Family resemblances and family trees: Two cognitive metaphors

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 30, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 537-556

  Ginzburg, Carlo ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 34547591267     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/421161     Document Type: Review

References (97)

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne," Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 9 vols. in 33 (Berlin, 1973), 3.2.374: "Was ist also Wahrheit? Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern, Metonymien."
2. See also Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover, N.H., 1999), p. 8.
3. See R. S. Wells, "The Life and Growth of Language: Metaphors in Biology and Linguistics," in Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification, ed. Henry M. Hoenigswald and Linda F. Wiener (Philadelphia, 1987), pp. 39-80.
4. See Renford Bambrough, "Universals and Family Resemblances," in The Philosophy of Wittgenstein, ed. John V. Canfield, 15 vols. (New York, 1986), 5:197-214, esp. p. 197.
5. See also Hubert Schwyzer, "Essence without Universals" and Ilham Dilman, "Universals: Bambrough on Wittgenstein," in The Philosophy of Wittgenstein, pp. 295-304, 305-28.
6. Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances is the starting point of George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago, 1987).
7. See also Marilena Andronico, Antropologia e metodo morfologico: Studio su Wittgenstein (Naples, 1988). Thanks to Arnold Davidson for pointing out this source to me.
8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen - Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2d ed. (1958; Oxford, 1998), §67, p. 32.
9. Wittgenstein, "A Lecture on Ethics," The Philosophical Review 74 (Jan. 1965): 4-5.
10. For the date, see Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London, 1990), p. 277.
11. Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen - Philosophical Investigations, §67, p. 32.
12. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan (South Bend, Ind., 1963), p. 157. Freud referred to this passage in his book on jokes;
13. see Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 8:23-24.
14. Here is a partial list of Galton's contributions to the subject: Francis Galton, "Composite Portraits, Made by Combining Those of Many Different Persons into a Single Resultant Figure," Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 8, no. 2 (1879): 132-44;
15. "Generic Images," Proceedings of the Royal Institution 9 (Apr. 1879): 167-70;
16. "Composite Portraiture," Photographic Journal 5 (1881) : 140-46;
17. "Composite Portraiture," Photographic News 25 (1881): 316-17;
18. Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development (London, 1883), with an appendix on "composite portraiture," pp. 221-40;
19. and "Photographic Composites," Amateur Photographer and Photographic News 29 (Apr. 1885): 243-45.
20. See also Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October, no. 39 (1986): 3-64 (on Galton, see pp. 18, 40, and 51-52);
21. and Peter Saurisse, "Portraits composites: La Photographie des types physionomiques à la fin du XIXe siècle," Histoire de l'art 37-38 (May 1997): 69-78.
22. I have been unable to see David Green, "Veins of Resemblance: Photography and Eugenics," in Photography/Politics: Two, ed. Patricia Holland, Jo Spence, and Simon Watney (London, 1986), pp. 9-21.
23. Quoted in Milo Keynes, "Sir Francis Galton - A Man with a Universal Scientific Curiosity," in Sir Francis Galton, FRS: The Legacy of His Ideas, ed. Keynes (London, 1993), p. 1.
24. See Nicholas W. Gillham, Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (Oxford, 2001). The section dealing with the debates between Galton's followers is especially valuable; the section on "composite portraits," pp. 215-20, is more descriptive.
25. Quoted in Galton, "Composite Portraits," p. 137.
26. See also Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development, pp. 345-46.
27. See Galton, Memories of My Life (London, 1908), pp. 259-61.
28. Galton, "Photographic Composites," Photographic News 29 (1885), pp. 243-245.
29. In this and other cases I used Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters, and Labours of Francis Galton, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1914-30), 2:283-98, whose illustrations (from Galton's archives) are far superior to the originals.
30. Galton's composite photograph is reproduced and commented upon in Daniel Pick, Svengali's Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (London, 2000), pp. 183-84.
31. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development, pp. 24-25 n. 1.
32. See Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London, 1869).
33. See Michael Banton, "Galton's Conception of Race in Historical Perspective," in Sir Francis Galton, FRS, pp. 170-79, esp. p. 178 (full of judicious remarks, notwithstanding its conclusions).
34. A point made by G. Contini, who refuted Leo Spitzer's earlier suggestion connecting razza and its synonyms to ratio. See G. Contini, "I più antichi esempi di 'razza,'" Studi di filologia italiana 17 (1959): 319-27.
