Exploring Genealogy's Necronominalism

Abstract

This article explores the relation of genealogy and necronominalism, or naming the dead. It discusses funerary practices as a recapture of the dead, gravestones as complex signs, and memory and death including a memento mori and a liber memorialis. An authentic search for the dead involves considering the cultural legacy they left. The article suggests that genealogy charts are modeled after historical consciousness which is formed on the basis of naming the dead. Naming and learning about the dead help some people gain or deepen their sense of identity. Naming the dead reverses the oblivion into which the forgotten dead disappear. Genealogy works in the opposite direction as political erasure. Genealogical research is essentially a practice that names the dead which enables the researcher to include an ancestor, relative, or research subject on genealogy charts and in the cultural world of the living. But genealogy is also sometimes used as an exclusionary power tactic.