Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture [Paperback]

Chris Knight (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300063083 | ISBN-13: 978-0300063080 | Publication Date: May 24, 1995

The emergence of human culture is generally traced to the development of a social order in which males hunted large game animals and females had access to the meat. This book presents a new theory of how this culture originated. Integrating perspectives of evolutionary biology and social anthropology within a Marxist framework, Christopher Knight rejects the common assumption that human culture was a gradual extension of primate behaviour and argues instead that it was the product of an immense social, sexual, and political revolution spearheaded by women. Culture became established, says Knight, when women realized that men armed with hunting weapons could not be trusted to share the spoils of the hunt with women and offspring. They began to assert conscious 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. Thus every month with the onset of menstruation, sexual relations were ruptured as the prelude to each successful hunting expedition; it was the means through which women motivated men not only to hunt but also to concentrate their energies on bringing back the meat. Knight shows how his hypothesis sheds light on the roots of such cultural traditions as totemic rituals, incest and menstrual taboos, blood-sacrifices, and hunters' atonement rites. Providing detailed ethnographic documentation of this theories, he also explains how myths and fairy tales from European, American Indian, Australian Aboriginal, and other cultures seem to be the derivations of the same cultural symbolic rituals.

Product Details

• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (May 24, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300063083
• ISBN-13: 978-0300063080
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,173,158 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling work on evolution of human society, March 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (Paperback)

This book may be the most important book ever written on the evolution of human social organization. It brings together observation and theory from social anthropology, primatology, and paleoanthropology in a manner never before equalled. The author, Chris Knight, who teaches social anthropology at the University of London is up to date on all these fields and has achieved an extraordinary synthesis. His critiques of Claude Levi-Strauss on totemism and myth are a sheer tour de force. The basic premise can be summarized, though only in an extremely cursory fashion, as follows. The basis of primate social organization is predicated on the distribution of food resources and how females array themselves around these. Males array themselves around females. Over the course of human evolution, the acquisition of animal protein came to be of critical significance. Proto-human females acquired this valuable resource from males via a collective bargaining agreement which formed the basis of human kinship organization and social exchanges. This accomplished through a systematic "sex-strike" cycle which ran according to a lunar based schedule of menstruation/hunting following by ovulation/feasting. Human females evolved concealed ovulation and a cultural system of sexual advertisement based on menstruation that guided this cycle. Females could now say 'yes', but they could also say 'no', depending on the success of the hunting venture. The author explores evidence for this thesis both in the ethnography of currently existing non-industrial societies as well as in the paleolithic in the use that anatomically modern humans' made of red ochre and other pigments to signify and exploit the menstrual event. A number of previously incomprehensible myths, such as the 'Rainbow Snake' of the Australian Aborigines, receive a new and revealing interpretation in this light.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Most Brilliant Anthropological Study Ever Written, December 25, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (Paperback)

The many words used to describe Chris Knight's "Blood Relations" include, monumental, encyclopedic, brilliant, original, ingenious, and a tour-de-force. It is all of these and more! This work is simply the most brilliant and imaginative book about human cultural development ever written. Its range is astonishing. Its arguments are cogently made with great detail. Its synthesis of primatology, socio-biology, and anthroplogy are compelling. Where others have depicted women as the victims of a dominant male hierarchy, Knight reveals how the sex roles and behavior of both men and women developed together in a dialectic relationship. Where others have stressed the loss of oestrus and continuous sexual receptivity in the female, Knight spotlights menstruation and its associated marital and other cultural taboos. Where others stress man the hunter and woman the gatherer, Knight envisions paleo-women as evolving an increasing solidarity to shape the structure of both hunting and gathering. Women are not the passive creatures that are so often depicted by the radical feminists who have an interest in portraying women as the victims of dominant males. Females have been active participants in shaping culture, behavior, and human destiny. As Knight says, "symbolic culture involves very widespread levels of synchronized co-operative action."

Somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 years ago, Knight believes, a massive social, sexual, and cultural explosion occurred and he does an ingenious job of providing us with insight into how this may have happened. A major change in reproductive strategy had to take place before males could take off as hunters and leave their women behind. Women synchronized their ovulatory cycles with one another; the concept of the "sex-strike" is the heart of the book. Blood as a symbol of menstruation provides a key to much of human culture and Knight uses it to explain the inner logic of many of mankind's myths and taboos. Because the disruptive effects of sex can be enormous, these controls have played an important role in the development of human culture.

The riches of this deeply learned book cannot simply be conveyed in a brief review. It is a work to be read over and over and contemplated. The many insights into human culture and the relationships among the sexes will surely provide any open minded person with a new perspective as to why we are the way we are.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tour-de-force, September 15, 2000

By 

Mick H (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (Paperback)

This book was a revelation for me. Having struggled through numerous turgid anthropological works by the likes of Levi-Strauss, Roheim, etc., it was thrilling to read such an ambitious clear-sighted and compelling account of the origins of human culture, together with an excellent critique of much current anthropological thinking.

It's worth mentioning that Chris Knight is a marxist, and by that I don't mean vaguely left-wing in the manner of, say, Eric Hobsbawm. He's a real believer...dialectic materialism, the whole works. Clearly Knight believes his marxism is essential to his thesis. I would argue that although this maybe enabled him to see through other anthropological schools - structuralism, functionalism, what-have-you - and to develop his own theories, in the end it's irrelevant to his conclusions. So, wade through the marxist stuff, you can ignore it, it's not to my mind necessary to agree with his ideological beliefs (I don't) to appreciate his arguments, and to agree with much of what he says - or at least to find this a wonderfully stimulating book.