I an early, instructive ethnographic vignette, anthropologist Vaibhav Saria, who is living with a community of hijras (commonly referred to as a “third gender” in India), describes a conversation with an interlocutor who has just returned from conducting sex work along a local highway in eastern India. Nandita, a poor hijra, ecstatically shows off a used condom and proclaims she “finally ate Saajan” (8). Amid peals of laughter and jubilation, Nandita empties the contents of the condom into her mouth, momentarily consuming her lover’s semen before spitting it back into the condom. The hijra swallows and spits her lover’s semen repeatedly, declaring, “I want his smell in my mouth, so that I can smell him every time I breathe. It’s like perfume...” (8). Attuned to such intimate, intricate scenes of pleasure and desire, alongside the wider sensorium of affective labors and longings, Saria’s ethnography skillfully traces the textures and tapestries that make “the fullness of hijra lives in India” (1). Drawing on 24 months of living and traveling with hijras between 2008 and 2019—including 16 continuous months of fieldwork in Bhadrak and Kalahandi, two of eastern India’s poorest districts— Saria traces fraught webs of kinship, sexual fields of fantasy and fucking, libidinal attachments and gendered labors, as well as everyday struggles and quotidian pleasures. The author grounds his vital analysis in a decolonial critique of global public health, which both singles out hijras as biopolitical mascots for spreading information about safe sex and casts hijras’ own quests for survival and sexual desire as stigma-ridden, dangerous, and incommensurable with the normative goals of global health practice.
{"title":"Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India by Vaibhav Saria (review)","authors":"Nikhil Pandhi","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0038","url":null,"abstract":"I an early, instructive ethnographic vignette, anthropologist Vaibhav Saria, who is living with a community of hijras (commonly referred to as a “third gender” in India), describes a conversation with an interlocutor who has just returned from conducting sex work along a local highway in eastern India. Nandita, a poor hijra, ecstatically shows off a used condom and proclaims she “finally ate Saajan” (8). Amid peals of laughter and jubilation, Nandita empties the contents of the condom into her mouth, momentarily consuming her lover’s semen before spitting it back into the condom. The hijra swallows and spits her lover’s semen repeatedly, declaring, “I want his smell in my mouth, so that I can smell him every time I breathe. It’s like perfume...” (8). Attuned to such intimate, intricate scenes of pleasure and desire, alongside the wider sensorium of affective labors and longings, Saria’s ethnography skillfully traces the textures and tapestries that make “the fullness of hijra lives in India” (1). Drawing on 24 months of living and traveling with hijras between 2008 and 2019—including 16 continuous months of fieldwork in Bhadrak and Kalahandi, two of eastern India’s poorest districts— Saria traces fraught webs of kinship, sexual fields of fantasy and fucking, libidinal attachments and gendered labors, as well as everyday struggles and quotidian pleasures. The author grounds his vital analysis in a decolonial critique of global public health, which both singles out hijras as biopolitical mascots for spreading information about safe sex and casts hijras’ own quests for survival and sexual desire as stigma-ridden, dangerous, and incommensurable with the normative goals of global health practice.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"697 - 702"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46864858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
W was declared to be a human right by the United Nations in 2010, yet universal access to water is still not a reality. In A Future History of Water, anthropologist Andrea Ballestero provides a sophisticated and intriguing analysis of the everyday, mundane work done by bureaucrats, politicians, NGO workers, and activists to render water a human right while working within existing legal and political-economic frameworks. These actors are not especially radical, but they wish to make a difference in the world by shaping the future history of water. Through a material-semiotic lens, Ballestero explores the constant work of differentiating water as a human right from water as a commodity that takes place in bureaucratic and political spaces. She analyzes this work as processes of disentanglement and forms of bifurcation that never seem to end; new distinctions are always required, but they are never fully finalized, resulting in a “neverending bifurcating mesh” (6). Ballestero does not enter into direct conversation with the many ethnographies of water published in the past decade, most of which focus on users, their relations to water bodies and infrastructures, as well as the role of engineers and bureaucrats as key actors in the distribution of water. Instead, she makes a point of doing something different. Taking a radical move away from the physical water sources, users, and canals, Ballestero intentionally looks for water elsewhere, “in places where we might not usually explore its material politics” (15). The ethnographic material of the book derives from many years of research with technocrats, documents, models, and calculations in offices,
{"title":"A Future History of Water by Andrea Ballestero (review)","authors":"Astrid B. Stensrud","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0040","url":null,"abstract":"W was declared to be a human right by the United Nations in 2010, yet universal access to water is still not a reality. In A Future History of Water, anthropologist Andrea Ballestero provides a sophisticated and intriguing analysis of the everyday, mundane work done by bureaucrats, politicians, NGO workers, and activists to render water a human right while working within existing legal and political-economic frameworks. These actors are not especially radical, but they wish to make a difference in the world by shaping the future history of water. Through a material-semiotic lens, Ballestero explores the constant work of differentiating water as a human right from water as a commodity that takes place in bureaucratic and political spaces. She analyzes this work as processes of disentanglement and forms of bifurcation that never seem to end; new distinctions are always required, but they are never fully finalized, resulting in a “neverending bifurcating mesh” (6). Ballestero does not enter into direct conversation with the many ethnographies of water published in the past decade, most of which focus on users, their relations to water bodies and infrastructures, as well as the role of engineers and bureaucrats as key actors in the distribution of water. Instead, she makes a point of doing something different. Taking a radical move away from the physical water sources, users, and canals, Ballestero intentionally looks for water elsewhere, “in places where we might not usually explore its material politics” (15). The ethnographic material of the book derives from many years of research with technocrats, documents, models, and calculations in offices,","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"709 - 714"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42911621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This article questions the idea of "equine therapy" and explores the communication occurring between horses and humans in the equine therapy encounter. The choreography performed by horses, riders, as well as the staff and volunteers who facilitate lessons often appears to simply happen, with human-horse partnerships occluding the layers of trust and collaboration that go into the functioning of an equine therapy facility. I argue that horsemanship, particularly "therapeutic horsemanship," is the foundation of what makes the therapy space a safe and productive environment for both horses and humans. Through fieldwork conducted at an equine therapy facility in eastern Pennsylvania, this article asks: How do horses participate in the equine therapy encounter? How can equine therapy be used to think anthropologically beyond the human? And what happens when non-human animals like horses inhabit the position of ethnographic informant? Through the breakdown of therapeutic horsemanship at a high-profile international horseshow, this article draws attention to the successes and failures of horse-human communication in equine therapy. Attending to therapeutic horsemanship as a form of communication provides new ways to imagine the work of thinking together, across species and beyond words.
{"title":"The Art of Therapeutic Horsemanship: Communication, Choreography, and Collaboration in Equine Therapy","authors":"M. Finkelstein","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0034","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article questions the idea of \"equine therapy\" and explores the communication occurring between horses and humans in the equine therapy encounter. The choreography performed by horses, riders, as well as the staff and volunteers who facilitate lessons often appears to simply happen, with human-horse partnerships occluding the layers of trust and collaboration that go into the functioning of an equine therapy facility. I argue that horsemanship, particularly \"therapeutic horsemanship,\" is the foundation of what makes the therapy space a safe and productive environment for both horses and humans. Through fieldwork conducted at an equine therapy facility in eastern Pennsylvania, this article asks: How do horses participate in the equine therapy encounter? How can equine therapy be used to think anthropologically beyond the human? And what happens when non-human animals like horses inhabit the position of ethnographic informant? Through the breakdown of therapeutic horsemanship at a high-profile international horseshow, this article draws attention to the successes and failures of horse-human communication in equine therapy. Attending to therapeutic horsemanship as a form of communication provides new ways to imagine the work of thinking together, across species and beyond words.