Bloodpdf

Introduction

The meanings attributed to blood are never fixed; they vary across cultures and historical periods, even as blood retains a remarkable capacity to represent and materialise both essence and transformation (Carsten 2013). At once seen to convey immutable truths about the person, relatedness, life and, spirituality, blood is also regarded as highly amenable to material and symbolic change through marriage, conversion, purification rites, and contagion. Blood’s dual nature—both a physical substance and symbolic medium—makes it indispensable in rituals that explore ideas of vitality, purity, morality, and transcendence. In medieval Christian blood relics, blood was revered not only as the sacred essence of Christ’s sacrifice but also as a bridge between the divine and the human (Bynum 2007). This sacred significance often stems from blood’s intimate association with life itself. The biblical verse in Leviticus 17:11—‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood’—captures this intrinsic connection to existence. Similarly, in Hindu sacrificial ceremonies, blood offerings, even when replaced by plant-based substitutes in contemporary practice, symbolise the transfer of life’s essence, reinforcing its role as a conduit between the human and the divine. Across these contexts, blood’s sensory immediacy and ritual uses bring into view the material dimensions of religious experience. Blood is not reducible to symbol; it exerts physical, emotional, and spiritual effects that deeply shape religious practice and belief.

Blood’s sensory qualities—its vivid colour, warmth, viscosity, and metallic scent—call forth an embodied response, engaging participants in ways that exceed intellectual grasp. This is strikingly visible in sacrificial rites and depictions of martyrdom, in which the immediacy of blood’s presence creates visceral, emotional reactions that draw participants into intensely corporeal religious experiences. The deliberate spilling of blood in Mayan rituals formed a powerful display of divine presence and human vulnerability, conjoining the visceral and the sacred in ways that left an indelible mark on both participants and witnesses (Houston, Stuart and Taube 2006; Foster 2002). As such, blood’s capacity to flow, spill, and stain lends it a potent force, catalysing transcendental experiences of life and sacrifice (Carsten 2013).

Yet blood’s symbolic resonance extends beyond its connection to vitality, frequently serving as a charged substance and symbol of purification and redemption. Within Christian theology, the Eucharistic wine—representing the blood of Christ—encapsulates the dual themes of sacrifice and salvation, binding together material and metaphysical dimensions. This capacity for multiple significations allows blood to function across varied social and doctrinal settings. For example, Catholic communities in Northeast Brazil link sacrificial blood to agricultural labour and the transformative power of water (Mayblin 2013): Christ’s sacrifice is emulated in the shedding of sweat and tears when cultivating food in this parched land, joining a sequence of fluids like rain, broth, and isotonic fluids in a life-giving cycle that replenishes body and soil alike. In this ‘fluid economy’, the material realities of farming are imbued with religious significance, harmonising human effort with Christ’s salvific narrative.

The use of blood symbolism to negotiate identities and foster collective belonging is especially pronounced. In post-revolutionary Iran, for instance, the blood of Iran-Iraq war martyrs forms a powerful motif for uniting ‘kindred citizens’ in everyday projects of moral and religious purification (Wellman 2017; 2021). From museum displays to Islamic-national commemorations of martyrs, images and tropes of spilled blood highlight sacrifice and national kinship forged through blood. The sharing of votive food that often accompanies these events is understood to ‘imbue citizens with purity and blessing in much the same way as the blood of martyrs, thereby regenerating the Iranian nation (Wellman 2017, 512; 2021). Meanwhile, among Scottish Shia Muslims, blood donation functions as both an expression of religious piety and civic engagement, bridging spiritual devotion with contributions to broader societal welfare (Hashemi 2022). Here, blood donation has been explicitly framed as a contemporary enactment of the sacrifice in 680 AD of the prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussain, whose spilled blood is central to Shia histories of martyrdom. Organised blood drives, often coordinated with national health institutions and concentrated around Muharram, the first month of the Islamic New Year, recast religious commemoration as civic contribution, allowing Shia Muslims to forge gift relations with the wider public while affirming both religious piety and national belonging. Similarly, blood donation in India highlights how donors imagine their contributions transcending caste and religious barriers, creating an imagined network of national solidarity (Copeman 2009a). The dynamic interplay of individuality and collectivity that blood enables in these cases mirrors Christian discourses of redemption, where the blood of Christ is celebrated as a unifying force, purging sin and integrating believers into a universal spiritual community.

