Academic literature on the topic 'Special genealogy. Family histories'

This chapter is mainly concerned with scholarship over the past eighty years or so in both China and overseas on the qiaopi phenomenon. It first discusses the reasons for the large quantities of letters Chinese emigrants wrote home and the replies (known as huipi) they received from their families. It then analyzes scholarship on qiaopi up to 2013, when qiaopi were included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. During this period, studies on qiaopi were mainly undertaken in the context of local histories of South China (Fujian and Guangdong). In the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, qiaopi studies gradually emerged as a special branch of research. This chapter pays special attention to qiaopi studies after 2013, when interest in qiaopi, both as an object of collection and a subject of research, reached new heights. While the focus of Chinese-language studies has been primarily on the role remittances play in the Chinese economy and in the economic and social development of the migrant-sending areas (the qiaoxiang), this book looks at qiaopi not only as an economic and financial phenomenon but also as a means of sustaining emotional and spiritual ties in families, clans, and local communities.

I build a framework for exploring conflicting narratives in ethnographic interviews, public policy discussions, and news media, grounded in a critical engagement of allegory. I construct a genealogy of legitimacy, gender, race, enslavement, and tribal identity, focusing on disjunctures between mainstream online family-tree programs and the family-making histories of African American, Navajo, and white queer mothers. I suggest that “traditional” family tree structures can be read as allegories for how society defines legitimate families. I argue that grafted trees function as more useful metaphors for family relationships. I consider ethnographic allegory through the family-making stories of one African American lesbian. I then turn to a discussion of the “family values” politics of the 1990s to consider sociopolitical allegory as a lens through which to explore connections between public news media, public policy discussions, and law. Genealogical allegory completes this theoretical framework of nesting analytical lenses.

Why are so many people getting their DNA tested? Apart from the science nerds who are always up for such activities, there are two main reasons: health and genealogy. And for each of these there are subgroups. Traditional genealogists hit the proverbial “brick wall” and seek some means to break through, while some adoptees, desperate to find biological family, seem willing to try almost anything. On the other hand, those seeking medical information may have a family history of some frightening health condition, or—due to missing family histories—are in the dark about potential medical issues and want to find out. This chapter first explores personal genomics: the medical and health information held in your DNA base sequence, how to interpret that information, and what may be next on the horizon. What does all this data mean? Can it answer questions such as “Am I carrying around a ticking cancer bomb in my DNA, waiting for me to smoke one more cigarette, or eat one more hot dog before it activates a malignant tumor?”

This chapter addresses the special considerations that must be applied when therapeutic interventions occur in the context of unresolved allegations of trauma or abuse. Evidence-informed techniques that address functional deficits being exhibited by the child, without compromising external investigation of the allegations, are discussed. Methods for maintaining or strengthening the healthy aspect of parent–child relationships, as consistent with child safety, are also discussed. This chapter considers evidence-informed techniques for addressing functional deficits exhibited by children as a result of unresolved trauma. Attention is placed on methods for resolving histories of trauma within the family law and child dependency context. This may include resolving traumatic memories with parents, dealing with situations in which more than one party is traumatized or memories do not align, and reaching child-supportive resolutions when parent–child contact requires a trauma-supportive lens.

As in other countries, the surge of interest in Great War commemoration in Belgium has taken many by surprise. Public engagement in 2014 was undeniable: exhibitions were visited, special newspaper editions were bought, documentaries were watched and elaborate commemorations attended. Public demand for knowledge of the First World War was driven by a desire to situate family and local history within wider themes of the War. In the course of such commemoration, Belgians rediscovered the horror of the trenches, the massacres of civilians in 1914 and the harshness of the German occupation, whilst attempting to situate their own family histories in the grand narrative of the conflict. In contrast, it is clear that the participation of the Belgian Congo in the First World War received neither official nor media attention. Only modest private initiatives saw the light of day during the Centenary. But with a significant Congolese diaspora resident in Belgium, how can we explain the ‘forgetting’ of the Belgian Congo in the Centenary commemorations? What indeed was the Belgian Congo’s actual contribution to the War? Who organised those rare initiatives of commemoration and for whose benefit? These are the questions that will frame this chapter, which examines the two major issues that pertained to the Belgian Congo in 1914-1918: the question of the colony’s neutrality and then the major military operations in central Africa. In light of this, the chapter then examines and explains the lack of commemorative activity in Belgium concerning its former colony. This chapter concludes that the regional administrative division of commemorative organisation combined with the historical conditioning of Belgian colonial memory created this absence in Belgium’s Centenary commemorations....

It is evident from the discussion in previous chapters that the projection into the past of dualistic conceptual frameworks that sharply distinguish subject from object, for example, or culture from nature, is problematic. Instead, the evidence suggests that the Bronze Age self was not constructed in opposition to an external ‘other’. Things outside of the body, such as significant objects, formed inalienable components of the person, while parts of the human body circulated in the same exchange networks as objects. The self was constituted relationally, so that the social and political position of particular people depended on their connections with others. Special places, too, were sedimented into the self, forming an inextricable part of personal, family, and community histories. The Bronze Age person can therefore be viewed as a composite—an assemblage of substances and elements flowing in and out of the wider social landscape. Indeed, it is interesting to note how ideas of substance may have changed from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Neolithic technologies—notably the grinding and polishing of stone axes—made evident the qualities of the material itself: polishing enhanced the colour, texture, and geological inclusions of such objects, rendering visible their very essence and origin (Whittle 1995; Cooney 2002). By contrast, bronze was made of a mixture of materials and its constituent elements were hidden. The production of composite objects also became more frequent during the Bronze Age (Jones 2002, 164–5), for example the miniature halberd pendant made of gold, amber, and copper alloy from an Early Bronze Age grave at Wilsford G8 in Wiltshire (Needham et al. 2015a, 230). Sometimes particular components of such items were concealed: the conical pendant or button from Upton Lovell G2e in Wiltshire comprised a shale core covered with sheet gold (Needham et al. 2015a, 222–5). This need not indicate an attempt to deceive others into believing this item was made of solid gold, however, for shale was itself used to make decorative items and was evidently a valued material during this period.