in African literature. Magona’s “threshold people”, like Ngugi’s perfect nine, destabilise, disrupt, and refuse to be subordinated as they codify living differently in the in-between worlds. Magona, for instance, laminates the challenging discourse of contestation to map difficult, dangerous, and marginal spaces where women live at the borders of sociocultural, religious, ethnic, and gendered norms. These are spaces suffused with affective possibilities—defensiveness, shame, anxiety, anger, curiosity—and the women have to develop relational solidarities in negotiating hyper-visibilities or (in)visibilities within the 21st-century global south.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10030073

Authors: Maia Berryman-Kamp

Whānau (family) is a foundational unit of Māori social organisation, and the replacement of Māori family structures with Western nuclear models is widely regarded as among the most significant tools of colonisation. As Māori move toward decolonisation and re-Indigenisation, approaches to family and identity are shifting from imported structures. However, takatāpui and irahuhua (LGBTQ+ and gender-diverse Māori) are rarely explicitly included in these movements. Contemporary framings of whānau within Māori discourse can inadvertently reiterate colonial talking points, particularly regarding binary gender roles, divisions of labour, and the boundaries of what constitutes whānau. Building on takatāpui scholarship and the findings from three separate wānanga (targeted collective conversations) across a 1.5-year period with 18 irahuhua participants, the article examines the contrasts and connections between “coming out” and “coming in” to tradition and whānau. These conversations revealed that when participants enact self-determination and “come in” to their whānau, they demonstrate pathways to strengthen and restore Māori understandings of whānau and challenge the role of historic inquiry in modern Māori politics. Grounded in one wānanga participant’s understanding that “family pressures that make you feel divided [are] just what the coloniser wanted,” this article explores how takatāpui and irahuhua strengthen their communities and demonstrate sovereignty in settler contexts.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020072

Authors: Victoria Enefiok Etim Jude Terkaa Tyoh

Language embodies traditions, values, and collective identity, bridging gaps between generations and geographies. Maintaining consistent language policies at home and in communities remains challenging, with research showing that only a few families have explicit rules about language use and few enforce them regularly. The study explores strategies for heritage language maintenance (HLM) to mitigate language attrition among Anaañ bilinguals residing in the Akpabuyo and Calabar South Local Government Areas of Cross River State, Nigeria. The study draws on social identity theory, which links language use to identity, motivation, and group affiliation, thereby influencing language maintenance. Using a qualitative approach, data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 40 participants, selected purposively from Anaañ speakers in the study areas. Thematic analysis is employed to identify patterns and themes, revealing approaches for heritage language maintenance to curb language attrition. Findings reveal that despite some Anaañ speakers’ negative attitude towards their HL, others value it, keep it alive, and are ready to pass it to the future generations. This will preserve cultural identity and foster a sense of pride, belonging and shared values among Anaañ people, especially those residing in Southern Cross River State.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020071

Authors: Kieran E. James Sheikh A. Tanzil

Although Marx’s industrial reserve army (IRAL) theory suggests that Mexican Americans should be acknowledged by the capitalist class and perhaps resented by the white working class and middle class who compete with them in the labor market, the ideology and discourse of Trump and his supporters has labelled them as an illegitimate foreign body which pollutes the racial and cultural purity of America. In fact, this discourse has overshadowed earlier discourses that pointed to their contributions to local economies. Even capitalist business owners and major shareholders may give their commitment to this newly reinvented, but actually very old, discourse even when it goes against earlier ideas and their own self-interests. If anything, the discursive pattern of vilifying Mexican-descended people ensures their persistence—in the mind of capitalists—as a potential IRAL. We connect our ideas to related sociological events such as the establishment of “whitopias” and the whitening of the gated communities.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020070

Authors: Seoyoung Kim

Nuclear contamination challenges assumptions that harm can be contained through technological control, political borders, or bodily separation. Across the Asia-Pacific, radioactive exposure moves unevenly through racialised, gendered, and colonial histories, rendering some bodies more vulnerable to ecological violence than others. Nuclear regimes continue to depend upon theological logics of purity, sacrificial exclusion, and protected innocence. This article develops a spirituality of fermentation through Asian eco-feminist theology and the Korean practice of sakhim. Fermentation becomes a practice of sustaining wounded life through endurance, permeability, and communal care. From this spirituality of fermentation, I develop the concept of Vital Fluidity as an ethical and theological framework for understanding how life continues through shared vulnerability, where bodies, nourishment, and histories remain deeply entangled. The article contributes to intersectional debates in theology, religion, gender, and ecology by approaching contamination through relation rather than separation. Under nuclear conditions, ethical responsibility emerges through practices that hold grief, contamination, memory, and nourishment together within shared existence. Fermentation therefore becomes a practical theological model for living with nuclear bodies.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020069

Authors: Themba Shingange

The conceptualisations of the “sacred” and the “secular” are shaped by diverse entities in different epochs and spaces of society. Again, these conceptualisations often exhibit power dynamics, epistemic privileges, and the classification of people using the notions of human and non-human zones. In Africa, the historic intersectionality of the empire, mission, and conversion shaped, and continues to shape, the nuances of the sacred and secular in race, gender, and religion. Thus, this article used a desktop approach to analyse both the primary and secondary literature to explore the nuances of this phenomenon in this historic intersectionality and how its legacies continue to dominate the contemporary context. The preliminary findings showed that the historic missionary/colonial conceptualisations of the sacred and secular on race, gender, and religion remain the fulcrum of the contemporary narratives and their consequences. Thus, the article argues that decoloniality can serve as a lens in exploring this phenomenon and as an option to transform the current status quo.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020068

Authors: Josias Tembo

In this article, I show how discourses of African tradition, human rights, and African indigeneity circumscribe and curtail the emancipatory potential of discussions of same-sex relations in Africa. The terms of the debate on both sides—those who claim that same-sex relations are ‘un-African’ and the critics who rightly challenge this view—are circumscribed by what I call the religious-secular divide. This divide continues to entrap discussions of African humanity and agency within racial-colonial strictures of tradition/religion and secularity/modernity. Instead, by engaging with the work of Amilcar Cabral and Aimé Césaire, I develop a notion of decolonial or emancipatory African agency and a way of understanding African humanity as an alternative basis for engaging with the question of same-sex relations in Africa, African traditions, and African indigeneity, and with questions of African humanity and decolonial agency more generally.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020067

