Genealogy,origins and ontological security

Abstract

Genealogical practices uncovering individuals’ ‘roots’ or ancestries have a long heritage but have acquired heightened interest with the advent of genealogical services and DNA testing. When one does a simple inventory of all the ways that genealogy, writ large, gets practised, the desire to find the ‘origins’ of individuals, groups, and national communities seems ubiquitous. This article examines how genealogy relates to the self in Late Modernity. Specifically, it utilises ontological security to understand how finding one’s origins has both transnational implications and ones that relate to an individual and group’s ‘ordering of the Self’. The article explores the evolution of genealogy, highlights the constitutive role of methods in genealogical ontologies, foregrounds the centrality of race in contemporary political contests over genealogy, considers the politics of ‘genealogical ascription’, and posits the ordering features of genealogy expressed through ontological security referents of routines, vicarious identity, narration, and scientific ‘expertise’.

Keywords

expertise genealogy Late Modernity narration ontological security race vicarious identity

‘She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting the Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black, until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?’

(Donald Trump speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists, 31 July 2024)

Introduction

Of the polarising debates that animated the 2024 US presidential election campaign was one about the racial identification of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. Speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists shortly after she had replaced President Biden as the Democratic candidate, her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, questioned what he claimed was Harris’ recent embrace of a Black heritage and identity. Intuiting Harris was engaged in a racially appropriative and opportunistic move for electoral advantage, Trump continued that while he respects all racial identities, ‘she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went – she became a Black person’.¹

‘Fact Checkers’ and supporters quickly debunked the claim, emphasising that Harris had a longer history of invoking her Black ancestry via her Jamaican father and noting a 2016 New York Times feature where she stated that her Indian mother had raised her and her sister ‘to be two Black women’ following her parents’ divorce.² Central to this empirically demonstrative response was an assertion of genealogical authenticity and legitimacy that belied an understanding that Trump’s accusation of racial opportunism had the potential to derail her presidential campaign at its inception.³ In contrast, a much more radical response was provided by the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who, in unprepared remarks, sought to redirect the focus of attention away from Harris’ own racial identification to the character of someone who would make the accusation, stating ‘you know, no one has any right to tell someone who they are, how they identify. That is no one’s right. It is someone’s own decision’.⁴ From this perspective, race (like gender) is something for the entrepreneurial subject to curate as they please, and where questions of authenticity and legitimacy for racial identification become purely self-referential.

Intriguingly, though, Jean-Pierre’s statement was out of sync with a contemporary world in which accusations – usually from the left – of inappropriate racial and cultural identification can be a fundamental source of stigmatisation, humiliation, and social ostracism for anyone so targeted. Notably, others have not been similarly defended and have suffered the social consequences, like Rachel Dolezal, a local leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Spokane and a lecturer on African Studies, who in 2015 made national and global headlines when her parents outed her as racially White, despite her claims to a Black identity (Dolezal, 2017). While we return to the Harris/Dolezal comparison later, key in both cases is that when it comes to the legitimacy of claims of racial identity, issues of socially mediated, and recognised narratives of genealogical authenticity matter. Thus, while claims that are accepted may bestow belonging, identity, recognition, and understanding, rejected claims will likely be experienced as shaming, destabilising, and ostracising. And what goes for racial identification goes for other identity claims too.

While the above foregrounds the contemporary politics of race, this article’s central interest is with the genealogical move that underpins it⁵ and the observation that genealogy has been understudied within the discipline. Surprisingly, this lacuna also stands for the recent proliferation of literature on ontological security (OS), within which we locate this investigation. There are at least three reasons why OS studies – or indeed anyone interested in the politics of identity – should be interested in genealogy.

First, the ‘search’ for one’s roots has implications for concepts of home (imagined or otherwise) that are often central to establishing a sense of belonging, authenticity, and OS (Mitzen, 2018), but also of inclusion and exclusion. Second, and as indicated above, the topic has become increasingly politically and socially salient. Partly, this is a response to new technologies creating new possibilities for genealogical exploration and commercial ventures capitalising on these (via databases and genetic testing services). Partly, it reflects how the fracture of the traditional family unit in the West has been a driver of personal instability that can be compensated by ‘seeking stability and constancy’ in ancestral kin relations (Hackstaff, 2010: 660). And partly, it accords with the foregrounding of cultural, religious, ethnic, and racial dynamics in much contemporary politics, of which a trend towards nativist populism is only one part. Yet such trends are themselves a recognised manifestation of the dislocatory experience of Late Modernity and globalisation, or what Bauman (2000) terms the era of ‘liquid modernity’, where moorings feel removed and OS is destabilised. Foregrounding sociological renderings of OS, we therefore emphasise Giddens’ (1991) analysis of the assault on traditional and religious cosmologies, which suggested a need for other forms of grounding. Giddens’ (1991) interest was in the late 20th century’s booming self-help industry (Chapter 6). While this continues, today it seems increasingly connected to genealogical practices of self-discovery, fostered anew, for example, in series like Henry Louis Gates’ PBS series, Finding Your Roots, or its UK equivalent, Who Do You Think You Are, and supported at the everyday level via a booming industry facilitating genealogical excavations into people’s (claimed authentic) origins. Genealogy can therefore be read as one attempt to satisfy subjects’ desire for origins, grounding and authenticity in a context in which origin stories and foundational myths have been seemingly discredited by science.

A third reason for exploring genealogy concerns what has become a core (if ironic) maxim in the OS story – how the subject’s search for the self often generates insecurity. This may be due to the revelation of challenging surprises about the self or from ontological insecurity generated by others’ attempts at securing their own identity. In all this, genealogy has become important, exerting a material impact on who we are and what our politics ‘should’ be. Yet we do not always control our own genealogical biography, since genealogies are not only acquired but also ascribed to subjects (be they people or nations). Indeed, today, some (groups of) people are being laden with ascribed genealogical histories in consequentially new ways. Through ‘genealogical ascription’, individuals and communities are expected to care and assume responsibility for their forebears’ actions – whether direct or collective ancestors. In many cases, this constitutes a battle between shame and pride, a moral evaluation of people’s contemporary selves that is conducted through applying current moral norms to the actions and lives of ancestors who occupied different moral universes. What they did is seen to reflect positively/negatively on their descendants today, to ascribe guilt/innocence, and virtue/moral rectitude. The temptation to moor OS through genealogy is therefore one that can also create personal and social anxiety and ontological insecurity.

Pulling together these three implications, we argue that genealogy has become increasingly important for understanding contemporary ontological (in)security dynamics by offering a (often contestable and fragile) sense of rootedness, origins, and foundations for claims subjects make about themselves. From an International Relations (IR) perspective, it is interesting how genealogy simultaneously cuts across the micro–macro divide, highlighting the relevance of ‘the everyday’ for (international) politics (Solomon and Steele, 2017) and across levels of analysis, with the ‘subject’ of genealogy and OS often discursively mutually imbricating (or layered over) individuals, communities, and nations (Solomon, 2015: 63; 2013: 16-17). The article therefore shows how an attention to OS can help us understand the (contemporary) politics/politicisation of genealogy, but genealogy likewise helps us understand the politics of OS today, but also historically.

