Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation

Blood Magic, edited by Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb, is a scholarly anthropological essay collection on menstruation and its ritual meanings across a range of cultures, published by the University of California Press. Both editors are recognized anthropologists, and the volume brought together case studies specifically to push back against earlier anthropology's tendency to treat menstrual taboo as a single universal phenomenon rather than as culturally specific practices with widely differing meanings and functions. Its authority rests on the individual contributors' own fieldwork based chapters. Its limit is the ordinary one for an edited collection, uneven depth across chapters depending on each contributor's own specialization, and a claim about one specific culture's practice is best checked against that chapter's own sources rather than treated as representative of the whole volume's scope.