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Chris Knight
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Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture Paperback – May 24, 1995

by Chris Knight (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 15 ratings
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This original and ingenious book presents a new theory of the origins of human culture. Integrating perspectives of evolutionary biology 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.
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  1. Print length
    592 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Yale University Press
  4. Publication date
    May 24, 1995
  5. Dimensions
    9.07 x 6.06 x 1.61 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0300063083
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0300063080
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A most important, novel, well-argued and monumental piece of work." - David Lewis-Williams, author of Believing and Seeing.

"This book may be the most important ever written on the evolution of human social organization." - Alex Walter, author of Evolutionary Psychology and the Propositional-attitudes.

"Revolutions in science seldom appear ready made, but I suspect that the basis of anew synthesis between anthropology and biology may well lie within thepages of this book." - Robin Dunbar, Times Higher Educational Supplement.

"Chris Knight in Blood Relations has this 'extraordinary resolve'. His is an immense work ofdocumentation and close argument. ... It appears to solve most of theoutstanding conundrums in contemporary anthropology." - Peter Redgrove, Times Literary Supplement.

"A quite remarkable contribution to our subject." - Marilyn Strathern, author The Gender of the Gift.

"Blood Relations is an extraordinary work, in which imaginary creatures andmagical events are orchestrated on a global scale, from Australia toAmazonia, into a single vision of how humans created humanity." - Marek Kohn, The Independent.

"Chris Knight's great achievement is to put logic in what, otherwise, lookslike a vast mess of anecdotal anthropological facts." - Jean-Louis Dessalles, author of Why We Talk.

"A refreshing alternative to the plethora of prosaic and sexist variations on the 'Man-the-Hunter' theory of the origins of human culture." - Cris Shore, author of The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology.

"Blood Relations points us all in a refreshingly new direction." - Clive Gamble, author of Origins and Revolutions.

"This is the most ambitious project on the origins of culture to have emerged for decades." - Mary Douglas, author of Purity and Danger.

"I suspect that it will be a slow burning classic, revived from time totime, but then discarded because it repudiates bourgeois metaphysics." - Keith Hart, author of The Memory Bank.

"Chris Knight has taken on the task of explicating not only the whys and howsof human cultural evolution, but also vast constellations of culturalbehaviour covering Australia, Africa, Europe and all of the Americas.His scholarship is impeccable." - R. E. Davis-Floyd, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

"Chris Knight has a political agenda, and he is not going to hide it from us.... The result is an exhilaratingly original edifice of astonishingrange." - Caroline Humphrey, London Review of Books.

"As women all over the world fight for control over their own sexuality and fertility, Chris Knight in Blood Relations has performed a service. We can now prove that we're demanding nothingnew. We once had collective control over our own bodies; our fight nowis to regain it." - Leonora Lloyd, secretary National Abortion Campaign.

"Chris Knight has produced a book of absorbing interest." - Agnes Miles, Sociology of Health and Illness.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press (May 24, 1995)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 592 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300063083
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300063080
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.75 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.07 x 6.06 x 1.61 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 15 ratings

About the author

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Chris Knight

Chris Knight

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Following an M.Phil degree in Russian Literature from the University of Sussex in 1977, I gained my Ph.D in 1987 at the University of London for a thesis on Claude Lévi-Strauss's four-volume work, 'Mythologiques'. I began lecturing in anthropology at the University of East London in 1989 and was appointed professor in 2000. A founding member of the Radical Anthropology Group, since my retirement I have been giving talks and conducting research on human origins in the Department of Anthropology, University College London.

Since the 1960s, I have been exploring the idea that human language and culture emerged in our species not simply by gradual Darwinian evolution but in a process culminating in revolutionary change. In this, I take inspiration from the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, particularly with respect to gender and its relationship to class.

I published my first book, 'Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture' in 1991. In 1996, I co-founded the EVOLANG (Evolution of Language) series of international conferences, since when I have been prominently involved in debates on the origins of symbolic culture and especially the origins of language.

I became an activist in 1957, when my father took me on the first London-to-Aldermaston march in opposition to nuclear weapons. As a student at Sussex University during the mid-1960s, I was swept up in the political optimism of the period, joining with my friends in opposing the Vietnam war and believing that revolutionary change was both necessary and possible.

I joined the Labour Party in 1966 and am still an active member. In 1980 I was a founder editor of the journal 'Labour Briefing' and remain on the editorial board. My political activism, often described in the press as ‘anarchist’, is considerably wider than this. Over the years, it has included drumming in a samba band and various street theatre performances, some of which have got me into trouble with my university management and/or the London Metropolitan Police.

I have just published a book on Noam Chomsky and am now working to complete a book on the origins of language. My blog is www.scienceandrevolution.org

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
15 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Mario Rendon MD
5.0 out of 5 stars Blood Relations by Chris Knight
Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2009
Verified Purchase
This is truly a magnificent work that will influence all human sciences for a long time to come. Scholarly, well written, a landmark that subverts the field. I read it with the aim of using it in a critique of psychoanalysis and found exactly what I need. Mario Rendon.
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Earl Hazell
5.0 out of 5 stars Paradigm shifting achievement that revalidates Afrocentrism
Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2002
"The notion of tabu as connoting both 'danger' and 'power' belongs in fact to a venerable tradition. One source of this is the work of Durkheim...a pioneering article on menstrual symbolism published in 1898...Durkheim argued that women established the exogamy rule by periodically BLEEDING so as to repulse the opposite sex...[women] were the immediate agents of religious ideology's segregating action."

"...But of course, the model of cultural origins advocated in this book would lead us to trace the underlying abstract logic of the Rainbow Snake...much further back into the Aborigines past--indeed, right back to their first entry into Australia [from central Africa]..."

