Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture is a book by the evolutionary anthropologist Chris Knight. Published by Yale University Press in hardback 1991 and in paperback four years later, it has remained in print ever since.
The book outlines a new theory of human origins, focusing particularly on the emergence of symbolic ritual, kinship, religion and mythic belief. Previously, the main theory in currency was that of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who claimed that culture's rule over nature was established by men when they invented the incest taboo.
According to Lévi-Strauss, a point came when the human mind proved capable of distinguishing between 'sister' and 'wife'. Equipped with that ability, human males who had previously kept their sisters to themselves offered them in matrimonial exchange to other males, who reciprocated by making a return gift of their own sisters. In this way, rule-governed society became established as alliances were forged between neighbouring groups of men.Lévi Strauss, C. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Lévi-Strauss claims that in addition to the incest taboo, men invented a further series of critically important rules concerning such things as the timing of menstruation, cooking, romantic attachment and the wearing of personal ornaments.Lévi-Strauss, C. 1970. The Raw and the Cooked. Introduction to a Science of Mythology 1. London: Cape. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1973. From Honey to Ashes. Introduction to a Science of Mythology 2. London: Cape. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1978. The Origin of Table Manners. Introduction to a Science of Mythology 3. London: Cape. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1981. The Naked Man. Introduction to a Science of Mythology 4. London: Cape.
In making his very different case, Knight draws on evidence not only from mythology – Lévi-Strauss' primary source – but from a wide range of disciplines including human behavioural ecology, hunter-gatherer ethnography, Paleolithic archaeology, palaeontology, rock art studies, modern genetics and studies of monkeys and apes in the wild. For Knight, symbolic culture emerged through Darwinian processes of gradual evolution culminating eventually in revolutionary change.
The 'sex-strike' theory of human origins
Most theoretical accounts of the origins of rule-based social life are 'top-down' in the sense that they envisage some dominant force, typically male, as constructing and enforcing the incest taboo and other fundamental rules. Knight's model differs starkly in postulating an essentially counter-dominant, 'bottom-up' social dynamic as the factor responsible for the world's first morally authoritative rules.
Knight's model has often been termed the 'sex-strike' theory. Females band together to resist male sexual harassment or violence, drawing on assistance from supportive sons and brothers in collective self defence. As a weapon of last resort, such female-led kin-coalitions will support one another in denying sex to any abusive, lazy or unhelpful males. As this strategy becomes embedded, women go on periodic sex-strike to underline their value and motivate men to leave camp and go hunting as a condition of sex.
In attributing creative agency to females in establishing the cultural realm, Knight turns Lévi-Strauss upside-down, claiming that his new theory is more simple, parsimonious and consistent with the rest of science. In his view, the human revolution – the momentous transition from nature to culture – is eventually consummated when females successfully mount collective resistance to male sexual thoughtlessness or abuse.
These ideas suggest a radically different explanation for the initial establishment of the incest taboo. In Knight's model, it emerges as a logical consequence of going on strike. In response to the potential threat of sexual coercion or rape, women recruit sons and brothers as members of their sex-strike coalition. Once a young male has been initiated into such a defensive alliance, it would be unthinkable for him to impose himself sexually on those sisters and mothers whose sexual resistance he is upholding. Once initiated, therefore, young men must look outside their coalition (their 'clan' or 'lineage') for sex – resulting in the pattern of 'exogamy' or 'marrying out' so characteristic of traditional systems of kinship and residence. According to Knight, collective resistance to prohibited sex also explains why kinship terminology in traditional cultures is so regularly 'classificatory', meaning that women address other female coalition members of the same generation as 'sister' while men similarly use the term 'brother'.
The Hunter's 'Own Kill' rule
Knight describes how traditional hunters recurrently link the incest prohibition with its counterpart on the economic plane, the rule against consuming the flesh of an animal one has killed oneself. Although many anthropologists had noticed such a prohibition while working in the field, each scholar had imagined it to be a local peculiarity without any relevance to classical concepts in the study of religion – topics such as 'rites of atonement', 'guardian spirits of the game animals', 'totemism' or 'sacrifice'. Noticing a common underlying pattern, Knight suggests that all these ideas so central to religious practices across the world have their origin in a once universal 'own kill' taboo.
Largely unnoticed by academics until 'Blood Relations' drew attention to it, what Knight terms 'the hunter's own kill rule' is almost universally recognized, even under deteriorating economic conditions which have prompted it to be evaded or ignored. Among the Mountain Arapesh people of Papua New Guinea:
Most significantly, from Knight's point of view, Margaret Mead stresses how in Arapesh culture "the taboo against eating one's own kill is equated with incest".Mead, M. 1941. The Mountain Arapesh. Part 2. Supernaturalism. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 37: 317-451, p. 352. By this, Mead means that just as men should make their sisters available to other men as wives, so they should generously make flesh from the animals they hunt available to others as food.
