CARSTEN EDITED BY EDITED BY 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, Blood Will Ou 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. t 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 EDITED BY JANET CARSTEN Remembrance and Relatedness (Wiley Blackwell, 2007) and Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (2000). Blood Will Out Essays on Liquid Transfers and Flows ISBN 978-1-118-65628-0 Blood Will Out Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Special Issue Book Series The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is the principal journal of the oldest anthropological organization in the world. It has attracted and inspired some of the world’s greatest thinkers. International in scope, it presents accessible papers aimed at a broad anthropological readership. We are delighted to announce that their annual special issues are also repackaged and available to buy as books. Volumes published so far: Blood Will Out: Essays on Liquid Transfers and Flows, edited by Janet Carsten Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation between Mind, Body and Environment, edited by Trevor H.J. Marchand Islam, Politics, Anthropology, edited by Filippo Osella and Benjamin Soares The Objects of Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to the Production of Knowledge, edited by Matthew Engelke Wind, Life, Health: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, edited by Elisabeth Hsu and Chris Low Ethnobiology and the Science of Humankind, edited by Roy Ellen BLOOD WILL OUT ESSAYS ON LIQUID TRANSFERS AND FLOWS EDITED BY JANET CARSTEN Royal Anthropological Institute This edition first published 2013 Originally published as Volume 19, Special Issue May 2013 of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society © 2013 Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/ wiley-blackwell. The right of Janet Carsten to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blood will out : essays on liquid transfers and flows / edited by Janet Carsten. pages cm “Originally published as volume 19, special Issue May 2013 of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute”– Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-118-65628-0 (pbk.) 1. Blood–Symbolic aspects. 2. Blood–Social aspects. 3. Blood–History. I. Carsten, Janet, editor of compilation. II. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Special issue. GT498.B55B578 2013 306.4–dc23 2013020970 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover image: Cover image: Outside exhibition of portraits painted in blood of Indian martyrs for Independence, held in Delhi in 2009 (photo Jacob Copeman). Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates. Set in 10 on 12pt Minion by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited 1 2013 Contents 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 Notes on contributors Bettina Bildhauer is a Reader in German at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Medieval blood (University of Wales Press, 2006) and Filming the Middle Ages (Reaktion, 2011), and co-editor (with Robert Mills) of The monstrous Middle Ages (University of Wales Press, 2004) and (with Anke Bernau) Medieval film (Manchester University Press, 2009), as well as the author of several shorter pieces on medieval blood. Department of German, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, UK. Fenella Cannell is Reader in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her books include Power and intimacy in the Christian Philip- pines (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and The Christianity of anthropology (Duke University Press, 2006). Her current research is with American Latter-day Saints. Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics, London, UK. Janet Carsten is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The heat of the hearth: kinship and community in a Malay fishing village (Clarendon Press, 1997) and After kinship (Cambridge University Press, 2004); and editor of Cultures of relatedness: new approaches to the study of kinship (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Ghosts of memory: essays on remembrance and relatedness (Blackwell, 2007). Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. Jacob Copeman is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University. His publications include Veins of devotion: blood donation and religious experience in North India (Rutgers University Press, 2009/Routledge, 2012), Blood donation, bioeconomy, culture (ed., Sage, 2009) and The guru in South Asia: new interdisciplinary perspectives (co-ed. with Aya Ikegame, Routledge, 2012). Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. Susan E. Lederer is the Robert Turell Professor of the History of Medicine and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Her books include Flesh and blood: organ transplantation and blood transfusion in twentieth-century America (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Subjected to science: human experimenta- tion in America before the Second World War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). University of Wisconsin, School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, WI, USA. viii Notes on Contributors Emily Martin is Professor of Anthropology at New York University. She is the author of The woman in the body: a cultural analysis of reproduction (Beacon Press, 1982 [1987]), Flexible bodies: tracking immunity in American culture from the days of polio to the age of AIDS (Beacon Press, 1994), and Bipolar expeditions: mania and depression in American culture (Princeton University Press, 2007). Her current work is on the history and ethnography of experimental psychology.