Authors: Therese Smith

In this article, I explore Blackface Minstrels as a burlesque representation of African Americans. Black minstrelsy was an American nineteenth-century entertainment sensation that was subsequently exported to Europe and sustained there. While it would be impossible in this article to give an overview of the history of blackface minstrelsy, it is necessary to first tease out some of the characteristics of the genre, at particular historical moments, in order to reach an understanding of the genre’s popularity, how it sat in its social (and primarily race-sculpted) landscape, and examine some of the inherent contradictions therein. I scrutinise in particular blackface minstrelsy’s reception by Irish audiences, probing the politics of representation therein involved. To this end, I also investigate issues of social and cultural visibility in an Irish landscape that was remarkably homogeneous racially until at least the 1990s. As two core documents in this regard, I firstly examine the BBC’s ‘Black and White Minstrel Show’, created by George Inns in 1958, which ran from 1958 to 1978, in black and white, ironically, until 1967, and thereafter in colour. The second document that I examine is the very successful Irish Lyons Tea Company’s advertisement from the 1980s, which featured stick-figure black-and-white minstrels in stereotypical makeup and ‘standard minstrel Kentucky dress’ singing and dancing to a simple but memorable jingo.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020066

Authors: Raquel Levy-Toledano Wim Penninx Michael Waas Goran Runfeldt Michael Sager Paul Maier Adam Brown

This Y-chromosome study of Moroccan Jews, the largest conducted to date, analyzes the patrilineal origins of 288 men of genealogically verified Moroccan Jewish descent through the Avotaynu DNA Project, identifying 111 distinct founder lineages. The long-standing hypothesis of large-scale Berber Judaization has not previously been tested at full Y-chromosome resolution; our findings provide the first systematic evidence against it. Approximately 71% of founder lineages and 80% of individuals trace to haplogroups common in the Middle East. Only 4.5% of founder lineages are of autochthonous North African origin. Iberian-origin lineages account for 11% of Moroccan Jewish founder lineages reflecting sustained demographic and cultural exchange between Morocco and the Iberian Peninsula over many centuries. Split dates between Moroccan and Ashkenazi or Sephardic subclades cluster between the 5th and 8th centuries CE, suggesting that the ancestral lineages of contemporary Moroccan Jews were already present across the Mediterranean basin during late Antiquity and the early medieval period. Analysis of 190 distinct Moroccan Jewish surname roots identifies 29 polygenic and 30 monogenic surnames, and demonstrates that the linguistic origin of a surname, including surnames of Maghrebi morphology, does not necessarily reflect its bearer’s Y-chromosome ancestry. Unlike Ashkenazi Jews, Moroccan Jews show no evidence of a founder effect or genetic bottleneck, and display a remarkable patrilineal diversity. Among the individual lineages documented here are the first paleogenetic link between a contemporary Moroccan Jewish patriline and a victim of the 1348 Tàrrega pogrom, an Iberian/Ashkenazi split traceable to tenth-century al-Andalus, and an unexpected connection between a predominantly Moroccan Jewish lineage and the Saint Thomas Syrian Christian community of Kerala. Moroccan Jewish patrilineal heritage is overwhelmingly Middle Eastern in origin and has been preserved with remarkable continuity across two millennia of diaspora, persecution, and migration.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020065

Authors: Motadi Masa Sylvester

This article examines how women’s ritual authority and identity are negotiated in contemporary mourning practices among the Tsonga. Although African scholarship has increasingly addressed gender, widowhood, and ritual life, limited attention has been paid to mourning as a gendered space in which women’s authority is simultaneously exercised, regulated, and contested. The article addresses this gap by analysing mourning not as a static cultural residue, but as a dynamic ritual field shaped by kinship, seniority, obligation, memory, and social change. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative document analysis of recent scholarly literature, ethnographic studies, and theoretically relevant texts on Tsonga mourning, African ritual practice, kinship, and gender. The analysis is guided by a decolonial perspective, which recentres African epistemologies and lived ritual meanings, and a genealogical perspective, which traces how authority, identity, and obligation are transmitted and reworked across generations. The article argues that Tsonga mourning practices position women as custodians of ritual continuity while also subjecting them to moral discipline and social regulation. Its contribution lies in bringing together African gender studies, ritual studies, genealogy, and decolonial scholarship to show how mourning remains a vital site for the ongoing negotiation of gender, belonging, and cultural authority.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020064

Authors: Donald Mark C. Ude

The article argues that existing conceptualizations of secularity ought to be expanded to embrace a plurality of practices and forms of life within African societies. In other words, secularity must be understood as a plurality of historically situated forms of life rather than a single Western conceptual template. Two interconnected objectives define the article. The first is to show shows how the concepts of “deprivatization,” “conditions of belief,” and “postsecularity,” drawn from José Casanova, Charles Taylor, and Jürgen Habermas respectively, may contribute to a pluralistic conception of secularity. The second is to furnish concrete instances of secular forms of life in African societies by exploring the Igbo socio-religious world, underlining its secularity. In foregrounding African forms of secularity, the article not only challenges Western hegemonic appropriation of the secular category and its implicit race-religion nexus, but also contributes to ongoing efforts to rethink, ‘decolonize,’ and deracialize secularity as a global category of social analysis. Ultimately, the future of secularity lies in ongoing, decentered contestations and conversations across multiple worlds.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020063

Authors: God’sgift Ogban Uwen Itang Egbung Stephen Magor Ellah Josephat Adoga Odey

