This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Systems' Graduate School (now the 'Societies and Cultures in Motion' Graduate School) of the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg as well as by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the Research Group Law, Organization, Science and Technology (LOST) in particular. Our thanks go to these institutional bodies for making our convention possible. The workshop benefited greatly from the contributions of all participants. Special thanks go to Suman Seth and Ina Kerner, who enriched our discussion tremendously but who are not represented here. Michi Knecht and Eliza Slavet joined our conversation for some time as well. Thanks go to Michi Knecht for inviting Katharina Schramm to participate in a conference on 'Genealogical Practices', which took place at the Institute for European Ethnology,