This chapter details local understandings of menstruation. It provides an ethnographic account of the situations in which menstrual blood generates disgust. The chapter critically engages with the work of Mary Douglas, where emphasis is put on the way bodily or social integrity is breached by the circulation of “matter out of place.” Here, the problem is taken the other way and issues concerning bodily boundaries are seen as making, rather than unmaking, bodies. The chapter provides ethnographic data on how menstruation is experienced by women, rather than by focusing on how it is symbolized. Drawing on extensive interview data on...