The word "blood" awakens ancient ideas, but we know little about its historical representation in Western cultures. Anthropologists have customarily studied how societies think about the bodily substances that unite them, and the contributors to this volume develop those questions in new directions. Taking a radically historical perspective that complements traditional cultural analyses, they demonstrate how blood and kinship have constantly been reconfigured in European culture. This volume challenges the idea that blood can be understood as a stable entity, and shows how concepts of...
The word "blood" awakens ancient ideas, but we know little about its historical representation in Western cultures. Anthropologists have customari...
Christophe H. Johnson Bernhard Jussen David Warren Sabean
"This is a book of astonishing quality, comprising a wealth of outstanding studies that underline the various shifts and mutations that took place mostly in the late medieval and late modern periods. It is true that issues of gender could play a more prevalent role and that discourses and semantic issues are largely privileged over visual matters, cultural practices, and material culture, but rather than a critique this is an invitation for further investigations on those aspects. In any case, those limitations certainly do not make this book less inspiring and pioneering regarding the...
"This is a book of astonishing quality, comprising a wealth of outstanding studies that underline the various shifts and mutations that took place mos...