Veins of Devotion: Blood Donation and Religious Experience in North India

by Jacob Copeman

Overview

According to public health orthodoxy, blood for transfusion is safer when derived from voluntary, nonremunerated donors. As developing nations phase out compensated blood collection efforts to comply with this current policy, many struggle to keep their blood stores up.

Veins of Devotion details recent collaborations between guru-led devotional movements and public health campaigns to encourage voluntary blood donation in northern India. Focusing primarily on Delhi, Jacob Copeman carefully situates the practice within the context of religious gift-giving, sacrifice, caste, kinship, and nationalism. The book analyzes the operations of several high-profile religious orders that organize large-scale public blood-giving events and argues that blood donation has become a site not only of frenetic competition between different devotional movements, but also of intense spiritual creativity.

Despite tensions between blood banks and these religious groups, their collaboration is a remarkable success story—the nation's blood supply is replenished while blood donors discover new devotional possibilities.

Download open access ebook here.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900813544495
Publication date:	11/18/2008
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

Jacob Copeman is a research fellow at Jesus College at Cambridge University in England.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Generative Generosity
Chapter 3: The Reform of the Gift
Chapter 4: Devotion and Donation
Chapter 5: Blood Donation in the Zone of Religious Spectacles
Chapter 6: Utility Saints and Donor-Soldiers
Chapter 7: The Nehruvian Gift
Chapter 8: Conclusion
Glossary of Gurus and Organizations
References
Index
About the Author
 
 

Editorial Reviews

A very impressive achievement. Copeman quite brilliantly illuminates some of the most dramatic and important developments in contemporary Indian public life.

Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge - James Laidlaw

No book covers the same terrain or anything close to what Copemanaccomplishes with VEINS OF DEVOTION. It is an extraordinarily smart bookthat sets the standard for future work on biomoral exchange in anthropology.

University of California, Berkeley - Lawrence Cohen

Fascinating. Copeman's richly conceptualized study, in which he nimbly moves from his underlying frame of the Indian notions of gift and service to touch on a range of related topics, from national integration to Indian notions of asceticism, sacrifice, sin, and caste lucidly connects a range of Indian spiritual idioms to the seemingly unlikely, mundane context of voluntary blood donation.

Journal of Asian Studies

Veins of Devotion is a fascinating ethnography of everyday tissue exchange in urban India. For medical anthropologists, Copeman expands the dimensions of ideology, structure, and agency in bodily donation. For scholars of religion and South Asia, he provides a new venue for analyzing the shifting domains of sacred and secular in contemporary urban India. Accessibly written, this volume is eminently teachable for a graduate or upperdivision undergraduate course. It is an excellent work of scholarship.

American Ethnologist

An excellent piece of scholarship that synthesizes classic themes in theindological literature—sacrifice, gift-giving, caste, asceticism,guru/chela relationships—with the very contemporary and iconicallymodern, biomedical procedure of blood donation

University of Pittsburgh - Joseph S. Alter