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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.

6: Bloodlines: blood types, identity, and association in twentieth-century America7: 'Searching for the truth': tracing the moral properties of blood in Malaysian clinical pathology labs; 8: The art of bleeding: memory, martyrdom, and portraits in blood; 9: Blood and the brain; Index.

Janet Carsten traces the multiple meanings of blood as it moves from donors to labs, hospitals, and patients in Penang, Malaysia, showing how those meanings provide a gateway to understanding the social, political, and cultural dynamics of modern life.

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. Drawing together the historical and ethnographic case studies presented in this volume – from the literal presence of blood in spaces of blood donation to the metaphorical deployment of sanguinary idioms in depictions of the economy – this introduction examines blood's special qualities as bodily substance, material, and metaphor. In sketching out a 'theory of blood', it suggests why such a comparative undertaking might be of value.

This paper begins with a remarkable moment in contemporary Malaysian politics when a contested blood sample of the leader of the opposition was claimed by some as having the capacity to 'reveal the truth' about his character. What is it about blood that gives it this iconic status? Drawing on research carried out in hospital clinical pathology labs and blood banks in Penang, the paper shows how blood samples, far from being detached from persons, may accrue layers of meaning as they travel round the lab. This occurs partly through the special properties of blood, and partly through the socially embedded interventions of laboratory staff. Tracing the social life of blood also allows us to grasp how the separation between domains of social life, which is fundamental to an ideology of modernity, must be laboriously achieved, and can often be only precariously maintained. In the case of blood, however, the stakes may be unusually high when the boundaries between, for example, biomedicine and politics or kinship become over‐permeable or threaten to collapse.

This article examines the way bodily substance has been deployed in the anthropology of kinship. Analytically important in linking kinship with understandings of the body and person, substance has highlighted processes of change and transferability in kinship. Studies of organ donation and reproductive technologies in the West considered here challenge any simple dichotomy between idioms of a bounded individual body/person and immutable kinship relations in Euro-American contexts and more fluid, mutable bodies and relations elsewhere. Focusing on blood as a bodily substance of everyday significance with a peculiarly extensive symbolic repertoire, this article connects material properties of blood to the ways it flows between domains that are often kept apart. The analogies of money and ghosts illuminate blood's capacity to participate in, and move between, multiple symbolic and practical spheres—capacities that carry important implications for ideas and practices of relationality.

One much-commented upon feature of globalization is an increased access to information. If new kinds of information, and a new speed of access to it, characterize the so-called "global society," then how do new kinds of kinship information and kinship knowledge affect Western practices of kinship, or a Western "sense of self?" Examining the place of certain kinds of knowledge in Western idioms and practices of relatedness and personhood, this paper explores the effects of new kinds of information upon family ties. The role of information and knowledge in pre-natal testing, in adoptive kinship, in the searches undertaken by adoptees for their birth kin, and in transfers of bodily substance in fertility treatment, provide some specific contexts to understand the way that kinship knowledge contributes to people's sense of connectedness to their relatives, and to their own sense of identity. Rather than assuming a clear trajectory from a world of ascribed ties to one in which such ties are achieved, I highlight some of the more complex processes which people put to work when they constitute themselves through their various kinds of relations. A web of intertwinings, separations, and rejoinings between what is apparently inherited from the past, and what is created anew can be discerned as central to Western kinship practices.

This article, based on research in Scotland, discusses reunions between adults who have been adopted in infancy, and their birth kin. Although the distinction between 'biological' and 'social' kinship, which is central to the anthropological analysis of kinship, is clearly relevant to experiences of reunions, as it is to adoption more generally, this analytic focus is disrupted by issues of temporality, biographical completion, and memory, which both motivate and are raised by reunions. Narratives about adoption reunions can be used to illuminate the connections between these different themes. I explore the implications of these both for experiences of kinship in the West more generally and for the anthropological analysis of kinship.