Jacob Copeman is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Veins of Devotion: Blood Donation and Religious Experience in North India (2009). His edited and co-edited works include Blood Donation, Bioeconomy, Culture (2009), The Guru in South Asia: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2012), and Social Theory After Strathern (2014).

The essays in this edited book powerfully investigate questions generated by the extraction, circulation, valuation, and technical manipulation of biological substances in South Asia in order to gain new insights into the meanings of humanness, life, value, and relationality in the region.

This book was published as a special issue of Contemporary South Asia.

1. Introduction: South Asian tissue economies 2. Blood splattered Bengal: The spectacular spurting blood of the Bangladeshi cinema 3. Writing the disaster: substance activism after Bhopal 4. Portraits of substance: image, text and intervention in India's sanguinary politics 5. Forbidden exchanges and gender: implications for blood donation during a maternal health emergency in Punjab, Pakistan 6. Citizens in the commons: blood and genetics in the making of the civic 7. The substance that empowers? DNA in South Asia 8. Interweaving fragments of ethical publicity and ethical resistance: the quest for cadaver organs in India 9. Afterword: Given over to demand: excorporation as commitment