After listing and describing comparable traditions from across the world, Knight concludes that hunters' varied and often ingenious strategies for getting around the own flesh rule are as interesting as the many instances of compliance. For example, the prohibition might be weakened by applying it only to hunters who have not yet reached a certain age, or only to the first animal you kill in a given season. A widespread indigenous belief is that if you apologize profusely to the animal or its spirit, you may hope to be forgiven for eating it. Frequently misunderstood as kindhearted sentimentality toward animals, Knight argues that the sense of guilt is prompted by an awareness that the animal is being killed for selfish reasons, in defiance of the own kill taboo.
Finally, according to Knight, there is 'totemism' as classically defined – the idea that although your 'own flesh' (defined as a species of animal) must be respected, it is permissible to eat such an animal provided others have killed it, or kill your totemic animal on condition it will be eaten by others.Spencer, B. and F. J. Gillen 1904. The Northern Tribes of Central Australia. London: Macmillan.
The Dragon motif in ritual and mythology
The book culminates with a new explanation of the 'Dragon' motif in world mythology. According to Knight, the roots of this mythological creature are ancient, taking us back to when an ancestral population of humans evolved in Africa and began migrating across the world, taking with them their rituals and beliefs. Knight argues that religious beliefs are among the most conservative aspects of human symbolic culture, making them potentially a rich source of information about our distant evolutionary past when all humans still lived by hunting and gathering.
During the early decades of the twentieth century there was one place in the world where the Dragon was still being acted out regularly during the course of seasonally timed rituals of initiation. This place was the continent of Australia, where the many local variants of the Dragon became known by anthropologists as 'the Rainbow Serpent.'Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1926. The rainbow-serpent myth of Australia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 56: 19-25.Buchler, I. R., and K. Maddock (eds) 1978. The Rainbow Serpent. A chromatic piece. The Hague: Mouton.Watts, I. 2017. Rain serpents in Northern Australia and Southern Africa: a common ancestry? In C. Power, M. Finnegan and H. Callan (eds), Human Origins: Approaches from Social Anthropology. New York & Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 248-271.
In Knight's view, the Rainbow Snake was an imagined creature conjured up recurrently through ritual performance. It was a way of depicting the traumatic and unforgettable events and emotions experienced by boys and girls as they underwent their initiation into adult life. Since hunter-gatherer rites of passageVan Gennep, A. (1960 ). The rites of passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. were not scheduled randomly but at auspicious times of day or night, moon phase and season, the experiences they produced reflected cyclical time – an alternating movement between darkness and light, wet season and dry, rain and sunshine, death and new life.Maddock, K. 1978. Metaphysics in a mythical view of the world. In I. R. Buchler and K. Maddock (eds), The Rainbow Serpent. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 99-118. Knight points out that the Rainbow Snake or Dragon likewise moves through contraries. For example, it is the lowest of creatures – a snake – yet also the highest, since it has wings. It is a single creature, yet often with a plurality of heads. It lives in water, perhaps as the guardian of a sacred spring or waterhole, yet also spits out lightning fire. It is a non-human beast, but with human sexual appetites – it is famous for desiring maidens. It is gender-ambivalent, being sometimes male, sometimes female and sometimes both.Knight, C. 1991. Blood Relations. Menstruation and the origins of culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 449-479.
Knight notes that all of us find it hard to accept unfamiliar ideas or internalize concepts that form no part of our own culture. For this reason, we have a history of attempts to reduce the Dragon, Plumed Serpent or Anaconda to 'water', 'fertility', 'fear of venomous snakes' or some other concept or phenomenon familiar to us from our own culture.Jones, David E. (2000), An Instinct for Dragons, New York City, New York and London, England: Routledge,Blust, Robert. The Origin of Dragons. Anthropos, vol. 95, no. 2, 2000, pp. 519–536. For Knight, such distortions of vision can best be corrected by turning to hunter-gatherer ethnography and other branches of social anthropology – disciplines designed precisely to enable us to transcend our own cultural assumptions. In Australia, this means listening carefully to the wisdom of Aboriginal elders – including words recorded by anthropologists at a time when informants could brush aside Western moral sensitivities and speak with pride about their own sacred knowledge and traditions.Warner, W. L. 1957. A Black Civilization. New York: Harper.Berndt, R. M. 1951. Kunapipi. Melbourne: Cheshire.