This article examines the ethnopragmatic significance of religiously based personal names among the Agwagune people of Biase in Cross River State, Nigeria. Insights from a socio-onomastic framework are used to account for the situational, socioreligious and sociocultural contexts of Agwagune naming practices that reinforce the people’s belief systems and worldview. Using participant observation and semi-structured interviews, data were generated during a nine-month fieldwork session involving 30 participants who were knowledgeable in the traditional religious socio-onomastic tradition. Our findings show that Agwagune people draw from their symbolic linguistic resources to bestow personal names that become messaging instruments that express traditional religious affiliations, sociocultural practices and indigenous belief systems. The personal names bear ethnopragmatic relevance that manifests in the veneration of deities and traditional worship; significations in rituals and religious festivals; mysteries of death, reincarnation and commemoration; traditional familial hierarchies; and the sociocultural connection between the people and their physical and spiritual universe. Aside from contributing to the global discourses on socio-onomastics from the perspectives of a micro-minority ethnolinguistic group, the study is also relevant because it serves as documentary material for an endangered and transitioning socio-onomastic practice that characterizes the people’s cosmology, belief systems and lived experiences that are gradually being replaced by Christian orientations.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020062

Authors: Nasar Meer

This article examines how social science has recurrently positioned Islam as a problem-case for European narratives of modernity, simultaneously comparable as ‘a religion’ yet cast as the religion that ‘doesn’t fit’ secularisation, differentiation, and liberal public-reason expectations. Moving beyond the view that social science merely misdescribed Islam, this article argues that Islam has often been made to carry an explanatory burden internal to Europe’s self-narration, a limit-case through which stalled secularisation, anxious liberalism, and contested universals are rendered intelligible and governable. The article returns to canonical texts that helped establish such comparative imagination, including Hegel’s philosophy of history, Weber’s typologies of religious ‘bearers,’ and Gellner’s account of Islam as a comprehensive ‘blueprint’ of social order, to show how durable contrast effects were installed and later reactivated in contemporary debates on secularism, gender, security, and belonging. Drawing on Asad’s critique of the category ‘religion’, the article theorises ‘disruption’ as a recurring genre through which Islam is made exceptional, disruptive to secularisation theory, to accounts of modern differentiation, and to liberal self-understanding. It concludes by appealing to a reflexive sociology of religion that historicises its own categories, compares entanglements rather than civilisations, and treats Muslim intellectual traditions as theory-producing interlocutors rather than merely empirical ‘data’.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020061

Authors: Isaac Nortey Darko Noah Boakye-Yiadom

Introduction: This article examines the roles of chiefs and traditional leaders in fostering environmental sustainability, collective responsibility, and accountability in Ghana. It argues that chieftaincy functioned as a key institution for regulating human relationships with land, natural resources, and social order in precolonial governance systems. By grounding environmental stewardship in customary authority, moral obligation, and spiritual legitimacy, chiefs helped sustain communal balance and cohesion. Methods: The article uses a conceptual and historical-interpretive approach to analyze the chieftaincy institution’s normative, political, and spiritual functions in environmental governance. It draws on interpretations of precolonial governance structures, customary practices, and indigenous cosmologies to examine how chiefs exercised authority and shaped collective conduct. Results: The analysis shows that chiefs, with their councils, established and enforced rules, norms, and sanctions that promoted sustainable community life. Their authority included custodianship of land, social order, and sacred obligations. As representatives of ancestors and intermediaries between the human and spiritual realms, chiefs reinforced a moral framework in which environmental harm was seen as both a social offence and a disruption of divine and ancestral balance. The nonpartisan nature of chieftaincy provided a unifying platform for guiding communities toward shared responsibilities, regardless of political differences. Discussion: The article concludes that chieftaincy historically served as an important mechanism for environmental stewardship and ethical governance in Ghana. Chiefs were positioned as custodians of a balanced relationship between people, land, and spiritual order. Revisiting these indigenous governance principles offers insight into how traditional authority can contribute to contemporary discussions on sustainability, accountability, and community-based environmental governance.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020060

Authors: Daniel Pratt Morris-Chapman

Over the last forty years British Methodism has moved increasingly toward becoming an inclusive Church. Indeed, today, the concept of inclusion may accurately be described as a hallmark of British Methodism. However, while the Methodist Conference has formally identified principles governing its practice in this area there has been limited discussion as to how far these developments cohere with the church’s doctrinal standards which are officially related to John Wesley’s writings. This paper explores the continuity and discontinuity between Wesley’s theology and the commitment to inclusion characteristic of his spiritual descendants. In particular, it probes Wesley’s actual practice in relation to the admission and expulsion of members and evaluates whether or not his conception of holiness really serves as a warrant for the conception of inclusion, practically operative in contemporary British Methodism. In exploring these questions the paper explores whether or not John Wesley really was as Inclusive as contemporary British Methodists imagine.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020059

Authors: Leonie Pihama Margie Kahukura Hohepa Linda Tuhiwai Smith Graham Hingangaroa Smith Jenny Lee-Morgan Matt Roskruge Herearoha Skipper

This article discusses the role of Kaupapa Māori in transforming Māori educational experiences within Aotearoa (New Zealand) over the past forty years. Since the initial articulation of Kaupapa Māori from the mid-1980s, there has been an exponential growth in its development and application across Aotearoa (New Zealand). There has been extensive documentation that it was within the education sector that Kaupapa Māori initiatives were developed and initiated by Māori in response to the failure of mainstream conventional education to provide for Māori children. That response was formalized through the establishment of Te Kōhanga Reo (Māori Language Nests) and Kura Kaupapa Māori (Māori Immersion Schools), which were led by Māori. Since then, there has been an increased utilization of Kaupapa Māori theory as a foundation for understanding, explaining and critiquing key issues facing Māori and Aotearoa more broadly. In the research project “Kaupapa Māori: Creating an Indigenous Model for Systems Change”, we undertook a series of interviews (n = 80) with Māori people involved in a range of sites who utilize Kaupapa Māori as the foundation in their lives, both personally, as whānau (extended family), and in their work. A key question posed was: What are the success factors within Kaupapa Māori that can inform innovative models for systems change that will transform inequities experienced by Māori? This was asked to gain insights into how Kaupapa Māori have created transformative and meaningful change across a range of sectors and sites. Where the wider project included participation from across a broad range of social contexts, this article looks at key themes that arose from how kaikōrero (participants) saw transformative change occurring through being a part of Kaupapa Māori educational developments. Kaikōrero shared multiple ways in which transformation occurred for individuals, within their whānau (extended families), through intergenerational changes and impacts at community and systems levels.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020058