The article starts by providing a brief overview of the history of genealogy, focusing specifically on the US and UK contexts, before then considering the ontological and political implications of genealogical methods in the ‘Genealogies: An overview’ section. Engaging Giddens’ problematic of OS in conditions of Late Modernity, the ‘Genealogy, ontology, and politics’ section discusses how genealogy as a practice intersects with several late modern ordering features of OS: routines, narration, scientific expertise, and vicarious identity. The ‘OS and genealogy’ section delves deeper into the relationship between genealogy, ontological (in)security, and race by considering status dynamics and certain ironies connected to contemporary racial genealogy and ends by exploring the contemporary politics of ‘genealogical ascription’ – the ascription of genealogical identities onto others.

Genealogies: An overview

Starting with history, the following discussion does not pretend to provide an authoritative genealogy of genealogies. This is because we are limited to speaking to the Western context in which we are situated and because, like all genealogies, the outline below inevitably simplifies. The emphasis is therefore on highlighting themes that resonate with contemporary debates, especially with respect to the (post)imperial West as exemplified by the United Kingdom and United States.⁶

Genealogical practices have evolved over time. Indeed, where the introduction focused on racial themes, in a UK/European context, historically, an interest in family origins operated primarily along class lines, being foremost a concern of the aristocratic ruling class. In dynastic Europe, for instance, establishing genealogical (royal) lines of descent was key to consecrating and maintaining claims to power, legitimacy, and popular support. Competing genealogical claims were therefore a frequent cause of war. For instance, the Wars of the Roses that divided medieval Britain from 1455 to 1487, pitted Lancastrian and Yorkist branches of the House of Plantagenet against each other over which had the rightful claim to the royal succession (waroftheroses.com; Makinson, 1959; Trevisan, 2020 1). Establishing royal legitimacy through pedigree rolls was crucial in such contests, where accuracy often succumbed to political expediency and ambition. Many rolls therefore included invented ‘false pedigrees’ and ‘genealogical concoctions’ (Round cited in Trevisan, 2018: 258; Wagner, 1972: 310). Thus, one pedigree roll presented to James 1 in 1605, shows the king ‘descended from Noah via Woden, King Lear, Banquo and many others, the majority of whom never existed’ (Trevisan, 2020: 4).⁷

Such inventiveness highlights the creative potential in genealogy. Royal lines could mix, and new ones emerge through marriage between royal families or through establishing connections between unrelated monarchs. Beyond supporting particular power claims, though, this also served a broader function by helping legitimise the monarchy as a political institution (Trevisan, 2020: 22). However, diluting the royal line by marrying commoners was generally avoided lest the ‘magic’ of royal descent dissipate.

Royal ‘genealogical concoctions’ also played a broader role in dynastic Europe. Alongside legitimising royal authority, they performed important nation-building functions, establishing a sense of kinship and legitimate nationhood to be traced back through the community’s ancestral monarchs, giving the imagined community historical heft (Reynolds, 1983). Dynastic genealogies therefore provided many nations with origin myths. In medieval Europe, these were typically traced to figures from the Bible or Greco-Roman mythology, who could grant the nation the ‘prestige of antiquity’. Thus, in 12th-century Britain, the Trojan refugee, Brutus of Troy, was heralded for settling in beautiful Albion, a land then populated by ‘none but a few giants’, defeating them and establishing a new capital city, New Troy, along the River Thames. Similar roles were played by Woden (for Germans), Francus (for Franks), and Hispanus (for Spaniards) (Trevisan, 2020: 7–12). Indeed, Trevisan (2020: 12) notes how, over time, the tendency was to shift from biblical to more ‘native’ ancestors in royal genealogies, with this showing how royal genealogies also became central to the constitution of racial/ethnic origin narratives for many countries. Royal pedigrees, therefore, not only strengthened the claims of kings but also of kingdoms and their constituent nations.

Of course, dynastic genealogies have not always legitimised. For instance, the creation of the British House of Windsor in 1917 was a public relations stunt to distance the British royal family from its Saxe-Coburg-Gotha origins at a time of rising anti-German sentiment (Malloch, n.d.). But even then, establishing and historicising the House of Windsor was central to the legitimising process. Of course, what goes for royal families has also held for the aristocracy, for whom the ability to trace (and parade) their genealogies (e.g. through picture galleries in the ancestral home and the inheriting of titles) has been a key source of status, standing, and power. Historically, ancestors have provided the aristocracy with ‘genealogical capital’ (Zerubavel, 2011), with the ability to chart their ancestry, up until the recent advent of the mass-market ancestry industry, a source of ancestral distinction (Bourdieu, 1984), marking them out from the hoi polloi.

A look at the development of genealogy in the United States helps highlight other dynamics central to genealogy’s contemporary ontological and political functions in Western contexts. Prior to its official founding, the beginning of genealogy as a practice in the United States is often considered to be 1771, ‘when Luke Stebbins published his New England family’s genealogy’. Come the American Revolution, Bailus (2021) notes that genealogy was often ‘dismissed as elitist pretension’, although its popularity grew after the war. Thus, while initially ‘genealogy’ had an ‘ambiguous status in the new republic’ (Weil, 2013: 43), by the mid-19th century, genealogical publications and pamphlets had exploded. At an elite level, for instance, and despite the Republic’s antimonarchist foundation, it is notable that many US presidents openly acknowledged and embraced their royal connections, presumably viewing this as a further source of distinction (Hitchens, 2006). Particularly significant in the US context, though, is how, in the 1890s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints began creating one of the most detailed genealogical databases at its headquarters in Salt Lake City. For Weil (2013), the animating factor for this interest throughout 19th- and 20th- century America was ‘the growing significance of the family as a moral, social and political unit in the new republic’ (p.43).

Fast forward to the modern United States, and bearing deeper consideration for the growing interest in family genealogy and the politics of the present was the television miniseries Roots, which, in January 1977, was watched by almost half of US households and the cultural and social significance of which still resonates today.⁸ Inspired by Alex Haley’s 1976 book, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, the series traced the origins of Haley’s ancestors, starting with the kidnapped Gambian boy who was brought across the Middle Passage in a slave ship to North Carolina and sold into chattel slavery. The episodes documented how the descendants of Kunta Kinte, renamed ‘Toby’ by his slave masters, elaborated the oral history of the African who came to America, using it to propel their inter-generational challenges and hopes in the antebellum South.

