Blood Work

<div>What is blood? How can we account for its enormous range of meanings and its extraordinary symbolic power? In <i>Blood Work</i> 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.</div>