Authors: Yaw Ofosu-Asare

This paper argues that the colonial introduction of Christianity in Africa must be understood as a reordering of personhood, moral feeling, and the conditions under which lived experience becomes intelligible, rather than as a change in formal religious affiliation alone. Drawing on scholarship in African philosophy, religious history, European intellectual history, and African psychology, the paper traces how missionary Christianity reclassified African spiritual worlds, recoded suffering and misfortune, and disrupted the transmission of spiritual knowledge across generations. Crucially, it situates this encounter within the longer history of Christianity’s own disenchantment: the suppression, within dominant Protestant and Enlightenment traditions, of enchanted practices that had characterised European Christianity for over a millennium. The missionary traditions that condemned African spirit mediation, ancestral veneration, and ritual healing were carriers of a tradition that had practised structurally analogous things before disciplining them out of its own self-understanding. The paper shows that colonial religion produced layered forms of subjectivity in which ancestral obligation, Christian doctrine, communal personhood, moral anxiety, and therapeutic pluralism coexist in tension. The concept of ontological compression is proposed to name the condition under which parts of the self become unsayable within authorised vocabularies, a condition rendered doubly intense by the fact that the compressing tradition had already performed this narrowing upon itself. Rather than treating African spirituality as residue, superstition, or cultural background, the paper proposes that it should be approached as a living philosophical and psychological archive through which many people continue to interpret suffering, relation, responsibility, and reality itself.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020057

Authors: Khalid Ahmed Hassan Mahmood Farah Kashif Aasia Nusrat Ruqia Saba Ashraf

This study examines women’s marginalization and agency in We Need New Names by situating the novel within broader frameworks of transnational genealogies, spatial politics, and colonial migration legacies. Utilizing Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), based on Lazar’s gender ideology and discourse approach in (de)constructing gender identities and gender equality, along with Homi K. Bhabha’s Third Space Theory, this study analyses how diaspora displacement and colonial past influence gendered identities. Through a qualitative and interpretive analysis of select textual episodes, the study reveals how spatial displacement, linguistic fragmentation, and cultural hybridity both inhibit and facilitate female empowerment. Women counter marginalization using everyday tactics such as silence, storytelling, embodied resistance, and discursive bargaining, turning marginal spaces into spaces of resistance. This paper makes a theoretical contribution to migration studies, spatial inequality, and decolonization by exploring gendered identities in transnational and postcolonial settings.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020056

Authors: Suhail Ahmad

This paper examines the colonial and postcolonial construction of the underdeveloped Hindu male ego in V.S. Naipaul’s “One Out of Many”, focusing on immigrant Santosh—who migrates from Bombay to Washington—as a site where gender, caste, and race intersect. Using Stephen Greenblatt’s technique of New Historicism as a methodological tool, it argues that Santosh’s posture, psychological and sexual crises epitomize colonial and psychoanalytical discourses that feminized Hindu masculinity through martial race ideology and psychoanalytic tropes. The paper shows how Naipaul employs, in the novella, colonial period’s circulating Hindu symbolic motifs such as Kali, Prayashchittam (purificatory rituals), bronze gods, and brass plates to reinforce images of Hindu men as guilt-ridden, impure, sexually deficient and lacking assertiveness, and gift of vison. The paper further argues by excavating an archived letter of Sudhir Kakar how Naipaul in India: A Wounded Civilization appropriated Sudhir Kakar’s psychoanalytic approaches to undermine Hindu masculinity. It concludes that Santosh is less a universal immigrant and more a culturally historicized projection of colonial, and psychoanalytical discourses on emasculation.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020055

Authors: Loreen Maseno Sophia Chirongoma

The writing scene in East Africa has witnessed a rise in the emergence of contemporary literature. One example is Dust, a 2014 novel by the Kenyan Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, who, in 2003, was awarded the Caine prize for African writing. The novel Dust has been reviewed from various angles. Dust introduces two female characters, Akai and Ajany, who are both connected to a key character in the novel: Odidi Oganda. How do the characters Akai and Ajany exemplify forms of hybrid identity shaped by colonial and diasporic contexts? This essay is about these two female characters who provide adequate material with which to explore hybrid identities during the colonial period and in the diaspora. Both experience trauma, which impacts their associations in their local communities and in the diaspora. Akai is tremendously affected by colonialism. She is a contract laborer impregnated by a British colonial settler who later attempts to kill her. Ajany moves in with an abusive man, whom she stabs to death in self-defense right before fleeing Brazil as a fugitive. This essay uses a Postcolonial Feminist lens to explore how these two characters propagate cultural resilience, challenge nationalist narratives, and demonstrate resistance. It employs the method of Narratological Text Analysis in order to present Akai and Ajany in their particular contexts. For analysis, the essay adopts a dialectical type of literary theorising.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020054

Authors: Chenae Christensen-Duerden Sarah M. Coyne Loren Marks Erin K. Holmes Ashley Larsen Gibby

Although identity development is often framed as a task of adolescence, identity continues to evolve across the life course. Midlife, in particular, involves significant role change, reflection, and meaning-making, yet women’s midlife identity development within religious contexts remains understudied. Using life course and narrative identity frameworks, this qualitative study examined how women navigate identity shifts during midlife within a family-centered faith context. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 women aged 38–69 who identified as practicing members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in six countries. A grounded theory analysis revealed three interrelated processes, identity disruption, re-evaluation, and revision, while anchoring identity in core sources of meaning. Faith and purpose provided continuity across transitions, supporting coherence, resilience, and growth. These findings challenge deficit-based models and position midlife as a generative period of ongoing identity development.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020053

