Ann-Marie Moiwo, Delia Massaquoi, Tuwoh Weiwoh Moiwo
et al.
Genealogy is a powerful analytical framework for understanding the cultural evolution of tribes, communities, and societies. This article demonstrates that the recurrent reliance on genealogical structures is a common feature of human societies, serving as a fundamental mechanism for cultural evolution through time, space, and culture. Based on comparative analysis of indigenous tribal societies (e.g., Aboriginal Australian kinship, Polynesian chiefly genealogies), agrarian civilizations (e.g., European feudal lineages, Chinese patriliny), and modern nation-states (e.g., nationalist mythmaking, DNA-based ancestry movements), this study reveals consistent patterns in genealogical functions. Drawing on an interdisciplinary perspective from anthropology, sociology, history, and evolutionary biology, it is argued that genealogical systems are not passive records of descent but dynamic forces of cultural continuity and adaptation. The evidence shows that, despite vast sociocultural differences, genealogy widely operates as a dual-purpose instrument. It preserves cultural memory and legitimizes political authority while simultaneously facilitating social adaptation and innovation in response to new challenges. The paper also critiques contemporary trends like commercial genetic genealogy, highlighting its potential for reconnecting diasporic communities alongside its risks of biological essentialism. Ultimately, the work establishes that the persistent and patterned reliance on genealogy from oral traditions to genetic data offers a critical lens for understanding the deep structures of cultural continuity and transformation in human societies. It further underscores the importance of genealogy in cultural evolution, historical persistence, societal transformation, and the construction of belonging in an increasingly globalized world.
Subcritical population processes are attracted to extinction and do not have non-trivial stationary distributions, which prompts the study of quasi-stationary distributions (QSDs) instead. In contrast to what generally happens for stationary distributions, QSDs may not be unique, even under irreducibility conditions. The general conditions for uniqueness of QSDs are not always easy to check. For the branching process, besides the quasi-limiting distribution there are many other QSDs. In this paper, we investigate whether adding little extra information to the continuous-time branching process is enough to obtain uniqueness. We consider the branching process with genealogy and branching random walks, and show that they have a unique QSD.
This article examines how belonging and aspirations among women with a migrant background are shaped by experiences of discrimination in the Norwegian labour market. While extensive research exists on policy implementation and public measures aimed at integrating migrants into the labour market, less focus has been placed on understanding how migrants’ work aspirations and desires are shaped. This article builds on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among migrant women in a Norwegian city. Drawing on research suggesting that migrants’ agency is influenced by actual or perceived opportunity structures, I explore how discrimination, as a distinct structural barrier, (re)shape aspirations and belonging among women with migrant backgrounds. In this article, I explore identity and belonging as dynamic and context-dependent, rather than fixed categories like gender, ethnicity, or class. The findings show that discrimination is a salient part of women’s experiences in the labour market and further illustrate how discrimination affects their sense of belonging, and their aspirations connected to work-life. Some women seek belonging in arenas other than the labour market in society, where they experience that their resources are valued.
We develop an excursion theory that describes the evolution of a Markov process indexed by a Levy tree away from a regular and instantaneous point $x$ of the state space. The theory builds upon a notion of local time at $x$ that was recently introduced in [37]. Despite the radically different setting, our results exhibit striking similarities to the classical excursion theory for $\mathbb{R}_+$-indexed Markov processes. We then show that the genealogy of the excursions can be encoded in a Levy tree called the tree coded by the local time. In particular, we recover by different methods the excursion theory of Abraham and Le Gall [2], which was developed for Brownian motion indexed by the Brownian tree.
We consider a general class of branching processes in discrete time, where particles have types belonging to a Polish space and reproduce independently according to their type. If the process is critical and the mean distribution of types converges for large times, we prove that the tree structure of the process converges to the Brownian Continuum Random Tree, under a moment assumption. We provide a general approach to prove similar invariance principles for branching processes, which relies on deducing the convergence of the genealogy from computing its moments. These are obtained using a new many-to-few formula, which provides an expression for the moments of order $k$ of a branching process in terms of a Markov chain indexed by a uniform tree with $k$ leaves.
