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 distributed. 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. (shrink)

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 distributed. 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. (shrink)

_Blood_, according to Gil Anidjar, maps the singular history of Christianity. As a category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law. Engaging with a variety of sources, Anidjar explores the presence and the absence, the making and unmaking of blood in philosophy and medicine, law and literature, and economic and political thought from (...) ancient Greece to medieval Spain, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Melville. The prevalence of blood in the social, juridical, and political organization of the modern West signals that we do not live in a secular age into which religion could return. Flowing across multiple boundaries, infusing them with violent precepts that we must address, blood undoes the presumed oppositions between religion and politics, economy and theology, and kinship and race. It demonstrates that what we think of as modern is in fact imbued with Christianity. Christianity, Blood fiercely argues, must be reconsidered beyond the boundaries of religion alone. (shrink)

Ethical reflection on the justice/injustice of past public health policy can inform current and future policy creation and assessment. For eight years in the 1980s, Haitians were prohibited from donating blood in the USA due to their national origin, a supposed risk factor for AIDS. This case study underlines the racial stereotypes and cultural ignorance at play in risk assignment—which simultaneously marked Haitians as risky ‘others’ and excluded them as significant participants in policy-making. This article also discerns Haitian understandings (...) of justice related to this donor policy and explores how dimensions of this past policy relate to current blood donor policy. (shrink)

Although excess blood collection has characterized U.S. national disasters, most dramatically in the case of September 11, periodic shortages of blood have recurred for decades. In response, I propose a new model of medical philanthropy, one that specifically uses charitable contributions to health care as blood donation incentives. I explain how the surge in blood donations following 9/11 was both transient and disaster-specific, failing to foster a greater continuing commitment to donate blood. This underscores the (...) importance of considering blood donation incentives. I defend charitable incentives as an alternative to financial incentives, which I contend would further extend neoliberal market values into health care. I explain my model's potential appeal to private foundations or public–private partnerships as a means for expanding both the pool of blood donors and the prosocial benefit of each act of blood donation. Finally I link my analysis to the empirical literature on blood donation incentives. (shrink)

It is increasingly suggested that shortages in the supply chain for human blood could be met by the development of techniques to manufacture human blood ex vivo. These techniques fall broadly under the umbrella of synthetic biology. We examine the biopolitical context surrounding the ex vivo culture of red blood cells through the linked concepts of alienation, immunity, bio-value and biosecuritization. We engage with diverse meanings of synthetic blood, and questions about how the discourses of biosecurity (...) and privatization of risk are linked to claims that the technology will address unmet needs and promote social justice. Through our discussion we contrast communitarian ideas that culturing red blood cells ‘extends the gift’ of adult blood donation with understandings of the immunitary logics that underpin the cord-blood economy. (shrink)

In the first half of the twentieth century the attention of American and European researchers was drawn to the area of ‘extreme physiology’, partly because of expeditions to the north and south poles, and to high altitude, but also by global conflicts which were fought for the first time with aircraft, and involved conflict in non-temperate zones, deserts, and at the freezing Eastern front. In an attempt to help white Euro-Americans survive in extreme environments, physiologists, anthropologists, and explorers studied indigenous (...) people’s bodies, cultures, and technologies. This paper will sketch an outline of the science of white survival in three ‘extreme’ environments: the Antarctic and Arctic; high-altitude; and the Australian desert, with a particular focus on the ways in which indigenous populations were studied, or in some cases ignored, by Western biomedical scientists—despite their crucial and systematic contributions to the success of experiments and expeditions. Particularly focusing on altitude, and on blood in both its symbolic and literal sense, the article shows how assumptions about race, indigeneity, civilisation, and evolution shaped the ways White Westerners understood their own bodies as well as those of the people they encountered in cold, high and hot places on the earth. Despite new discoveries in physiology and evolutionary science, old racialised assumptions were maintained, especially those that figured the temperate body as civilised and the tropical body as primitive; and in at least one case it will be shown that these racialised assumptions significantly altered, if not retarded, the science of respiratory physiology. (shrink)

In Beyond Blood Identities, Jason D. Hill presents a bold defense of a form of cosmopolitanism according to which only individual persons—not cultures, races, or ethic groups—are the bearers of rights and the possessors of an inviolable status worthy of respect.

In Beyond Blood Identities, Jason D. Hill presents a bold defense of a form of cosmopolitanism according to which only individual persons_not cultures, races, or ethic groups_are the bearers of rights and the possessors of an inviolable status worthy of respect.

