Abstract
As evident from the social links we seem to envision between successive piano teachers, newspaper editors, submarine commanders, or college presidents, bridges established among different generations are quite evocative even when the connection between them is strictly social. They are even more sentimentally evocative, however, when such can be articulated in biological terms, especially in terms of blood. Social reproduction, in other words, is even more symbolically effective when it also involves elements of actual biological reproduction. The symbolic significance of blood as the stuff upon which we establish historical continuity is most pronouncedly evident in essentialist narratives that try to portray the contact between past and present objects as more 'real. By presenting their fellow Egyptian contemporaries' blood as the same blood that had once flowed in the veins of Akhenaten and Ramses, for example (see Gershoni and Jankowski 1986:165-66), nationalist Egyptian intellectuals in the 1 920s tried to portray them as the direct descendants of those ancient Pharaohs. The seemingly inevitable psychological bond between them, which was believed to transcend the actual 3,000-year historical distance separating them from those totemic ancestors, could be presented as more real because it was envisioned as almost literally located in a particular national personality that was genetically transmitted through that same blood throughout history. The biological continuity of Egypt's past and present could thus become the basis for the sociocultural continuity envisioned between them. As far as the phenomenology of such structures of ancestry and descent is concerned, their depth is quite unlimited. Unlike in other species, where
Published Version
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