What is the impact on anthropology of recent studies of reproductive technologies, gender, and the social construction of science in the West? What is the significance of public anxiety about the family to anthropology's analytic approach? Janet Carsten presents an original view of the past, present, and future of kinship in anthropology which will be of interest to anthropologists as well as to other social scientists.

Our understanding of what makes a person a relative has been transformed by radical changes in marriage arrangements and gender relations, and by new reproductive technologies. We can no longer take it for granted that our most fundamental social relationships are grounded in "biology" or "nature." Examining the idioms of relatedness in other societies, and ways in which relationship is symbolized and interpreted in our own society, this book challenges established analytic categories of anthropology, and brings into question the received wisdom at the heart of the study of kinship.

The domestic unit is inseparable from its homestead, and the "house," at once a physical place and a social unit, is often also a unit of production and consumption, a cult group, and even a political faction. Inspired by Lévi-Strauss' suggestion that the multi-functional noble houses of Medieval Europe were simply the best-known examples of a widespread social institution, the contributors to this collection analyze "house" systems in Southeast Asia and South America, exploring the interrelationships among buildings, people, and ideas. They reveal some of the ways in which houses can stand for social groups and serve as images of process and order.

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.

What is the impact on anthropology of recent studies of reproductive technologies, gender, and the social construction of science in the West? What is the significance of public anxiety about the family to anthropology's analytic approach? Janet Carsten presents an original view of the past, present, and future of kinship in anthropology which will be of interest to anthropologists as well as to other social scientists.

Our understanding of what makes a person a relative has been transformed by radical changes in marriage arrangements and gender relations, and by new reproductive technologies. We can no longer take it for granted that our most fundamental social relationships are grounded in 'biology' or 'nature'. These developments have prompted anthropologists to take a fresh look at idioms of relatedness in other societies, and to review the ways in which relationships are symbolised and interpreted in our own society. Defamiliarizing some classic cases, challenging the established analytic categories of anthropology, the contributors to this innovative book focus on the boundary between the 'biological' and the 'social', and bring into question the received wisdom at the heart of the study of kinship.

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.

British Academy lectures have previously been published in the Proceedings of the British Academy. Lectures are now made available in the new open access Journal of the British Academy. But they will also be printed in an annual volume. This volume publishes xx lectures from the 2012 and 2013 programmes, which were posted to the Journal in 2013. The subjects covered include early 20th-century ethnographic research among the Andaman Islanders and Polar Eskimos, the Scottish Mental Surveys of 1932 and 1947, Edward Lear's nonsense poetry, university authors' rights and the end of the British Empire in India. The editors are Professors Janet Carsten and Simon Frith, who are both Fellows of the British Academy. The authors are all recognised experts in their fields within the humanities and social sciences and the texts published here have been rigorously peer-reviewed.

Janet Carsten offers a vivid and original investigation of nature and kinship in Malaysia, based on her own experience of life as a fister daughter in a family on the island of Langkawi. Kinship relations are crucial to personal and social identity, and in Malaya culture identity is mutable and fluid: it is given at birth through ties of procreation, but is also aquired throughout life by living together and sharing food. The author shows that the heat of the hearth is not only necessary for the cooking and sharing of food, but central to domestic life, including childbirth and reproduction. Kinship is a process not a state; people become kin largely through the everyday actions of women in and between the households. The incorporation and assimilation of newcomers-`making kinship'-is central to the social reproduction of village communities; domestic life is thus central to the political process. Janet Carsten gives the reader a fascinating `anthropology of everyday life', including a compelling view of gender relations; she urges reassessment of recent anthropological work on gender, and a new approach to the study of kinship.