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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.
List of contents
Foreword / Thomas Gibson ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
The Public Life of Blood I: Donation in the News 35
1. Blood Donation 43
The Public Life of Blood II: Newspapers and Laboratory Life 75
2. Lab Spaces and People: Categories and Distinctions at Work 79
The Public Life of Blood III: Elections and Their Aftermath 116
3. The Work of the Labs 125
The Public Life of Blood IV: Medical, Supernatural, and Moral Matters 158
4. "Work is Just Part of the Job": Ghosts, Food, and Relatedness in the Labs 165
Conclusion 200
Notes 209
References 217
Index 233
About the author
Janet Carsten
Summary
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.
