Genealogy has become big business. With home test kits readily available and a flourishing of web sites devoted to tracing family ancestors, it has never been easier to dig up and examine one’s roots.
But is there a darker side to this research, one that goes beyond connectedness and into a claim of legitimacy that comes from being able to trace one’s relatives back to a certain ancestor or group of ancestors?
That question is at the center of a fascinating conversation that will take place at Mason this week, as Harvard professor and author Maya Jasanoff and Mason biocultural anthropologist and assistant professor Rick W. A. Smith discuss some of the implications of our society’s fascination with bloodlines.
Jasanoff is the X.D. and Nancy Yang Professor and Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University. A historian of British imperial and global history, her books Edge of Empire (2005), Liberty’s Exiles (2011), and The Dawn Watch (2017) have won numerous accolades including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Cundill Prize in History, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction. She is currently writing a history of the human preoccupation with ancestry and genealogy, the topic of a popular undergraduate course she teaches. She also writes widely about history, literature, and world affairs for publications including The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. In 2021 she was chair of judges for the Booker Prize.
Smith’s work centers on how colonialism and imperialism in the Americas has impacted people’s DNA and our shared genetic and ecological landscapes. In addition to working with Mason’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Women and Gender Studies program, they are a research affiliate with the Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society Lab in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta and a core founding faculty member of the Summer Institute for INdigenous peoples in Genomics (SING) Canada. Their work merges genomics with queer, feminist, and Indigenous science studies to trace the ways that shifting systems of power become molecular. This includes a focus on the genetic and environmental impacts of imperialism and colonialism in the Americas, but also the rise of genetic ancestry technologies and the ways they have attempted to transform what it means to be Indigenous into a question of a DNA test.
Public event Friday, October 21, 1:30 to 3 p.m.
Jasonoff and Smith will discuss the implications of our society’s exploding interest in genealogy in a conversation on Friday, October 21. The event, presented by the Omicron of Virginia Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and co-hosted by Mason’s Center for Humanities Research and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS), is open to the public, and promises to offer a critical and thoughtful consideration of the issues related to ancestral research.
The event may be attended in-person, on Mason's Fairfax Campus, or virtually. A reception will follow the in-person event.
Jasanoff is bringing this conversation to Mason as a visiting scholar from Phi Beta Kappa (PBK). The oldest academic honor society in the United States, PBK was launched by college students in 1776. Today, nearly 300 chapters serve more than 500,000 living members, who include past and present Supreme Court justices, former presidents, artists and authors such as Kerry Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Samuel Clemens, as well as journalists, scientists, and more than 150 Nobel Laureates.
The George Mason chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was installed in April, 2013, after the university undertook a decade-long admission process. From the first 141 founding members of the Omicron of Virginia chapter, over 900 students have been inducted.
This organization is a living network of highly achieving individuals, and membership in PBK–based on selective academic criteria–offers a distinguished credential of academic excellence as well as opportunities for engagement with this esteemed community. Professor Jasanoff’s visit is an example of the opportunity to share intriguing research with a broader public audience.
Catherine Olien, associate director of the Center for Humanities Research, hopes to bring home to Mason students the prestige that attaches to an invitation to join the society. “Phi Beta Kappa is in a league of its own,” she said. “We hope to excite Mason students, to help them understand what an achievement it is.”
CHSS dean Ann Ardis agrees. "Membership in Phi Beta Kappa is a mark of academic achievement that is recognized world-wide,” she notes. “More than an honor society, it is an entry into a community of scholars and life-long learners.”
October 18, 2022