Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture is a book by the evolutionary anthropologist Chris Knight. It was published by Yale University Press in 1991.

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. In this origins model, men renounce all sexual claims to their own sisters and daughters, instead forging matrimonial alliances by exchanging their female relatives between themselves as wives.^[1] Alongside the incest taboo, according to Lévi-Strauss, the dominant sex invented a further series of critically important rules concerning such things as cooking, romantic attachment, the timing of menstruation and the wearing of personal ornaments.^[2]

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 hunter-gatherer ethnography, paleolithic archaeology, human paleontology, 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

Knight's model has often been termed the 'sex-strike' theory. Females band together to mount resistance against male sexual violence, harassment or abuse. Jointly, they withhold sex from abusive, lazy or unhelpful males. Once their strategy has become established, they go on strike periodically just to underline their value and motivate men to go hunting as a condition of sex.

The cultural prohibition of incest is not given a separate genetic or cultural explanation because from Knight's standpoint it emerges simultaneously with sexual morality more generally. In this as in other ways, the apparently separate and unconnected aspects of human symbolic culture so often described by anthropologists do not require separate approaches to explain them, one theory for each puzzle. Other things being equal, a single parsimonious theory should suffice.

In attributing creative agency to females in establishing the cultural realm, Knight turns Lévi-Strauss upside-down, claiming that his new theory is not only more simple and parsimonious but more compelling. In his view, the human revolution – the momentous transition from nature to culture – is achieved when females successfully mount collective resistance to male sexual abuse.

One consequence is 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 sex 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 recruited into his mother's and sister's defensive alliance, for him to seek sexual relations within that alliance becomes not only complicated but unthinkable. On reaching maturity, 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'.

Testing the Model

One of Knight's findings is that taboos around menstruation are deeply rooted in every traditional culture, taking surprisingly similar forms. Knight suggests that what have now become irrational and oppressive taboos were originally established by women in order to assert their periodic inviolability. He attributes the ubiquity of these rules and taboos to their antiquity and to the probability that they once upheld all other moral, religious and cultural taboos.

In Knight's model, female intolerance of male harassment or abuse reaches a peak each month around menstruation, when women declare themselves to be temporarily 'set apart' or 'sacred'. Knight notes that the human female cycle has an average periodicity of approximately 29.5 days, making it compatible in principle with the periodicity of the moon.^[3] This is in contrast to our close great ape relative the chimpanzee, whose menstrual cycle length is around 36 days.

Knight remarks on the extent to which an 'ideology of blood' permeates ritual performances and cosmological beliefs among hunter-gatherers across the world, noting how such rituals and beliefs are preserved in diverse forms even as horticulture, cattle herding and farming replace hunting and gathering. One feature which persists into historically more recent religions is the salience of blood as core marker of sanctity and potency. Knight interprets indigenous myths about the origins of language in the same light, noting their insistence that the First Word, spoken in blood, meant prohibition or 'No'. When Knight was writing, his suggestion of an intimate link between incest prohibitions and menstrual taboos seemed original even though in fact it was not new – having been proposed by the founder of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim, as long ago as 1898.^[4]

Knight acknowledges that his theory is at odds with mainstream thinking. He responds by arguing that because it makes surprisingly detailed and often unexpected predictions, his theory is unusual in being testable in the light of empirical evidence.

One of Knights's theoretical predictions, made it 1991, was that future archaeological research should find that the earliest fully-cultural humans were regularly using red ocher pigments as cosmetics in their ritual displays. In 2002, this prediction was confirmed by the archaeologist Ian Watts when, as the ocher specialist working in a team led by Chris Henshilwood, he announced an early date for the world's first art. Among the team's discoveries were cross-hatched patterns engraved on pieces of ocher apparently used as body paint, found in Blombos Cave, South Africa, and dated to more than 70,000 years ago.^[5] According to Watts, the kinds of ocher most frequently utilized were especially valued because their color suggested that of fresh blood.^[6]

