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Bjarki, Not Bjarki
On Floorboards, Love, and Irreconcilable Differences
Matthew J. C. Clark
University of Iowa Press, 2023
“You know, I actually think about that an awful lot, like, what is our purpose in life? Why am I here? I always think about some little kid being like, ‘What’d you do with your life?’ And me being like, ‘Well, I sold a bunch of floors.’” 

These are the words of Bjarki Thor Gunnarsson, the young man who manufactures the widest, purest, most metaphorical pine floorboards on the planet. 

As Matthew Clark—a carpenter by trade—begins researching a magazine-style essay about Bjarki and his American Dream Boards, he comes to discover that nothing is quite as it seems. Santa Claus arrives by helicopter. A wedding diamond disappears. A dead coyote jumps to its feet. And then, at a Thai restaurant in central Maine, Bjarki is transformed into an eggplant.  

In Bjarki, Not Bjarki, Clark wants nothing less than to understand everything, to make the world a better place, for you and him to love each other, and to be okay. He desires all of this sincerely, desperately even, and at the same time he proceeds with a light heart, playfully, with humor and awe. As Clark reports on the people and processes that transform the forest into your floor, he also ruminates on gift cards, crab rangoon, and Jean Claude Van Damme. He considers North American colonization, masculinity, the definition of disgusting, his own uncertain certainty. When the boards beneath our feet are so unstable, always expanding and cupping and contracting, how can we make sense of the world? What does it mean to know another person and to connect with them, especially in an increasingly polarized America?
 
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Black Writing from Chicago
In the World, Not of It?
Edited by Richard R. Guzman. Foreword by Carolyn M. Rodgers
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It? takes readers on a cultural trip through Chicago’s literary history. Editor Richard R. Guzman compiles the first comprehensive collection of the works of Chicago’s black writers from 1861 to the present day. The anthology, which includes works from newspaper writing, poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and historical and social commentary, seeks not only to represent a broad range of writings but also to focus tightly on such themes as hope and despair, racism and equality, spirituality and religion. More than sixty writers, from the anonymous “J. W. M. (Colored)” to Ken Green, unfold a story that reflects the literary periods in black American history. Each author’s selection is preceded by a biographical and a bibliographical introduction. Readers interested in Chicago, race relations, and literature, as well as scholars of history, sociology, urban studies, and cultural studies, will find the collection invaluable.

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The Children of 1965
On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American
Min Hyoung Song
Duke University Press, 2013
Since the 1990s, a new cohort of Asian American writers has garnered critical and popular attention. Many of its members are the children of Asians who came to the United States after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted long-standing restrictions on immigration. This new generation encompasses writers as diverse as the graphic novelists Adrian Tomine and Gene Luen Yang, the short story writer Nam Le, and the poet Cathy Park Hong. Having scrutinized more than one hundred works by emerging Asian American authors and having interviewed several of these writers, Min Hyoung Song argues that collectively, these works push against existing ways of thinking about race, even as they demonstrate how race can facilitate creativity. Some of the writers eschew their identification as ethnic writers, while others embrace it as a means of tackling the uncertainty that many people feel about the near future. In the literature that they create, a number of the writers that Song discusses take on pressing contemporary matters such as demographic change, environmental catastrophe, and the widespread sense that the United States is in national decline.
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I Was Content and Not Content
The Story of Linda Lord and the Closing of Penobscot Poultry
Cedric N. Chatterley and Alicia J. Rouverol with Stephen A. Cole. Foreword by Michael Frisch. Photographs by Cedric N. Chatterly. With an Essay by Carolyn Chute
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Most studies of deindustrialization in the United States emphasize the economic impact of industrial decline; few consider the social, human costs. "I Was Content and Not Content": The Story of Linda Lord and the Closing of Penobscot Poultry is a firsthand account of a plant closure, heavily illustrated through photographs and told through edited oral history interviews. It tells the story of Linda Lord, a veteran of Penobscot Poultry Company in Belfast, Maine, and her experience when the plant—Maine’s last poultry-processing plant— closed its doors in 1988, costing over four hundred people their jobs and bringing an end to a once productive and nationally competitive agribusiness.