Roots generated another explosion of interest in genealogy and family histories across all US ethnic and racial groups, not only Black Americans (Morgan, 2017). For example, as Ball and Jackson (2017a: 9) note, ‘as it turns out, Roots appeared at a significant moment [also] for white “ethnic” US viewers who also felt disconnected from their own family histories and whose turn-of-the-twentieth-century grandparents and parents had also struggled to assimilate’ into the United States. Understandably, though, Black Americans especially ‘appreciated Haley’s emphasis on the importance of honouring black families and black history’ (Ball and Jackson, 2017a: 9). The show’s broader impact was further complemented by Haley’s own fascinating (if ultimately ‘factious’ – facts mixed with fiction – Ball and Jackson, 2017a: 13) story researching his origins, visiting Gambia to locate a griot (village storyteller) who confirmed his family’s oral histories invoking ‘The African’ who was captured, enslaved, and transported to the United States through the Middle Passage. It invigorated an agency that those whose pasts had been erased or cut off (due to slavery, the Holocaust, or waves of immigration) could now recover to reconstruct their own origins.

It was also, simultaneously, an attempt by Haley (via the subtitle The Saga of an American Family) to claim America for both himself and, ostensibly, Black Americans. For some Black Americans, the revived historical spotlight was uncomfortable, especially for those who, like Malcolm X, had severed their connections to the United States’ systemic/structural oppression, violence, and racism, ‘spurning the painful histories behind their slave names’ (Morgan, 2017: 66). But Roots also unsettled some White Americans, who were presented for the first time with a brutal depiction of slavery that contrasted wholly with the benign ‘Lost Cause’ myths they had grown up with.

Appearing on the back of a longer history of Black and working-class Americans, of all races and ethnicities, using oral histories to reclaim family origins, Roots captured the genealogical imagination, sparking a broader cultural phenomenon of genealogical interest through to the present. This dynamic has been boosted more recently by entertainment products like Finding Your Roots, the proliferation of local genealogical societies, and the emergence of the ancestry industry. Alongside oral histories, new research in libraries using census data and microfilm can reconstruct, in a more confirmative way, the historical (auto)biographical narratives of individuals, families, and even groups, with Roots central to legitimating the search for who people are and were, what they are, when they were and are, and from which (inter)national communities. In short, searches seeking to generate a security of family ontologies.

Genealogy, ontology, and politics

The proliferation of different genealogical research methods itself raises questions about the search for determinative and ontologically securing genealogies. This is because different methods influence the sorts of genealogies that can be constructed, with this meaning that genealogical methods have ontological and political implications. As noted, genealogical research may take different forms. Historically, oral histories have been important, especially for community groups, but other methods include archival research, philological enquiry over name derivations, and, most recently, genetic testing. Indeed, today, genetic testing for genealogical origins has become increasingly popular, with a key development being the advent of ‘autosomal DNA’ testing in the mid-2000s (‘23andMe’) that enables the portrayal of geographic origins. ‘By counting the percentage of SNVs [single nucleotide variants] originating from each geographic region, the percentage of an individual’s ancestry derived from each region can be estimated’ (Jorde and Bamshad, 2020: 1089).

Kramer (2015: 83) calls this ‘biogeographical ancestry’, emphasising that ‘ancestry testing only has meaning and significance because it is presented through the universal idiom of family’. However, genetic testing also delimits the notion of family along genetic lines, leaving little space for cultural, historical or adoptive relations. Thus, while DNA testing offers perhaps the greatest promise of establishing a sense of ‘origins’, its ability to provide a richer account of personal histories is limited. So, while it is tempting to think that some methods may be more robust and ‘scientific’ than others, enabling more authentic and legitimate claims to be made, in practice, different methods are useful in highlighting different forms of relations and may be preferred for different reasons.

For instance, narrative claims derived from oral histories or archival research may enable a certain amount of creativity and poetic licence, with an emphasis on storytelling and plot lines designed to make the genealogies both persuasive and enticing to the subject (and to others) – as with the dynastic genealogies discussed earlier. In this respect, genealogy is a creative and constitutive process involving selected inclusions and exclusions, manipulations, and distortions, operating as narratives which ‘we construct to actually make them our ancestors’ and that we deploy selectively according to our personal and collective strategic agendas (original emphasis, Edwards, 2018: 732–733; Zerubavel, 2011: 10). In contrast, while genealogies drawing on genetic testing may be mobilised to try and establish more ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ claims, in practice, such claims are also narrative since the appeal to science and the employment of ‘experts’ are typically used as a mechanism of verification (and therefore legitimation) of claims made, and not least because genetic testing has typically operated to naturalise essentialised discourses that can shift people’s conception of genealogy away from a narrow notion of family history – as in the typical family tree – to become a broader racialised endeavour.

For such reasons, and aside from their evident interconnection, there is no obvious hierarchy between (more) narrative and (more) scientific techniques/technologies through which authenticity can be established. Indeed, what works best in securing recognition from salient others and peers is often a question of political context and norms currently operating around different issues and the purposes to which genealogical exploration is being directed. Two examples are illustrative.

First, the Kamala Harris/Rachel Dolezal comparison discussed earlier is instructive, with defenders of Harris’ claim to blackness relying on her presumed genetic inheritance of blackness via the biological relationship with her father. Trump’s challenge was to question the centrality of the biological link and prioritise a claimed lack of sufficient demonstrative commitment to this heritage. By contrast, in her autobiography, Dolezal (2017) establishes a genealogical connection to Blackness via her mastery and participation in various aspects of Black culture (hair dressing, music/rhythm, church, and history/education), aligned experiences of suffering, and via family and adoptive relations (her marriage to a Black man, referring to another Black man as her second adopted father, her formal adoption of her Black adopted siblings) (Browning et al., 2021: 31–41) such that she argues she ‘began to see the world through Black eyes’ (Dolezal, 2017: 63). While many rejected her claim on biological/genetic grounds, the claim was based on immersion in Black culture and a Black community which she viewed as an extended family, a genealogical right that is often accepted in respect of adopted children.

Interestingly, the changeable centrality of biological and genetic links versus cultural mastery for claiming authentic and socially accepted genealogies is evident in other cases. For example, Comaroff and Comaroff (2009: 65–66; also Zerubavel, 2011: 5) highlight how economic incentives can shift attitudes over who can legitimately claim community membership rights. Specifically, they note how worries about cultural extinction had led many Native American tribes to facilitate membership via an emphasis on attachments to place, social ties, and ‘competence in civilization’ – that is, precisely those things demonstrated by Dolezal. However, the granting of casino rights to some Native American tribes created economic incentives to delimit membership rights via an emphasis instead on DNA testing and bloodlines as designators of ethnic identity. By contrast, while many Western nations have historically also often established genealogies through bloodlines, with this also apparent in current nativist populist movements’ reassertion of the cultural (and sometimes racial) bases of national community, until recently, the ‘official’ trend has been to refrain from such an emphasis. This is because the implication that some people are ‘more’ authentically (i.e. genetically) national does not align with progressive conceptions of national identity. Indeed, upholding such a view has been a shortcut to accusations of fascism in a context in which many Western nations have been cultivating community solidarity via genealogical histories of multiculturalism.

