Anchoring Oneself in Genealogical Time
Thinking through Michael Jackson's The Genealogical Imagination: Two Studies of Life Over Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020)
2008. I was standing on the rooftop of a low-slung building in Xiamen. I don’t remember if it was a class night out to celebrate our final language class with our Chinese teacher. Perhaps, I am conflating two separate events. Nevertheless, I found myself in a quiet moment. Alone, looking up in the night sky. Suddenly, I was communing with my paternal ancestors whom I knew left the inner counties of Quanzhou to escape the persecution following the confiscation of their homes and land. They were probably branded as capitalists by the communists. Perhaps, they were headed to the port area, one of the endpoints of the Silk Road, and from there, caught the first boat that took them to the Philippines. They could have gone to Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and even Taiwan. But it was the Philippines. Maybe they had a friend who told tales of new life and new opportunities on the islands.
And new opportunities were, indeed, there.
With no naturalization law in place in the Philippines at that time, my ancestors could only own non-landed assets and occupations. It must have been difficult for them when they arrived. Chinatown in Manila, perhaps. My grandfather though found his way as a rice miller in Tarlac in Central Luzon, the rice granary of the country. He did pretty well considering he had 13 children with my grandmother whose kingdom was circumscribed around the house. She had tiny bound feet you see, she probably could not do anything. All the photos I saw of her were seated in her dotage. She must have been in pain (she always wore those compression stockings) and lacked mobility by the time my father was in university. As the youngest, my father took care of her until her death. I had no memories of her. My fond memories consisted of visiting their well-appointed tomb in Tarlac to “pray” using scented joss sticks. Was I supposed to speak to them? Did they hear me? I was sure they could hear us because incense smoke floated up into the ether. I had a hard time as a kid finding the connection to them.
Until that night in Xiamen.
I got it. I understood them. I had gone full circle. I found what I needed to do in China and I was no longer enamoured of the baggage of being third-generation Chinese. They left for a reason. I was thankful that they did and ensured that I had the choice to travel, even back to the place they left for good, but occasionally visited.
All was well. I was not alone in China for my fieldwork. I am no longer the floating migrant.
Michael Jackson’s work opens the possibility of relational connection through genealogical time. He proposes an approach to seeing kinship and relations beyond the traditional genealogy vertical models of descent. In his work, he prioritises what he calls, “being-in-time” or the “quotidian contexts of action and interaction” that occur in families across generations. This is through life histories and storytelling that collapses time, space, and even death. The result is presenting a picture of “universal experiences of birth, begetting, and belonging” that defy lineal or vertical models we so commonly expect in genealogy models and kinship studies.
In his attempt to collapse difference, we see the sameness in humanity.
Relationships involve oedipal and sibling rivalries, psychological complexes, knots, and double binds.
The two works in this book - the life (his)tories of his Sierra Leone counterparts as well as his own field and life accounts - are no different. And this he narrates well. The pull of ancestry and duty, sometimes bordering on the mythical weight of obligation, from fathers to son and among siblings. Hence the levirate system in Sierra Leone seems insignificant to an Irish immigrant family. This is a comparative project that needs no comparison at all.
The difference comes down to the historical and localised challenges that confront our protagonists. You could accuse the work of ignoring the specific socio-eco-historical conditions plaguing the informants. (Where’s the brutal war in Sierra Leone?) However, I see these complex issues discussed subtlety as the interlocutors experience them in their lives. Political arrest in Sierra Leone, lack of educational opportunities, aboriginal groups forcibly (but also willingly circumscribed) in religious residential schools, an itinerant academic living precariously (despite teaching at Harvard)…the list goes on. These are not just metaphysical issues but deeply embedded in the stories Jackson carefully weaves. His voice on the matter matters less than showing the reader how these conditions reverberate through generations.
Much of how he accomplishes this is a specific type of narrative and writing against much of the expected academic treatise. Jackson combines both non-fiction and fiction, “juxtaposing ethnography and phantasmography 1.” Because much of life histories narrate ancestral myths, “relations with the natural environment, history, the gods, and material objects, and like kinship,…vexed and subject to continual negotiation,” Jackson argues that it demands a different point of view that necessitates “different methodologies and different styles of writing.” In his life history recording, he combines ethnography, poetry, fiction, and memoir-style as multiple “measure(s) for deciding whether we have spoken truth to reality.” He believes that “there is no necessary connection between the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we create with others.”