Linda Lord’s story could be that of any number of Americans—blue- and white-collar—effected by the rampant and widespread downsizing over the past several decades. She began working at Penobscot straight out of high school and remained with the company for over twenty years. Lord worked in all aspects of poultry processing, primarily in the "blood tunnel," where she finished off the birds that had been missed by the automatic neck-cutting device—a job held by few women. Single and self-supporting, Lord was thirty-nine years old when the plant closed. In part because she was the primary caretaker for her elderly parents, Lord did not want to leave Maine for a better job but did want to stay in the area that had been her home since birth.

The book is comprised of distinct sections representing different perspectives on Lord’s story and the plant’s demise. Cedric N. Chatterley’s gritty black-and-white photographs, reproduced here as duotones, document the final days at the poultry plant and chronicle Lord’s job search, as well as her daily life and community events. Lord’s oral history interviews, interspersed with the photographs, reveal her experiences working in poultry processing and her perspectives on the plant’s closing. Carolyn Chute’s essay reflects on her own struggles as a worker in Maine, and, more generally, on the way workers are perceived in America. Alicia J. Rouverol’s historical essay explores the rise and fall of Maine’s poultry industry and the reasons for its demise. Stephen A. Cole’s epilogue brings the story full circle when he tells of his most recent visit with Linda Lord. Michael Frisch (Portraits in Steel, A Shared Authority) contributes a foreword.

Lord’s story and the story of Penobscot’s closing brings into question the relationship of business to community, reminding us that businesses and communities are in fact integrally linked—or, perhaps more accurately, should be. Her narrative makes plain that plant closings have particular ramifications for women workers, but her experience also points to the way in which all individuals cope with change, hardship, and uncertain times to create possibilities where few exist. Perhaps most important, her story reveals some of the challenges and complexities that most human beings share.

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Not a Catholic Nation
The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1920s
Mark Paul Richard
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
During the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan experienced a remarkable resurgence, drawing millions of American men and women into its ranks. In Not a Catholic Nation, Mark Paul Richard examines the KKK's largely ignored growth in the six states of New England—Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont—and details the reactions of the region's Catholic population, the Klan's primary targets.

Drawing on a wide range of previously untapped sources—French-language newspapers in the New England–Canadian borderlands; KKK documents scattered in local, university, and Catholic repositories; and previously undiscovered copies of the Maine Klansmen—Richard demonstrates that the Klan was far more active in the Northeast than previously thought. He also challenges the increasingly prevalent view that the Ku Klux Klan became a mass movement during this period largely because it functioned as a social, fraternal, or civic organization for many Protestants. While Richard concedes that some Protestants in New England may have joined the KKK for those reasons, he shows that the politics of ethnicity and labor played a more significant role in the Klan's growth in the region.

The most comprehensive analysis of the Ku Klux Klan's antagonism toward Catholics in the 1920s, this book is also distinctive in its consideration of the history of the Canada–U.S. borderlands, particularly the role of Canadian immigrants as both proponents and victims of the Klan movement in the United States.
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Not a Hero
A Novel
Ignaty Potapenko
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

Between 1890 and 1893, Ignaty Potapenko published a number of works in which he presented the Russian intelligentsia with a new role model, the “mediocre, but common-sensical man,” whose diligence and steady devotion to the improvement of society are depicted as being more productive than the reckless heroism of the regime’s most outspoken, and sometimes violent, intellectual opponents. Not a Hero introduces the twenty-first-century reader to an important debate of the prerevolutionary period, a debate that is still relevant today: how to bring about social change within an oppressive and ossified political system without resorting to violence.

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Not a Thing to Comfort You
Emily Wortman-Wunder
University of Iowa Press, 2019
From a lightning death on an isolated peak to the intrigues of a small town orchestra, the glimmering stories in this debut collection explore how nature—damaged, fierce, and unpredictable—worms its way into our lives. Here moths steal babies, a creek seduces a lonely suburban mother, and the priorities of a passionate conservationist are thrown into confusion after the death of her son. Over and over, the natural world reveals itself to be unknowable, especially to the people who study it most. These tales of scientists, nurses, and firefighters catalog the loneliness within families, betrayals between friends, and the recurring song of regret and grief.
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Not from Here
A Memoir
Allan Johnson
Temple University Press, 2015
When Allan Johnson asked his dying father where he wanted his ashes to be placed, his father replied—without hesitation—that it made no difference to him at all. In his poignant, powerful memoir, Not from Here, Johnson embarks on an extraordinary, 2,000-mile journey across the Upper Midwest and Northern Plains to find the place where his father’s ashes belonged.
 