Equally, however, blood may be a divisive substance, well capable of acting as an agent of pollution. Anthropologists have documented widespread beliefs and rituals around menstrual taboos and blood pollution across different cultural and religious traditions (Douglas 1966; Durkheim [1915] 1976; Héritier 1996; Meggitt 1964; Namihira 1987; Paige and Paige [1981] 2021). A striking example of this is the belief in the Blood Pond Hell, which emerged in medieval China and later spread to other parts of East Asia. The belief describes the dire fate of women to suffer in a hell formed by the blood shed during childbirth and menstruation, which they are forced to drink as a punishment for defiling the gods. In early modern Japan, it inspired popular salvation rituals which required women to entrust male relatives or monks with throwing copies of the script known as the ‘Blood Bowl Sutra’ into earthly representations of the Blood Pond Hell. These were located in sacred mountains where women themselves were often forbidden to enter (Faure 2003, 73–8). As such, the material reality of women’s bleeding bodies served as a potent symbolic motif, reinforcing their subordinate position both in this world and the afterlife, with escape contingent on male support and eventual rebirth as men.

Beliefs in blood pollution, however, often coexist with and counterbalance views of blood as a transformative force. This duality is evident in practices like the use of menstrual blood in witchcraft, healing, and fertility rituals (Buckley and Gottlieb 1988; Frick 1951; Stewart and Strathern 2002). Historically practiced in the Duna area of Papua New Guinea’s Highlands, for instance, one rite of renewal involved collecting a virgin’s menstrual blood in a bamboo tube, carrying it along sacred sites, and casting it into the dwelling hole of the ground spirit (tama) to appease him and restore ecological balance (Stewart and Strathern 2002, 355). As such, across cultures and histories, even the most polluting forms of blood have also been imbued with generative and protective power, underscoring that blood’s symbolic potency rarely resolves into a single meaning.

Blood has long served as a powerful symbol and substance. It functions as both medium and agent in rituals and social practices that channel sacred, political, and vital forces—yet it often eludes human control, resisting fixed meaning. It has a dual temporality that evokes both transience in bloodshed and sacrifice, and permanence in bloodlines and legacies. Anthropologists have traced how flows of blood—whether in kinship ties or in donation—forge and sustain relationships, while also reinforcing boundaries through ideas of race, inheritance, and contagion. Until the 1990s, anthropologists primarily examined blood as a symbolic marker of kinship, nationalism, and race, as well as its role in menstruation taboos and rituals such as sacrifice. From the 2000s onward, however, the focus has shifted towards concrete medical and practical uses of blood, following new influences, particularly from medical anthropology, studies of the body (often framed through Michel Foucault’s thinking on biopolitics [1990; 2003; 2009; 2010]), and science and technology studies.

Twentieth-century developments in transfusion also led researchers to investigate how blood circulates outside the body, attending to donation and the collection and freezing of samples for genomic research and diagnostic testing, as well as blood’s use in political protest and artistic performance and laboratory efforts to create artificial substitutes. The increasingly complex governance of blood-borne diseases and inherited blood disorders introduced new biological dimensions worthy of study, from the surveillance of blood-borne diseases such as malaria to the regulation of inherited conditions including thalassaemia and sickle-cell disease. Rather than displacing earlier and mostly symbolic and social concerns, however, this expansion of inquiry revealed how practical uses of blood interact with its social and symbolic significances. Contemporary anthropological studies therefore frequently highlight how blood’s material properties and metaphorical resonances shape and reinforce one another. They show that blood has agency in reconfiguring how we understand social life and transform social worlds.

Blood’s agency in religious and medical contexts

Ethnographers have increasingly shown how blood is not merely passive but is an active force that shapes attitudes, practices, and, in religious contexts, the very nature of spiritual engagement. The Maya, for example, regarded blood as essential to sustaining cosmic balance. Through bloodletting rituals, rulers offered their own blood to open portals to divine realms, an act that was imbued with tangible, transformative power. In these rituals, blood became more than a substance—it was an agent of mediation, directly connecting the human and divine worlds and reaffirming the sacred order of the cosmos (Schele and Miller 1986).