Summary Historians have devoted little attention to blood transfusion in the nineteenth century. In part, this neglect reflects the presentist assumption that, before Karl Landsteiner's discovery of blood types, this practice would have failed too often to gain currency. Yet, transfusion was in fact the subject of much debate, and was actively practised, primarily by obstetricians on haemorrhaging women. Examining this practice through the conceptual lens of ‘blood clots’, both as noun and as observation, I follow transfusors’ (...) assumptions about the nature of the blood and the problem of its coagulation. Tracing the medicalization of ideas about blood by the century's end, I map this shift onto changing notions about why transfusion was performed, what substance was best employed, and what instrument best fitted that substance's movement into the circulation. In this way, ‘Blood Clots’ reconstructs the discourse surrounding transfusion, extending that discourse to material culture in order to illuminate the rationale that guided transfusion's practice in nineteenth-century Britain. (shrink)

Introduction -- Moral reasoning from a cosmopolitan perspective : the problem of culture -- Culturalism and moral reasoning -- Towards a moral conceptual base of culture -- Cosmopolitanism : a definition and the question of tolerance -- Who owns culture : a moral cosmopolitan inquiry -- Culture-faith : the mystification of culture -- Culture-faith applied : cultural privacy and the ownership of native culture -- Counter arguments against applied culture faith : the right to cultural privacy -- Representation without authorization (...) -- Who has the right to speak for whom? -- Ethnocide or culture killings : is it so bad? -- Dismantling the tribes from within : modernization and the capabilities approach -- Moral culture is public culture : cosmopolitanism and culture warfare -- Sylvia Plath : daddy and the creation of moral culture -- Moral incommensurability and the clash of cultures -- The anatomy of anti-assimilationism and the logic of contagion -- The cult of death and the worship of ancestry : the genesis of group arcissism -- The psychopathology of tribalism : an exposé -- The tribalist as moral appropriator -- Symbolic ethnicity -- Ethnic vs. ethnic : the problem of definition -- Tribalism, untouchability, and human slime -- The art of symbolic necrophilia -- Imagistic and emblematic representations : tribal epistemology and the impossibility of knowing the other -- Moral masochism and Black identity : a tragic tale -- Jim in Africa -- Theorizing post humanity : radical inclusion, Jews as the chosen people, and the identity politics of St. Paul -- Laissez-faire existential engagement -- Post human in the flesh : Jews and the fragility of chosennes -- How God became a cosmopolitan -- The identity politics of St. Paul. (shrink)

Irigaray turns to Merleau-Ponty's intuitions about the perception of color to develop her own insights into the creative emergence of sexuate identity. As a quality of the flesh, color cannot be reduced to formal codes. The privileging of word and text inherent to Western culture suppresses the coming into being of the embodied subject in his or her own situated context. Color, tied as it is to a corporeal creativity could provide an important link since it facilitates reflection, and a (...) re-enfleshing through color of a differentiated sexuate identity tied to the imagination as well as to genetic identity. (shrink)

Blood supplies have become indexes of national security and the public good. While blood shortages can provoke anxiety, controversies continue to erupt in many countries over proper donor screening, especially with reference to HIV. This article sketches these dynamics in several global settings, focusing especially on activist efforts by gay men to reform exclusionary blood donor guidelines. The contours of the debate recall familiar conflicts between the putative demands of public health and the rights of individuals in (...) the era of AIDS. However, if gay activists marshal a discourse of individual rights vis-a-vis forms of institutional exclusion, they also seek a broader shift in social and cultural understandings of gay identity. To capture this complex interplay of citizenship and sociality, risk and responsibility, the article introduces the notion of `vital publics' to refer to the peculiar associational form represented by blood supplies. Vital publics are kinds of embodied association elicited through the generalized exchange of body — in this case, blood. Hailed to `give life' by the jargon of the pervasive social marketing of varied blood service systems, activists seek to contribute to the life of the `vital public' that transfusion medicine calls into being. (shrink)

