The Genealogical Science analyzes the scientific work and social
implications of the flourishing field of genetic history. A biological
discipline that relies on genetic data in order to reconstruct the
geographic origins of contemporary populations--their histories of
migration and genealogical connections to other present-day groups--this
historical science is garnering ever more credibility and social reach,
in large part due to a growing industry in ancestry testing. In this
book, Nadia Abu El-Haj examines genetic history's working assumptions
about culture and nature, identity and biology, and the individual and
the collective. Through the example of the study of Jewish origins, she
explores novel cultural and political practices that are emerging as
genetic history's claims and "facts" circulate in the public domain and
illustrates how this historical science is intrinsically entangled with
cultural imaginations and political commitments. Chronicling
late-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century understandings of race,
nature, and culture, she identifies continuities and shifts in
scientific claims, institutional contexts, and political worlds in order
to show how the meanings of biological difference have changed over
time. In so doing she gives an account of how and why it is that genetic
history is so socially felicitous today and elucidates the range of
understandings of the self, individual and collective, this scientific
field is making possible. More specifically, through her focus on the
history of projects of Jewish self-fashioning that have taken place on
the terrain of the biological sciences, The Genealogical Science
analyzes genetic history as the latest iteration of a cultural and
political practice now over a century old.