35. Galton, Memories of My Life, p. 311.
36. I have been unable to see "Eugenics and the Jews," a letter Galton sent to The Jewish Chronicle, 30 July 1910 (one of his last published pieces). If I am not mistaken, the connection between Galton's composite portraits and his commitment to eugenics has been often underplayed or missed; see for instance Pearson, The Life, Letters, and Labours of Francis Galton, 2:283-98;
37. Charles Paton Blacker, Eugenics: Galton and After (London, 1952), pp. 46-47;
38. and Derek William Forrest, Francis Galton: The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius (London, 1974), pp. 138-42.
39. But see Sekula's pertinent comments in "The Body and the Archive," pp. 51-52.
40. Maximillian A. Rügge, "Eugenics and the Superman: A Racial Science and a Racial Religion," The Eugenics Review 1, no. 3 (1909): 187.
41. See Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," History Workshop 5 (Spring 1978) : 9-65.
42. See Gillham, Sir Francis Galton, pp. 345-47.
43. See Primo Levi, I sommersi e i salvati (Turin, 1986);
44. trans. Raymond Rosenthal, under the title The Drowned and the Saved (New York, 1988).
45. Jacob Cooper, "The Platonic Idea Elucidated by the Composite Photograph," Methodist Review 82 (July 1900): 579.
46. "The face that I saw in the dream was at once my friend R's and my uncle's. It was like one of Galton's composite photographs. In order to bring out family likenesses, Galton used to photograph several faces on the same plate. So there could be no doubt that I really did mean that my friend R. was a simpleton - like my Uncle Josef" (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 4:139; see 4:293, 320-21).
47. See also Maurizio Giuffredi and Rodolphe Töpffer, Fisiognomica: Arte e psicologia tra Ottocento e Novecento (Bologna, 2001), pp. 195-209.
48. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, p. 41.
49. See Gregory Bateson, Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View, 2d ed. (Stanford, Calif., 1958). In the French and Italian translations of Naven the subtitle has been omitted. Gregory Bateson was named after Gregor Mendel.
50. On the scientific feud that opposed Mendelians and biometricians, see Donald Mackenzie, "Sociobiologies in Competition: The Biometrician- Mendelian Debate," in Biology, Medicine, and Society (1840-1940), ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 242-88
51. (on which Gillham, Sir Francis Galton, pp. 286-323 is largely based).
52. David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (Boston, 1980), p. 141.
53. Bateson, Naven, p. 3.
54. Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's "Golden Bough," trans. A. C. Miles (London, 1979), pp. 8-9.
55. See Brian C. Clack, Wittgenstein, Frazer, and Religion (Oxford, 1999), pp. 43-54.
56. See also Wittgenstein, "Bemerkungen über Frazer's The Golden Bough," Synthese 17 (Sept. 1967): 233-53.
57. For my debt to Wittgenstein's "Bemerkungen über Frazer's The Golden Bough," as well as a criticism of it, see Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (New York, 1991), p. 15.
58. Clack, Wittgenstein, Frazer, and Religion, p. 73, refers to my comment, stressing only the latter.
59. See Wittgenstein, Libro blu e libro marrone, ed. Amedeo G. Conte (Turin, 1983), pp. 27, 115-16;
60. trans. pub., under the title The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for "The Philosophical Investigations" (New York, 1958).
61. On Wittgenstein's discovery (or rediscovery), see Rodney Needham's brilliant essay "Polythetic Classification," in Against the Tranquility of Axioms, ed. Needham (Berkeley, 1983), pp. 36-65.
62. See Stephen Toulmin, "Ludwig Wittgenstein," Encounter 32 (Jan. 1969), esp. pp. 71-72
63. and Needham, "Polythetic Classification," p. 37.
64. For a different perspective, see Andrea Ginzburg, "Sraffa e l'analisi sociale: Alcune note metodologiche," in Piero Sraffa: Contributi a una biografia intellettuale, ed. Massimo Pivetti (Rome, 2000), pp. 109-41, esp. pp. 122-25.
65. Walter Benjamin, "Conversation with André Gide" (1928), trans. Livingstone, Selected Writings, trans. Livingstone et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., 4 vols. to date (Cambridge, Mass., 1999- ), 2:94.
66. On the peculiar construction of Charlus's character, see Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (New York, 2001), p. 20.
67. Christiane Klapisch, L'Ombre des ancêtres: Essai sur l'imaginaire médiéval de la parenté (Paris, 2000), p. 9.
68. Some late nineteenth-century examples appear in Mary Bouquet, "Family Trees and Their Affinities: The Visual Imperative of the Genealogical Diagram," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of London, n.s., 2 (Mar. 1996): 43-66.
69. See A. Morpurgo Davies, "Language Classification in the Nineteenth Century," in Current Trends in Linguistics, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, 14 vols. (The Hague, 1975), 13:636 n. 53
70. and Sebastiano Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann, rev. ed. (Padua, 1981), p. 84 n. 6; hereafter abbreviated G.
