One of the most widespread human experiences is the sense of being descended from those who came before. It is a basic way – sometimes people feel it the most basic way – of understanding, justifying, and contesting the organization of social life, including matters of family, class, place, race, and professions. Along with my co-authors Loka Ashwood and Jay Orne (we’re writing a book about this) in this talk I term this deep and abiding concern heritas: the authority of social relations we contend we did not choose because they descend from our embodied past. Heritas draws on two common conceptions of “blood” heritage, what we term physical blood and generated blood, a more figurative understanding. Embodied heritage gains social power through externalizing identity into the past and into nature through historicization and naturalization. Heritas is inescapably ideological, since no one can know for sure what went on in the past or what will go on in the future. But it is a felt ideology – deeply meaningful, capable of eliciting some of the strongest emotional responses of human experience. There is also a spirited quality to heritas’s felt ideology. Part of what people feel is a sense of the presence of descent, ghostly ties that tingle the flesh and enliven the blood. And heritas is recursive. It structures much of our social organization, which in turn shapes our felt ideology, configuring our sense of the justice of social power and the boundaries of commitment we show for one another’s well-being. Painfully, but crucially, heritas is a common source both of some of our most basic delights and worst torments. Heritas is a troubled joy, for we are troubled beings.

Professor Michael M. Bell is an accomplished agroecologist, environmental sociologist, and community scholar at the esteemed University of Wisconsin-Madison. He boasts an impressive collection of eleven published books, three of which have been granted prestigious national awards. Among his recent works are City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right (Princeton, 2018), the Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology (Cambridge, 2020), and the 6th edition of Invitation to Environmental Sociology (Sage, 2021). In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Professor Bell is also a gifted composer and performer of grassroots and classical music.