“COMMUNITIES OF BLOOD”: THE NATURAL HISTORY OF KINSHIP IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

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The A. reevaluates Lewis Henry Morgan and his work, seeing his pioneering anthropological kinship studies and his researchs on the beaver as aspects of a unitary vision comprehending the landscapes and its inhabitants. She proposes a natural history of kinship, the aim of which its to break out of the box which Durkheim built and David Schneider dismantled, in the critique of Morgan’s supposed biological notion of kinship: the impossible project of asserting that kinship is purely social, abstracting humans from their landscapes, their animals relatives, their bodies. She finds that Morgan’s ideas of relationships were more linguistic and social than physiological, but also entangled with a wide range of geological and zoological phenomena, earthy and watery. Understanding his work in his own terms, his example may inspire us to search for new ways to integrate phenomenological, political-economic, and ecological analysis into the sudy of how people understand their life processes.