Blood and Kinship

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.