This is why Jackson himself appears in the text - not as the famed academic we know him now, but as a struggling and vulnerable itinerant doctoral candidate eking out living arrangements and starting his family. This is an important component that makes this account significant. His interlocuters’ stories change as they encounter him and together produce a coherent integrated reality.
…the transformation of ethnography into literature…suggest a renewed interest in the philosophical question of verisimilitude - how we can best speak truth to life - and a deep questioning of all truth claims, not in order to finally arrive at the truth once and for all but in order to more deeply appreciate the nuanced complexity of what is at play for any person, in any moment, or in any one society.
This is an example of that form of experimental ethnography that outlines both fieldwork reflection and rigor of recording. In doing so, Jackson theorises a genealogical time that is not limited by geographic borders (Sierra Leone with Irish/Australian/New Zealander white migrants, Australian Aborigines, and New Zealand Maoris) or by specific historical trajectories, but by intersubjective stories between generations shared across these lines. It is passe to talk about universality in Anthropology but Jackson is bold enough to propose one.
Universality and the comparative project in anthropology
In a recent book club meeting, I was asked, why was I so enamoured with kinship as an area of study. My answer: kinship was one of the earliest comparative projects and human universals that distinguished anthropological research across the social sciences. The models of kinship and its genealogical systems allowed disparate geographic areas and ethnicities to be classified into one of six kin terminological systems: the Hawaiian system, the Eskimo system, the Omaha system, the Crow system, the Iroquois system, and the Sudanese system. These kin naming systems were hypothesised as significant in defining which relations matter in families, economic transactions, marriageability, and power relations in social groups. Much of this work was done in the early nineteenth century as a type of macro analysis and framework to understand the institutions of marriage, economy, and political order in human societies. It was not just the expertise in diving deep into ethnographic details but the ability to zoom out using universal categories was one important core work implied in any anthropological fieldwork. The flattening of the white noise of details and diversity using a macro lens, in particular genealogical models, makes a comparison possible across different groups. This is the equivalent of “big data” in anthropology then.
Anthropology’s comparative roots were identified by Rebecca Lemov 2 from specimen-gathering research and in larger team research cluster projects in anthropology. Typically, this means that every investigator could study their own niche but rejoin the core group afterward. This still continues today but what distinguishes it in the early American post-war period was a conscious decision by members to “massively collect certain kinds of information.” For instance, in the Six Cultures project from John and Beatrice Whiting’s laboratory of human development funded by Harvard University, the child-rearing practice was the core problem. Aside from individual research interests, there was a concerted intensive effort to collect all types of material and social practices related to child-rearing. Lemov characterised this shared scientific endeavour as “intensively comparative at their base.” She reports that Yale and Harvard, in particular, collected about 503,000 index cards of discrete anthropological data, “a kind of audit cultural approach to facts themselves.” I myself was a product of this type of anthropological endeavour when for our undergraduate fieldwork we were required or encouraged to use the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM) to code our fieldnotes and data collection in the field. The OCM was a classification system devised by Mark May and George Murdock in 1935 and is now currently part of Yale’s Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) cross-cultural survey project.
The decline of large-scale research can be attributed to two developments. One, George Marcus shares, is the decline in interest in these collaborative projects and became what Lemov also calls “epistemologically embarrassing” for academics in the face of development and defense-oriented funding. By the time of the 1960’s, the lone researcher became the norm.
The second development was the critique within anthropology against universal models. Instead, the interpretive school in the 1990s showed the faults and weaknesses of such an approach. In American Kinship, David Schneider showed symbols and meaning trumped the simplified familial roles defined by genealogical blood relations. In other words, kinship is a complex combination of nature, law, and other factors. The fragmentation of a comparative universal kinship model is akin to the successive breakdown of other categories such as gender. The feminist project3 at that time broke the fixidity of gender by also simultaneously juxtaposing with kinship’s nature/biological and nurture debate. Cultural analysis won that contest.
