Blood Will Out: Essays on Liquid Transfers and Flows

What is blood? The many meanings of blood vividly attest to its polyvalent qualities and its unusual capacity for accruing layers of symbolic resonance. Life and death; nurturance and violence; connection and exclusion; kinship and sacrifice – the associations multiply, flowing between domains in a quite uncontainable manner. Whether expressed in the rhetoric of familial, racial, ethnic, or national exclusion, or in calls to violent action, idioms of blood often have exceptional emotional force. Blood has the capacity to flow in many directions: it is literally present in spaces of blood donation, and metaphorically central to sanguinary idioms in depictions of the economy. These essays illuminate through close anthropological and historical scrutiny blood′s special qualities as bodily substance, material, and metaphor. They suggest many reasons for elucidating a theory of blood.

Notes on contributors vii Acknowledgements ix Janet Carsten Introduction: blood will out 1 1 Kath Weston Lifeblood, liquidity, and cash transfusions: beyond metaphor in the cultural study of finance 24 2 Maya Mayblin The way blood flows: the sacrificial value of intravenous drip use in Northeast Brazil 42 3 Bettina Bildhauer Medieval European conceptions of blood: truth and human integrity 56 4 Fenella Cannell The blood of Abraham: Mormon redemptive physicality and American idioms of kinship 76 5 Nicholas Whitfield Who is my stranger? Origins of the gift in wartime London, 1939–45 94 6 Susan E. Lederer Bloodlines: blood types, identity, and association in twentieth–century America 117 7 Janet Carsten ‘Searching for the truth’: tracing the moral properties of blood in Malaysian clinical pathology labs 129 8 Jacob Copeman The art of bleeding: memory, martyrdom, and portraits in blood 147 9 Emily Martin Blood and the brain 170 Index 183

Janet Carsten is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the anthropology of kinship. She is the author of After Kinship (2004) and The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community (1997). She is the editor of Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness (Blackwell, 2007) and Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (2000).