Given a discrete-time non-lattice supercritical branching random walk in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we investigate its first passage time to a shifted unit ball of a distance $x$ from the origin, conditioned upon survival. We provide precise asymptotics up to $O(1)$ (tightness) for the first passage time as a function of $x$ as $x\to\infty$, thus resolving a conjecture in Blanchet--Cai--Mohanty--Zhang (2024). Our proof builds on the previous analysis of Blanchet--Cai--Mohanty--Zhang (2024) and employs a careful multi-scale analysis on the genealogy of particles within a distance of $\asymp \log x$ near extrema of a one-dimensional branching random walk, where the cluster structure plays a crucial role.
In the present article, we are faced with two phenomenological philosophers who, in two different intellectual traditions, namely philosophical hermeneutics and moral phenomenology, have referred to the concept of the Other as the fundamental possibility of the individual. The other, as an ontological and common concept in the thought of Gadamer and Levinas, is the turning point of the condition for the possibility of understanding and ethics. Focusing on the concept of the other, while addressing the points of difference and commonality between Gadamer and Levinas, this article will show that Levinas’s preoccupation with the other as a philosopher refers to the foundations of ethics, and the condition for the possibility of foundations of ethics is encountering the other. In Gadamer, the turning point is the determination of the possibilities of understanding in dialectical and dialogue-oriented relationships. Without the other, in Levinas’s thought, ethics, and moral matter, and in Gadamer’s thought, the process of understanding will not occur in the form of a fusion of horizons. Therefore, this article shows that the other is a common concept between these two philosophers, which both of them cannot avoid in their philosophical analyses of ethics or the process of understanding. IntroductionThe analysis of ethics is one of the important and innovative achievements of Levinas’s philosophical intellectual structure. Levinas’s concern is to refer to the foundations of morality itself, regardless of institutionalizing the moral in the form of law, and the foundation of morality is in face-to-face relationships with others. Regardless of Levinas’s plan about the concept of the other, Gadamer imagines the determination of understanding in a new way in the face of the other. The other is the comprehensible strain in philosophical hermeneutics, in such a way that the process of understanding is formed by the presence of the other and the face-to-face encounter with it. According to Gadamer, the other is the factor of openness in the process of understanding. The fusion of horizons is the product of openness and mutual encounters in dialogue, which is not possible without the other. The other is the condition of determining the possibility of understanding in each of the parties who are allowed to reveal a part of their being and allow the other to open up and talk. In fact, understanding is a kind of event that is revealed in a two-way conversation in an event-like way. This type of understanding depends on the presence of another. The main focus of the research is the analysis of the concept of the other, which has been done with emphasis on two important works: Truth and method, Totality and infinity.Body & discussionIn general, the process of understanding is a dialogical process, whether the other side of the conversation is a text or a person, the foundation of understanding is formed in a relationship with the other. Determining the other as an independent personality and a different perspective is an ontological determination. The other thinks and becomes meaningful beyond the subject or object and even beyond my intellectual position, it belongs to its own independent world and its own experience. In conversation, it plays a significant role in the production of truth. Openness provides the possibility of dialogue and mutual agreement. In dialogue, the final product is not reproduced. The other condition for the production of the final product is dialogue According to Gadamer, facing the other is facing his world. At the moment of facing me, the other makes his abstract aspects concrete and opens his lived experience to me. He believes that the question-and-answer process is a kind of encounter with the world of experience and openness toward it. According to Gadamer, the process of understanding is the result of dialectical-hermeneutic relations between me (the interpreter) and you (the other). The dialogical relationships that allow each other to enter the other’s history are relationships that are formed based on questions and answers. From Gadamer’s point of view, questions and answers are the opening of a new horizon based on tradition and contemporary history.Levinas phenomenologically refers to the philosophical tradition of the West to reread the process of the formation of the concept of the other. Many commentators and interpreters of Levinas’s works believe that it is