"Our Blood is a highly original, inventive, and provocative book that elucidates a new sociological concept that the authors have coined, heritas. It critiques essentialist and reductionist categorizations of identity, rather emphasizing the invention of race, and capacities to convert between religions and political traditions, as well as the formation of attachments to places and territorial identities where there is no natural blood connection. As such, Our Blood is an important and timely corrective to the ways in which identity (and notions of blood) are frequently essentialized and deployed in politics today." -- Michael Woods, Aberystwyth University Bell, Ashwood, and Orne have developed a sophisticated framework for thinking about how we experience our identities and social relationships to be organized around feelings of co-descent and shared heritage. The greatest contribution of the book is in its conceptual work and its holistic treatment of this phenomenon, and in the authors ability to develop the notion of heritas across several different cases, levels of social organization, and domains of social experience. -- Thomas DeGloma, author of 'Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities' 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 thoughtour 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 freedomof place, space, and timethat will be at the forefront of controversy in the next few years. Not to be missed. -- John Levi Martin, University of Chicago