Blood has also served as an important agent in Judaic-Christian traditions, fuelling theological debates around its role in mediating the human and the divine (Anidjar 2014; Biale 2007; Bynum 2007; Hart 2009; Rubin 1991). In Jewish altar rites, sacrificial blood has operated to purify, consecrate, and seal covenants, enacting God’s presence and sustaining the bond between God and the people of Israel (Biale 2007; Hart 2009). Early Christianity reconfigured this agency through the figure of Christ, whose blood—shed once yet endlessly efficacious—was understood to effect atonement and inaugurate a new covenant. In Catholic liturgy, the Eucharist renders this agency immediate: Christ’s blood becomes materially present and, when consumed, incorporates believers into the body of Christ (Anidjar 2014; Bynum 2007; Rubin 1991). The Protestant Reformation’s rejection of transubstantiation (here: the turning of wine into blood) marked a decisive shift, relocating this agency from the material substance to the realm of faith and spiritual reception (Gregory 2012). These divergent theologies framed ongoing debates over whether and how divine blood could act in the world, highlighting blood’s agentive capacity to transform, bind, and divide.

Devotional practices such as those in Naples, Italy surrounding San Gennaro’s liquefying blood and the veneration of capozzelle (human skulls) vividly reveal blood’s material agency in Christianity. Here, three times a year, the preserved blood of third century Catholic martyr San Gennaro liquifies, which is held to indicate that the saint continues to protect the city and that Christianity ultimately triumphs over death. These rituals destabilise the boundaries between institutional and popular religious practices (Cosentino 2014). Blood functions here as an active participant in devotional life, mediating between the sacred and the secular, the official and the vernacular. These practices are part of actively ‘lived religion’, transforming blood into a material presence that is tactile and emotionally charged (Cosentino 2014). Blood becomes a dynamic medium through which individuals engage with divine power and negotiate their relationship with the sacred.

One way to think about blood’s agency is that it constitutes a ‘saturated phenomenon’ (Marion 2002), in that it overwhelms human frameworks of meaning. Blood’s agency offers an excess that cannot be entirely mastered, resisting human attempts to fully control or symbolise it. Blood particularly exemplifies this defiance in contexts where it is ritualised or institutionalised, such as in sacrificial ceremonies or through medical transfusions. Despite the structures intended to contain it, blood spills, coagulates, and resists regulation, asserting its unpredictability. This unruliness exposes the limits of human control and mastery of the substance. Blood’s material agency thus operates at the intersection of order and chaos, revelation and mystery, pointing to the uncontrollable forces at play in religious and social life.

Blood can often seem to exceed the boundaries of conceptual understanding and practical utility, offering an excess that cannot be contained within ordinary frames of experience. For instance, Shia Ashura rituals commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, called tatbir, can involve public self-flagellation, flailing and cutting with swords in order to cause the mourner’s blood to splash and flow in the manner of the Prophet’s grandson. Though tatbir are banned in Iran, much blood is shed during such commemorations in Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere (Copeman 2009b). Blood flows in such rituals not simply as a remembrance of the martyrdom but as a powerful re-presentation of it. Through acts of lamentation and bloody self-flagellation, participants infuse the ritual space with grief, devotion, and an overwhelming sense of transcendence (Hashemi 2022; Hegland 1998). In such contexts, blood is more than a symbol—it becomes an uncontainable force that draws participants into an encounter with the divine, an experience that resists intellectual or emotional resolution.

In medical contexts, blood as a substance does not just mediate experience but it also navigates material and ethical infrastructures. It is moved from donor to recipient through complex socio-technical assemblages that include bags, test tubes, medical staff, and different modes of transport. In these settings, blood mobilises complex logistical and ethical networks of care and dependency. Its vitality and perishability demand its swift movement across these networks. As such, the circulation of blood, both within and beyond the body, is both a biological process and a profound interplay of infrastructure and vulnerability. The modern movement of blood brings about ‘vital mobilities’, i.e. forms of mobility that safeguard life and that must constantly continue to ensure patient survival (Sodero 2018). The vital mobility of blood underscores its duality as both a life-giving material and a dynamic agent of connectivity.