possible to determine the foundations of ethics from Levinas’s point of view from face-to-face relationships. The condition for the possibility of morality is to pay attention to others. To describe another concept, Levinas analyzes the negative and positive aspects of this concept. In a negative way, Levinas first answers what the other is not, and for this reason, he criticizes the history of Western metaphysics and the criticism of Husserl and Heidegger’s phenomenology. Positively, the other is relative to me and different from me. The other is beyond subject and object. The other is not subjugated by any concept and recognizes its independent identity. The other and the encounter with him are the conditions for determining fundamental ethics from Levinas’s point of view. Another condition of concreteness refers to another person. According to Levinas, it is the condition for the formation of moral form. He believes that ethics is a kind of double encounter in the context of bilateral relations. Many moral concepts are formed in relation to a concrete other. In Levinas’s genealogy of ethics, we are faced with the presence of the other in a concrete way and with the subjectivity of the subject in an abstract and a priori way. Levinas specifies two approaches with the description of the other in the form of an infinite idea. First of all, there is an infinite gap between the other and the same. This issue shows its foreignness and otherness, its independence, and being true to its essence towards me. Second, it is the determination of another in a concrete or abstract form, which in both cases evokes an identity independent of me.ConclusionAccording to the explanations of the concept of the other in the thought of Gadamer and Levinas, we are faced with two phenomenological philosophers who have paid attention to the ontological aspects of the concept of the other in the fields of philosophical hermeneutics and ethics. In Gadamer’s thought, the other is an ontologically dialectical relationship between I-Thou and the starting point of the conversation process. The fusion of horizons is the turning point of the formation of the relation to the other, which is manifested in another area. The other has its own history, world, tradition, and authority, regardless of the formation of dialogical relationships, and has an independent identity. The other is allowed to share his lived experience in the conversation. The other creates new worlds. The other has opened himself and in return can be self-interpreting and self-revealing. Regardless, the other is the consistency of the complex relationship between language and the world. This form of bilateral relations, which is manifested in the presence of another, is a linguistic form that is the cause of a deep connection between language and the world. The other, whether concrete or abstract, is the turning point of our connection with the world in an ontological way.Regardless of Gadamer’s point of view, Levinas returns to another concept in his new thought project entitled “How to determine the possibilities of ethics.” According to Levinas, finding the foundations of ethics and determining the condition of moral possibilities is in facing the other and in face-to-face relationships. The other is concretely a kind of bilateral encounter which is the basis of many moral events and is manifested abstractly in the form of the subject’s subjectivity. This kind of infinite aspect of the other is revealed in subjectivity is implied in sense. Encountering another in an abstract form within itself is the encounter of the subject’s subjectivity with the sense, and the sense is in the encounter with the other. Sense is the basis of the subjectivity of the subject. Sense is a kind of concrete and visual face-to-face encounter that adds to the importance of determining another. Therefore, both Gadamer and Levinas raise many possibilities about the concept of the other, which shows the importance of this concept in the Western philosophical tradition.
Philosophy of religion. Psychology of religion. Religion in relation to other subjects
Since the 1990s, a large number of studies have emerged around the practices of certain activist movements where creativity assumes a key role. This article takes as its starting point the idea that art history can provide a useful framework for exploring the genealogy of these social movements. Not only can its methodology contribute to a better understanding of their aesthetic dimension but the topic itself can help to explore certain issues within our own discipline. Within a chronological narrative, we present various leftist autonomous groups and activist movements whose creative dimensions are particularly important. These practices are repeatedly subject to tensions between the notion of the autonomy of art and its function in the service of political expression or an intensification of everyday life. Focusing on the carnival as protest metaphor, artistic activism groups, interactions with museum institutions and the question of visual culture, we trace a chronological arc going from the TAZ to the PAZ between the 1990s and summer 2023.
