The Genius of Kinship: The Phenomenon of Human Kinship and the G ...

theorizing genius developed in Germany (Wolf, 1923; Zilsel, 1926), England (Thüme, 1927), and France (Jaffe, 1980).

The English word genius is a borrowing from Latin genius ‘guardian deity or spirit which watches over each person or clan (gens) from birth; spirit, incarnation, wit, talent,’ which in turn is a substantive related to the verb gignere ‘beget, produce.’ A French dictionary of the 17th century specifies that genius is a spirit that accompanies an individual from birth to death (Jaffe, 1980, p. 581). The native English reflexes of the Indo-European root *gen- ‘beget, produce’ are kin and kinship. In Europe, the notion of genius originally referred to the divine presence in the works of art, as testified by such Renaissance luminaries Joseph J. Scaliger and Giordano Bruno (Tonelli, 1974, p. 293). Subsequently, the celestial connotations of the word were dropped, and genius was reinvented as a force of nature.

As far back as 1642, a Spanish writer, Baltasar Graciàn y Morales (1601–1658), the author of Arte de ingenio (revised as Agudeza y arte de ingenio), spoke of artistic genius as an ability to detect similarities and analogies (Croce, 1995, p. 190).¹ Neapolitan philosopher and historian, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), was one of the first to undertake studies of such “marginal” social groups as deaf-mutes, aphasics, and children in order to develop a general theory applicable to “mainstream” society. He concluded that humans mediate between physical and mental worlds by means of a special mind faculty, ingenium (a sort of anti-Dawkinsesque “geneish self”), which exploits the body as a semiotic vehicle (see Gensini, 1995). Vico spoke of ingenium as an “induction by analogy,” as “mother wit” (Vico, 1988, p. 102) and as “the creative power through which man is capable of recognizing likenesses and making them himself.” He authored the famous aphorism: “Likeness is the mother of all invention,” and called curiosity “the daughter of wisdom and the mother of knowledge” (Vico, 1984, p. 377). He further observed that: