Blood Work: Life and Laboratories in Penang by Janet Carsten (review)

Abstract

J Carsten’s Blood Work: Life and Laboratories in Penang opens in an operating theater during a triple bypass surgery. The reader encounters the technological complexity of the procedure, which depends on a heart-lung machine to ensure the transmission of oxygenated blood to the body and the removal of carbon dioxide while the heart is stopped. The scene conveys a sense of the embodied expertise of the professionals involved—nurses, perfusionists, anesthetists, and the cardiac surgeon— who perform their tasks seriously and in quiet, casual sociality, talking shop and talking holidays. This counterbalance of life and death with the everyday, which Carsten maintains elegantly throughout the book, brings forward the significance of blood for anthropological inquiry. Blood has unique material properties—“striking color, liquidity, warmth while in the body, its smell, and the way it solidifies and changes color when spilled” (6)—and capacities of animation, namely sustaining life and bringing back to life those at the brink of death. Carsten argues that blood’s material properties and its animating capacity are key to its elaboration as a metaphor in diverse domains, including kinship, religion, ethnicity, politics, and morality. Thus, blood, as both metaphor and material, is central to understandings of social and biological life. Blood Work explores the everyday labor of maintaining life through the donation, screening, labeling, cross-matching, and transfusion of blood in private hospitals in Penang, Malaysia. Siting an ethnography of blood in the pathology lab is an inspired choice as it foregrounds mid-level, often neglected actors in the hospital hierarchy—technologists, technicians, and managers, who tend to be women and Chinese Malaysian. (Malay,