Inspired by the work of Christine Sleeter and Avril Bell, among others, the articles that comprise this Special Issue seek to respond to questions focused on the relationship between family history and the processes of migration and colonisation and how this might impact on a family’s sense of itself today [...]
Serbia is a country with a long tradition of emigration. The increase in the number of displaced people sharply rose in 1992 when all the diplomatic options to preserve Yugoslavia had failed. The ensuing ethnic conflict resulted in mass mobilization by young adults who were required to go to war, mainly against their will. The main purpose of the paper is twofold: to draw attention to the key challenges that displacement plays on individuals and to show how traumatic events, such as the war in Ukraine, can mobilize historical traumas. To elicit deeper and new understandings of how displacement impacts people, conversations with my elementary school classmates of Hungarian ethnic origin, including those who were serving the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) between 1991 and 1992, were analysed through the lens of the author’s autoethnographic positioning. It shows how life stories are co-produced through narrative inquiry and, by ‘co-reflecting’ on the past, it shows how they are simultaneously positioned within social categories of intersectionality, such as gender, social inequality, stayed and displaced. These reflections offer a broader understanding of how qualitative research can enrich existing knowledge of the effect of this specific conflict, and ethnic conflict in general.
We consider a single genetic locus with two alleles $A_1$ and $A_2$ in a large haploid population. The locus is subject to selection and two-way, or recurrent, mutation. Assuming the allele frequencies follow a Wright-Fisher diffusion and have reached stationarity, we describe the asymptotic behaviors of the conditional gene genealogy and the latent mutations of a sample with known allele counts, when the count $n_1$ of allele $A_1$ is fixed, and when either or both the sample size $n$ and the selection strength $\lvertα\rvert$ tend to infinity. Our study extends previous work under neutrality to the case of non-neutral rare alleles, asserting that when selection is not too strong relative to the sample size, even if it is strongly positive or strongly negative in the usual sense ($α\to -\infty$ or $α\to +\infty$), the number of latent mutations of the $n_1$ copies of allele $A_1$ follows the same distribution as the number of alleles in the Ewens sampling formula. On the other hand, very strong positive selection relative to the sample size leads to neutral gene genealogies with a single ancient latent mutation. We also demonstrate robustness of our asymptotic results against changing population sizes, when one of $\lvertα\rvert$ or $n$ is large.
Is there a political theology of revolution in Carl Schmitt or is his political theology only and exclusively autocratic? Schmitt sees the key to revolutionary politics in the construction of the idea of the people as a constituent power. This idea, and the first event it produced, namely, the French Revolution, not only establishes a concrete state of exception but also makes exceptionality both at the same time a constituent and a de-constituent element of the political order of the Modern State. The exception goes from coming from “outside” the political order to being integrated into it as an element of stasis, that is to say, of destabilization. Hence, all modern politics, under the mask of legality, become permanently revolutionary. This article analyses the juridical genealogy and the theological–political transfers involved in the construction of the modern revolutionary political era that follows from Schmitt’s insights.
Статья посвящена 90-летию со дня рождения двух видных отечественных археологов, совершивших заметный вклад в изучение археологии эпохи средневековья на Южном Урале – Г.И.Матвеевой и Н.А.Мажитова. Ещё в самом начале своей научной карьеры (начало 1960-х годов) они, каждый со своей позиции, выдвинули на повестку дня вопрос об археологическом содержании проблемы пребывания древних угров/венгров на Южном Урале. Их позиции были диаметрально противоположными. Н.А.Мажитов считал, что древними венграми являлись носители бахмутинской культуры, сформировавшиеся на территории современной Башкирии на базе пьяноборской и её локального варианта – караабызской культур. То есть, Предуралье являлось одной из территорий, на которой уже в эпоху раннего железа происходило формирование угорской этнической общности, охватывающей обе стороны Уральского хребта. Однако с течением времени взгляды исследователя кардинально меняются. В своих работах конца 1970-х годов он уже отказывается от признания угорской/древневенгерской принадлежности носителей бахмутинской культуры, а в работах конца прошлого – начала текущего столетий вообще не касается вопроса об этнической принадлежности «бахмутинцев». Г.И.Матвеева изначально выступала против интерпретации бахмутинской культуры как угорской. По её мнению, которого она придерживалась до конца своей жизни, уграми на территории Приуралья являлись носители кушнаренковской и караякуповской культур, которые обитали в регионе в VI–IXвв.н.э. Она считала, что это были близко родственные, но не тождественные археологические культуры. Своими генетическими корнями они восходят к культурам Зауралья и Западной Сибири, составлявшими бакальскую этнокультурную общность.
