Blood Rhetorics: Donor Campaigns and Their Publics in Contemporary Sri Lanka

Abstract

In this article, I focus on an aspect of voluntary blood donation that has received relatively little attention, namely the spaces – public, moral and political – that connnect individual donors with the recipients of blood. More specifically I focus on five distinct but related modalities of blood donation – internationalism, Buddhism, familism, nationalism and anti-commercialism. These rhetorics are highly significant, yet they are often missed in accounts of the link between donor and recipient and how individuals account for and justify their actions within wider, shared imaginings of family, community and nation.

Keywords:

• Blood donation
• Sri Lanka
• bio-economies
• rhetorics
• publics

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks to Michael Carrithers, Kaushalya Kumarasinghe, Jagath Pathirage and Peter Phillimore who all made important contributions to the development of this paper, to the three anonymous reviewers who provided excellent feedback and to participants in seminars at the Universities of Durham, Edinburgh and Aberdeen at which earlier versions of the paper were presented. I would also like to express my particular thanks to Dr Ananda Gunasekera director of the Sri Lankan, National Blood Transfusion Service for permission to reproduce their advertising materials and to Mr Palitha Gunasinghe for permission to reproduce the ‘mā wani bilinda’ poster.

Notes

See http://www.wbdd.org/ and also see Valentine (2005) and Strong (2009).

Giving blood as a mark of solidarity in times of war or national crisis is a widely noted phenomenon (see, e.g. Starr 1998; Rabinow 1999:84).

For example, see the British Army website http://www.army.mod.uk/join/terms/3111.aspx (accessed 19 May 2009).

For example, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiWOrO8Lhig&feature=related (accessed 19 May 2009).