Blood Will Out Essays on Liquid Transfers and Flows

Unique in focus and international in scope, this book brings together 10 essays about the material, metaphorical, and symbolic importance of blood.

• An interdisciplinary study that unites the work of noted historians and anthropologists
• Incorporates insights from recent work in symbolism, kinship studies, medical anthropology, the anthropology of religion, the sociological study of finance, and textual analysis
• Covers topics such as Medieval European conceptions of blood; blood and the brain; blood and the cultural study of finance; and blood types, identity, and association in twentieth-century America

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).

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

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