While multicultural histories can be identified, temptations for ‘genealogical concoction’ in support of such claims have also been apparent. The case of ‘Beachy Head Woman’ (BHW) is illustrative, with this referencing a skeleton dating from Roman Britain that was discovered in 2012 in a box in East Sussex labelled ‘Beachy Head’ and that scientists originally declared belonged to a woman from sub-Saharan Africa. The BHW was soon heralded as evidence of Britain’s historically insufficiently recognised ethnic/racial diversity, with the renowned postcolonial historian David Olusoga (2016: 33) proclaiming her to be ‘the first black Briton known to us’, with this narrative gaining traction across media and academic papers and being incorporated into school educational resources (Hackney Learning Trust, n.d.; The Royal Mint, n.d.). Yet research using more recent advances in bioarchaeological DNA testing suggests BHW was of unremarkable ‘local British ancestry’ (Walton et al., 2026). Contrary to initial craniofacial reconstructions that had ‘depicted her as having curly black hair, brown eyes and dark skin’, the latest research suggests she had ‘blue eyes, between pale and dark skin and light hair’, though the BBC still ran the story under the (misleading) headline ‘True origin of “first black Briton” revealed’ (BBC News, 2025). While the latest study emphasises the role of scientific advancements in the different interpretations, the broader embrace of the original and (more remarkable) scientific conclusion highlights the ideological (and ontologically affirming) temptations that still today can lie behind genealogical excavations and appropriations and the role of different genealogical methods in this.

OS and genealogy

Although the above historical and methodological discussion points to the growing societal interest in genealogy, it does not fully account for the mechanisms driving this. Here, we argue that Giddens’ problematic of subjects’ need to manage OS in conditions of Late Modernity is instructive. Understood as the ‘security of being’, OS addresses how, in the face of myriad existential and social anxieties connected to (1) our physical existence, (2) questions of cosmological meaning, and (3) challenges to our moral fortitude (Tillich, 2014), subjects are generally able to ‘go on’ with their everyday lives. Subjects able to manage such anxieties exhibit OS. Subjects who fail will face the prospect of feeling overwhelmed and destabilised and can be said to manifest ontological insecurity. Thus, while OS is usually understood as the ability to maintain a coherent sense of self-identity through time and space and to establish a ‘sense of continuity and order in events, including those not directly in [one’s] perceptual environment’ (Giddens, 1991: 243), subjects experiencing ontological insecurity may feel their sense of self is fractured, with this entailing the risk of slipping into depressive or psychotic states (Giddens, 1991: 40–41).

While not the originator of this initially psychoanalytical concept (see Laing, 1959), coming from a sociological background, Giddens’ key contribution was to suggest that conditions of Late Modernity were creating enhanced problems for practices of OS management. The reason stemmed from the ontologically destabilising challenge that the Enlightenment and modern science posed to certitudes of traditional forms of knowledge. Specifically, while science challenged the doctrinaire nature and routinised certainties of religious and traditional beliefs, these were not replaced with other certainties. Instead, with its methodology of ‘radical doubt’, science’s only promise is that today’s knowledge may yet be discredited by new scientific discoveries. In a scientific world, all knowledge is therefore contingent (Giddens, 1990: 38–39; 1991: 2–3). The challenge for subjects in Late Modernity is therefore how to generate a sense of grounding and OS in a situation in which the only certainty to believe in is the conditionality of all knowledge claims, uncertainty itself. A central concern for Giddens and for ontological security studies (OSS) in IR, therefore, has been investigating how subjects establish their continuity of being through various devices or practices. In the following, we highlight four such devices before discussing how genealogy as a practice appears attractive to subjects because of how it intersects with these late modern ordering features of OS.

Routines and narratives

The first ordering device is routines which, simply through their reproduction, help establish certainties and stabilise expectations about the world. Routines are therefore ‘integral both to the continuity of the personality of the agent . . . and to the institutions of society, which are such only through their continued reproduction’ (Giddens, 1984: 60). Because individuals and groups practice their routines in institutional (and often ritualised) contexts, this itself helps to establish order for themselves and others (Kinnvall and Mitzen, 2020: 245).

Closely linked to routines is the second ordering device, (biographical) narrative. This has been a central point of focus within OSS (Delehanty and Steele, 2009; Eberle, 2019; Hinck et al., 2021; Homolar and Scholz, 2019; Subotić, 2016) that has also, and importantly from a genealogical perspective, entailed a more specific concern with how ‘mnemonical’ practices of memory (in)securitise groups, political communities, and regions (Mälksoo, 2015, 2019; Subotić, 2019). Biographical narratives are important because they are both inclusive and exclusive, ordering the self and communities, although they occasionally need updating to resolve information that may otherwise generate anxiety or unease in the subject. Memory practices are, of course, coconstitutive with narratives, linking a past to a contemporary self and group, and vice versa (Carr, 1986).

Routines and narratives, however, can be disturbed, precisely because of the social and political contexts within which they operate. Throughout daily life, subjects often (reflexively) adjust their routines to accommodate changes in their social milieus, with such reflexivity an important ability in managing anxiety and upholding OS. Indeed, what makes routines ‘healthy’ is that they can be amended quite easily in light of such occurrences (Mitzen, 2006). But ‘critical situations’, understood in OSS as ‘radical disjunctions that challenge the ability of collective actors to ‘go on’ (Ejdus, 2018: 883), may severely disrupt and disorder the subject by upending their routines and/or the biographical narratives that legitimate the self. In such situations, narratives and routines must either be transformed or the critical situations confronted and changed, if the possibility of OS is to return.

Expertise

Third, expertise, or what Giddens referenced as ‘expert systems of knowledge’, also helps instruct individuals and groups in modernity on how to order the self, including through ‘deploying modes of technical knowledge which have validity’. These ‘penetrate virtually all aspects of social life in conditions of modernity – in respect of the food we eat, the medicines we take, the buildings we inhabit [and] the forms of transport we use’ (Giddens, 1991: 18). The OSS scholars exploring expertise’s ordering functions have, for instance, analysed the role of private security companies in delivering OS through ‘risk identification, risk profiling and risk management’ (Krahmann, 2018: 356) and the Central Intelligence Agency’s ‘expertise’ in carrying out ‘technical’ and ‘effective’ forms of torture during the United States’ Global War on Terror (Steele, 2017). Indeed, in the absence of determined truths, Giddens argues that Late Modernity entails subjects’ responsibilisation to seek out their own experts, something which he identifies with the rise of everyday life politics and the emergence of a booming self-help industry since the 1980s. Ordered and routinised identities warding off existential anxieties could therefore be established through adhering to ‘expert’-mediated self-help exercise, diet, relationship, and mental health programmes or by consulting your own economic advisor, life coach, and so on. The irony is that ‘experts’ typically offer competing advice to invest in and trust in adherence to whichever, therefore, typically entails some element of a leap of faith influenced by modern marketing techniques.

