Blood Will Out: Essays on Liquid Transfers and Flows 1st Edition
Author(s): Janet Carsten
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Publication Date: 18 Oct. 2013
Edition: 1st
Language: English
Print length: 198 pages
ISBN-10: 9781118656280
ISBN-13: 9781118656280
Book Description
Unique in focus and international in scope, this book brings together 10 essays about the material, metaphorical, and symbolic importance of blood.
An interdisciplinary study that unites the work of noted historians and anthropologists
Incorporates insights from recent work in symbolism, kinship studies, medical anthropology, the anthropology of religion, the sociological study of finance, and textual analysis
Covers topics such as Medieval European conceptions of blood; blood and the brain; blood and the cultural study of finance; and blood types, identity, and association in twentieth-century America
Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
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, 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.
From the Back Cover
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, 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.
About the Author
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 Remembrance and Relatedness (Blackwell, 2007) and Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (2000).
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