Jacob Copeman and Dwaipayan Banerjee
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781501745096
- eISBN:
- 9781501745102
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501745096.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
This book is an account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India. It examines how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life. The book ...
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This book is an account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India. It examines how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life. The book traces how the substance congeals political ideologies, biomedical rationalities, and activist practices. Using examples from anti-colonial appeals to blood sacrifice as a political philosophy to contemporary portraits of political leaders drawn with blood, from the use of the substance by Bhopali children as a material of activism to biomedical anxieties and aporias about the excess and lack of donation, the book broaches how political life in India has been shaped through the use of blood and through contestations about blood. As such, the book offers new entryways into thinking about politics and economy through a “bloodscape of difference:” different sovereignties, different proportionalities, and different temporalities. These entryways allow exploration of the relation between blood's utopic flows and political clottings as it moves through time and space, conjuring new kinds of social collectivities while reanimating older forms, and always in a reflexive relation to norms that guide its proper flow.Less
This book is an account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India. It examines how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life. The book traces how the substance congeals political ideologies, biomedical rationalities, and activist practices. Using examples from anti-colonial appeals to blood sacrifice as a political philosophy to contemporary portraits of political leaders drawn with blood, from the use of the substance by Bhopali children as a material of activism to biomedical anxieties and aporias about the excess and lack of donation, the book broaches how political life in India has been shaped through the use of blood and through contestations about blood. As such, the book offers new entryways into thinking about politics and economy through a “bloodscape of difference:” different sovereignties, different proportionalities, and different temporalities. These entryways allow exploration of the relation between blood's utopic flows and political clottings as it moves through time and space, conjuring new kinds of social collectivities while reanimating older forms, and always in a reflexive relation to norms that guide its proper flow.
