Hematologies: The Political Life of Blood in India - Hardcover

Copeman, Jacob; Banerjee, Dwaipayan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501745093 ISBN 13: 9781501745096

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2019

Synopsis

In this ground-breaking account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India, Jacob Copeman and Dwaipayan Banerjee examine how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life. Hematologies 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, Hematologies broaches how political life in India has been shaped through the use of blood and through contestations about blood. As such, the authors offer new entryways into thinking about politics and economy through a "bloodscape of difference": different sovereignties; different proportionalities; and different temporalities. These entryways allow the authors to explore 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.

About this title

About the Author

Dwaipayan Banerjee is Assistant Professor in the program on Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Follow him on Twitter @dwai_banerjee.

Jacob Copeman is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of Veins of Devotion.

Review

"This book is unparalleled in its ability to show how the political absorbs the techno-scientific over various scales and temporalities in contemporary India. The authors take breath-taking risks with the plethora of objects and contexts they dwell on but manage to land on the ground each time. A splendid achievement."

(Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University)

"This book is an extraordinary exploration of the multitudes of meanings and uses of blood in northern India. Its breadth and range make the questions it raises of wide interest, from blood as a donation, as a means to political protest, as a sign of modernity or patriotism"

(Emily Martin, New York University)

"This revelatory book brings us a thoroughly political hematology, not only tracking economies of sacrifice, extraction, and spillage, but also thinking through blood as a medium for writing, for protest, and for the telling of historical time"

(Stefan Helmreich, MIT)

"Hematologies is an astute, learned, and ground-breaking account of the political economy and cultural meaning of blood in contemporary India, the product of a powerful, cogent collaboration between two prominent and exciting thinkers."

(Rachel Berger, Concordia University, author of Ayurveda Made Modern)

"Jacob Copeman and Dwaipayan Banerjee have written a deeply insightful book on the potent symbolism and political significance of blood."

(Joseph Alter, University of Pittsburgh, author of Gandhi's Body)

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1501745093
• ISBN 13: 9781501745096
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288