Authors: Beatrice Taringa

Africa is historically celebrated as the cradle of humankind. However, there is doubt on whether she is maintaining her own originality and position as the motherland and fatherland of all humanity. Although globalisation has impacted all continents and states, its negative effects seem to be skewing towards African and in particular Zimbabwean Shona families. This paper examines how DNA testing has impacted on some of the Shona families in Zimbabwe. The Shona community in Zimbabwe is culturally porous and receptive in terms of traditional, religious, linguistic and cultural values. They embraced Western democracy that is premised on human rights principles, constitutionalism, and citizenship, which, however, do not guarantee their belongingness. As some of the Shona families in Zimbabwe drifted away from the traditional cultural belief system campus, they got into a foreign and alien worldview that is dictated by the host in the name of technology. This has led to excessive reliance on foreign systems that are appearing like global standards yet they are disempowering them and causing them emotional and social distress. The reliance is a result of neocolonialism, linguistic and cultural imperialism that needs decolonisation. Thus, the paper adopts a qualitative approach based on an illuminating multiple case study design of six purposively selected scenarios aired on the The Closure DNA Show programme broadcasted on Zimbabwe Television (ZTV). The Afrocentric paradigm serves as a lens to uncover some of the perceptions of Shona families in Zimbabwe on DNA testing and its implications on parenthood, the family unit, and identity. The findings reveal that DNA testing is perceived as gender divisive and a destroyer of the family unit and exposing children to vulnerability, while it is also perceived positively as a way of (dis)affirming identity, which is crucial among the Shona. The paper recommends that other television programmes be screened based on their implications on gender relations, the family unit and identity.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020052

Authors: Hundzukani P. Khosa

With a focus on how both traditions influence identity, memory, and lived spirituality in African contexts, this article examines the theological and cultural interactions between Christianity and African Traditional Religion (ATR). This study highlights the ongoing interaction between ATR and Christianity as two significant systems ingrained in African life, notwithstanding the continent’s religious diversity. In Africa, religion and culture are inextricably linked, influencing social customs, moral standards, and a sense of community but also constantly changing due to personal experience. African spiritual systems were frequently disregarded by missionary Christianity in the past, which led to conflicts that still exist in modern African Christianity. The importance of ancestors, rituals, and supernatural beliefs all of which are still fundamental to the worldviews of many African Christians are areas where these conflicts are especially noticeable. This article makes the case for a positive theological approach that acknowledges ATR as an essential tool for African Christian identity rather than as a rival or subpar system, drawing on the idea of inculturation. The article illustrates how African spirituality serves as a storehouse of collective memory and identity over generations by delving into issues of ancestry, ritual, and spiritual mediation. Additionally, it offers a liberative and dialogical theological concept that promotes understanding between Christianity and ATR. Such an approach not only bridges spiritual divides but also contributes to the development of a contextually grounded liberation theology that affirms indigenous knowledge systems while remaining open to global theological discourse.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020051

Authors: Madalina Iordache Ioana Chelu Daniel Dicu Ioan Gaica

This study aimed to estimate life expectancy at birth and survival patterns within a multigenerational family from Romania (102 individuals), whose members lived across the period 1900–2024. Life expectancy was estimated using abridged synthetic cohort life tables, and the results were interpreted through survival curve analysis. Life expectancy at birth was estimated at approximately 84 years for females and 80 years for males, while the overall life expectancy for the total family population was 81 years, representing a weighted estimate derived from sex-specific life tables, with weights corresponding to the proportion of females and males in the studied population, rather than a simple arithmetic mean, following standard demographic practice. The resulting survival curves exhibited a clear Type I survival pattern, characterized by low mortality at younger ages and an increasing concentration of deaths at older ages. When contextualized using recent Eurostat data, the life expectancy estimated for the analyzed family exceeds current national-level values reported for Romania and is close to the European Union average, particularly for females. These findings indicate a favorable survival profile at the familial level and illustrate the usefulness of life tables for investigating longevity patterns in small populations.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020050

Authors: Aaron Rosenthal Saher Selod

Objectives: Government surveillance of American Muslims has grown following 9/11, yet little scholarship has analyzed how this activity impacts political participation. We examine racial and ethnic variation in American Muslims’ experiences of state surveillance, as well as the connection between those experiences and voter turnout. Methods: Using a survey of 1000 American Muslims, we identify racial and ethnic patterns in being singled out in airports and by the police. We then analyze how being stopped in these venues shaped turnout behavior in the 2016 presidential election. Results: Black Muslims are more likely to encounter surveillance from the police, while Muslims who identify as Asian report the highest degree of monitoring in airports. We find that police encounters are linked to decreased electoral participation, but being singled out by airport security is not tied to a change in turnout. Conclusions: These findings provide a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of who is impacted by surveillance in the US and how that surveillance shapes American democracy.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020049

Authors: Nomatter Sande

There is a correlation between colonial histories and contemporary migration practices, and this paper examines these transnational enduring connections. Using a qualitative thematic synthesis of existing interdisciplinary sources, this paper argues that the politics of space, migration, and identity in the present cannot be fully comprehended without tracing their colonial genealogies. The findings demonstrate that colonial migrations in all forms (forced, enslaved, or settled) formed transnational genealogies that determine who moves, who is stopped, who belongs, and who is an outsider. The paper concludes that understanding current migration politics, spatial inequalities, and identities requires an appreciation of transnational genealogies that connect the past to the present. The paper suggests that colonial history is more than a background but a framework that sets the conditions within which migration occurs today. This paper contributes to showing that family functions as a neglected site where genealogies are transmitted and contested across generations.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020048