Yet, this circulation is fragile, particularly in the face of crises induced by climate change. Extreme weather events disrupt blood supply chains by damaging transport infrastructure and interrupting cold-chain storage, thereby restricting access to donor populations and prompting the development of alternative delivery systems such as drone-based blood transport in settings with limited or unreliable road access (Gangwal et al 2019). They expose the vulnerability of infrastructures and the life-sustaining healthcare systems they support. Blood can thus also be seen as part of ‘emergency mobilities,’ in which exceptional forms of adaptation and improvisation are required to save lives. In engendering both vital and emergency mobilities, blood’s circulation becomes entangled with broader challenges of resilience, ethical regulation, and equity (Sodero 2018).

Across religious and healthcare contexts, blood has agency in that it mobilises networks of people, objects, and meanings. While rituals and biomedical interventions seek to harness and direct blood’s power, its perishability and changeable qualities often resist attempts to contain its efficacy in predictable ways.

The heterochrony of blood: Temporality, memory, and history

Blood is often marked by a striking dual temporality. On the one hand, blood is fleeting, as it flows and dissipates in a single moment. It exemplifies the flux that is the hallmark of many materials, as they constantly transform and interact with their environments (Ingold 2007). Blood is never static; it moves, coagulates, stains, and endures, transforming as it interacts with objects and spaces. Focusing on its ever-changing nature shifts the focus from blood’s symbolic meanings to its active, transformative role in shaping social practices and worlds.

On the other hand, blood also persists, embedding itself in memory, rituals, and physical remnants (Carsten 2011, 2019; Copeman and Banerjee 2019; Kim 2018). Its sensory immediacy—the vibrant flow, deep red colour, and enduring trace—makes it a physical manifestation of transcendence, pointing to realities beyond human comprehension. It invites us to consider blood not just as a fixed substance but as something intrinsically tied to time—ephemeral in its shedding yet enduring in the traces it leaves behind. This interplay between transience and permanence allows blood to function both as a momentary gesture of commitment and as a foundation for lasting cultural or personal significance.

Blood’s temporal power lies in its paradoxical ability to both mark time and disrupt it. This is the case when contemporary middle-class Indians draw upon the blood sacrifices of anti-colonial nationalism by donating their own blood to create ‘blood portraits’ of nationalist martyrs who shed their own blood for the nation (Copeman and Banerjee 2019). These acts re-enact and reanimate the violent materiality of blood as a challenge to what they perceive as a secularised, Gandhian historiography that prioritises non-violence and ‘de-sanguinises’ understandings of the fight for Independence. By contributing their blood for this purpose under the banner of the anti-colonial struggle, participants seek to revitalise a past era steeped in emotional nationalist fervour. Blood, in this context, not only commemorates history but actively sustains its vitality, connecting the present with the affective intensity of a prior epoch.

Even the inconstant and ephemeral qualities of blood as artistic material can be used to signify permanence. When blood is used for painting, it fades over time, analogous to the faded memories that paintings are supposed to enliven. But in Delhi in the early 2000s the decay of paintings became an opportunity for collective re-creation, with contributors from diverse backgrounds—caste, religion, and region—encouraged to donate their blood so their mingled blood can be used to retouch the portraits, transforming these nationalist artworks into ‘more-than-symbolic’ microcosms of the nation’s ‘unity in diversity’. The element of exchange is explicit: The martyrs gave their blood for the nation; contemporary Indians are exhorted to give them their blood to keep their memory alive.

Blood’s temporal power thus lies in its paradoxical ability to both mark time and disrupt it. Seen in this way, blood is a ‘transtemporal hinge’ (Copeman and Banerjee 2019, after Pedersen and Nielsen 2013, 123–4), a substance capable of binding disparate temporalities—past, present, and future—into narrative continuity. Like a hinge, blood can connect moments otherwise left apart. This dynamic quality imbues blood with a unique material agency, enabling it to hold together seemingly disjointed historical events and shape collective memory across generations.

