Genealogy works backward from present certainties to their contingencies

Evidence

Genealogy is not intended here as a substitute for social history (“real history,” as many would put it) but as a way of working back from our present to the contingencies that have come together to give us our certainties. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 74

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Genealogy refuses to take sovereignty, the state, and civil society as givens — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 128