Authors: Wendy Hermeston

Permanency planning, an approach to the placement of children in out-of-home care, is central to child and family system practice, policy and law. Using the example of legislative reforms in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, this article explores how privileging legal permanence leads to ongoing failures to account for Aboriginal worldviews and child-rearing practices. Drawing on qualitative research, including Yarning Circles and semi-structured interviews that I conducted with Aboriginal community members in NSW, the findings contribute to limited evidence on permanence from Indigenous perspectives, revealing how familial and cultural connectedness shape belonging and social and emotional wellbeing and highlighting the importance of children’s ongoing connections with extended Aboriginal family, community and culture. Aboriginal understandings of permanence align more closely with cultural, relational and physical domains than with the construct of legal permanence that predominates in permanency planning approaches. Prioritizing legally permanent care arrangements above other domains poses long-term risks to Aboriginal children’s social and emotional wellbeing, demonstrating the need for “deep-level” cultural adaptation in child welfare law, policy and practice. The findings have implications for decolonizing child protection and repositioning Aboriginal conceptualizations of permanence as the foundation for legislation, policy and practice—reforms that must be Indigenous-led, culturally grounded from the outset, and anchored in full implementation of principles embedding self-determination and Indigenous children’s fundamental rights.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020047

Authors: Ănúolúwapọ̀ Adéwùnmí Adétọ̀míwá Elvis Banoeye Batung Hasiyatu Abubakari

This study investigates the role of naming practices as cultural repositories that preserve family, lineage, and community identity. It explores how anthroponymy encodes histories of ancestry, migration, settlement, and sociopolitical organisation in two West African societies, Dàgáárè-speaking communities and Yorùbá communities. Adopting a comparative onomastic ethnographic approach, this research analyses names among the two selected cultures. Data is drawn from interviews, school registers, attendance sheets, and cultural practices, with emphasis on how names record genealogical descent, settlement histories, occupational roles, spiritual affiliations, and ethical expectations. In Dàgáárè and Yorùbá culture, bal/baloo yoe (clan names) and lineage names identify descent from founding ancestors, document migration and settlement, mark ritual responsibilities, memorialise historical events, and regulate kinship and marriage through totemic and spiritual identities. This study argues that names in Dàgáárè- and Yorùbá-speaking societies operate as cultural texts that preserve and transmit heritage across generations. The significant implications extend to linguistics, anthropology, and heritage studies, where names can be leveraged as tools for cultural preservation and historical analysis.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020046

Authors: Ruth Ratidzai Murambadoro Carol Lynne D’Arcangelis

This article juxtaposes the Indigenous communitarian feminist concept cuerpo-territorio and the African proverb musha mukadzi drawing on ethnographic research with Zimbabwean women activists in the context of land reform, thereby expanding the scope of both concepts. Our entry point is Zimbabwean women’s struggles for land in the Third Chimurenga, or post-2000 Fast-Track Land Reform Programme. Despite egalitarian promises, land redistribution efforts have favored political elites and men, reinforcing colonial capitalist practices of extraction and accumulation. Our comparative exercise reveals musha mukadzi as a political discourse that enables Indigenous women to reclaim their body–land relationship through struggles for land reform and beyond. In the process, we identify four key resonances between musha mukadzi and cuerpo-territorio, namely, an ontological similarity expressed through Indigenous women’s commitments to and responsibilities for re/generating the network of life; a common appeal to ancestral (feminist) wisdom to enhance ongoing struggle; the political mobilization of the concepts by Indigenous women to seek liberation from patriarchal, neo/colonial oppression; and, their conceptual utility as feminist analytics. Finally, we lay the foundation for further work on the possibilities of transnational feminist solidarity between Indigenous women in Africa and Abya Yala.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020045

Authors: Khalid Ahmed Hassan Mahmood Sardaraz Khan Aasia Nusrat

This study analyses NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names through the framework of intersectional feminism, a concept introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw that examines how multiple identities, such as race, gender, and class, intersect to shape distinct experiences of marginalization. Bulawayo’s narrative, centred on the protagonist Darling, reveals the complex social forces she encounters as she navigates cultural and geographic transitions. Through a blend of English and Shona, the text reflects cultural duality and the tensions of migration, including acculturation and displacement. The episodic structure mirrors the fragmentation inherent in Darling’s African upbringing and her transcontinental journey. The analysis situates the novel alongside contemporary works such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, highlighting shared thematic concerns with identity, oppression, and the migrant experience. Ultimately, the study argues that Bulawayo’s representation of intersecting identities enriches the novel’s engagement with gender, race, class, and the transformative potential of language in articulating minority experiences.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020044

Authors: Bruce Durie

The question of which Scottish surnames constitute a Clan and which do not is hotly contested. It is wrongly felt, especially in the Scots-abroad communities, that Clan is somehow of higher status than “Family” or “House” and/or applies to everyone of Scottish heritage. Opinions and assertions are on a spectrum between two absolutes: (a) “everyone in Scotland is in a Clan, and everyone should wear kilts and tartans”; to (b) “Clans disappeared in the 18th century and there is no point clinging to a Romantic notion with no modern relevance”. Historically, the Clan is a phenomenon of the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Islands and was not found as a social structure in the Lowlands; the Southern Uplands (Scottish Borders) are a special case. The “everyone” persuasion leads to cultural nonsenses such as Lowland-ancestry Scots abroad forming “Clan” Societies and adopting Highland dress. Scots overseas are looking for an authoritative statement as to whether their surname constitutes a Clan, a family, or some other nomenclature. Yet, there is no official or agreed historically based list of who are Clans and who are not. There is no such list—or a formula by which an answer can be derived. This essay is intended as a step towards that. Also, the non-historical concept of “Septs” is dismissed.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020043

Authors: Deniz Aktaş

In Western Europe, and particularly in The Netherlands, speech is rarely neutral: to talk is to participate morally and civically, while silence is frequently marked as evasive, passive, or suspect. The capacities for speech, for being heard, understood, and responsive, are widely regarded as hallmarks of autonomous, transparent, free-thinking, and sovereign subjectivity, celebrated as expressions of a shared progressive modernity. These ideals of subjectivity are routinely placed in tension within the so-called secular–religious binary framework, in which the compatibility of non-secular sensibilities or non-Christian religions, especially Islam, with such Dutch societal values is persistently and heavily problematized. Within such accounts, speech becomes a criterion Muslims in Europe are then expected to meet, not merely by speaking but by doing so in ways deemed proper and intelligible. To complicate and deepen understanding of these dynamics, this article draws on ethnographic insights from (secular) Christian–Muslim couples in The Netherlands, looking at how the dynamics of speech–silence function within intimate contexts, where they take place, where they break down, and ultimately where their limits lie. Attuned to the cacophony of multivocal gestures, whether in acts of refusal, the quiet eloquence of silence, or the directness of vocal protest, the article reveals the intricate and consequential interplay between these dynamics and the structuring and affective forms of secular and religio-racial norms in everyday life.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020042