The heterochrony—the diversity of temporal activities and understandings—of blood is also suggested in Michel Foucault’s work, particularly his History of sexuality (1990), which has significantly shaped anthropological and historical discussions of blood and its intersection with politics. Foucault famously argued that premodern European societies were ‘societies of blood’, where power was exercised through the control and spilling of blood. In these ‘thanatopolitical’ societies, blood served both material and symbolic roles: It marked descent, delineated social divisions, and embodied sovereign power through the threat or reality of its shedding. Foucault is usually interpreted as contending that modern societies had transitioned from this blood-centric order to a ‘society of sex’, where power shifted to the regulation of life, bodies, and their reproduction through mechanisms of biopolitics, or the political management of populations. Anthropologists have taken divergent positions on this argument: some have critiqued Foucault’s periodisation for its implied dichotomy (Strong 2009), whilst others have interpreted it as a heuristic tool to trace heterogeneous configurations of power rather than as a definitive historical rupture (Stoler 2016). Regardless of their interpretation of Foucault, anthropologists converge in emphasising blood’s role as a potent medium through which disparate power logics—each with its own historicity—are merged and enacted.

Anthropologists who read and critique Foucault for drawing a stark dichotomy between blood and sex highlight instead how the two continued to intersect in contemporary practices (Strong 2009). This is emblematically shown in blood donor screening in many global contexts, wherein gay men have been excluded on the basis of their sexual practices, forcing confrontation with the social meanings of sexuality in relation to blood. Their exclusion from blood donations underscores how blood retains its symbolic and regulatory significance in modern regimes of power.

Meanwhile, anthropologists who have argued that Foucault’s account of blood is better understood as heterochronic, have argued that his analysis did not imply a clean break between epochs (Copeman and Banerjee 2019; Stoler 2016). Instead, Foucault’s lectures and writings revealed an understanding of historical transitions where the old languages and techniques of power—such as those centred on blood—are reanimated and repurposed in new contexts. This perspective encourages us to view the ‘symbolics of blood’ and the ‘analytics of sexuality’ not as discrete historical phases but as co-temporal processes that intersect and shape each other (Copeman and Banerjee 2019). As studies of eugenics and expansionism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe have shown, blood was not diminished but was instead powerfully reconfigured as a medium of both sacrifice and reproduction, particularly as fascist and militarist agendas were invoked in the name of nation and race [see section ‘Blood and othering’ below]. This legacy has continued to shape political imaginaries and biopolitical projects in the postwar period, such as in the racial exclusion and labelling of blood products (Lederer 2008) as well as in the governance of sickle cell anaemia as the ‘black’ and ‘tribal’ disease (Chattoo 2018; Wailoo 2014). It shows that blood cannot be confined to a single historical or symbolic register. Instead, the meanings and uses of blood persist and evolve, not only complicating received interpretations of Foucault’s framework but also deepening our grasp of its enduring vitality.

Relationalities of blood: From kinship to gift relations

Beyond Foucault’s contested insights, two further theoretical trends in anthropology have drawn attention to blood as both a metaphor and a material substance mediating social relations. The first centres on critical re-examinations of blood within new kinship studies. Earlier critiques of kinship studies highlighted how Euro-American-centric approaches tended to foreground ‘blood ties’ as a universal basis of relatedness (Schneider [1968] 1980). Building on, yet moving beyond, these critiques, new kinship scholars have shown how ‘blood’ itself is not a fixed, self-evident substance, but rather one that takes on shifting meanings and forms across diverse sociocultural contexts (Carsten 2004). Questioning the permanence traditionally attributed to genealogical models of descent, this perspective has highlighted the materiality of blood as a substance that forges and sustain kin relations, as it is shared alongside other substances, such as milk, semen, and food, through acts of care and consumption (Carsten 2004, 2011, 2013; Héritier 1996). In new reproductive contexts, too, scholars have shown how technologies like in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy generate moral and bodily ties through symbolic and material transfers of substances, whether hormonal, gestational, or nutritional flows (Franklin 1997, 2013; Franklin and McKinnon 2001; Strathern 1992; Thompson 2001).

This connects to a second trend, which foregrounds blood’s symbolic and material role in light of biomedical advances (Carsten 2004, 2019; Strathern 1992). While some scholars highlight how genetics—scientifically measurable and foundational to modern medicine—may be displacing the more ancestral and symbolic connotations of blood as a symbol and indicator of relatedness, anthropologists point out that biomedical knowledge and technology do not biologically determine kinship. Instead, they open up new spaces for negotiating who may be related to whom and reconfigure the role of blood within it (Carsten 2004). When confronted with the ambiguities of genetic data in genetic counselling, for instance, individuals often revert to traditional narratives of blood and lineage (Franklin 1997). These older frameworks continue to shape interpretations of genetics, rather than genetics entirely displacing them. These theoretical trends have urged anthropologists to reconsider not only kinship as a generative process, but also blood itself as a mutable metaphor and substance that flows across different domains to remake relations and their meanings (Carsten 1995, 2004). 

