Siblings and all the lateral relationships that follow from them are clearly important, and their interaction is widely observed, particularly in creative literature. Yet in the social, psychological, and political sciences, there is no theoretical paradigm through which to understand them. In the western world our thought is completely dominated by a vertical model, by patterns of descent or ascent: mother--or father-to-child or child-to-parent. Yet our ideals are liberty, equality, and fraternity or the sisterhood of feminism; our ethnic wars are the violence of fratricide. When we grow up, don't siblings feature prominently in sex, violence, and the construction of gender differences? This book examines their omission from our theories, the possible reasons for it, and starts the search fora new paradigm based on siblings and lateral relationships. --- from the publisher |