Thus, as Giddens noted, expertise in Late Modernity has ontological insecurity baked into it, since the need to rely on and trust experts – and opaque expert systems – to navigate much contemporary life becomes problematic in a context in which the very notion of expertise is up for grabs (O’Brien, 1999: 20). Recent studies in OSS have therefore analysed two intriguing dynamics of subjects’ changing relationship to expertise in Late Modernity. First, it has focused on the rejection of experts (including the very idea of expertise) in an era of populist ‘revolts’ (like Brexit and MAGA) against not only political but also broader ‘life politics’ elites whose counsel fails to deliver the anxiety mitigation promised by relying on them (Browning, 2019; Steele and Homolar, 2019). Second, though, it has also been noted that the fault line between Late Modernity and more traditional forms of knowledge is less categorical than Giddens suggested. For example, Kurowska (2023) has highlighted how certain experts and forms of expert knowledge, what Kurowska calls ‘guardian experts’, may support the ‘sacralisation’ of ‘knowledge’, thereby enlivening tradition instead of challenging it. Thus, whereas Giddens (1991) saw the radical doubt central to the scientific method as rupturing ritualised forms of traditional knowledge, scientific claims to knowledge are themselves not immune from ritualisation, as whenever scientific knowledge is reified into a theological scientism policed by guardian experts, with such knowledge providing a sense of (ultimately insecure) epistemic security in the face of the otherwise unknown (Kurowska, 2023: 9–10).⁹

Vicarious identification

The fourth ordering device occurs when, lacking the opportunity, confidence, or capability to secure itself on its own, the subject establishes identification vicariously through other agents. Vicarious identification (VI) involves two of the above devices – routines and narratives – but as experienced through a ‘significant Other’ (Browning et al., 2021; Brassett and Browning, 2024; Browning, 2018; Haigh, 2024). This phenomenon, common in parents (who practice VI through their children), in sports fans (through their teams), and citizens (through their nations) includes both vicarious identification, understood as ‘practices that subjects engage in while establishing a sense of vicarious identity’ and vicarious identity promotion: ‘attempts . . . to actively induce citizens into vicariously identifying with others, typically deemed to symbolize national ideals’ (Browning et al., 2021: 7; Browning and Haigh, 2022: 3).

Genealogy and the ordering devices of OS

We highlight these four practices because all are at stake in genealogy. Family relations are often routinised, and the story/biographical narrative behind someone’s origins or ancestry can also acquire a routinised and even ritualised (Aalberts et al., 2020; Mälksoo, 2021; Solomon, 2023) dynamic. Meanwhile, expert institutions, be it state or local genealogical societies, and more recently private companies, have increasingly provided community venues facilitating routines of genealogical investigation driven by and supporting vicarious identification.

Yet, given the centrality of biographical grounding and continuity, genealogy has been strangely absent within OSS and within IR work on narrative. Much of the OS literature and work in adjacent fields skirts around the genealogical dynamics of OS seeking without engaging it explicitly. For instance, work on nations and nationalism typically emphasises the importance of (biographically routinised and inherently vicarious) chosen traumas and historically grounded claims of national identity (see Kinnvall, 2004), thus national narratives are inherently genealogical.

In addition, though, narratives that structure genealogical stories illuminate both Giddensian and Lacanian theorisations of the subject, a distinction that has otherwise come to divide approaches to OS in IR. Giddensian accounts depict subjects struggling to find OS but ultimately possibly doing so. At base, this is the ultimate promise of genealogical investigation. By contrast, Lacanian accounts see the closure or attainment of such security as a fantasy, an unsatiable ‘lack’ that nevertheless pushes forward the subject with an eternal desire for wholeness, often directed to future-oriented projects of becoming (Kinnvall, 2019). This desire, though, almost painful as with the elusive jouissance of the Lacanian subject (Eberle, 2019), also resonates with what those seeking out genealogical origins grounded in personal histories experience. Words like ‘quest’, ‘obsession’, and analogies of origins to a ‘grail’ litter testimonies and characterisations of genealogy (see Morgan, 2017: 64).

Indeed, genealogy can be understood as one way of suturing what Sartre called the ‘abyssal’ aspect of birth, the fact that birth itself is a ‘total night of identity’ (quoted in Hatton, 2018: 3) with consciousness of ourselves only emerging in infant development. Although memory of our birth eludes us, those blanks can be (partially) filled through those who did experience it, with this potentially becoming part of our subjectivity – at least adding meaning to understandings of our origin. Yet, genealogy enables us to push back our sense of origin temporally even further, establishing roots and grounding us ontologically, even if the abyss of origins can never be fully demystified. Citing Ricoeur, Hatton (2018: 4) notes how ‘Genealogy can be a way of enabling a more meaningful consideration of oneself’ as ‘One experiences one’s origin through the lives of ancestors’ who provide us with an ‘umbilical consciousness’ because of how genealogy ‘allows an expansion into the past of a perception of prior beginning, and of events pertaining to oneself’. Indeed, genealogy enables us to recognise that one’s origin precedes our birth and even our immediate biological conception, which itself was preconditioned and preceded by the births of our many ancestors in a ‘chain of generations’ (Hatton, 2018: 7).

However, if knowledge of our genealogy provides us with a ‘hereditary capital fund’ that helps ‘ground the self in a transcendental birth’ through knowledge of the ancestral preconditions of our origins (Hatton, 2019: 10), the absence of this – or the restricted ability to explore one’s genealogy – may be a source of trauma and anxiety. This is evident for those whose family origins were erased due to slavery, colonialism, and genocide (David, 2024: 153–154; Hackstaff, 2010: 663–664). For such groups, not only may the discovery of personal histories be painful, but the very possibility of discovering origins (beyond a certain recent point in time) may have been erased, putting a limit on the experience of a historically rooted genealogical sense of self-understanding. Yet even here, there is something akin to a rare ‘closure’ to genealogical searches,¹⁰ a way to work through these painful disjunctures that still may not, of course, satisfy the search for ‘wholeness’ the Lacanian subject desires. It is at this point that Giddens’ take on narrative dovetails with the practice of genealogical stories. As Giddens (1984: 359) notes,

Narrative history [as] the telling of stories . . . [entails the] . . . conscious acknowledgement of the common root which ‘history’ has with ‘story’ and of the fact that histoire means both. The stories have to conform to the demands of factual evidence, but what holds them together and commands the assent of the reader is the coherence of the plot.

To be convincing, genealogical storytelling has to ‘resonate’ (Solomon, 2013). One requirement is that such stories appear to provide not just conjecture or fantasy but serve the ‘demands of factual evidence’. Told well, genealogy may even offer a corrective to alternative subject narratives that have become unstable and viewed as increasingly ‘fictitious’ – a way of restabilising the subject on new moral grounds. For instance, by 2019, one analyst had come to see genealogy as a chance finally ‘to come to terms with America’s true past – as recorded and verified as opposed to rewritten and edited to suit partisan agendas’, the antidote to the current ‘era of alternative facts, gaslighting, and deliberate spin’ (McFarland, 2019). Another requirement, though, is dramatological, especially in an era in which genealogy has emerged as its own entertainment industry. Genealogical ‘storytellers’ therefore need to attract not only the subject but also the audience.