Yazid Janati El idrissi, Sylvain Le Corff, Yohan Petetin
In this paper, we consider the problem of online asymptotic variance estimation for particle filtering and smoothing. Current solutions for the particle filter rely on the particle genealogy and are either unstable or hard to tune in practice. We propose to mitigate these limitations by introducing a new estimator of the asymptotic variance based on the so called backward weights. The resulting estimator is weakly consistent and trades computational cost for more stability and reduced variance. We also propose a more computationally efficient estimator inspired by the PaRIS algorithm of Olsson & Westerborn. As an application, particle smoothing is considered and an estimator of the asymptotic variance of the Forward Filtering Backward Smoothing estimator applied to additive functionals is provided.
Every European country now has some distinctive heraldic conventions and traditions embodied in the designs and artistic representations of the emblems forming part of its national corpus. This paper deals with these matters in the period from independence in 1991 to the recent change of name in 2019. It deals with the successive designs proposed for the emblem of the state itself, some of which conformed to international heraldic conventions closely enough to be called “arms” or “coats of arms”, not including the emblem adopted in 2009. Special attention is given to the distinctive conventions created for municipal heraldry, including its novel legal framework, as well as those governing personal heraldry developed in the twenty-first century. The paper examines the evolution of heraldic thought and practice in Macedonia in the three decades in question, especially in the context of the Macedonian Heraldic Society and its journal, The Macedonian Herald, and its Register of Arms and the Civic Heraldic System it created.
The gender binary, like many colonial acts, remains trapped within socio-religious ideals of colonisation that then frame ongoing relationships and restrict the existence of Indigenous peoples. In this article, the colonial project of denying difference in gender and gender diversity within Indigenous peoples is explored as a complex erasure casting aside every aspect of identity and replacing it with a simulacrum of the coloniser. In examining these erasures, this article explores how diverse Indigenous gender presentations remain incomprehensible to the colonial mind, and how reinstatements of kinship and truth in representation fundamentally supports First Nations’ agency by challenging colonial reductions. This article focuses on why these colonial practices were deemed necessary at the time of invasion, and how they continue to be forcefully applied in managing Indigenous peoples into a colonial structure of family, gender, and everything else.
This paper deploys narrative inquiry and analysis to capture the oral history of two families’ intergenerational memory of an African American woman named Celia who was hanged in 1855 for killing her owner Robert Newsom. It is the first scholarly investigation into the intergenerational memory of both black and white descendants of Robert Newsom, and the first to be conducted utilizing the theory of critical family history. Through the paradigm of Black Feminist Thought, the paper analyzes the power imbalances embedded in the narrative about family relations, especially those that conjure race, gender roles and class produced through oral history.
