What kind of object is blood? How is it transformed from one kind of substance into another? What is the source of its extraordinary range and plasticity of meanings? And what can the anthropological analysis of its symbolic power tell us about the nature of symbolism or about domaining practices in contemporary life? At once bodily substance, biomedical resource, diagnostic tool, as well as an unusually potent metaphor with a heightened propensity to flow between different social domains, blood is a paradoxical kind of object. The remarkably plural meanings of blood are linked in this talk to its connection with animation and vitality, and demonstrated through a detailed ethnography of a specific nexus of sites in Malaysia, centering on hospital blood banks and clinical pathology labs in Penang in which blood is collected and analysed, and blood donation sites where blood is donated and categorised. I argue that a close ethnography of these sites reveals wider aspects of kinship, politics, medicine, science, and sociality.

What kind of object is blood? How is it transformed from one kind of substance into another? What is the source of its extraordinary range and plasticity of meanings? And what can the anthropological analysis of its symbolic power tell us about the nature of symbolism or about domaining practices in contemporary life? At once bodily substance, biomedical resource, diagnostic tool, as well as an unusually potent metaphor with a heightened propensity to flow between different social domains, blood is a paradoxical kind of object. The remarkably plural meanings of blood  are linked in this talk to its connection with animation and vitality, and  demonstrated through a detailed ethnography of a specific nexus of sites in Malaysia, centering on hospital blood banks and clinical pathology labs in Penang in which blood is collected and analysed, and blood donation sites where blood is donated and categorised.  I argue that a close ethnography of these sites reveals wider aspects of kinship, politics, medicine, science, and sociality.