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"621 - 648"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46796292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J Boyarin is a critical anthropologist, a conscientious ethnographer, and an unmatched writer of our time. His recent book, Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side, is a compelling and robust ethnography of Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ), New York’s oldest institution of traditional rabbinical learning. Based on intensive fieldwork at MTJ during his sabbatical year, Boyarin, as an “observant participant” and a “paraethnographer,” builds on his previous work about Jewish communities, the cultural role of scriptural text, as well as the politics of memory and knowledge in order to understand what it means for yeshiva students to study Torah for its own sake. Highlighting the intricacies of dealing with halachaic texts as a primary interlocutor, Boyarin’s Yeshiva Days speaks to a fundamental issue at the heart of anthropology of religion: the relationship between textuality and orthodoxy within the analytic framework of tradition. Given the legitimizing force of authorized texts in the Jewish tradition, Yeshiva Days compels anthropologists and scholars of religion to reconfigure the boundary between the cultural (à la Clifford Geertz) and a more literal text. Situating Boyarin’s motivations and goals, the book’s introduction presents the author’s struggle to find his place in yeshiva as a “secular academic ethnographer” and a “traditional male Jew” wanting to learn Torah (3).1 In Chapter 1, Boyarin gives us a sense of MTJ as a space, both architecturally and liturgically. At the center is the beis medresh, the main study hall where pedagogical and social interactions actively play out. The author then, in Chapter 2, explores MTJ’s relationship with its Lithuanian
J·博雅林是一位批判性的人类学家，一位尽职尽责的民族志学者，也是我们这个时代无与伦比的作家。他的新书《犹太时代:下东区的学习》是一本引人注目的、有力的民族志，讲述了纽约最古老的传统拉比学习机构——耶路撒冷圣殿学院(MTJ)。博雅林在休假期间在MTJ进行了密集的实地考察，作为一名“观察参与者”和“民族志学者”，他在之前关于犹太社区、圣经文本的文化角色、以及记忆和知识的政治的工作基础上，理解了犹太学生为了自己的利益而学习托拉的意义。博雅林的《叶史瓦日》强调了处理作为主要对话者的哈拉查文本的复杂性，它谈到了宗教人类学核心的一个基本问题:在传统的分析框架内，文本性和正统之间的关系。鉴于犹太传统中授权文本的合法化力量，耶史瓦日迫使人类学家和宗教学者重新配置文化文本( la Clifford Geertz)和更字面的文本之间的边界。书的引言将博雅林的动机和目标置于情境中，展现了作者如何努力在犹太历史学院找到自己的位置——一个“世俗的学术人种学家”和一个想要学习托拉的“传统男性犹太人”(3)在第一章中，博亚林给我们一种MTJ作为一个空间的感觉，无论是建筑上的还是礼拜上的。中心是beis medresh，主要的学习大厅，在这里教学和社会互动积极发挥作用。然后，在第二章中，作者探讨了MTJ与其立陶宛的关系
{"title":"Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side by Jonathan Boyarin (review)","authors":"Rehan Sayeed","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0039","url":null,"abstract":"J Boyarin is a critical anthropologist, a conscientious ethnographer, and an unmatched writer of our time. His recent book, Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side, is a compelling and robust ethnography of Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ), New York’s oldest institution of traditional rabbinical learning. Based on intensive fieldwork at MTJ during his sabbatical year, Boyarin, as an “observant participant” and a “paraethnographer,” builds on his previous work about Jewish communities, the cultural role of scriptural text, as well as the politics of memory and knowledge in order to understand what it means for yeshiva students to study Torah for its own sake. Highlighting the intricacies of dealing with halachaic texts as a primary interlocutor, Boyarin’s Yeshiva Days speaks to a fundamental issue at the heart of anthropology of religion: the relationship between textuality and orthodoxy within the analytic framework of tradition. Given the legitimizing force of authorized texts in the Jewish tradition, Yeshiva Days compels anthropologists and scholars of religion to reconfigure the boundary between the cultural (à la Clifford Geertz) and a more literal text. Situating Boyarin’s motivations and goals, the book’s introduction presents the author’s struggle to find his place in yeshiva as a “secular academic ethnographer” and a “traditional male Jew” wanting to learn Torah (3).1 In Chapter 1, Boyarin gives us a sense of MTJ as a space, both architecturally and liturgically. At the center is the beis medresh, the main study hall where pedagogical and social interactions actively play out. The author then, in Chapter 2, explores MTJ’s relationship with its Lithuanian","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"703 - 708"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66209112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs by Saida Hodžić (review)","authors":"Miriam Hird-Younger","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0037","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"691 - 696"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47248373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:Amerindian languages have often borrowed the lexical terms of colonial languages that refer to "culture," "tradition," or "heritage," or else created neologisms for them. Amerindian languages, however, express related notions through grammatical forms, rather than with lexical terms. In contrast to lexical terms, grammatical elements are normally more constrained, less open to reflexivity for the speaker but nonetheless manipulable while also being the product of recurrent verbal and interactional practices. This article focuses on three grammatical domains: temporal configurations, expressions of person and agency, and epistemicity. For each of these, we study the contextual use of relevant linguistic constructions, especially in situations in which speakers can resort to different expressions to refer to "cultural" practices, each of which implies different attitudes towards "culture." The study is based on three languages—two Mayan languages from Mexico (Yucatec and Chol), and one Tupian from Brazil (Suruí of Rondônia)—whose speakers experience very different situations regarding the definition of their "culture," by themselves and by others.
