An Anthropology Geneology Project?

On the subject of the diverse forms of Marriage and Reproduction, consider mathematicians. About 8 or 9 years ago the Mathematics Department of North Dakota State University started the “Mathematics Genealogy Project”– a database of every mathematician, living and dead and a list of their advisors and advisees. Mathematicians, and many other scientists, are famously obsessed with this kind of accounting of filiation. There’s even a mathematical concept, coined by the Kevin Bacon of Mathematics, Paul Erdös. The Erdös Number measures the co-authorship relation of two authors.

The Mathematics genealogy project has gotten a fair amount of attention, and it got me thinking that, Anthropology being the discipline most obsessed with genealogy as such, shouldn’t we have something similar, an Anthropology Genealogy project? Except better, and wackier with all those fantastic forms of kinship we know to exist? Not just students and advisors, but co-authors, membership in groups, crazy collaborations, informants who become anthropologists and anthropologists who become informants, concepts and diagrams and long-standing arguments about specific locales and research programs. Indeed, if we could figure out how to tie it in to major research traditions, conflicts and disagreements etc.—even if schematic and simplistic—then it might be a really good way to present the diversity of the discipline. Perhaps a Google Maps mashup of fieldsites, a la Susanne Calpestri’s for Berkeley? Or a recommendation engine…”People who studied this people, might also enjoy studying this people…” etc.

What does your genealogy of anthropology look like? Mine starts with Gary Gygax at the top

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ckelty

Christopher M. Kelty is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has a joint appointment in the Institute for Society and Genetics, the department of Information Studies and the Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on the cultural significance of information technology, especially in science and engineering. He is the author most recently of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008), as well as numerous articles on open source and free software, including its impact on education, nanotechnology, the life sciences, and issues of peer review and research process in the sciences and in the humanities.

9 thoughts on “An Anthropology Geneology Project?”

  1. We have actually already constructed such a genealogy. We keep it mounted on one wall of the billiard room in the clubhouse and ask Jeeves to update it regularly after we have our evening sherry.

  3. Seriously, though, a lot of work has been done on this already, at least in sociology. Check out:

    Burris, Val. 2004 “The Academic Caste System: Prestige Hierarchies in Ph.D. Exchange Networks.” American Sociological Review, Vol. 69, No. 2, pp. 239-264.

  4. When linguistic anthropology was still young enough to compile such a geneology Stephen Murray wrote: Theory Groups and the Study of Language in North America: A Social History. Its about the closest I’ve seen to what you are talking about.

  5. And for the French case, we have Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus which has a nice signature Bourdieuian diagram with all the Parisian academics on it. In general, I would say we don’t lack for reflexive data on this subject, only a clever and playful interactive tool for exploring the relationships.

  6. Consider PAJEK. It’s free, not hard to learn, and has very fast algorithms for converting network data into network drawings. I’m using it for my research on the social networks of Tokyo ad contest winners. The only tricky bit is getting data into a form that PAJEK can handle. There are, however, a couple of free utilities for converting Text and Excel files.

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