This emergence of genealogy as an entertainment product has itself reinforced (and relies upon) deference to the genealogical expert. For instance, most Americans will recognise Henry Louis Gates and his show Finding Your Roots on PBS. Indeed, Gates’ reassuring and even upbeat demeanour recalls Kurowska’s (2023) ‘guardian expert’ who, through their composure and reassurance, ‘rely on intimacy with the audience’ for their authority (p.7). Yet even before Finding Your Roots aired, throughout the 2010s, various shows or segments proliferated throughout US networks (Genealogy Roadshow, Genetic Detective), investigating individuals’ genetic genealogical background. Many of these include the work of CeCe Moore, a former theatre performer and television actor, who became a genetic genealogist running a blog and Facebook group dedicated to the enterprise. Alongside serving as a consultant and substitute host for Finding Your Roots, she also regularly appears on US shows like 20/20 and Good Morning America.

The role of individuals like Moore demonstrates how expert ‘systems of knowledge’ are now embedded in the search for family origins. This includes the local librarians and census ‘government records’ consulted to assist in finding missing links in a family tree, to the geneticists and evolutionary biologists who instruct and consult the companies and agencies on the DNA utilised to provide an individual’s genealogical ‘fingerprint’. Indeed, for African Americans, genetic testing may be the only genealogical method available, given slavery’s eradication of family ties and memories and where establishing historical genetic ancestral links may operate as a surrogate for family history when constructing narratives of personal identity, belonging, and kinship (David, 2024: 153–154; Hatton, 2019: 8).

Yet a fairly straight-forward biopolitical reading of DNA testing highlights the limitations and problems of this form of genealogical ‘expertise, including how genetic genealogy operates to naturalize race (and racial categorization) and has emerged as a biopolitical operation of surveying and surveiling populations’ (Cachoian-Schanz and Schwerzmann, 2023: 71). And yet despite this, the ‘trust’ that Giddens once assumed operated for ‘expert systems of knowledge’ but which is now increasingly questioned in many areas of social life (media, finance, medicine, etc.), even today is regularly invested in by subjects seeking their genealogical origins. This is especially so with DNA testing, which is inherently complicated and requires ‘an expert to help you interpret it’ (Kristen Brown, quoted in Copeland, 2020: 82). As Cachoian-Schanz and Schwerzmann (2023) note, this provides a powerful market for companies offering genetic genealogical knowledge to subjects ‘affectively attached to their geographic, cultural, and national origins, often as the result of historical dispossession’. Of course, ‘surprises’ regarding genealogical origins (or branches of a family) happen quite regularly, though it is usually not the expert, but rather history (or histoire) that is to blame for the origin story’s disruption.

Likewise, the literature on vicarious identity has noted how individual and collective subjects frequently establish a sense of OS by vicariously identifying with forebears and through whom an appropriative sense of pride, resourcefulness, heroism, and so on can be claimed (Browning et al., 2021). Genealogies facilitate ‘a sense of vicarious participation in history’, this promoting ‘a way of experiencing even distant historical events quasi-autobiographically’ (Zerubavel, 2011: 21). We see this particularly in practices of military Remembrance, where citizens are actively encouraged to draw pride from family ancestors’ sacrifices or from previous generations more generally (Browning and Haigh, 2022; Haigh, 2020, 2024). However, VI is also often practised with respect to contemporaries. The point, though, is that VI can be both enhanced through genealogical practices while also being a mechanism through which legitimating genealogies are claimed.

Last, while the above has highlighted how the OS devices of routines, narratives, expertise and vicarious identity may be important for understanding (and are at stake in) genealogy, crucially, the relationship also operates in reverse. Specifically, genealogy is increasingly important for understanding contemporary OS dynamics. Thus, genealogy’s attraction derives from its ability to offer a sense of rootedness and an enhanced foundation of legitimacy for (certain) claims that subjects may make about themselves.

This section has argued that genealogy’s contemporary popularity can only be understood insofar as it may provide an antidote to feelings of rootlessness fostered by globalisation and a fractured modernity. Mobility is one thing, but people also desire anchors of belonging that can be found in origin stories they can at least carry with them as they move. Indeed, this may explain the sense of ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ people experience when engaging in ‘roots tourism’ (Hackstaff, 2010: 666). Relatedly, genealogy may also be appealing given a pervasive consumer culture within which authenticity is increasingly derived through brands (Banet-Weiser, 2012). Here, genealogical claims have the potential to unveil and reveal what the subject may perceive as the ultimate in authenticity branding – the very origin of themselves.

Genealogy, ontological (in)security, and the contemporary politics of race

To end, we return to the opening engagement with racial themes. While genealogy is not delimited to racial issues, the intersection of genealogy with race has a long history but has also become particularly pronounced and animated in contemporary politics in ways that cut across the domestic and international. We point to two broad sets of processes. First, while it often seems to appeal as a source of OS and (status-enhancing) distinction, racial genealogy can also prove ontologically destabilising and has, in fact, become a deeply ironic process. Second, we point to the overt politicisation of genealogy evident in stigmatising and ontologically insecuritising practices (and strategies) of ‘genealogical ascription’.

Status and ironies of racial genealogy

While already noted, the historical intertwining of genealogy with race is evident in how the emergence of US American interest in the late 19th century, with genealogy, was linked to the Darwinian and Eugenicist mood in White America over racial hierarchy. Weil (2013: 113) quotes zoologist George Brown Goode, who wrote in his family history that ‘as members of the great Aryan race we may justly take pleasure in tracing back our lineage, so far as possible, in that broad stairway of ancestral derivation’. Genealogical practices helped to reinforce the ‘biological point of view’ central to the ‘growing racialization of American society and culture’ in the late 19th century (Weil, 2013: 124) – but also Europe (e.g. Kemiläinen, 1998) – one that imposed ethnic hierarchies across and within racial groups. The relationship between eugenics and genealogy was especially pronounced. As Weil (2013: 122) observes, while ‘not all genealogists were eugenicists at the time . . . most eugenicists were interested in genealogy’ since knowledge of family backgrounds was integral towards ‘improving’ racial groups’ hereditary lines. Genealogical practices, then, at best, proceeded alongside violent segregational practices in the early to mid-20th century, such as forced sterilisation, institutionalisation, and, in their most extreme, genocidal concentration, expulsion and extermination of ‘inferior’ groups.

The irony is that there is a liberating possibility in genealogy. One may blanche at Weil’s (2013: 180–181) more triumphant cosmopolitan conclusion that by the 1970s ‘genealogy not only had become extremely popular but also had attracted new practitioners for whom its meaning lay in stunning contrast with the situation of the first half of the twentieth century . . . Self-understanding superseded self-assertion’. But his follow-up that ‘ordinary Americans were legitimately looking for their ancestors, whether African American slaves from Georgia or immigrant maids from Finland’ speaks of genealogy’s multicultural possibilities (Weil, 2013: 183). When genetic genealogy arrived, the combination of entertainment platforms such as Finding Your Roots, combined with the economic interests of a backstage industry – companies like 23andMe — who engaged in ‘a series of initiatives to increase the diversity of the company’s samples’ in the early 2010s to expand their potential market (Weil, 2013: 183). Of course, one of the interesting things about genetic testing is how it contains the genomic biopolitical potential to actually free society from racial politics by pointing to the racial diversity inherent in all our DNA (Bliss, 2009: 324). Despite its postracial potentials, though, the opposite effect is often identifiable, with many people evidently seeking some level of purity/dominance of particular racial markers – often to be disappointed (Edwards, 2018: 728; Hackstaff, 2010: 664; Nash, 2015: 9). Especially in the US context, the racially confirmative, as well as disruptive, possibilities that DNA testing entailed brought home some of the violent historical truths of its slavery-era past.

