Family trees and their affinities: The visual imperative of the genealogical diagram

A substantial part of the study of kinship after Rivers involved visualizing relationships in systematic, comparable form. For anthropologists, the genealogical diagram is a piece of graphic shorthand whose theoretical status is rarely considered. This article pursues the visual dimension of various sorts of European 'family trees' as examples of precedents for the genealogical diagram. Rivers's transformation of pedigree into genealogy included tapping the diffuse currency of tree imagery as a taxonomic device in certain domains of European culture. Darwin had already harnessed the language of pedigree to express phylogeny, which was given graphic expression by Haeckel. Calvinist charting of Christ's earthly ancestry back to Adam expanded, in its turn, the earlier Trees of Jesse. The genealogical diagram charts kinship within ethnographic time, but owes its moral tone and visual clout to sacred, scientific and secular forerunners.