Genealogy and Genetics (Topoi Plus-18)

Genealogy, understood as social orientation in kinsmanlike categories, is a – probably universal – human phenomenon that is used to produce relations among each other, between individuals and groups and to construct social reality in a diachron and historicizing perspective. As a derivation of origin in form of ancestral lines it is often used as a medium to legitimize and stabilize social reality. Genealogically linked groups and persons belong to a kinship, one of the major social ordering principles.