For instance, Gates has mentioned in several interviews about his show (see Wilmore, 2023) the recurrent expectation by Black Americans (based on family lore) that they had some Native American ancestry, only to be disappointed (Gates estimates that the ‘average’ Black American has less than 0.7% Native American ancestry, see also Wade, 2014). Two things are left unsaid in such exchanges. First, by the time slave plantations were well established, much of the United States’ Indigenous population had been moved or exterminated in those areas. The largest percentage of Native ancestry in Black Americans is found in Oklahoma. This can be dated to the 1831 ‘Trail of Tears, when thousands of Native Americans were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma, which was also home to a significant number of black slaves’ (Wade, 2014). A second often overlooked point is that this overstated belief in Native American ancestry is arguably a consequence of understandable OS enhancing status desires. As historian Claudio Saunt states, ‘If you are a slave or an African American living in Jim Crow America, who wouldn’t want to be associated with someone like Crazy Horse or Geronimo?’ (quoted in Zerubavel, 2011: 8).

But Black Americans do have, on average, 24% European ancestry (Wade, 2014), with the reasons traceable to the violent and coercive sexual relations between White slaveowners and their female Black slaves. Thus, how individuals relying on DNA testing in the expectation of discovering their ontologically affirming ‘authentic’ origins often discover potentially destabilising complicated histories to navigate and weave into narratives of self-identity. In short, genealogy generates a conundrum over what to remember/forget and what to (vicariously) embrace/regret. For example, when former First Lady Michelle Obama’s ancestry was identified in a 2012 study, it was reported that she was descended from a slaveowner’s son and a family-owned slave. One White descendant noted her ashamed realisation that ‘the idea that one of our ancestor’s raped a slave . . .’ before ending her sentence (quoted in Copeland, 2020: 122).

Racial genealogies, then, have the potential to foster both ontological affirmation and pride but also ontological destabilisation and shame because of how they have become narrativised into changing racialised status dynamics. This element is evident whenever claimed racial genealogies are contested – as in the cases of Kamala Harris and Rachel Dolezal – and where these cases highlight well the ongoing sensitivities of racial politics (especially in the United States), but where claiming different racial identities and lineages also entails entering a realm of contested debates about morality and responsibility – something further discussed below. Thus, despite claims about the self-curatorial possibilities of the neoliberal entrepreneurial subject, at least when it comes to genealogy, subjects claiming racial backgrounds need to secure audience acceptance if their claims are to be accepted as authentic and not objectionably appropriative.

The contemporary politics of genealogical ascription

Such ontological vulnerabilities, though, are not limited to the genealogies people find through their own investigations but may also result when stigmatised genealogies are ascribed onto subjects by others, raising questions about their moral virtue, social standing, and often also their (presumed) inherited wealth. This reaffirms the fact that OS often has an inherently intersubjective dimension, especially when anxieties of guilt and condemnation can be activated through shaming and stigmatisation practices that put in question the subject’s desire for status, standing, and moral recognition as articulated through their own routinised biographical narratives (Adler-Nissen, 2014; Steele, 2005; Zarakol, 2011). In these practices, subjects are assumed to bear inherited responsibility for their forebears’ actions because they are assumed to be extensions of them – even though such claims are inherently vicarious and may be rejected by the subject themselves.

Today, the issue of ascribed genealogy is especially evident over the contested issues of responsibility and reparations for slavery/colonialism. This has different manifestations. Between nation-states, representatives of ‘colonised’ countries have become increasingly vocal about the responsibilities of former colonial powers. Methodologically, what counts here is not scientific genetic DNA testing but the expertise of historians. Underlying such claims is the ascription of inherited responsibility attached to whole countries and nations, though these debates can also extend into contests over which genealogy/history should actually count/be ascribed primary moral weight. Thus, Marxist analyses of colonialism have long argued that the colonial system’s exploitative nature was complex, also entailing notable class dynamics (Bannerji, 2005). Working-class defenders therefore emphasise how they too were victims of exploitation of the colonial system and should not suffer again through demands to pay reparations for things that ‘they’ (i.e. their forebears) did not do. Indeed, why should they when elites in colonised states also often benefitted from their ancestors’ accommodation with colonial rule?

Similar disputes exist at the domestic level. For instance, in 2023, Reuters published the results of an investigation into the genealogies of America’s political elite.¹¹ These were, however, partial genealogies since what interested Reuters was establishing politicians’ ‘personal connections’ to slavery, with other genealogical dimensions omitted. The investigation determined:

that a fifth of the nation’s congressmen, living presidents, Supreme Court justices and governors are direct descendants of ancestors who enslaved Black people. Among 536 members of the last sitting Congress, Reuters determined at least 100 descend from slaveholders. Of that group, more than a quarter of the Senate — 28 members – can trace their families to at least one slaveholder.

Quoted in the accompanying article, Henry Louis Gates Jr., noted how Reuters’ investigation revealed the intimate connections between the ‘people who make the laws that govern our country’ and the institution of slavery. Yet he also noted that identifying familial connections to slaveholders is ‘not another chapter in the blame game. We do not inherit guilt for our ancestors’ actions’ (emphasis added). Yet, it is hard to think that notions of inherited guilt and responsibility did not play some role in Reuters’ investigation given that the report drew attention to ‘those leaders’ connections to what’s commonly called America’s ‘original sin’ and suggested it was an opportunity ‘for them to learn – in personal, specific and sometimes graphic ways – the facts behind their own kin’s part in slavery’.¹²

Moreover, Reuters was keen to present these socially stigmatising and potentially ontologically unsettling genealogical revelations to the people in question and to report on their reactions. Few were willing to discuss the subject, even though ‘Among the silent are politicians who previously have spoken publicly, sometimes eloquently, about the legacy of slavery and the need for racial healing’. Contrastingly, the report highlighted various politicians who, when campaigning, have made a virtue of mining other parts of their genealogical heritage – for example, ties to place and land, family stories embodying the American Dream – but who have remained silent about these more shameful episodes. Given the current moral climate, confronting politicians with their ancestors’ (now considered) distasteful actions had a ‘gotcha’ element to it, especially in suggesting that the wholesome genealogies politicians prefer to present may be subject to moral tarnishing as a result of vicarious genealogical ascription. Hence, politicians who vicariously appropriate their familial ancestors’ achievements for political ends presumably cannot escape vicarious responsibility (and shame) for all their actions.