As a white man with Norwegian and English lineage, Johnson explores both America and the question of belonging to a place whose history holds the continuing legacy of the displacement, dispossession, and genocide of Native peoples.
 
More than a personal narrative, Not from Here illuminates the national silence around unresolved questions of accountability, race, and identity politics, and the dilemma of how to take responsibility for “a past we did not create.” Johnson’s story—about the past living in the present; of redemption, fate, family, tribe, and nation; of love and grief—raises profound questions about belonging, identity, and place.
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front cover of Not from Here, Not from There/No Soy de Aquí ni de Allá
Not from Here, Not from There/No Soy de Aquí ni de Allá
The Autobiography of Nelson Díaz
Nelson A. Díaz
Temple University Press, 2018

Raised in the squalor of a New York tenement until he was 10 years old, Nelson Díaz saw his life change when his family moved to a brand-new high-rise project in West Harlem in the 1950s. That experience, along with lessons learned as the only Latino law student at Temple University, would drive him throughout his life as a lawyer and activist, fighting for the expansion of rights for all Americans.

“No soy de aquí ni de allá” is a mantra for Puerto Ricans who feel like foreigners wherever they are and who seek a place for themselves. In his inspiring autobiography, Not from Here, Not from There, Díaz tells the story of his struggles and triumphs as his perspective widened from the New York streets and law school classrooms to the halls of power in Philadelphia and Washington, DC. Whether as a leader in economic development, a pioneer in court reform, or a champion of fair housing, Díaz has never stopped advocating for others. Díaz was happy to be the first Latino to “do something,” but he never wanted to be the last. This story of an outsider who worked his way to the inside offers powerful lessons on finding a place in the world by creating spaces where everyone is welcome.

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Not in Front of the Children
'Indecency,' Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth
Heins, Marjorie
Rutgers University Press, 2007

From Huckleberry Finn to Harry Potter, from Internet filters to the v-chip, censorship exercised on behalf of children and adolescents is often based on the assumption that they must be protected from “indecent” information that might harm their development—whether in art, in literature, or on a Web site. But where does this assumption come from, and is it true? 

In Not in Front of the Children, Marjorie Heins explores the fascinating history of “indecency” laws and other restrictions aimed at protecting youth. From Plato’s argument for rigid censorship, through Victorian laws aimed at repressing libidinous thoughts, to contemporary battles over sex education in public schools and violence in the media, Heins guides us through what became, and remains, an ideological minefield. With fascinating examples drawn from around the globe, she suggests that the “harm to minors” argument rests on shaky foundations.

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Not in Our Lifetimes
The Future of Black Politics
Michael C. Dawson
University of Chicago Press, 2011

For all the talk about a new postracial America, the fundamental realities of American racism—and the problems facing black political movements—have not changed. Michael C. Dawson lays out a nuanced analysis of the persistence of racial inequality and structural disadvantages, and the ways that whites and blacks continue to see the same problems—the disastrous response to Katrina being a prime example—through completely different, race-inflected lenses. In fact, argues Dawson, the new era heralded by Barack Obama’s election is more racially complicated, as the widening class gap among African Americans and the hot-button issue of immigration have the potential to create new fissures for conservative and race-based exploitation. Through a thoughtful analysis of the rise of the Tea Party and the largely successful “blackening” of President Obama, Dawson ultimately argues that black politics remains weak—and that achieving the dream of racial and economic equality will require the sort of coalition-building and reaching across racial divides that have always marked successful political movements.

Polemical but astute, passionate but pragmatic, Not in Our Lifetimes forces us to rethink easy assumptions about racial progress—and begin the hard work of creating real, lasting change.
 