Currently, the comparative project (cross-cultural comparison or ethnology) is no longer a key objective or innate to a research project. If it at all happens, the method to do it is unclear. Typically, key concepts such as ‘emotion,’ ‘relationality’ or shifting themes and frameworks such as ‘network theory’ or ‘Anthropocene’ are potential rubrics because these terms represented at least a type of unifier ripe for comparison. However, no clear comparison among social groups and practices is deliberately generated within those research. In one collaboration by Sylvia Yanagisako and Lisa Rofel on clothing design and manufacturing, they even gave up on it as it was too difficult to put the stories of Italian and Chinese managers side by side.4
I return to Jackson’s Genealogical Imagination to point out how he managed to do a new type of cross-cultural comparison. He successfully latched onto a key ingredient missing in the craft of anthropology post-large scale research - how to write a comparative project. His book is an example of ‘flattening’ extraneous details (e.g. Sierra Leone’s terrible civil war or Australia’s brutal Aborigines treatment) by focusing on the personal experiences of individuals against those conditions. However, it was not just the intersubjective experience among the cast of characters that he focused on. He used the fulcrum of the wide expanse of time to anchor the comparison around the recurring longing and experience between father and son across the generations. What he has regained is a writing methodology to enable comparison without necessarily using universal categories as the sole explainer (among the Kuranko in Sierra Leone, bonson is a cognatic descent category) of their social reality.
Like most anthropological monographs, it is in part a thinly-disguised allegory of culture contact mediated by personal relationships. Just as the Kuranko enabled me to understand myself in another way, so this book may offer them a novel perspective for contemplating themselves. Rather than deny the element of creativity and invention in the writing of this book, I am more interested in drawing attention to these same elements in the context of Kuranko social life, for it is my view that their social world is just as provisional and negotiable as the social world which I have represented in this book.
From Michael Jackson’s first monograph on the Kuranko
For a discipline to survive and remake itself, how do you train the students in this writing style? From what I can glean from his previous work, Jackson has conformed with traditional ethnographic documentation5 but would later fuse disparate field sites and groups as a comparative project. In other words, research maturity both as a practitioner and as a person is one essential ingredient. Another is the ability to be adventurous with writing styles playing with other forms of creative writing. This style has been more widely used in Anthropocene studies.6
What we have lost with the decline in collaborative practice among investigators around central objectives, I can personally regain through a comparative project of my own. It is becoming clear why I wanted to write about the Ifugaos of the Philippines and the young career professionals of Qingdao. Perhaps even look back on our time with the Ivatans. And now I know how.
A comparative project somehow counters my sense of dislocation and isolation within my own practice as a solo researcher. It is no wonder that I find affinity with problems on kinship, relationality, and ‘seeing social disconnection.’ It is my own way of countering my existential feeling of dislocation or un- tetheredness as an anthropologist. What Jackson says is true that fragmentation results when we only write to depersonalise (using models). In his example, he writes to personalise his interlocutors that are at risk of becoming depersonalised using the macro lens situated across time (past is present). In the process, there is a potential to conclude using macro-level categories without sacrificing ethnographic details.
He is inspired by the work of Robert Desjarlais, The Blind Man: A Phantasmography (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019) who, having failed to enter a blind man’s reality, speculates and guesses the man’s subjectivity and recreates an “uncertain nature of intersubjective understanding.” Jackson attempts to combine his hunger for reality in the social sciences with literary imagination.
Rebecca Lemov published her work on the comparative big data project in anthropology called The Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Much of my discussion here about her findings comes from Afterword: A Conversation on the History of Anthropological Collaboration with Rebecca Lemov in Dominic Boyer and George E. Marcus’ Collaborative Anthropology Today: A Collection of Exceptions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020).
See Jane Collier and Sylvia Yanagisako’s Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), and a good summary of the aftermath of those changes can be found in Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell’s The Difference Kinship Makes, the first chapter in Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship (New Mexico: School for Advanced Research Press, 2013).
In the introduction, Sylvia Yanagisako and Lisa Rofel mentioned how they both shared their field sites with each other with one visiting the other. However, once they started writing, it became too difficult for them to piece together a joint analysis, and opted to write the book into two halves. Lisa Rofel and Sylvia Yanagisako’s Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Fashion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019)
See Michael Jackson’s, The Kuranko: Dimensions of Social Reality in a West African Society (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1977). This is an example of classical ethnographic work made more enticing to revisit once you read his current 2020 publication.
Anthropocene is a specific period and represented in anthropology as studies that decenters the human and with a sensitivity for the environment and climate change. Some of the studies I refer to are found on this list. Those in the animal-human and nature-human genres are exceptional. Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway are often cited in anthropology for their working concepts and writing. A writing outlier is the work of Susan Lepselter on American UFO captivity narratives, The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity and UFOs in the American Uncanny (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016) available open access.