Power and placement in blood practices

Anthropologists writing on the Highlands societies of Papua New Guinea have stressed the variable importance of ideas of menstrual pollution as markers of gender relations. This article suggests an alternative approach to these ideas, emphasizing instead aspects of power, placement, complementarity, collaboration, and the moral agency of both genders. Turning to the ethnographic work of the 1960s, we contrast the writings of Salisbury and Meggitt and discuss the usefulness of the "three bodies" concept of Lock and Scheper-Hughes in the comparative analysis of body substances and their meanings in this region. The use of a collaborative model is helpful in such an overall analysis.