 

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Not of Pure Blood
The Free People of Color and Racial Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico
Jay Kinsbruner
Duke University Press, 1996
Countering the popular misconception that racial discrimination has largely not existed in Puerto Rico, Jay Kinsbruner’s Not of Pure Blood shows that racial prejudice has long had an insidious effect on Puerto Rican society. Kinsbruner’s study focuses on the free people of color—those of African descent who were considered nonwhite but were legally free during slavery—in order to explore the nature of racial prejudice in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. In considering the consequences of these nineteenth-century attitudes on twentieth-century Puerto Rico, Kinsbruner suggests that racial discrimination continues to limit opportunities for people of color.
Following a discussion of Puerto Rican racial prejudice in historical perspective, Kinsbruner describes residential patterns, marriages, births, deaths, occupations, and family and household matters to demonstrate that free people of color were a disadvantaged community whose political, social, and economic status was diminished by racism. He analyzes the complexities and contradictions of Puerto Rican racial prejudice and discrimination, explains the subtleties of “shade discrimination,” and examines the profoundly negative impact on race relations of the U.S. occupation of the island following the Spanish American War.
Looking behind the myth of Puerto Rican racial equity, Not of Pure Blood will be of interest to specialists in Caribbean studies, Puerto Rican history, and Latin America studies, and to scholars in a variety of fields investigating questions of racism and discrimination.
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Not the Camilla We Knew
One Woman's Life from Small-town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army
Rachael Hanel
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

The mystery of how an ordinary Minnesota girl came to be, briefly, one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States

Behind every act of domestic terrorism there is someone’s child, an average American whose life took a radical turn for reasons that often remain mysterious. Camilla Hall is a case in point: a pastor’s daughter from small-town Minnesota who eventually joined the ranks of radicals like Sara Jane Olson (aka Kathleen Soliah) in the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army before dying in a shootout with Los Angeles Police in May 1974. How could a “good girl” like Camilla become one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States? Rachael Hanel tells her story here, revealing both the deep humanity and the extraordinary circumstances of Camilla Hall’s life.

Camilla’s childhood in a tight-knit religious family was marred by loss and grief as, one after another, her three siblings died. Her path from her Minnesota home to her final, radical SLA family featured years as an artist and activist—in welfare offices, political campaigns, union organizing, culminating in a love affair that would be her introduction to the SLA. Through in-depth research and extensive interviews, Hanel pieces together Camilla’s bewildering transformation from a “gentle, zaftig, arty, otherworldy” young woman (as one observer remarked), working for social change within the system, into a gun-wielding criminal involved in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.

During this time of mounting unrest and violence, Camilla Hall’s story is of urgent interest for what it reveals about the forces of radicalization. But as Hanel ventures ever further into Camilla’s past, searching out the critical points where character and cause might intersect, her book becomes an intriguing, disturbing, and ultimately deeply moving journey into the dark side of America’s promise.

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Not the Germans Alone
A Son's Search for the Truth of Vichy
Isaac Levendel
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Winner of the Prix Franco-Européen

On the eve of D-Day, Isaac Levendel's mother left her hiding place on a farm in southern France and never returned. After 40 years of silence and torment, he returned to France in 1990 determined to find out what had happened. This is the story of how, with perseverance, luck, and official help, he gained access to secret wartime documents laying bare the details of French collaboration-and the truth about his mother's fate.
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Not the Other Avant-Garde
The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance
Edited by James M. Harding and John Rouse
University of Michigan Press, 2010
Almost without exception, studies of the avant-garde take for granted the premise that the influential experimental practices associated with the avant-garde began primarily as a European phenomenon that in turn spread around the world. These ten original essays, especially commissioned for Not the Other Avant-Garde, forge a radically new conception of the avant-garde by demonstrating the many ways in which the first- and second-wave avant-gardes were always already a transnational phenomenon, an amalgam of often contradictory performance traditions and practices developed in various cultural locations around the world, including Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Argentina, India, and Japan. Essays from leading scholars and critics-including Marvin Carlson, Sudipto Chatterjee, John Conteh-Morgan, Peter Eckersall, Harry J. Elam Jr., Joachim Fiebach, David G. Goodman, Jean Graham-Jones, Hannah Higgins, and Adam Versényi-suggest collectively that the very concept of the avant-garde is possible only if conceptualized beyond the limitations of Eurocentric paradigms.

