About the Book
What is blood? How can we account for its enormous range of meanings and its extraordinary symbolic power? In Blood Work Janet Carsten traces the multiple meanings of blood as it moves from donors to labs, hospitals, and patients in Penang, Malaysia. She tells the stories of blood donors, their varied motivations, and the paperwork, payment, and other bureaucratic processes involved in blood donation, tracking the interpersonal relations between lab staff and revealing how their work with blood reflects the social, cultural, and political dynamics of modern Malaysia. Carsten follows hospital workers into factories and community halls on blood drives and brings readers into the operating theater as a machine circulates a bypass patient's blood. Throughout, she foregrounds blood's symbolic power, uncovering the processes that make the hospital, the blood bank, the lab, and science itself work. In this way, blood becomes a privileged lens for understanding the entanglements of modern life.
Table of Contents:
Foreword / Thomas Gibson ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
The Public Life of Blood I: Donation in the News 35
1. Blood Donation 43
The Public Life of Blood II: Newspapers and Laboratory Life 75
2. Lab Spaces and People: Categories and Distinctions at Work 79
The Public Life of Blood III: Elections and Their Aftermath 116
3. The Work of the Labs 125
The Public Life of Blood IV: Medical, Supernatural, and Moral Matters 158
4. "Work is Just Part of the Job": Ghosts, Food, and Relatedness in the Labs 165
Conclusion 200
Notes 209
References 217
Index 233
About the Author :
Janet Carsten is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, author of After Kinship, and editor of Blood Will Out: Essays on Liquid Transfers and Flows.
Review :
“As Janet Carsten shows, blood is a thick moral substance: it can be bagged and tagged, but its powerful associations with vitality, connection, personhood, and life are not easily shed. Strikingly original, beautifully and often poetically written, Blood Work not only makes an important set of contributions to science and technology studies, anthropology, and Southeast Asian studies; it takes the long-standing themes in Carsten's career to a new level of conceptual innovation.” - Sarah Franklin, author of (Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship) “Blood Work, based on fieldwork in hospital labs and surgeries, blood banks, and blood drives in Penang over ten years (2005–2015), draws on a deep well of insights springing from Janet Carsten’s innovative research on kinship, marriage, and migration in rural Malaysia in the 1980s. One of the most valuable contributions of Carsten’s distinctive sensitivity to the particulars of living and dying in this longtime global crossroads, combined with her keen comparative perspective, is her elucidation of the paradoxical capacity of blood everywhere to unite and divide simultaneously.” - Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of Michigan “Through a rich ethnographic portrait of medical labs and blood banks at hospitals in Penang, Malaysia, Janet Carsten successfully meets Blood Work’s twofold aim: to offer a fresh perspective on social and cultural lives in a modern Malay city and to explore the general nature of blood and its capacity for figurative elaboration. She reveals that, on the one hand, ethnic, religious, and kinship ties permeate the seemingly isolated techno-scientific environment of the labs in Penang, while on the other, it is the quality of animation that lies at the heart of blood’s aptness for symbolization and capacity for naturalization.” - Jaehwan Hyun (Journal of Asian Studies) “With Blood Work, Carsten joins an important and expanding group of scholars extending work in the anthropology of science beyond the Western settings typically associated with what Donna Haraway identified as technoscience. Blood Work is distinctive even within this group in that Carsten’s focus on technoscience builds on deep familiarity with Malaysia rooted in her prior long-term ethnographic engagement in the country. She thus brings substantial nuance to her analysis, repeatedly drawing the reader’s attention to the tensions between assumptions about the universality of medical technologies and the distinctively Malaysian dimensions of the ways such technologies are taken up in the laboratories in which she works.” - Karen-Sue Taussig (Medical Anthropology Quarterly) “Blood Work is a superbly written, thickly ethnographic exploration of those spaces in the multi-ethnic Malaysian state where human blood is collected, tested, processed and used…. One of Carsten’s major contributions, in my view, to the recent surge in anthropological literature on blood and blood economies lies in her insistence on collapsing the imagined dichotomy between the symbolic potential of blood and its material properties and uses, addressing both of these qualities in equal measure, while heeding to their ongoing effect on one another.” - Ben Belek (Cambridge Journal of Anthropology) “Carsten faithfully focuses on what people think, talk and do about blood and how such engagement indeed makes it so alive. Blood Work is indeed a call to attentiveness to human agency that transmutes the inert into the living and the technical into the social. It beautifully illustrates the animating force emerging from our everyday routine practices of working, eating and living together…. This will be an inspirational read for those interested in richer ethnographic accounts of science and technology and of Malaysia. It is also a work of theoretical mastery that will be an outstanding teaching resource on modernity, medical anthropology, material culture and the anthropology of work.” - Bo Kyeong Seo (Sojourn) “Historians have in Carsten’s Blood Work a finely crafted ethnography that has far-reaching explanatory significance-like blood itself.... Her book should also serve as a model for anyone willing to consider that blood cultures may teach us as much about kinship as cultural analyses of organs, genes, or genomes.” - Stephen Pemberton (Bulletin of the History of Medicine)
