Review by Diane Bell, American Ethnologist
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.
In explicating a new paradigm, not merely worrying away at existing puzzles, Knight needs to clear away the anomalous debris. He embarks on a remarkable and exhaustive journey through theories of the founding fathers of science and the study of culture. We are offered a history of anthropology in Britain and the United States by way of contextualizing lack of attention to questions about origins.
From there we move to the ethnographic record, totemism, own-kill taboo, incest, exogamy, and so forth. The scope of Knight's scholarship is awesome, but the result is not the elegance or parsimony promised in a Kuhnian paradigm shift.
Knight's struggle to remain faithful to a traditional Marxist anthropology (p. 529) while according value to feminist standpoints, generates potentially invigorating tensions. However, when he explores the ethnographic record, his feminist sensibilities evaporate and he relies on the same texts where male/male encounters purport to represent culture for all. A case in point is his reliance on the Arnhem Land material from Aboriginal Australia. Knight admits the experience of menstruation in the protein rich, well-watered north of Australia is not that of the rather lean parched central desert. The distinction is important. In the 1970s, I recorded life histories of women in their eighties. They spoke of late menarche, early menopause, extended breast feed-ing, and a lean diet. Menstruation was very occasional. The notion of sexual solidarity and synchronicity does not hold for such women, yet there is greater female solidarity in the desert than there is amongst their northern sisters who possibly did menstruate more regularly. Knight passes over this as a blip on his world chronology (p. 253).
In Primate Visions (Routledge 1989:6-8) Donna Haraway enumerates four temptations: scientific practice viewed as literary practice; Marxist (stand-point) epistemologies; dualism dissolved; and the politics of the intertwining of feminism, race, and gender. These are resources that both empower and signal danger in analyzing primatology as storytel-ling, in understanding scientific knowledge as socially constructed. I would add a fifth — interdisciplinary discursiveness. It can be illuminating drawing on insights from many disciplines, but it may also license undisciplined collages of diverse insights.
Knight sometimes gets lost in the detail of his albeit excellent literature reviews, falters in his excursions into fields where women have been path breakers,. and undermines his endorsement of female agency by relying on misogynistic sources. Chris Knight opens his book with Robin Fox, whose "man" as a false generic is not critiqued. The dialogue with.
Donna Haraway is undeveloped. Knight's insistence that his traditional Marxist class analysis can accommodate gender is problematic. If the point is to change the world, we have much work to do. The conditions for a sex strike in late 20th-century America are as remote as a doctor's strike for a rational health care system. Nonetheless, Knight's narrative deserves serious consideration.
