Blood Work - Life and Laboratories in Penang (Paperback)

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.

General

Imprint:	Duke University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures
Release date:	June 2019
First published:	2019
Authors:	Janet Carsten
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 14mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	256
ISBN-13:	978-1-4780-0481-3
Categories:	Books > Medicine > General issues > Public health & preventive medicine > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology > General
LSN:	1-4780-0481-9
Barcode:	9781478004813

Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate? Let us know about it.

Does this product have an incorrect or missing image? Send us a new image.

Is this product missing categories? Add more categories.

Review This Product

No reviews yet - be the first to create one!