Thinking of blood as a relational substance has sparked deeper reflection on how the material uses of blood, in diagnostics, genomics, or transfusions, reshape relational imaginaries. Even when biomedicine seeks to reduce blood to its technical properties, blood rarely loses its social meanings. Rather, its analogising and substitutive capacities run across kinship, medical, religious, and political domains (Carsten 2011). In Penang, Malaysia, for example, anonymised laboratory blood samples still remind the lab workers of social categories like family ties and ethnic belonging, while anxieties surrounding inter-ethnic transfusions coexist with discourses of national unity around blood donation (Carsten 2019). As such, various forms of ‘blood work’ take place across different social contexts, and ‘meanings may be entangled with each other’ so that a reference to blood in one register—medicine—may evoke a response in another—kinship and ethnicity (Carsten 2019, 7).

Foregrounding these intertwined material and metaphorical dimensions of blood also helps us move beyond the framework of ‘altruism’ in studies of blood donation that draw on the long-standing anthropological interest in gift-giving (Mauss [1925] 2016; Titmuss 1970). Classic studies of blood donation have argued that the voluntary gift of blood draws on and reinforces the social obligation to give (back). Blood donations may thus serve as a key mechanism of solidarity that underpins national health and welfare systems. This approach frames the ‘contemporary globalized blood donation ecumene’ around altruism (Copeman 2009b, 2). Yet, ethnographic studies on the ‘gift of blood’ have revealed that a rich repertoire of heterogeneous values and cultural practices are at play instead. In Brazil, for instance, blood donation is viewed as a welcome opportunity to ‘cleanse blood’, intertwining moral and medical discourses of purification (Sanabria 2009). This complicates accounts centring on altruism by foregrounding self-interest in the form of bodily renewal. Blood donation, here, is a form of alleviative bloodletting, parallel to menstruation, evoking gendered and ethnicised aspirations towards acquiring ‘pure blood’ (see section ‘Blood and othering’ below). This example urges us to consider not only people’s motivations for giving, but also the metaphorically and materially transformative force of blood itself. 

Similarly, ethnographic studies have shown that people think of the shedding of blood in medical contexts—whether for transfusion, testing, biobanking, or DNA analysis—as analogous with diverse practices, including creating family ties, menstruation, sacrifice, bloodshed in war, and even Christ’s crucifixion (Copeman 2009b). These analogies both support and challenge biomedical practices. For example, religious motifs—such as donors being asked to ‘bleed for others like Christ’—may motivate blood donation. Similarly, they can critique practices like animal sacrifice, suggesting blood donation as a more ‘modern’ alternative, as illustrated by an animal rights slogan during Kali Puja, a Hindu festival traditionally marked by animal sacrifice to the goddess Kali: ‘If you want to offer blood to the Goddess Kali, give your own, and help to save a human life’ (Copeman 2009a, 138).

In spite of its many symbolic associations, medical professionals continue to encourage a shift toward understanding blood as a ‘biochemical ensemble’, devoid of cultural connotations (Simpson 2009). However, this deculturalised view can clash with entrenched beliefs. In India, for instance, medics work to dispel the misconception that donated blood is nonrenewable, yet they also rely on its sacrificial connotations to encourage donations (Copeman and Banerjee 2019). Paradoxically, the assurance of replenishment may reduce donors’ sense of sacrifice, hindering collections. When donation is presented as involving no real loss, its appeal as a morally charged or meritorious act may be weakened, undercutting motivations that hinge on sacrifice or bodily commitment. Such examples demonstrate how the biomedical use of blood is rarely neutral but instead embedded within overlapping systems of value—moral, social, political, and kinship-based. Across these domains, blood remains a potent relational substance, circulating through bodies, institutions, and imaginaries to remake social worlds and understandings of mutual ties and ‘relatedness’.

