In the shadow of the tree: The diagrammatics of relatedness in genealogy, anthropology, and genetics as epistemic, cultural, and political practice.

The preferred tool for conceptualizing, determining, and claiming relations of kinship, ancestry, and descent among humans are diagrams. For this reason, and at the same time to avoid a reduction to biology as transported by terms such as , , and , we introduce the expression . We seek to understand the enormous influence that especially tree diagrams have had as a way to express and engage with human relatedness, but hold that this success can only be adequately understood by attending to what in fact are broader diagrammatic practices.