Not the Other Avant-Garde is groundbreaking in both avant-garde studies and performance studies and will be a valuable contribution to the fields of theater studies, modernist studies, art history, literature, and music history.

"Joins the growing field of critical and transnational theories on the arts. . . its grounding in live performance and its foregrounding of the performative human body presents a new theoretical paradigm that is pathbreaking."
--Haiping Yan, University of California, Los Angeles


James M. Harding is Associate Professor of English at Mary Washington University. He is author of Adorno and "A Writing of the Ruins": Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture and editor of Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality.

John Rouse is Associate Professor of Theater at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of Brecht and the West German Theatre.
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Not the Triumph But the Struggle
The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete
Amy Bass
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

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A Religion, Not a State
Ali 'Abd al-Raziq's Islamic justification of Political Secularism
Souad T Ali
University of Utah Press, 2009

Utah Series in Middle East Studies

In this notable work, Souad T. Ali examines the seminal writings of Egyptian reformist scholar Ali'Abd al-Raziq, often regarded as the intellectual father of Islamic secularism, and his controversial argument that the caliphate should be considered a human innovation, rather than a religious imperative. 'Abd al Raziq contended that Islam is "a religion, not a state; a message, not a government," a major departure from the traditional view that religious and political spheres are intertwined and inseparable in Islam.

Opponents denounced 'Abd al-Raziq's ideas as a foreign corruption imported from the West.  Ali's careful, objective, and scholarly examination of 'Abd al-Raziq's work, however, reveals that his arguments are not based in Western thought.  Rather, they sit firmly within the dictates of Islam's sacred texts, particularly the Quran and Hadith, and also enjoy considerable support from the historical record.

This analysis critically challenges prevalent misinterpretations of Islam that have endured for centuries.  Ali recognizes the varied models and discourses that have arisen throughout different epochs, especially so the role that Western intervention has played in placing the question of Islam's modernity at the forefront of intellectual debate.  Throughout, the study emphasizes the atmosphere of openness and tolerance that is a requisite for free, intelligent debate.

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To Agree or Not to Agree
Leadership, Bargaining, and Arms Control
Lisa A. Baglione
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Why were the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union able to negotiate a series of arms control agreements despite the deep and important differences in their interests during the Cold War? Lisa A. Baglione considers a variety of explanations for the successes--and failures--of these negotiations drawn from international relations theories. Focusing on the goals and strategies of individual leaders--and their ability to make these the goals and strategies of their nation--the author develops a nuanced understanding that better explains the outcome of these negotiations. Baglione then tests her explanation in a consideration of negotiations surrounding the banning of above-ground nuclear tests, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the 1970s, the negotiations for the limitation of intermediate-range nuclear forces in the 1980s, and the last negotiations between the Americans and the disintegrating Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991. How these great rivals were able to negotiate significant arms control agreements not only will shed light on international relations during an important period of history but will help us understand how such agreements might develop in the post-Cold War period, when arms proliferation has become a serious problem.
This book will appeal to scholars of international relations and arms control as well as those interested in bargaining and international negotiations and contemporary military history.
Lisa A. Baglione is Assistant Professor of Political Science, St. Joseph's University.
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To Have and Have Not
Edited by Bruce F. Kawin; Tino T. Balio, Series Editor
University of Wisconsin Press, 1980

    The story of the making of To Have and Have Not (1944) is an exciting and complex one, ranging from the widely reported romance between its stars, Humphrey Bogart and the unknown nineteen-year old Lauren Bacall, to one of the more subtle developments in the wartime alliance between the United States and the Batista regime in Cuba. Bruce F. Kawin's substantial and informed introduction reflects this excitement while explaining the complexities, helping all film scholars, students, and buffs to gain a fuller appreciation of one of Hollywood's most memoriable melodramas.
    This is a story also of a collaboration amoung four important writers: Ernest Hemingway, Howard Hawks, Jules Furthman, and William Faulkner.

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To Test or Not To Test
A Guide to Genetic Screening and Risk
Zallen, Dorris Teichler
Rutgers University Press, 2008
Tests are a standard part of modern medicine. We willingly screen our blood, urine, vision, and hearing, and submit to a host of other exams with names so complicated that we can only refer to them by their initials: PET, ECG, CT, and MRI. Genetic tests of our risks for disease are the latest trend in medicine, touted as an approach to informed and targeted treatment. They offer hope for some, but also raise medical, ethical, and psychological concerns for many including when genetic information is worth having.