{"title":"\"Culture:\" Say it with grammar! The Expression of Notions Related to \"Culture\" in Amerindian Languages","authors":"Valentina Vapnarsky, Cédric Yvinec, Cédric Becquey","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0033","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Amerindian languages have often borrowed the lexical terms of colonial languages that refer to \"culture,\" \"tradition,\" or \"heritage,\" or else created neologisms for them. Amerindian languages, however, express related notions through grammatical forms, rather than with lexical terms. In contrast to lexical terms, grammatical elements are normally more constrained, less open to reflexivity for the speaker but nonetheless manipulable while also being the product of recurrent verbal and interactional practices. This article focuses on three grammatical domains: temporal configurations, expressions of person and agency, and epistemicity. For each of these, we study the contextual use of relevant linguistic constructions, especially in situations in which speakers can resort to different expressions to refer to \"cultural\" practices, each of which implies different attitudes towards \"culture.\" The study is based on three languages—two Mayan languages from Mexico (Yucatec and Chol), and one Tupian from Brazil (Suruí of Rondônia)—whose speakers experience very different situations regarding the definition of their \"culture,\" by themselves and by others.","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"587 - 620"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48377941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
P disorientation is perhaps your first hint: this is not scholarship as usual. A white page opens on the cluttered desktop landscape of the computer screen, populated by colorful illustrations of fire, kudzu, and an emerald ash borer. One is compelled by the visual sensuality of the experience to sit with it for a moment, to “stay with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway (2016) might say, of exploring the patchy problematics of the Anthropocene. Attending to the materiality of land, water, and atmosphere-transforming projects, this transdisciplinary anthology centers four historical concurrences at the intersection of human and nonhuman activity, described as “Anthropocene Detonators”: invasion, empire, capital, and acceleration. Here there be monsters, certainly, but perhaps also opportunities for responsiveness and responsibility. One encounters, mingling on the landing page, a host of feral entities in motion: toxic fog, antibiotics, comb jellies, anti-fouling paint, bee villains. Each is associated with one of the four detonators that structure the project. These focal points are accompanied by one of 79 field reports representing a window into a different multispecies ecology that proliferates in the intermingling trails of human infrastructures and nonhuman entities. In the upper left-hand corner, an illustrated master key directs the reader to an index of related cases and concepts. It is a feature which contributes to the sense in which the project registers as an atlas, further articulating its virtual spatiality by introducing a reading room in which texts and other
{"title":"Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene ed. by Anna L. Tsing et al. (review)","authors":"Elexis Trinity Williams","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0042","url":null,"abstract":"P disorientation is perhaps your first hint: this is not scholarship as usual. A white page opens on the cluttered desktop landscape of the computer screen, populated by colorful illustrations of fire, kudzu, and an emerald ash borer. One is compelled by the visual sensuality of the experience to sit with it for a moment, to “stay with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway (2016) might say, of exploring the patchy problematics of the Anthropocene. Attending to the materiality of land, water, and atmosphere-transforming projects, this transdisciplinary anthology centers four historical concurrences at the intersection of human and nonhuman activity, described as “Anthropocene Detonators”: invasion, empire, capital, and acceleration. Here there be monsters, certainly, but perhaps also opportunities for responsiveness and responsibility. One encounters, mingling on the landing page, a host of feral entities in motion: toxic fog, antibiotics, comb jellies, anti-fouling paint, bee villains. Each is associated with one of the four detonators that structure the project. These focal points are accompanied by one of 79 field reports representing a window into a different multispecies ecology that proliferates in the intermingling trails of human infrastructures and nonhuman entities. In the upper left-hand corner, an illustrated master key directs the reader to an index of related cases and concepts. It is a feature which contributes to the sense in which the project registers as an atlas, further articulating its virtual spatiality by introducing a reading room in which texts and other","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"719 - 725"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44666733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: The Terms of Culture: Idioms of Reflexivity Among Indigenous Peoples in Latin America","authors":"Vincent Hirtzel, Anath Ariel de Vidas","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0030","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"513 - 532"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66209103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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,
{"title":"Blood Work: Life and Laboratories in Penang by Janet Carsten (review)","authors":"Jenna Grant","doi":"10.1353/anq.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2022.0025","url":null,"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,","PeriodicalId":51536,"journal":{"name":"Anthropological Quarterly","volume":"95 1","pages":"483 - 487"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41339917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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