Janet Carsten is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the anthropology of kinship. She is the author of After Kinship (2004) and The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community (1997). She is the editor of Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness (Blackwell, 2007) and Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (2000).

• Notes on contributors viiAcknowledgements ixJanet Carsten Introduction: blood will out 11 Kath Weston Lifeblood, liquidity, and cash transfusions: beyond metaphor in the cultural study of finance 242 Maya Mayblin The way blood flows: the sacrificial value of intravenous drip use in Northeast Brazil 423 Bettina Bildhauer Medieval European conceptions of blood: truth and human integrity 564 Fenella Cannell The blood of Abraham: Mormon redemptive physicality and American idioms of kinship 765 Nicholas Whitfield Who is my stranger? Origins of the gift in wartime London, 1939-45 946 Susan E. Lederer Bloodlines: blood types, identity, and association in twentieth-century America 1177 Janet Carsten ‘Searching for the truth’: tracing the moral properties of blood in Malaysian clinical pathology labs 1298 Jacob Copeman The art of bleeding: memory, martyrdom, and portraits in blood 1479 Emily Martin Blood and the brain 170Index 183