To Test or Not to Test arms readers with questions that should be considered before they pursue genetic screening.

  • Am I at higher risk for a disorder?
  • Can genetic testing give me useful information?
  • Is the timing right for testing?
  • Do the benefits of having the genetic information outweigh the problems that testing can bring?

Determining the answers to these questions is no easy task. In this highly readable book, Doris Teichler Zallen provides a template that can guide individuals and families through the decision-making process and offers additional resources where they can gain more information. She shares interviews with genetic specialists, doctors, and researchers, as well as the personal stories of nearly 100 people who have faced genetic-testing decisions. Her examples focus on genetic testing for four types of illnesses: breast/ovarian cancer (different disorders but closely connected), colon cancer, late-onset Alzheimer's disease, and hereditary hemochromatosis. From the more common diseases to the rare hereditary conditions, we learn what genetic screening is all about and what it can tell us about our risks.

Given that we are now bombarded with ads in magazines and on television hawking the importance of pursuing genetic-testing, it is critical that we approach this tough issue with an arsenal of good information. To Test or Not to Test is an essential consumer tool-kit for the genetic decision-making process.

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To Vote or Not to Vote
The Merits and Limits of Rational Choice Theory
Andre Blais
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000

What makes people decide to vote? In addressing this simple question, André Blais examines the factors that increase or decrease turnout at the aggregate, cross-national level and considers what affects people’s decision to vote or to abstain. In doing so, Blais assesses the merits and limitations of the rational choice model in explaining voter behavior. The past few decades have witnessed a rise in the popularity of the rational choice model in accounting for voter turnout, and more recently a groundswell of outspoken opposition to rational choice theory.

Blais tackles this controversial subject in an engaging and personal way, bringing together the opposing theories and literatures, and offering convincing tests of these different viewpoints. Most important, he handles the discussion in a clear and balanced manner. Using new data sets from many countries, Blais concludes that while rational choice is an important tool—even when it doesn’t work—its empirical contribution to understanding why people vote is quite limited.

Whether one supports rational choice theory or opposes it, Blais’s evenhanded and timely analysis will certainly be of interest, and is well-suited for advanced undergraduate and graduate-level classes.

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What Is Said and What Is Not
The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface
Edited by Carlo Penco and Filippo Domaneschi
CSLI, 2014
This volume contains essays that explore explicit and implicit communication through linguistic research. Taking as a framework Paul Grice’s theories on “what is said,” the contributors explore a number of areas, including: the boundary between semantics and pragmatics; the concept of implicit communication; the idea of the logical form of our assertions; the notion of conventional meaning; the phenomenon of deixis, which refers to when an utterance require context in order to be understood fully; the treatment of definite descriptions; and the different kinds of pragmatic processes.   
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What Kinship Is-And Is Not
Marshall Sahlins
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In this pithy two-part essay, Marshall Sahlins reinvigorates the debates on what constitutes kinship, building on some of the best scholarship in the field to produce an original outlook on the deepest bond humans can have. Covering thinkers from Aristotle and Lévy- Bruhl to Émile Durkheim and David Schneider, and communities from the Maori and the English to the Korowai of New Guinea, he draws on a breadth of theory and a range of ethnographic examples to form an acute definition of kinship, what he calls the “mutuality of being.” Kinfolk are persons who are parts of one another to the extent that what happens to one is felt by the other. Meaningfully and emotionally, relatives live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths.
 
In the second part of his essay, Sahlins shows that mutuality of being is a symbolic notion of belonging, not a biological connection by “blood.” Quite apart from relations of birth, people may become kin in ways ranging from sharing the same name or the same food to helping each other survive the perils of the high seas. In a groundbreaking argument, he demonstrates that even where kinship is reckoned from births, it is because the wider kindred or the clan ancestors are already involved in procreation, so that the notion of birth is meaningfully dependent on kinship rather than kinship on birth. By formulating this reversal, Sahlins identifies what kinship truly is: not nature, but culture.
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