Another of Knight's predictions was that future archaeological research should confirm the centrality of lunar periodicity to ancient hunting schedules and their depiction as calendars in rock and cave art. In 1991, Knight cited the Ice Age lunar notation systems described by Alexander Marshack in his 1972 book, The Roots of Civilization.^[7] Unfortunately for Knight, Marshack's interpretations were then being dismissed by critics as 'wishful thinking'.^[8] Since then, numerous paleolithic rock art images and cave paintings have added weight to Marshack's interpretations. Today, there is widespread agreement that early hunter-gatherers perceived significant correspondences between menstrual and lunar periodicities, scheduling their ceremonies and hunting patterns to achieve a ritual ideal of synchrony with the moon.^[9]

Another of Knight's predictions concerned structures of family, residence and kinship. In 1991, the consensus was that early human hunters must have lived in patrilocal bands. Knight's model seemed difficult to accept because it presupposed strong female kin-based coalitions, early hunter-gatherer women choosing to live with and share childcare with their own mother and other female relatives. In the years since Knight's book was written, a number of developments – including Kristen Hawks' 'grandmother hypothesis', Sarah Hrdy's 'alloparenting' model and Camilla Power's 'Female Cosmetic Coalitions' hypothesis – have indicated that early human postmarital residence patterns are unlikely to have been patrilocal. Paleogenetic studies over recent decades have confirmed that among African hunter-gatherers, matrilocal residence during the early years of marriage was traditionally the norm.^[10]

Reception

Negative

Knight's book was negatively reviewed by Chris Harman of the Socialist Workers' Party, who dismissed it as 'Menstrual Moonshine' incompatible with Marxist theoretical premises.^[11] Feminist critic Joan Gero found Knight's book 'offensive' on political grounds. In a harshly negative review published in The American Ethnologist in 1998, Gero wrote:

What Knight puts forward as an 'engendered' perspective on the origins of culture is a paranoid and distorting view of 'female solidarity', featuring (all) women as sexually exploiting and manipulating (all) men. Male-female relations are characterized forever and everywhere as between victims and manipulators; exploitative women are assumed always to have wanted to trap men by one means or another, and indeed their conspiring to do so serves as the very basis of our species' development.

— Joan Gero, Review of Chris Knight, Blood Relations, Menstruation and the Origins of Culture.

A review published in the International Communist Current found grounds for welcoming Knight's book despite criticizing it on political grounds.^[12]

Positive

Knight's book was favorably reviewed in The Times Higher Educational Supplement, The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books; it also received publicity through an interview on the BBC World Service Science Now program, a debate with Dr. Henrietta Moore on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, a front-page news report in The Independent on Sunday and Daily Telegraph and coverage in many other periodicals.^[13] The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute described Blood Relations as ‘a very readable, witty, lively treasure-trove of anthropological wisdom and insight.’^[14] In April 1998, the Independent on Sunday featured a two-page article on Knight's work by science correspondent Marek Kohn, who described Knight's approach to the origins of language as ‘drawing together some of the most dynamic lines of argument in current British evolutionary thought’.^[15]

“This book may be the most important 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, is up to date on all these fields and has achieved an extraordinary synthesis. His critiques of Claude Lévi-Strauss on totemism and myth are a sheer tour de force.”

— Alex Walter, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University

In 1997, the feminist journalist and historian Barbara Ehrenreich did much to explain and utilize Knight's ideas in her book, Blood Rites: The origins and history of the passions of war.^[16] Among major poets, Ted Hughes^[17] and Peter Redgrove^[18] favourably cite Knight's insights concerning menstrual synchrony and its place in world mythology and folklore.

The sculptor Anish Kapoor draws inspiration from Knight's work, describing how his appreciation of the colour red – in, for example, Kapoor's celebrated sculpture Blood Relations – owes much to Knight's 'wonderful theory' that the world's first art was produced when women began decorating themselves with red ochre cosmetics.^[19][20]

Another prominent figure inspired by Knight's book is the Chilean revolutionary activist and artist Cecilia Vicuña. Having studied Knight's work over many years, she associates the blood-red woolen quipus or 'Red Threads' central to much of her recent work with the string figures and images of menstruating goddesses in Aboriginal Australian rock-art as described and interpreted by Knight in his book.^[21]

Although Knight's theory of human cultural and symbolic origins remains controversial, in the years since Blood Relations was published it has become central to an increasing body of archaeological research and debate on how symbolic culture first emerged during the evolution of our species.^{[22][23][24][25][26]}

References