Authors: Bernd Reiter

This article argues that racism did not originate with the modern invention of race but crystallized out of a much older imperial grammar that had already learned how to naturalize domination through embodied difference. Long before race emerged as a named category, ancient and medieval empires developed durable ways of converting historically produced hierarchies into features of nature, the cosmos, and divine order. Through a comparative genealogy spanning early Mesopotamian epic, Near Eastern imperial inscriptions, Egyptian visual regimes, Greek philosophy and historiography, biblical scripture, South Asian metaphysics, late antique encyclopedism, and medieval Marian devotion, the article shows how inequality was repeatedly anchored in the body, in genealogy, in geography, and in moral psychology. Across these traditions, political authority is consistently masculinized, while subordination is feminized, animalized, or rendered reproductively vulnerable. Patriarchy and racialization thus emerge as co-constitutive imperial technologies rather than as separate or sequential phenomena. Modern racism did not invent hierarchy; it rendered an ancient logic portable, inheritable, and globally scalable by fastening domination to visible human difference. By situating race within a longue durée history of empire and male domination, the article reframes contemporary debates on racism as questions of imperial continuity rather than modern deviation.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020041

Authors: Husniye Merve Bingol Turkan

The 1923 Greek–Turkish Population Exchange (Mubadele in Turkish), formalized through the Lausanne Convention, remains one of the most consequential cases of compulsory migration in modern history. This systematic review synthesizes a century of scholarship across political, legal, social, cultural, and historiographical dimensions. Findings indicate that the exchange not only legitimized forced displacement under international law but also reinforced authoritarian state-building in Turkey and exacerbated political instability in Greece. The social consequences included trauma, marginalization, and the emergence of heterogeneous refugee identities, while cultural memory oscillated between nationalist silencing and transnational remembrance. Urban landscapes and demographic structures were profoundly reshaped, producing visible legacies in contemporary cities. Furthermore, assimilation policies formalized the integration of populations, influencing the development of national identities in both Turkey and Greece. Historiographical trajectories diverged, with Greek scholarship emphasizing refugee struggles and Turkish scholarship foregrounding nation-building. Recent studies highlight hybrid identities and transgenerational redefinitions of belonging. This review underscores the necessity of integrating political, social, and memory studies to capture the multi-layered impacts of the exchange, offering a comprehensive account of its enduring relevance for migration, nationalism, and memory studies in Southeast Europe.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020040

Authors: Dianala M. Bernard

Intergenerational memories, migration histories, and the lasting influence of colonial linguistic systems profoundly shape heritage language maintenance in Afro-descendant communities of Central America. This study examines how genealogy functions as a pedagogical tool for sustaining English-based Creole languages among Afro-descendant populations in Costa Rica, Panama, and Belize, three nations linked by Afro-Caribbean migration yet shaped by distinct colonial and educational systems. Drawing on scholarship documenting oral histories, family narratives, and community-based linguistic practices, the study advances a genealogy-as-pedagogy framework to explain how families transmit language, identity, and belonging across generations through ancestral memory, positioning family-based knowledge transmission as curriculum. In Costa Rica and Panama, where Spanish colonial and post-independence language ideologies marginalize English-based Creole varieties, genealogical practices operate as primary mechanisms of linguistic continuity in the absence of sustained institutional support. In Belize, by contrast, British colonial legacies and the national recognition of Belizean Kriol create a distinct sociolinguistic environment in which state institutions, the media, and educational policy reinforce genealogical memory. Through comparative analysis, the study argues for integrating genealogical knowledge into multilingual education, community revitalization initiatives, and heritage language policy to strengthen Afro-descendant linguistic continuity in Costa Rica, Panama, and Belize.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020039

Authors: Nikos Gogonas Christina Maligkoudi

Intercultural conflict is expressed as struggle due to a perceived incompatibility of values, norms, face orientations, goals, scarce resources, processes, and/or outcomes between at least two parties from different cultural communities in an interactive situation (Ting-Toomey and Oetzel 2001) [...]

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020038

Authors: Terri Libesman Paul Gray Wendy Hermeston Kirsten Gray

Across occupied Indigenous nations, child protection systems remain one of the most enduring sites of colonial power [...]

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10020037

Authors: Magezi Elijah Baloyi

Death is a universal phenomenon, defined by the rituals associated with it and conducted within the confines of the culture to which the deceased belonged; thus, it is nearly impossible to universalise a particular mourning pattern, as African people display considerable diversity. The complexities introduced into African mourning by colonialism and other developmental changes, such as urbanisation and the recent COVID-19 pandemic, have relegated many African traditions in relation to bereavement to the periphery. A newer and controversial practice associated with funerals conducted among black communities in South Africa is that of the “after tears” party. Although this practice has not yet infiltrated the rural areas, it is nevertheless a phenomenon that is worth investigating, seeing that those who participate in this practice are predominantly from townships in Gauteng, and such events are gradually occurring in the rural villages as well.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10010036