Blood and othering: Race, inheritance and contagion

Beliefs about differences in blood—ranging from notions of racial purity and pollution to associations with specific blood types and diseases—reveal how blood operates as a powerful medium and agent for constructing social boundaries and hierarchies, as well as social bonds. Historical studies show that concerns with blood purity were foundational to racial thought from the early modern period onward. One early and influential example is the concept of limpieza de sangre (literally, the ‘cleanness of blood’), developed in fifteenth-century Iberia to distinguish converted Christians of Jewish and Muslim heritage from so-called ‘Old Christians’ (Bethencourt [1995] 2009; Nirenberg [1996] 2015). This concept was later exported to the Iberian colonies in the Americas and Asia to justify the stratification of colonial subjects based on geographical and genealogical origins, foreshadowing modern forms of racial governance (Martínez 2004, 2008; Martínez, Torres and Nirenberg 2012; Schaub [2015] 2019).

By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Social Darwinist theories of natural selection and progress further shaped state projects that inscribed racial boundaries through the language of blood. Interestingly, through this history, blood emerges not only as the quintessential substance defining heredity—for instance, eclipsing flesh or bone—but also as a highly corruptible medium, one that demands vigilance and regulation. From the ‘one drop rule’, which classified any trace of African ancestry as grounds for racial classification and segregation in the US (Gross 2008; Hickman 1996) to the fixation on a ‘pure-blooded’ Aryan race in Nazi Germany (Hutton 2005; Proctor 1988), modern states—albeit through varying logics and intensities—have come to tether national strength and moral order to the policing of blood purity. This has underpinned diverse regimes of racialised belonging, hierarchy, and exclusion (Goldberg 2002; Kühl 1994).

Notably, notions of pure blood gained symbolic productivity by blending religious and folk beliefs, scientific knowledge, and theories into powerful ideologies and identities. In modern Japan, for instance, beliefs in the ritual purity of the imperial bloodline ‘congealed’ together with theories of eugenics and hygiene to construct ‘pure Japanese blood’ as a superior substance justifying Japan’s imperialist expansion (Robertson 2002, 2012). Pure blood ideology has further contributed to the post-war construction of Japanese national identity along with the principle of jus sanguinis that confers citizenship based on descent, thereby differentiating various ethnic minorities in a system of ‘semi-citizenships’ (Morris-Suzuki 2015). Within this historical context, blood became the medium through which the marginality of these minorities is most keenly felt and tackled. For instance, among the Indigenous Ainu, the feeling of ‘clamoring blood’ (chi ga sawagu) becomes a powerful assertion of identity and ancestral ties against broader histories of exclusion and assimilation that stigmatised and policed Indigenous bloodlines (Lewallen 2016). Meanwhile, Pentecostal Japanese Brazilian returnees in Japan navigate their ambivalent sense of belonging through 'two bloods': their ‘Japanese blood’ grants them ancestry-based visas; yet frequently having their ‘Japaneseness’ questioned, they also seek unity and spiritual kinship in the concept of ‘the blood of Jesus’ (Ikeuchi 2019).

Scientific knowledge of blood has also worked to enhance blood’s capacity to naturalise perceived differences among people in contexts of imperialism and racism. ‘Naturalisation’ has been theorised as an iterative and generative process through which social constructs, such as race, kinship, and gender, are made self-evident through symbolic and material means (Wade 2002; Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). In the case of blood, knowledge of blood groups, blood-borne viruses, and inherited blood disorders has powerfully fed into racialised understandings of bodily differences and measures safeguarding blood’s purity. The discovery of AB0 blood groups and their geographical distribution stimulated eugenic discourses identifying blood group B as a ‘Jewish marker’ in early-twentieth-century Germany (Mazumdar 1990). Fear of syphilis, hepatitis, and sickle-cell anaemia justified policies of racial segregation and exclusion in blood donation in mid-twentieth-century United States (Lederer 2008). Logics of inheritance and contagion have been intertwined to perpetuate blood-based othering through much of the twentieth century. Herein, blood donation remains a site where blood continues to function as a medium and agent through which differences are naturalised and contested.

