"The Collective Body of the Family": Interruptions and Assemblages in Family and Autobiographical Narratives

Abstract (English)

Subject: The focus of this study is “the collective body of the family”. This term we mean as the ways in which descendants conceptualize their familial and kinship ties, as well as various affinities [Mason 2008] with deceased, living, and potential relatives within the context of “complex inheritance” [Zevako 2024], traumatic and “inconvinient pasts” [Epple 2020]. We examine both published and unpublished autobiographical narratives and family histories of descendants from the second to fifth generations in Russia, including interview transcripts (from the author’s personal archive) and publicly available texts. In total, we have analyzed more than 50 interviews and texts.
Our research objective is to understand how descendants interact with their pasts-that is, to investigate the reasons, aims, and processes through which they make sense of ruptures in family history, which have resulted in connections with ancestors and/or relatives being concealed, lost, or diminished, and to study the actions (practical, cognitive, emotional) they undertake in the process of “assembling” previously lost and now rediscovered images of ancestors and fragments of family history.
In our analysis, we draw on a synthesis of anthropological, sociological, psychological, and folkloristic approaches, aiming to expand the understanding of the family as a “collective body” (within the concept of kinship). We based on the metaphor of the body and the multilayered physical and non-physical manifestations of intergenerational connectivity (affinities) between deceased ancestors and living (and potential) descendants. This interconnectedness is manifested through specific “languages of memory” within the “collective body of the family.” These languages include authentic or inauthentic (“prosthetic” A. Lansberg) materiality and the entire human sensorium through which the world is apprehended. Moreover, we have conceptualized a triad of corporeal/bodily, emotional, and intellectual dimensions of “assemblages”, enabling a more nuanced analysis of kinship and affinity between ancestors and descendants.
The relevance of our study is further emphasized by the fact that our materials and reflections contribute to the verification of data in similar studies conducted on examples from other countries. Also our investigation take into account current trends in kinship and family research, such as (a) the “memory boom” in the search for family roots over the past 30 years [Mitchell & Kim 2024], (b) the active development of "roots tourism", which demonstrates the link between the “body of the family” and space [Tomczewska-Popowycz & Taras 2022]; (c) the pursuit of personal identity through belonging to family and family history [Bottero 2015], regardless of how challenging this history may have been for ancestors in the past or for descendants in the present [Nash 2002; Barnwell 2019a, 2019b; Koegeler-Abdi 2021; Nugin 2021] and others.