71. Compare G. Holm, "Carl Johan Schlyter and Textual Scholarship, in Saga och Sed (1972), pp. 48-80, particularly p. 74;
72. see p. 53 for detail of H. S. Collin and C. J. Schlyter, Codex iuris vestrogotici, cum notis criticis, variis lectionibus, glossariis locupletissimis ac indicibus nominum propriorum (Stockholm, 1827), fol. 100r, showing the stemma codicum.
73. See also Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann, p. 52 n. 8.
74. See also p. 25 (on Bengel) as well as Giorgio Pasquali, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (1952; Milan, 1974), p. 190.
75. See Paul Maas, "Appendice: Errori-Guida e tipi stemmatici" (1937), Critica del testo, trans. Nello Martinelli (Florence, 1966), p. 53.
76. See Michael D. Reeve, "Shared Innovations, Dichotomies, and Evolution," in Filologia classica e filologia romanza: Esperienze ecdotiche a confronto, ed. Anna Ferrari (Spoleto, 1998), pp. 445-505, esp. pp. 451-52;
77. based on Jacques Froger, La Critique des textes et son automatisation (Paris, 1968), pp. 41-42.
78. See H. Don Cameron, "The Upside-down Cladogram: Problems in Manuscript Affiliation," in Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification, p. 231, referring to Hermann Sauppe's demonstration that all manuscripts of Lysias depend upon Codex Palatinus 88;
79. see Hermann Sauppe, Epistola critica ad Godofredum Hermannum (Leipzig, 1841).
80. Timpanaro equates Maas's errores coniunctivi with "coincidenze in corruttela veramente significative o, meglio, in lacune" (Timpanaro, Filologia classica e filologia romanza, p. 8).
81. See Jacob Bernays, "De emendatione Lucretii," Rheinisches Museum für philologie, no. 5 (1847): 533.
82. Arnaldo Momigliano, "Jacob Bernays" (1969), Quinto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, 2 vols. (Rome, 1975), 1:134.
83. See John Glucker, "Lachmann's Method - Bernays, Madvig, Lachmann, and Others," in Jacob Bernays un philologue juif, ed. Glucker and André Laks (Villeneuve d'Ascq, 1996), pp. 45-56.
84. See Johan Nicolai Madvig, "De aliquot lacunis codicum Lucretii," Opuscula academica (Copenhagen, 1887), pp. 248-62. The argument based on convergent gaps is presented as self-evident: "Sed horum utrumque, et ex uno codice omnes etiam meliores esse derivatos et illum non integerrimum et ad legendum difficilem fuisse, maxime apparet ex eo, quod iisdem in locis omnes, qui noti sunt, codices lacunas habent" (p. 252).
85. On Orelli and Madvig, see G, p. 49, and esp. pp. 63-64.
86. See Momigliano, "Jacob Bernays," p. 145.
87. See Jacob Bernays, Ein Lebensbild in Briefen, ed. Michael Fraenkel (Breslau, 1932); dedicated to "Herrn Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud."
88. See also Martin Treml, "Zum Verhältnis von Jacob Bernays und Sigmund Freud," Luzifer-Amor 19 (1997): 7-32.
89. See also Juan Dalma, "La catarsis en Aristóteles, Bernays, y Freud," Revista de psiquiatría y psicología médica 6 (Oct. 1963): 253-69.
90. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 4:8.
91. See ibid., 5:489.
92. Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, Conn., 1991), p. 23, remarks that Freud's sentence on dreams being "'like a sacred text'" (wie einen heiligen Text) has been mistranslated in James Strachey's English translation as "Holy Writ."
93. See also Stefano Brugnolo, La letterarietà dei discorsi scientifici (Rome, 2000), p. 274, who points out that Freud was particularly fond of analogies with mutilated, interpolated, censored texts.
94. Freud, "The Moses of Michelangelo," in Collected Papers, trans. Joan Riviere, 4 vols. (London, 1949), 4:271;
95. see Ginzburg, "Clues," Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1989), pp. 96-125.
96. Timpanaro, who reassessed Bernays's contribution in La genesi del metodo del Lachmann, did not mention Bernays in his later book The Freudian Slip, trans. Kate Soper (London, 1976).
97. See Jeff Rosen, "Of Monsters and Fossils: The Making of Racial Difference in Malvina Hoffman's Hall of the Races of Mankind," History and Anthropology 12 (2001): 101-58, esp. p. 132, fig. 15: "Family Tree of Man's Racial Types by Henry Field."