In the United Kingdom, similar stigmatising practices of ‘genealogical ascription’ have also been rising, especially directed at some of the country’s wealthiest landowners, universities, museums, and the royal family (Browning and Howe, 2026), when that wealth is linked to slave plantations. This has included the Guardian newspaper (established in 1821), renowned by critics for its moral(ising) certitude, but which recently faced revelations that the paper’s founder, the journalist and cotton merchant John Edward Taylor and other backers, had links to the transatlantic slave trade. Given that it has itself participated in such shaming tactics, the revelation was embarrassing, with the Guardian’s owners issuing an apology and instituting a decade-long ‘investment’ and ‘programme of restorative justice’ (Mohdin, 2023). Since the Guardian today is not the Guardian of 1821, it is interesting how contemporary employees and owners are understood to be legitimate targets of vicariously ascribed (and internalised) shame dynamics. The Guardian’s response, as with other institutions like Edinburgh University (2025; Research and Engagement Working Group, 2025), therefore appears as a form of, at minimum, institutional brand protection, but perhaps more maximally (and opportunistically) as an opportunity for reasserting the brand’s conspicuous and morally virtuous distinction.

Along similar lines, several (relatively) wealthy individuals and institutions have sought to get ahead of the game, actively embracing vicariously inherited shame and seeking to make preemptive recompense through symbolic gestures of apology and compensation. For instance, the former BBC journalist, Laura Trevelyan, has actively engaged with her family’s slave owning past in Grenada and stated that she feels a personal responsibility for her ancestors’ actions and the benefits she gained from this. In response, Trevelyan has signed an apology, donated £100,000 to a reparatory fund, but now says she wants to use her storytelling expertise and experience to act as a ‘roving advocate for reparatory justice’ (Kanter, 2023). Since the story went public in early 2023, other wealthy individuals and families have followed suit.

While there is no reason to impugn Trevelyan’s motives and others like her – not least those in the ‘Heirs of Slavery’ group of which Trevelyan is a founding member¹³ – such actions fit neatly with Ahmed’s (2000) observation that one way subjects may deal with (vicarious) shame is precisely by owning it. Doing so, she notes, operates as a mechanism of drawing distinction from one’s ancestors and ultimately reclaiming the status and standing of the (now cleansed) idealised and virtuous subject. Preemptive action is therefore one way for subjects to avoid being tarnished by vicariously ascribed moral condemnation of one’s ancestors and to actually enhance their moral standing, self-esteem, and OS by reinscribing a socially recognised and valued narrative of self-identity. The fact that this is also dependent on the exploitative actions of those ancestors now rejected is ironic.

Alternatively, subjects may seek to evade ‘guilt by genealogical association’ (Zerubavel, 2011: 25) through genealogical obfuscation and selectivity. For example, one aspect of the post-Roots genealogy boom in the United States was White Americans seeking out their own ancestral homelands and immigrant backgrounds, as Irish, Italian, Scandinavian, and so on, thereby ‘re-root[ing] themselves in their own ancestral homelands, far away, they imagine, from the unsettled settler societies in which they live’ (Edwards, 2018: 728). Subjects may also try to escape genealogical ascription by emphasising stories of their own ancestors’ hardships, struggles, and persecution to establish a (now vicariously treasured) victimhood that led to the move in the first place (Hackstaff, 2010: 660). Either way, the ‘compromised relationship as colonisers of indigenous peoples’ (Edwards, 2018: 728) is evaded.¹⁴

Politically speaking, the genealogical mining of others and (threats of) genealogical ascription have become an increasingly focused strategy of those seeking recognition (and sometimes recompense) for historical sins. This can, of course, raise questions about which historical sins are to be recognised, with (selective) genealogy and vicarious genealogical ascription becoming a mechanism through which the past is populated by a one-dimensional cast of victims and perpetrators. In short, whose suffering counts, for what and how much? The point is not whether subjects should apologise for all their ancestors’ unsavoury actions, but rather how genealogy illustrates a common dilemma of OS seeking in Late Modernity. As a practice seen to offer the promise of OS by fulfilling subjects’ desire for historical groundings, origins and authenticity, what is ‘located’ or vicariously ascribed to them can also at times be ontologically unsettling.

Conclusion

This article has examined how genealogical practices and the fascination with genealogy over time represent an integral, and perhaps even essential, modern practice. It suggested that OS is a helpful lens to understand how finding one’s origins has both transnational implications and implications that relate to an individual and group’s ‘ordering of the Self’. The article explored the evolution of genealogy over time and in different cultures and posited the ordering features of genealogy expressed through OS referents of routines, vicarious identity, narration, and scientific ‘expertise’.

Our purposes in this article were not only to centre genealogy as a modern practice at the intersection of politics, groups, and identities, but also as a heuristic provocation for future studies to explore more deeply themes underdeveloped here. We focus on two possibilities.

A first would be to directly link research into the practice of genealogy, with the genealogy-as-method Foucauldian approach that has been increasingly used in International Relations. While we distinguished our former interest here in an earlier footnote from the latter, possibilities emerge for how exploring the power/knowledge nexus is entangled in genealogical practices, in that they surely reflect ‘how and why some subjects and social items were brought about and not others’ (Vucetic, 2011: 1303). A genealogy-as-method approach to genealogy-as-practice would foreground both the contingent moments shaping groups’ genealogies, as well as the power relations that constrain and enable those contingencies in the first place. Furthermore, it can both reveal the marginalised and asymmetric forms of knowledge that shape the ability to ‘tell’ a genealogical story for some, as well as suggest ways to ‘open the intellectual and political space for resistance to the dominant regimes of truth’ about one’s origins and history (Vucetic, 2011: 1298).

A second avenue for future study could examine genealogy as a multinational entertainment and political economic industry. It should be noted that in addition to the programmes in the United States and United Kingdom referenced here, since the early 2010s, several reality shows in Scandinavia (Alt for Sverige and Alt for Norge) have popularised the search by Americans for their ancestral, and even contemporary, relatives. This recalls that international migration, which has been central to many/all genealogical stories, is never limited to one national setting and extends to multiple contexts across time and space. This thread would seek to examine not only why individuals and groups care about their own origins but also why people care about others’ ancestry. Why does it seem to work as a form of entertainment? Presumably, the answer to this relates to the need to feel historically grounded, but this, and other issues coming from genealogical practices, deserve further attention and scrutiny.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2023 annual meeting of the International Studies Association-Northeast in Providence, the 2024 annual meeting of the International Society for Political Psychology in Santiago, Chile, and the University of Utah Political Science Department’s Political Research Colloquium. The authors thank Lina Benabdallah, Walker Chavatel, Luther McPherson for their enriching comments in Providence, John Cash and Xymena Kurowska for their supportive and insightful ones in Santiago, and Selene Campion, Claudio Holzner, Jacob Garrett, Faisal Kamal, Kosta Kambouris, Taemin Kim, Nicole Maalouf and Shaarif Sameer for their questions and comments at the PRC. Finally, we especially thank the reviewers of BJPIR and editor Jack Holland for their counsel, suggestions and guidance throughout the review process.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Christopher S Browning

Brent J Steele

Notes

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