Engelstein, Stefani Brooke (Author)
The sibling stands out as a ubiquitous—yet unacknowledged—conceptual touchstone across the European long nineteenth century. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Europeans embarked on a new way of classifying the world, devising genealogies that determined degrees of relatedness by tracing heritage through common ancestry. This methodology organized historical systems into family trees in a wide array of new disciplines, transforming into siblings the closest contemporaneous terms on trees of languages, religions, races, nations, species, or individuals. In literature, a sudden proliferation of siblings—often incestuously inclined—negotiated this confluence of knowledge and identity. In all genealogical systems the sibling term, not quite same and not quite other, serves as an active fault line, necessary for and yet continuously destabilizing definition and classification.In her provocative book, Stefani Engelstein argues that this pervasive relational paradigm shaped the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. The insecurity inherent to the sibling structure renders the systems it underwrites fluid. It therefore offers dynamic potential, but also provokes counterreactions such as isolationist theories of subjectivity, the political exclusion of sisters from fraternal equality, the tyranny of intertwined economic and kinship theories, conflicts over natural kinds and evolutionary speciation, and invidious anthropological and philological classifications of Islam and Judaism. Integrating close readings across the disciplines with panoramic intellectual history and arresting literary interpretations, Sibling Action presents a compelling new understanding of systems of knowledge and provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency.
...MoreReview Deborah R. Coen (2019) Review of "Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 192-193).
Review Deborah R. Coen (2019) Review of "Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 192-193).
Article
John P. DiMoia;
(2016)
“Counting One's Allies”: The Mobilization of Demography, Population, and Family Planning in East Asia, Late 1920s–Present
(/isis/citation/CBB560855337/)
Book
Emma Griffin;
(2020)
Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy
(/isis/citation/CBB390078146/)
Thesis
William Evan Young;
(2015)
Family Matters: Managing Illness in Late Tokugawa Japan, 1750-1868
(/isis/citation/CBB563831507/)
Article
Rajan, Supritha;
(2014)
Animating Household Gods: Value, Totems, and Kinship in Victorian Anthropology and Dickens's Dombey and Son
(/isis/citation/CBB001201800/)
Essay Review
Di Poppa, Francesca;
(2013)
Wittgenstein and Spinoza on the Logic of Immanence
(/isis/citation/CBB001500236/)
Article
Oertzen, Christine von;
(2013)
Science in the Cradle: Milicent Shinn and Her Home-Based Network of Baby Observers, 1890--1910
(/isis/citation/CBB001253067/)
Book
Juliette Rigondet;
(2019)
Un village pour aliénés tranquilles
(/isis/citation/CBB605654043/)
Article
Coleborne, Catharine;
(2006)
Families, Patients and Emotions: Asylums for the Insane in Colonial Australia and New Zealand, c. 1880--1910
(/isis/citation/CBB000770628/)
Book
Bala, Poonam;
(2009)
Biomedicine as a Contested Site: Some Revelations in Imperial Contexts
(/isis/citation/CBB000950294/)
Book
Klepp, Susan E.;
(2009)
Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760--1820
(/isis/citation/CBB001032601/)
Article
Wannell, Louise;
(2007)
Patients' Relatives and Psychiatric Doctors: Letter Writing in the York Retreat, 1875--1910
(/isis/citation/CBB000772504/)
Article
Van Wyhe, John;
Pallen, Mark J.;
(2012)
The “Annie Hypothesis”: Did the Death of His Daughter Cause Darwin to “Give up Christianity”?
(/isis/citation/CBB001232516/)
Article
Richards, Joan L.;
(2007)
In Search of the “Sea-Something”: Reason and Transcendence in the Frend/De Morgan Family
(/isis/citation/CBB000850278/)
Chapter
Opitz, Donald L.;
(2006)
“This House Is a Temple of Research”: Country-House Centres for Late Victorian Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001232437/)
Book
Coleborne, Catharine;
(2010)
Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860--1914
(/isis/citation/CBB001031295/)
Article
A. Desmond;
A. Darwin;
(2021)
T. H. Huxley’s turbulent apprenticeship years: John Charles Cooke and the John Salt scandal
(/isis/citation/CBB807422529/)
Book
Geoffrey Channon;
(2019)
Richard Potter, Beatrice Webb's father and corporate capitalist
(/isis/citation/CBB763430617/)
Article
Searcy, Elizabeth;
(2014)
The Dead Belong to the Living: Disinterment and Custody of Dead Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America
(/isis/citation/CBB001451695/)
Article
Wilbraham, Lindy;
(2014)
Reconstructing Harry: A Genealogical Study of a Colonial Family “inside” and “outside” the Grahamstown Asylum, 1888--1918
(/isis/citation/CBB001422139/)
Article
Endersby, Jim;
(2009)
Sympathetic Science: Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, and the Passions of Victorian Naturalists
(/isis/citation/CBB001030095/)
Be the first to comment!