"It would be interesting to study the ideological and political factors which led to Durkheim's insights being virtually ignored for a hundred years."
--Chris Knight, BLOOD RELATIONS
Chapter 11: "The Raw and The Cooked" and
Chapter 14: "The Dragon Within"

" At Yirkalla, in...north-east Arnhem Land [aboriginal Australia]...women's solidarity is still very strong, menstrual blood is regarded as 'sacred'... It is only when this snake power of the women themselves has been established that the conditions are felt appropriate for the climax of the ceremony...

'...really we have been stealing what belongs to them (the women) for it is mostly women's business... Women can't see what men are doing...This is because all the Dreaming business came out of women--everything...In the beginning we had nothing...we took these things from women.'

"It is one of the severest indictments of 20th Century anti-evolutionist anthropology that its models have led ethnographers to dismiss such profound Aboriginal insights as scientifically valueless."

--Chris Knight, BLOOD RELATIONS
Chapter 13: "The Rainbow Snake"
This is a five star, paradigm-shifting treatise on human cultural origins if there ever was one. Chris Knight's rendering of the four plus million years of primate and proto-human history in BLOOD RELATIONS, right up to the latest 200,000 years that begin true humankind and human culture in central Africa and along the Nile, through to the psychic/motivational bedrock of our conflicted modern society, becomes more impressive, more inclusive--and more impregnable with every chapter and every turn of the page.

My test for the far-reaching influence and power of any theorist--particularly of the wannabe revolutionary kind--is three-fold. One, their theory must be completely plausible; i.e. not needing simple revolt from detractors and complimentary but poorly explained aspects of ITSELF to proclaim and rationalize its essential relevance. Two, they must have the ability to completely encapsulate the foundational principles, concepts and findings of the other historical and competitive theories within its discipline as an integral part of its own new perspective; showing their ideas to be the great quantum leap beyond our sense of reality and the all inclusive step toward truth. And third, perhaps most important of all, it has to excite me. There may be things my mind will not be specifically educated enough, multi-lingual enough or quick enough to pick up, but you cannot fool my heart. All these three are BLOOD RELATIONS's great achievement and great contribution.
Chris Knight, the brilliant and controversial London anthropologist, does this all in BLOOD RELATIONS with such remarkable clarity and erudition, in fact, attempts to disagree with his findings becomes pointless. His unified field-theory of the prehistoric African woman's role in the formation of human culture is so incredibly well done, and so profoundly earth shattering in its implications, that I read the book twice to fully soak in all the sacred pre-verbal intuitions I have had that it reveals to be historical fact and obvious science.

So far the only complaint of BLOOD RELATIONS I could have is the only one possible: he seemingly focuses too much on the Marxist avatar of revolutionary cultural ideas while using it as the lens via which the origins of culture could be best understood. This at times seems to ironically minimize the revolutionary spirit of humankind that produced them. None less than the great Picasso was once quoted in saying "today's artists are tomorrow's politicians;" focusing more on the *artistic* power of the creative human spirit (my bias) may have put his new paradigm in an even more inclusive perspective. Yet even there he establishes, to my knowledge, the first credible dialectic between the devolved, political diseases of 20th century Stalinism/Maoism and the philosophical/scientific postulates of the 19th century Marxism upon which their regimes were originally based. So powerfully, in fact, that the Marxist perspective he examines and explains driving his reevaluation of 20th century anthropology--and, in turn, our entire view of human culture--need not (and in his book does not) come with the kind of intellectual apologies that would otherwise signify an inherent lack of validity.

Chris Knight with BLOOD RELATIONS shows unquestionably that women, via sex and the rhythm of menstruation, nurtured the primal creative impulse of civilization and they essentially created human culture. And he shows it to be made up of communal solidarity against oppressors and oppressive situations (be it prehistoric animals or alpha males), symbol-driven creativity, and achieving a certain oneness with the rhythms of nature. This primal social movement that is the womb of human culture, told in every ancient culture's foundational myths, could naturally just as easily explain the birth of democracy and/or capitalism in the historical ages of feudalism as it does the advent of Marxism in the age of capitalism...and what is next for human kind.

This is another of the great books of our time whose far-reaching influence in modern culture has not even begun to be felt. One can only imagine what anthropological works throughout history that have been ignored because of intellectual biases will now be reexamined and redeemed through his paradigm shifting work. I would combine this with Barbara Ehrenreich's 1995 work BLOOD RITES, and the 19th Century Gerald Massey's ANCIENT EGYPT, THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD as an anthropological trinity of monumental, paradigm shifting proportions that will change your view of humankind-our true past, present and potential-forever.

BLOOD RELATIONS is beautiful.
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M. J. Jenkins
5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant study by a brilliant man!
Reviewed in the United States on September 10, 2003
Dr.Chris Knight was one of my lecturers at university and without fail I would come away from my Anthropology lectures with my head blown away by all the amazing knowledge transfer that occurred. It was all fantastic stuff and all totally confusing until one of those "aha" moments, when all of Chris's and the other anthropologists theories suddenly all fell into place and began to make real sense.
The book itself was a key text during our studies with various chapters needing to be read at various times. For that reason I shall not break down the book, rather I shall say that it will be one of the most illuminating and eye-opening books that you will ever read. Maybe not the easiest to read but definitely one of the best. Oh, and you can always impress your friends in the pub of an evening with your knowledge of Marxist paleo-anthropological theories pertaining to the emergence of human culture!
4 people found this helpful
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Mick H
5.0 out of 5 stars A tour-de-force
Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2000
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.
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Top reviews from other countries

Mahesh
2.0 out of 5 stars Two Stars
Reviewed in India on December 24, 2015
Verified Purchase
the book was very old one
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