Recent anthropological studies on donor deferrals and exclusions related to HIV/AIDS risks have revealed the social and psychological impacts of being categorically denied the right to participate in bodily practices often considered civic virtues. These exclusions, particularly among stigmatised sexual and ethnic minorities, underscore the inequalities embedded within systems of blood donation (Avera 2023; Seeman 1999; Strong 2009; Valentine 2005). Extending the concept of ‘biological citizenship’ (Petryna 2002; Rose and Novas 2005), which highlights rights claims grounded in health and biological existence, such studies demonstrate that social membership becomes closely linked to the capacity to contribute bodily substances for the public good. While blood donation often symbolises ‘vital publics’ or ‘embodied associations around generalized exchanges of tissues’ (Strong 2009), being denied the ‘right to give’ frequently equates to a denial of one’s right to belong. In South Africa, for instance, many Black South Africans still remain scarred by memories of having their donated blood discarded on the basis of racialised HIV risk profiling. These memories persisted, even after blood banks reversed course to prioritise the collection of ‘black blood’ (Avera 2023).

The stigma associated with blood-related conditions, such as HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, and sickle cell disease, further complicates these dynamics (Farmer [1992] 2006; Fassin 2007; Fraser and Seear 2016; Wailoo 2014). These conditions often marginalise individuals within medical systems and society, reinforcing notions of bodily difference and exclusion around parameters of race/ethnicity, caste, class, and sexuality. However, such stigmas can also foster shared bonds of solidarity and activism among affected communities, reframing these disorders as sites of collective identity and advocacy. For instance, sickle cell and thalassemia advocacy networks have mobilised around the unique experiences of living with these blood disorders, creating spaces of mutual support while challenging stigmatising narratives (Chattoo 2024; Creary 2021; Unnithan et al. 2023). Similarly, a substantial body of medical anthropological literature shows that HIV/AIDS activism and struggles for access to antiretroviral treatment have reshaped the nexus of healthcare policy, pharmaceuticals, and global aid regimes, prompting reconfigurations of subjectivity, moral claims, and legal rights among patients (Biehl 2009; Nguyen 2010; Robins 2008). While prompting a broad-based activism, however, awareness of HIV/AIDS has also yielded new forms of moral and political distinctions among patients around different modes of transmission (Cullinane 2005, 2007; Shao and Scoggin 2009).

These examples underscore how understandings of blood as a biological reality are deeply entwined with cultural, historical, and political contexts. Whether in classification by blood type or the hierarchical valuation of bloodlines, such practices highlight the ways in which blood becomes a site for negotiating identity, purity, and belonging. At the same time, these beliefs often reinforce systems of inequality, where certain blood types or lineages are privileged while others are marginalised or pathologised. Blood emerges as a politically charged agent that confers belonging for some while marking others as perpetually outside the body politic. By examining these exclusions and their accompanying stigmas, we gain a deeper understanding of how blood operates as a site of both othering and solidarity, shaping the contours of citizenship, identity, and collective belonging.

Conclusion

Blood’s enduring resonance lies in its ability to collapse boundaries between the material and the symbolic. It embodies both the visceral, tactile realities of life and death and the intangible aspirations of the transcendent. As a substance, multivocal blood bridges the corporeal and the spiritual, the personal and the communal, the finite and the divine. This duality allows blood to become more than a symbol; rather, it frequently operates as an active participant that shapes our practices, understandings, and experiences.

Blood’s materiality—its flow, colour, warmth, and persistence—imbues it with a saturated significance that defies simple categorisation. By attending to its multivalent agency, we uncover the ways in which blood creates connections across divides: between individuals and their communities, the physical and the metaphysical, and the temporal and the eternal. Blood, then, is not merely a substance within traditions; it is a force, endlessly generative and deeply entwined with them. Rather than leaving the study of ‘real’ blood solely to scientists, contemporary anthropological investigations show how blood’s meanings and materialities are co-constructed through the practices and symbolic frameworks that engage with it. Such studies reveal how blood operates as both a physical substance and a site of dynamic cultural production.

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Note on contributors

Jieun Kim is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds. She examines how social inequalities are naturalised and contested through perceptions of social and bodily differences, a theme she is currently pursuing in an AHRC-funded project on the politics of blood donation in Japan and Korea.

j.e.kim@leeds.ac.uk; hematopolitics.org; @hematopolitics.bsky.social

 

Jacob Copeman is Oportunius Research Professor, University of Santiago de Compostela. His books include Veins of devotion: Blood donation and religious experience in North India (2009, Rutgers University Press), and the co-authored Hematologies: The political life of blood in India (2019, Cornell University Press) and Dissentiments: Non-religion, violence, and the politics of visibility in South Asia (2026, Cambridge University Press).