Once initiated, therefore, young men must look outside their coalition (their 'clan' or 'lineage') for sex – resulting in the pattern of 'exogamy' or 'marrying out' so characteristic of traditional systems of kinship and residence.
Once a young male has been initiated into such a defensive alliance, it would be unthinkable for him to impose himself sexually on those sisters and mothers whose sexual resistance he is upholding. In response to the potential threat of sexual coercion or rape, women recruit sons and brothers as members of their sex-strike coalition. In Knight's model, it emerges as a logical consequence of going on strike. These ideas suggest a radically different explanation for the initial establishment of the incest taboo. In his view, the human revolution – the momentous transition from nature to culture – is eventually consummated when females successfully mount collective resistance to male sexual thoughtlesness or abuse. In attributing creative agency to females in establishing the cultural realm, Knight turns Lévi-Strauss upside-down, claiming that his new theory is more simple, parsimonious and consistent with the rest of science. As this strategy becomes embedded, women go on periodic sex-strike to underline their value and motivate men to leave camp and go hunting as a condition of sex. As a weapon of last resort, such female-led kin-coalitions will support one another in denying sex to any abusive, lazy or unhelpful males. Females band together to resist male sexual harassment or violence, drawing on assistance from supportive sons and brothers in collective self defence. Knight's model has often been termed the 'sex-strike' theory. Knight's model differs starkly in postulating an essentially counter-dominant, democratic, 'bottom-up' social dynamic as the factor responsible for the world's first morally authoritative rules. Most theoretical accounts of the origins of rule-based social life are 'top-down' in the sense that they envisage some dominant force, typically male, as constructing and enforcing the incest taboo and other fundamental rules. The 'sex-strike' theory of human origins For Knight, symbolic culture emerged through Darwinian processes of gradual evolution culminating eventually in revolutionary change. In making his very different case, Knight draws on evidence not only from mythology – Lévi-Strauss' primary source – but from a wide range of disciplines including human behavioral ecology, hunter-gatherer ethnography, paleolithic archaeology, palaeontology, rock art studies, modern genetics and studies of monkeys and apes in the wild.
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Lévi-Strauss claims that in addition to the incest taboo, men invented a further series of critically important rules concerning such things as the timing of menstruation, cooking, romantic attachment and the wearing of personal ornaments. In this way, rule-governed society became established as alliances were forged between neighboring groups of men. Equipped with that ability, human males who had previously kept their sisters to themselves offered them in matrimonial exchange to other males, who reciprocated by making a return gift of their own sisters. Previously, the main theory in currency was that of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who claimed that culture's rule over nature was established by men when they invented the incest taboo.Īccording to Lévi-Strauss, a point came when the human mind proved capable of distinguishing between 'sister' and 'wife'. The book outlines a new theory of human origins, focusing particularly on the emergence of symbolic ritual, kinship, religion and mythic belief. Published by Yale University Press in hardback 1991 and in paperback four years later, it has remained in print ever since. Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture is a book by the evolutionary anthropologist Chris Knight.
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