Our Blood: The Social Experience of Heritas

Description: Who are we, where do we come from, and why does it matter?

From whom do I come? Our Blood describes the central importance of our sense not just of our heritage, but our embodied heritage: that our past is in our bodies and runs in our blood, and that our embodied past is central to our futures. Deeply felt heritas, as Michael M. Bell, Loka Ashwood, and Jay Orne call it, can be a source of great love and kindness for one another. But it can also be a beautiful horror, the source of some of our greatest hate and meanness towards one another. We think of our embodied heritage as natural and historical facts, beyond our choice, and therefore free of manipulation for social gain. We think of it as spirited presences in our bodies that we did not choose. We think of its origins as external to us, whether we are talking about family, class, caste, places, things, ethnoraciality, or our professions. We think of it as legitimate and rightful, therefore. But we do choose. We do select. Bell, Ashwood, and Orne argue that greater awareness of heritas's social origins and social selectivity can help us cultivate a wider sense of mutual care and ease the divisiveness of our time. Ultimately, Our Blood asks us all to consider heritas, and in doing so, to perhaps even reconsider our very selves.

Brief description: Michael M. Bell is the Philip David Lowe and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Community and Environmental Sociologyat the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent books are City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right, The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology, and the 6th edition of Invitation to Environmental Sociology.

Review Quotes:

Michael M. Bell has established himself as the great interpreter of the meaning of community in our time, as well as a daring cultural and historical theorist. Here, he teams up with Macarthur "Genius" Fellow Loka Ashwood, a rising star in the study of land, environment and culture, and Jay Orne, the stellar expert in qualitative research and sexuality. Together, they take on the most difficult questions at the heart of social thought--our relation to the groups, the very soil, from which it appears we have sprung, but which, they show, we ourselves create and re-create all the time. They sensitively explore questions of heritage, essence, and freedom--of place, space, and time--that will be at the forefront of controversy in the next few years. Not to be missed.