The Gift and Its Forms of Life in Contemporary India

Modern Asian Studies (2011), 45: 1051-1094

This paper seeks to document and interpret some of the many life forms of the gift of dan in contemporary India. It attempts to be both summative in reflecting on the recent extremely productive literature on dan and programmatic in identifying emergent themes and instances of dan that require more detailed analysis at present and in the future. The paper focuses in particular on highly public forms of dan, and examines the relationship between dan and modernist modes of philanthropy. It discusses the giving of dan online and biomedical variants of dan which foreground sacrifice. The paper is not a final statement but a call to focus attention on new terrains of dan and the continuing vitality of this distinctive set of exchange categories.

A Look at Blood Donor Motivation in the UK

The Gift of Blood (2011) (bimonthly newsletter). Kolkata: Association of Voluntary Blood Donors, West Bengal.

Cadaver Donation as Ascetic Practice in India

2006

This article explores emerging ascetic orientations towards utility and death in India. It chronicles the activities of an innovative organization which campaigns for cadaver donation for the purposes of organ retrieval and dissection by trainee doctors. This would entail dispensing with cremation, a mode of cadaver disposal newly characterized as wasteful. In order to counter ‘cremation-lack’, the asceticism of cadaver donation is accentuated by the organization. The group thereby re-interprets classical Hinduism according to the demands of ‘medical rationality’. This produces a novel ‘donation theology’ and additionally serves to demonstrate the ‘asceticism’ by which all voluntary donors of body material are obliged to abide.

Violence, Non-violence, and Blood Donation in India

2008

This article explores the relationship between medical blood donation and concepts and enactments of violence and non-violence in India. The focus is on those north Indian devotional orders in the sant tradition whose devotees donate their blood in large quantities for transfusion. These orders profess a commitment to the Hindu Brahmanic and reformist tenet of non-violence (ahimsa). At the same time, their attempts to donate blood for Indian army personnel shows how blood donation can be a means to engage in military affairs ‘from a distance’. This article also demonstrates the ways in which different modes of sacrifice surface in blood donation ideology and practice. Arguing that blood donation mediates between violence and non-violence in the subcontinent, the article concludes with a related set of points concerning the ambiguous relationship between caste concepts and blood donation.

Excessifs dons de sang: Dévotion et ascétisme en Inde.

Terrain 56 (March 2011) "Analyses de sang"

En Inde, l’interdiction en 1998 des dons rémunérés a exigé des stratégies innovatrices de la part des banques de sang et des autres établissements de santé afin d’augmenter le nombre des dons de sang bénévoles. Jusqu’à présent, les campagnes n’ont pas été particulièrement fructueuses. Il existe cependant des cas de succès exemplaires : depuis quelques années, les mouvements religieux, en particulier ceux dirigés par des gourous, sont devenus des pourvoyeurs majeurs des dons de sang bénévoles à travers l’Inde. Les médecins collecteurs de sang ont habilement reconnu le pouvoir et l’intensité de la relation qui existe entre les gourous et leurs fidèles et le mobilisent à leurs propres fins. De leur côté, les fidèles utilisent le don de sang comme un moyen d’enrichir et de transformer la base empirique de leur vie religieuse. Cet article met en lumière les aspects dévotionnels et ascétiques des pratiques indiennes du don de sang et montre de quelle façon celui-ci s’est développé tel un mouvement vibrant de créativité et de dynamisme religieux.

Veinglory: Exploring Processes of Blood Transfer between Persons

2005

This article examines processes involved in blood donation and ‘blood management’ in an anthropological light. It claims that blood management is not restricted to the procedures that medical professionals employ on blood outside of bodies, but that ‘manage- ment’ practice is enforced by donors themselves onto their own internal bodily processes. It suggests that donation and transfusion centre on issues of time-management and production; concepts of temporal synchrony and investment are employed to explore the implications of this dimension of blood donation. By way of a comparison with gift- giving amongst Jains in India, this article argues for an ‘overlapping’ of – and dependency between – different economies within blood-banking processes. In examining the general processes involved in blood donation, it aims to provide the groundwork for future comparative analyses of blood-banking processes.

Blood, Blessings and Technology in India

2006

Blood component therapy is a technology designed to enhance the efficiency of distribution and accuracy of prescription of donated blood. A centrifuge machine spins whole donated blood, thereby separating it according to the relative gravity of its constituent components. These are principally red cells, platelets and plasma. The divisions of blood component therapy are held by doctors and donors alike to multiply the substance because this permits the treatment of at least three people from one donated unit of blood. Component separation is held to produce both quantitative and qualitative benefits: more patients can be treated from a single donated unit; and not only that, blood division also allows patients to be treated for the specific ailment from which they are suffering – the transfusion of a whole unit of blood, now re-perceived as three components as opposed to a single unit, would not only represent the quantitative waste of two units, it would provide patients with components that are qualitatively unnecessary for their specific condition. The re-production of blood therefore introduces a new particularism into transfusion therapy. Developed in the United States in the 1950s, the technology had become widespread in developed countries by the late 1960s. The technology requires a linked set of three blood bags (called triple bags) for the components to subsequently be separated into. Indian blood banks, however, only began to move beyond crude glass bottles and introduce PVC collection bags in the early 1980s. It has been estimated that 25% of donated blood in the country is now separated into components. In Delhi the percentage is much higher. Blood banks that do not possess this technology invariably plan to acquire it just as soon as sufficient funds become available to them. Blood separation technology may be said to be a ‘default descriptor’ of modernity and sophistication in Indian blood banking circles. According to medico-marketing campaigns, those who persist in prescribing whole blood are abject and benighted. I once heard a proselytiser of ‘componentisation’ refer to a colleague who prescribes whole blood as a thief (chor in Hindi). The prescription of whole blood ‘steals’ use-value. Advertisements which inform the public that ‘One blood donation of yours can save three lives, not just one’ point to the inadequacy of the singular. Saving only one life is insufficient, derisory.