Authors: Mehmet Nuri Şanda Doğan Gün

Located in northeastern Anatolia, Çıldır and Ardahan serve as a gateway to the Caucasus for political entities such as the state and mobile groups such as the tribe. Due to this geopolitical characteristic, the region has fallen under the dominion of numerous states and civilizations throughout history. With its fertile highlands, Lake Çıldır, and natural water resources like the Kura River, the area constitutes an attractive living space for hem settled agriculturalists and nomadic tribe groups subsisting on animal husbandry. These features have profoundly influenced the ethnic, demographic, socio-economic, and cultural fabric of the region. Following the establishment of Ottoman sovereignty in the 16th century, Çıldır and Ardahan assumed a vital role in the state’s Caucasian and Eastern policies. This research addresses the Turkmen tribe and other ethnic communities residing around the eyalet of Çıldır and the sanjak of Ardahan. It further examines the banditry activities carried out by these groups, the attitudes of central and local administrators toward such activities, migration and settlement patterns, and the economic and political pressures exerted by the Russian State upon these tribes. The political and economic pressures exerted by the Russian State on these tribes reflect a broader imperial strategy of frontier making, as discussed by Khodarkovsky in the context of Russia’s expansion into its southern borderlands. By positioning the region as a negotiated frontier, this study moves beyond a descriptive narrative to analyze how tribal mobility and settlement functioned as tools of sovereignty and resistance within the broader context of Ottoman state formation and trans-imperial rivalry. The methodology employed in this study is the Qualitative Research Method; accordingly, documents from the Presidential Ottoman Archives (BOA) were transcribed, and the relevant sections were interpreted and incorporated into the study. The archival findings are contextualized within recent historiographical debates concerning the shifting definition of the state versus nomadic agency during the transition from the 18th to the 19th century. While existing literature contains academic studies aiming to elucidate the archaeological, geographical, economic, and administrative structures of Çıldır and Ardahan, it has been determined that no academic research has been conducted to analyze the ethno-socio-demographic structure of the region specifically focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries in a historical sense. With this focus on the interplay between imperial frontiers and tribal identity, this study provides a critical analysis of how local dynamics shaped the grand strategies of the Ottoman and Russian Empires.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10010035

Authors: Tiara Fernanda Aros Olmedo Hilde Danielsen

This article explores how young women of colour in Norway navigate everyday racism and how such negotiations are shaped by the tension between speaking out or maintaining social harmony in a society that largely perceives itself as egalitarian and non-racist. The study draws on qualitative interviews with 13 participants from diverse ethnic backgrounds—some were adopted, and others were children of immigrant parents or immigrants themselves. The analysis examines how anti-racism strategies are shaped by drawing on feminist and postcolonial theory, particularly the concept of the feminist killjoy. The notion of Orientalism, and the notion of cultural repertoires. The findings show that participants demonstrated different reactions from silence to confrontation, all demanding emotional labour. Several participants described the burden of having to choose between remaining polite and educating others, while others chose silence as a protective strategy. Rather than viewing resistance as a binary between silence and confrontation, this study demonstrates that everyday anti-racism is a fluid and context-dependent practice. How women performed anti-racism was also closely linked to their social position, social support, cultural norms, and access to political perspectives. The stories show that, over time, some women became more outspoken or secure in their interpretations of racist encounters, especially when gaining distance from constraining environments.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10010034

Authors: Edgar Gutiérrez-Gómez Rocío Laime-Huallpa Rubén Darío Alania-Contreras Aldo Bazán-Ramírez Daniela Isabel Dayan Ortega-Révolo Wilfredo Bazán-Ramírez

The female oral tradition of harawi constitutes a living cultural expression in Quechua-speaking Andean communities, where song is configured as an instrument of collective memory and identity. This study aimed to understand how women, through harawi, construct spaces of cultural resistance in the face of processes of forgetting and social transformation. A qualitative approach was adopted, using an ethnographic and phenomenological design. Data collection was conducted over a period of one hundred and twenty days through semi-structured interviews, participant and non-participant observation, audiovisual recording, and documentary review. The findings show that harawi not only preserves ancestral knowledge but also strengthens female identity and the intergenerational transmission of the Quechua language. Subtle forms of symbolic resistance to linguistic and cultural stigmatization were identified. It is concluded that female harawi oral tradition constitutes a mechanism of living memory and an active practice of cultural affirmation in Andean communities.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10010033

Authors: Tanya Allport Cinnamon Lindsay-Latimer

This article investigates narrative and storytelling as critical methods for understanding how relationships with land in Aotearoa New Zealand are shaped by colonial histories and ongoing systemic displacement of Māori (Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa). Colonialism is not a past event; it continues to structure daily life, disrupting our embodied connections to whenua (land) and reshaping what we call home. Drawing on the research project Tō mātou kāinga, tō mātou ūkaipō, Whānau conceptions of home we explore the concept of body–land, emerging from Indigenous women’s struggles and grounded knowledges, to examine how the land is not only a living genealogical ancestor but also a maker of our bodies and identities. Through narrative, we trace the ways land has been taken and commodified under colonial logics that frame it as property to be owned and extracted from, which contrasts with Indigenous ontologies that understand land as kin and relationality as central to existence. By centering Māori women’s embodied experiences, this article articulates home as a relationship rather than a fixed place and considers how these understandings open pathways toward relational, sustainable futures. This work contributes to broader conversations on decolonial praxis, Indigenous feminist theory, and the embodied politics of land and belonging.

Genealogy doi: 10.3390/genealogy10010032

Authors: Rachel Nir Ismail Karolia John Wainwright

This study explored the experiences, perspectives and confidence of teaching and research staff of discussing race and ethnicity, and associated equalities matters, at a post-1992 university in North West England, UK. In particular, it studied whether colleagues, who were largely white, had the understanding and personal skills to deliver on race equity in teaching and learning in a Higher Education Institution (HEI). Further, it examined whether there was a disconnect between the intention of an HEI working towards the Race Equality Charter (REC) mark and the detrimental effects this may have on its minoritised ethnic staff. The study was based on focus groups and interviews of 43 academic staff as participants using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Intersectionality as the theoretical lens. These address discrepancies between institutional declarations and realities within higher education, which is important, as HEIs are increasingly positioning themselves as committed to diversity and equity, while the practical implementation often remains inconsistent. The findings demonstrate that the white participants were not confident, competent or pro-active enough to effect any meaningful change in race equity. At the same time, the minoritised ethnic participants often felt the burden of having to relive the trauma and pain of racism and take the lead in any race equity initiatives. In sum, the study demonstrates that HEI initiatives that purport to tackle systemic racism through decolonisation and the REC mark have little chance of effecting institutional change if the staff do not have the confidence, competence and necessary skills to make it happen.