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 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." 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 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.