Full Description
Blood awakens associations with ancient ideas. But we know very little about the historical representations of blood in Western cultures. The contributors attempt to follow the use of blood in mapping family and kinship relations in European culture from the ancient world to the present. The project is "reflexive" in that it takes as its point of departure the questions that anthropologists are now asking about how different societies think about the substances that connect people, that are understood to produce either "kinship" - where that is still considered to be a relevant category - or "relatedness." What has been the development of European understandings of how kinship and blood are connected? "Blood" has come and gone in European culture, just as kinship has constantly been reconfigured. Both have been moving, sometimes in parallel and sometimes in divergent directions. And both have taken on quite different meanings over time.
Contents
Acknowledgments Preface List of Illustrations and Tables Introduction David Warren Sabean and Simon Teuscher Chapter 1. Agnatio, Cognatio, Consanguinitas: Kinship and Blood in Ancient Rome Ann-Cathrin Harders Chapter 2. The Bilineal Transmission of Blood in Ancient Rome Philippe Moreau Chapter 3. Flesh and Blood in Medieval Language about Kinship Anita Guerreau-Jalabert Chapter 4. Flesh and Blood in the Treatises on the Arbor Consanguinitatis (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries) Simon Teuscher Chapter 5. Discourses of Blood and Kinship in Late Medieval and Early Modern Castile Teofilo F. Ruiz Chapter 6. The Shed Blood of Christ. From Blood as Metaphor to Blood as Bearer of Identity Gerard Delille Chapter 7. Descent and Alliance: Cultural Meanings of Blood in the Baroque David Warren Sabean Chapter 8. Kinship, Blood, and the Emergence of the Racial Nation in the French Atlantic World, 1600 - 1789 Guillaume Aubert Chapter 9. Class Dimensions of Blood, Kinship, and Race in Brittany, 1780 - 1880 Christopher H. Johnson Chapter 10. Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Question of "Jewish Blood" Cornelia Essner Chapter 11. Biosecuritization: The Quest for Synthetic Blood and the Taming of Kinship Kath Weston Chapter 12. Articulating Blood and Kinship in Biomedical Contexts in Contemporary Britain and Malaysia Janet Carsten Chapter 13. From Blood to Genes? Rethinking Consanguinity in the Context of Geneticization Sarah Franklin Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index
