Blood and Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present

Edited by David Warren Sabean (NHC Fellow, 2008–09), Christopher H. Johnson, Bernhard Jussen, and Simon Teuscher

New York: Berghahn Books, 2013

From the publisher’s description:

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 blood and kinship moved in both parallel and divergent directions over the course of European history.

Subjects

History / Blood / European History / Kinship / Cultural History /

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Sabean, David Warren (NHC Fellow, 2008–09), ed. Blood and Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present. Edited by David Warren Sabean, Christopher H. Johnson, Bernhard Jussen, and Simon Teuscher. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013.