María Emilia Caballero, Adrián González Casanova, José-Luis Pérez
When two (possibly different in distribution) continuous-state branching processes with immigration are present, we study the relative frequency of one of them when the total mass is forced to be constant at a dense set of times. This leads to a SDE whose unique strong solution will be the definition of a $Λ$-asymmetric frequency process ($Λ$-AFP). We prove that it is a Feller process and we calculate a large population limit when the total mass tends to infinity. This allows us to study the fluctuations of the process around its deterministic limit. Furthermore, we find conditions for the $Λ$-AFP to have a moment dual. The dual can be interpreted in terms of selection, (coordinated) mutation, pairwise branching (efficiency), coalescence, and a novel component that comes from the asymmetry between the reproduction mechanisms. In the particular case of a pair of equally distributed continuous-state branching processes, the associated $Λ$-AFP will be the dual of a $Λ$-coalescent. The map that sends each continuous-state branching process to its associated $Λ$-coalescent (according to the former procedure) is a homeomorphism between metric spaces.
This article aims to analyze the articulation between the historical philosophy practiced by Nietzsche from 1876 and the genealogy of morality. For this, it is desired to emphasize how the philosopher passes from the task of analyzing the history of moral feelings, characteristic of Human, all too human, to that which leads to place the value of values (i.e., moral itself) in check, in Genealogy of morality. Finally, this requires analyzing the importance of the relationship between life and work in order to identify its results: a valuation of individual experiences and the affirmation of innocence.
Las investigaciones actuales, lejos de los enfoques hegemónicos o más extendidos, no coinciden en señalar el papel perjudicial de la imposición del colonialismo occidental y del orden social capitalista para las sociedades periféricas. En base a una revisión de la literatura, se identifica una escasez de estudios sobre la genealogía del discurso descolonizador. Así pues, el documento analiza la teoría poscolonial, sus primeros estudios, la construcción de conceptos y el desarrollo de la teoría en el ámbito académico, especialmente en los países de habla hispana. La perspectiva decolonial en la teoría postcolonial tiene un punto de partida común en las genealogías de la teoría postcolonial analizada. Sin embargo, varias diferencias prevalecen en las reflexiones de la teoría poscolonial. Se concluye que la investigación de la genealogía de la teoría postcolonial es una tarea necesaria no sólo para reflexionar sobre la epistemología de los estudios, sino también para tensar los aspectos históricos, ontológicos y gnoseológicos presentes en los textos.
TEORIA PÓS-COLONIAL E FACE DECOLONIAL: MERGULHANDO EM SUAS GENEALOGIAS
As pesquisas atuais, distantes dos enfoques hegemônicos ou mais difundidos, não coincidem em assinalar o papel nefasto da imposição do colonialismo ocidental e ordem social capitalista para as sociedades periféricas. Com base numa revisão de literatura, identifica-se uma escassez de estudos sobre genealogia do discurso descolonizador. Desse modo, o artigo analisa a teoria pós-colonial, seus primeiros estudos, a construção de conceitos e desenvolvimento da teoria na academia, em especial, nos países de língua espanhola. A perspectiva decolonial na teoria pós-colonial possui um ponto de partida comum nas genealogias da teoria pós-colonial analisada. Porém, prevalece diversas diferenças nas reflexões da teoria pós-colonial. Conclui-se que investigar a genealogia da teoria pós-colonial é uma tarefa necessária não somente para refletir sobre a epistemologia dos estudos, senão também para tensionar os aspectos históricos, ontológicos e gnosiológicos presentes nos textos.
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND DECOLONIAL FACE: DELVING INTO THEIR GENEALOGIES
Current researches, far from hegemonic or more widespread approaches, do not coincide in pointing out the harmful role of the imposition of Western colonialism and capitalist social order for peripheral societies. Based on a literature review, a scarcity of studies on the genealogy of decolonizing discourse is identified. Thus, this article analyzes the postcolonial theory, its early studies, the construction of concepts and the development of theory in academia, especially in Spanish speaking countries. The decolonial perspective in postcolonial theory has a common starting point in the genealogies of the analyzed postcolonial theory. However, several differences prevail in the reflections of postcolonial theory. It is concluded that investigating the genealogy of postcolonial theory is a necessary task not only to reflect on the epistemology of studies, but also to tension the historical, ontological and gnoseological aspects present in the texts.
Education (General), Theory and practice of education