'Aborescent culture: writing and not writing racehorse pedigrees' in Kinship and Beyond: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered. Sandra Bamford and James Leach, eds. 2009. Berghahn Books, New York

In this chapter I want to explore some of the implications of pedigree thinking that, it has been argued, were part of the social repertoire on which the genealogical method drew (Bouquet 1993). More importantly, this chapter is an argument for suspicion of any kind of genealogy constructed without consideration of the particular way of knowing it might produce. As I will show through a discussion of nineteenth-century Bedouin and English thoroughbred horse breeding practices, merely producing a written pedigree trans forms the manner in which knowledge about people (and horses) is envisaged. The recent creation of a cloned horse, the first in the world, has also provided a pertinent thought experiment for the current producers of the thoroughbred racehorse: what happens when pedigree stands still? What principles embodied by the pedigree (and by the genealogical model) are violated when descent is displaced by replication?