A Review of Chris Knight - Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture by Diane Bell, American Ethnologist

A man writing about menstruation as empowering not polluting; a Marxist analysis in which sex solidarity and class assume equal explanatory power; a fully social and revolutionary account of our human cultural origins that privileges women; an explicitly political narrative of science in the first person; an interweaving of anthropology, biology, history of ideas, and philosophy; an attempt not just to interpret but to change the world: Blood Relations is all this and more. The thesis is ingenious and imaginative: women withheld sex from all males save for those who brought provisions. The meat/sex relation is mediated by menstrual blood, noise, appeals to myth, science, and women's realization that through solidarity they might make men less individualistic and more responsible more of the time: a welcome message in an era of backlash and increasing violence against women.

“From the evidence of burials and symbolic objects, rituals and religious beliefs probably go back more than 100,000 years, but could they actually have been central to the origins of modern humans? A British anthropologist, Chris Knight, certainly thinks so, and in a wide-ranging synthesis of data from present-day anthropology, primatology and sociobiology…”

Review by R. E. Davis-Floyd, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“Ignoring this book is a mistake. It is a very readable, witty, lively treasure-trove of anthropological wisdom and insight….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

I heard of (Blood Relations) first in a review in the TLS of 7 February, 1992, by Peter Redgrove, who hailed it as a companion to his The Wise Wound, which he had co-authored with Penelope Shuttle in 1978. Redgrove described Blood Relations as “a magnificent work of materialistic science constructed from anthropological field work and tribal myth”, as compared to The Wise Wound, in which “we derived our ideas mostly from contemporary studies and dreams, and spoke as poets exploring aspects of the inner world of the menstrual cycle, its shared subjectivity”. And he went on: “Despite their different methods, neither book contradicts the other; indeed they seem to meet … in Knight’s triumphantly humanistic axiom: Magic for everybody, but no gods”.

Blood relations is a bold, panoramic and, in my opinion, easily the most persuasive account of the human revolution. A second, revised, edition is more than overdue. That or a re-issue with an extensive preface. Like any great work there are gaps and unfinished lines of thought - doubtless they will stimulate scholars in the years to come. However, Knight has made the decisive breakthrough which anyone who wants to be taken seriously must develop ... or decisively disprove.

For centuries the origin of language has divided scientists. Now a new Darwinian theory is being proposed. But how can this make sense when our ability to talk depends on co-operation, and not competition? Marek Kohn, Science correspondent, Independent on Sunday

SEVEN thousand tongues are spoken today, it's said, and half a million may have come and gone since humans acquired the faculty of language, according to the Oxford biologist Mark Pagel. In their attempts to work out how that transformation might have occurred, scholars seem to have deployed comparable numbers of theories, perspectives, papers and bits of jargon. There are noun phrases, generative grammars, voice onset times and fricatives. There's the question of the descent of the larynx, the heated debate over the Neanderthal hyoid bone, and the bitter controversy over the australopithecine lunate sulcus. But, according to anthropologists Chris Knight and Camilla Power, the questions that mattered most to our distant ancestors, as they hesitantly entered into the domain of language, were much the same as those which matter most to us: "Do you really mean it?" and "Can I rely on you?" First and foremost, language is a matter of trust.

A review of Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture, Chris Knight by Timothy Mason (Université de Paris)

The first academic anthropologists were much influenced by Darwin. The ways in which Tylor or Frazer applied the selectionist theory of evolution have often been summarily characterized as an Imperialistic and ethnocentric form of Social Darwinism, but in fact their thinking was more interesting and more complex than that. Nevertheless, when a new generation of anthropologists, closer to the terrain, less interested in historical questions, took over the baton, they renounced the search for the Key to All Mysteries, leaving Frazer to the poets and novelists. For Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, the Savage ceases to be the witness to our prehistoric past, and becomes a man like others, his daily cares and fundamental needs being much like our own.

A review of Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture, Chris Knight by Caroline Humphrey

Most people, including most social anthropologists, have only a hazy idea about the origins of human culture. For decades the whole treacherous territory has been avoided, and anthropology has come to construct itself in such a way that the subject is indeed unknowable. But here is a book which calls discretion’s bluff. Chris Knight has come up with a new and startling theory: human culture originated with a sex strike by female primates, a revolutionary act of collective solidarity which transformed ‘females’ into women. Culture came into being, Knight says, when evolving human females decided to control their own sexuality, allowing access only to males who provided them and their offspring with meat from the hunt. The ban on sex coincided with menstruation, women’s infertile period, which they now all synchronised with one another. Culture was, in effect, the social ritualisation of the rules consequent on the sex strike. Males had to forego the consumption of their own kills and feed them to their sexual partners. Females had to prevent the advances of non-hunter males, including their own adolescent sons. Thus appeared the first taboo, against eating meat killed by oneself, and the first human social group, the matrilineal coalition or clan.

A review of Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture, Chris Knight. Liz Dalton - SULFUR magazine.

Women initiated culture. It was they who opened the door to human history. They did so through a sex strike whose banner was the blood of menstruation.

This is Chris Knight’s claim in ‘Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture’ (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). It is the story of a revolution which worked. It is a book which will provoke some to fury, others to delight. It is based on 25 years of research and debate, and a wealth of evidence from the new biology, primatology, archaeology, palaeontology, social anthropology and the structural analysis of mythology. The author, a Marxist, an anthropologist and a man, makes no apology for any of this, but does acknowledge his debts to the women thinkers and activists — from scientists of almost every discipline to poets, witches and Greenham women — who have been and still are researching the same issues.