Introduction: Blood Donation, Bioeconomy, Culture

2009

This special issue of Body & Society explores critical issues arising from enactments of blood donation and transfusion in different parts of the world. With articles focusing on Brazil, China, India, the Navajo Nation, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, the United States and elsewhere, description and analysis is presented of a modal and mobile constellation of practices and knowledges, transnational in distribution, but also situationally enacted in particular instances. What comes across is the scope of blood donation: its extraordinary emotive force, the complex methodologies it requires for the mobilization of populations, its ability to stimulate imaginative thought among diverse constituencies, its variations of transactional form, the ways in which it reproduces controversies globally. The scope of blood donation – the remarkable heterogeneity of its enactments and of the associations condensed therein – can perhaps only begin to be captured with the bringing together of such a wide-ranging set of ethnographic accounts as is presented in this special issue.

"Blood will have blood": A Study in Indian Political Ritual

2004

This article considers the significance of the incorporation of blood donation as a widespread feature of commemorative political rituals in India. It places the rituals in the context of the current campaign in India to replace paid with non-remunerated donation, and explains how this campaign has led to the circulation of a store of ethical capital that the ritual organizers endeavor—through these blood-shedding commemorations—to capture for political ends. It is argued that there is nothing purely political about memorial blood donation—that its performance relies upon certain established religious themes in order to achieve political efficacy, and that this works both ways. The article highlights the role of blood donation in facilitating bodily transactions across and between different temporal locations, and finishes with a case study that demonstrates the risk involved in these rituals of remembrance.

Sangue, benedizioni e tecnologia in India

Published in 2009 in F.Dei, M.Aria, G.L.Mancini eds., Il dono del sangue. Per un'antropologia dell'altruismo. Pisa: Pacini, pp.113-125.

Blood component therapy is a technology designed to enhance the efficiency of distribution and accuracy of prescription of donated blood. A centrifuge machine spins whole donated blood, thereby separating it according to the relative gravity of its constituent components. These are principally red cells, platelets and plasma. The divisions of blood component therapy are held by doctors and donors alike to multiply the substance because this permits the treatment of at least three people from one donated unit of blood. Component separation is held to produce both quantitative and qualitative benefits: more patients can be treated from a single donated unit; and not only that, blood division also allows patients to be treated for the specific ailment from which they are suffering – the transfusion of a whole unit of blood, now re-perceived as three components as opposed to a single unit, would not only represent the quantitative waste of two units, it would provide patients with components that are qualitatively unnecessary for their specific condition. The re-production of blood therefore introduces a new particularism into transfusion therapy. Developed in the United States in the 1950s, the technology had become widespread in developed countries by the late 1960s. The technology requires a linked set of three blood bags (called triple bags) for the components to subsequently be separated into. Indian blood banks, however, only began to move beyond crude glass bottles and introduce PVC collection bags in the early 1980s. It has been estimated that 25% of donated blood in the country is now separated into components. In Delhi the percentage is much higher. Blood banks that do not possess this technology invariably plan to acquire it just as soon as sufficient funds become available to them. Blood separation technology may be said to be a ‘default descriptor’ of modernity and sophistication in Indian blood banking circles. According to medico-marketing campaigns, those who persist in prescribing whole blood are abject and benighted. I once heard a proselytiser of ‘componentisation’ refer to a colleague who prescribes whole blood as a thief (chor in Hindi). The prescription of whole blood ‘steals’ use-value. Advertisements which inform the public that ‘One blood donation of yours can save three lives, not just one’ point to the inadequacy of the singular. Saving only one life is insufficient, derisory.

Gathering Points: Blood Donation and the Scenography of 'National Integration' in India

2009

This article explores nationalist interpretations of blood donation activity, examining how some Indians read integrative messages into the practical procedures through which blood is donated and distrib- uted. The first post-Independence Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, proclaimed the need for ‘national integration’ as a bulwark against a myriad of linguistic, caste and ethnic agitations that threatened to disrupt the unity of the newly formed nation-state. This article shows that a striking manifestation of the Nehruvian ideology of national integration possesses a compelling presence in the Indian blood donation milieu. Scholars of India have long been preoccupied with documenting attempts by the Hindu right to redefine the nation in exclusively Hindu, anti-Nehruvian terms. Questioning the prevailing assumption that the only thing that counts politically in India today is the debunking or overriding of Nehruvian ideals of the secular inclusive nation, this article rehabilitates Nehruvianism as an important ethnographic subject. In so doing it demonstrates the roles of anonymity, enumeration and an array of technical and imaginative gathering points in the formation of the ‘difference-traversing gift’. The article also highlights ways in which technology may be employed for the imagining of social diversity.