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Loading... Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Cultureby Chris Knight
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"Chris Knight has taken on the task of explicating not only the whys and hows of human cultural evolution, but also vast constellations of cultural behaviour covering Australia, Africa, Europe and all of the Americas.His scholarship is impeccable." "Blood Relations is an extraordinary work, in which imaginary creatures and magical events are orchestrated on a global scale, from Australia to Amazonia, into a single vision of how humans created humanity." "Revolutions in science seldom appear ready made, but I suspect that the basis of a new synthesis between anthropology and biology may well lie within the pages of this book." Chris Knight in 'Blood Relations' has this extraordinary resolve. His is an immense work of documentation and close argument. ... It appears to solve most of the outstanding conundrums in contemporary anthropology.
The emergence of symbolic culture is generally linked with the development of the hunger-gatherer adaptation based on a sexual division of labor. This original and ingenious book presents a new theory of how this symbolic domain originated. Integrating perspectives of evolutionary biography and social anthropology within a Marxist framework, Chris Knight rejects the common assumption that human culture was a modified extension of primate behavior and argues instead that it was the product of an immense social, sexual, and political revolution initiated by women.Culture became established, says Knight, when evolving human females began to assert collective control over their own sexuality, refusing sex to all males except those who came to them with provisions. Women usually timed their ban on sexual relations with their periods of infertility while they were menstruating, and to the extent that their solidarity drew women together, these periods tended to occur in synchrony. The result was that every month with the onset of menstruation, sexual relations were ruptured in a collective, ritualistic way as the prelude to each successful hunting expedition. This ritual act was the means through which women motivated men not only to hunt but also to concentrate energies on bringing back the meat. Knight shows how this hypothesis sheds light on the roots of such cultural traditions as totemic rituals, incest and menstrual taboos, blood-sacrifice, and hunters' atonement rites. Providing detailed ethnographic documentation, he also explains how Native American, Australian Aboriginal, and other magico-religious myths can be read as derivatives of the same symbolic logic. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)392.6Social sciences Customs, Etiquette, Folklore Family, Courtship, Marriage and Sex SexualityLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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