Liana Badr's The Eye of the Mirror explores the historical trauma of the 1975–6 siege of the Palestinian refugee camp Tal el–Zaatar in Beirut and the massacre of thousands of its inhabitants by Christian militias. Analogous to Holocaust writing, Badr's fictionalized history, grounded in actual survivor testimonies, enacts a complex politics of cultural memory, but does so from a specifically female perspective. Collapsing the personal and political, private and public, inside and outside through figured violations of bodies and psyches, Badr (...) repositions women at the centre of the Palestinians’ struggle for and story of survival. Badr's novel traces the annihilation of the possibility of address, accompanied by self–loss and the ability to witness, and the laborious recreation of address. Claiming authority on the basis of the emotional, visceral truth of suffering, she seeks to break the endless cycle of an oppressive and impotent masculine history, constructing an alternative history which at least attempts to address the voice of cultural, national, and gender difference. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE BODY AND THE BLOOD: SACRIFICIAL EXPULSION IN A UREVOIR LES ENFANTS Diana Culbertson Kent State University In Scene 6 ofthe screenplay ofAu Revoir Les Enfants the students are at morning Mass and Father Jean is reading the Gospel: "Truly, truly, I say unto you, unless you eat the flesh ofthe Son ofMan and drink his blood, you will have no life in you." A student with (...) the curiously ironic name of Boulanger ("baker") faints. François comments to his younger brother Julien, "There's nothing to eat... we can't have breakfast before communion." In the back of chapel sit three new students—Bonnet and two other Jewish boys disguised as Christians, protected from the Gestapo by the monks, but prohibited because of their religious identity from Eucharistie communion. Food as scarcity, as plenitude, and as life functions as the signifier ofvalue and of every victim in Louis Malle's unforgettable portrayal of the loss of innocence in the occupied France ofhis childhood. Access to food was access to life in community—both religious and political—and the exchange offood, for what could not be consumed, plunges the small school society into its death. The cause ofthe dissolution of the school society is a failed sacrifice. The farewell to childhood which the title ofthe film suggests is Julien's entry into the world ofviolence and victims, ofmimetic rivalry, ofsacrificial expulsion, and societal destruction. The angle ofperception (Julien Quentin is Malle's quasi-autobiographical alter-ego) lures viewers out their own innocence and shocks theater audiences once again with the implications of all Final Solutions. Three concentric levels identify the communities in dissolution represented in Malle's portrayal: France under the occupying military force, the school administrators and staff, and the pupils in their charge. At each level the Diana Culbertson47 mimetic conflict is at a different state ofsocietal crisis. At the highest level, the German occupation troops and their collaborators represent a moment of Violence Triumphant, a Monstrous divinity who can impose control over the group by terrorizing everyone. This persecutory violence, which has co-opted the judicial system, drives the community of French people into (at least outward) submission and passivity. When the Monster requires victims, the community must consent to offer them. The persecutor's need for victims in this film has its own demonic rationale: "... to rid France of strangers, of Jews," says Müller, the Gestapo officer in one of the final scenes. When persecutory violence is resisted, however, when someone refuses to offer the designatedvictim for expulsion, the unity ofthe submissive society dissolves. Those who will not conform may suffer the violence of those who find their private well being in an alliance with public persecution. Father Jean, director ofthe school where Malle's scenario takes place, is one ofthe instruments ofresistance. Only the other instructors and staff are aware ofhis activities in the French underground. The audience is admitted to his dangerous secret, even as it observes the contrasting immaturity of the students, especially Julien, who cannot bear to leave his mother and is still wetting his bed. When he asks his older brother, "What is a Jew?" he is given the alimentary explanation: "Someone who doesn't eat pork." In this cultural situation, the Jew is more frequently someone who doesn't eat. Quentin's half truth is only one side ofa more ominous reality. Father Jean, aware of that reality, first appears in the film to introduce Bonnet, the "new classmate" and to show the boy his dormitory bed. As the director leaves, the schoolboys display their own societal dynamics, resuming their customary internecine, frenzied battles and rivalries. They throw pillows; they mock the outsider, focusing their ridicule on his name. Later in a classroom scene, they will hiss, "Dubo, Dubon, Dubonnet...."—an apt thematic detail with its allusion to wine and its liturgical translation into blood. In the morning Boulanger leads the attack against the stranger, slipping an icicle behind Bonnet's shirt collar. At recess games disintegrate into private quarrels. Their small brutal society is a microcosm of the larger world of which the schoolboys are apparently innocent but which they are grooming themselves to live in without remorse... (shrink)

Miranda Fricker identifies a form of injustice she calls “hermeneutical injustice”. She argues that each culture has a stock of shared meanings that its members can use to describe their experience. Cultures are made up of different social groups, with uneven relations of power between them. In some cases, a culture’s shared meanings will reflect the experiences of more powerful groups, and be a poor fit for the experiences of less powerful members, who are subsequently disadvantaged. This is what (...) Fricker calls “hermeneutical injustice”. Here, I argue that her account faces a serious difficulty: it relies on two intuitions about the source of hermeneutical injustice that are in tension with one another, and which cannot be made consistent within her framework. Consequently, her account is both too restrictive and too permissive. (shrink)

What personal truths reside in biological ties that are absent in adoptive ties? And why do we think adoptive and biological ties are essentially different when it comes to understanding who we are? At a time when interest in DNA and ancestry is exploding, Frances Latchford questions the idea that knowing one's bio-genealogy is integral to personal identity or a sense of family and belonging. Upending our established values and beliefs about what makes a family, Steeped in Blood examines (...) the social and political devaluation of adoptive ties. It takes readers on an intellectual journey through accepted wisdom about adoption, twins, kinship, and incest, and challenges our naturalistic and individualistic assumptions about identity and the biological ties that bind us, sometimes violently, to our families. Latchford exposes how our desire for bio-genealogical knowledge, understood as it is by family and adoption experts, pathologizes adoptees by posing the biological tie as a necessary condition for normal identity formation. Rejecting the idea that a love of the self-same is fundamental to family bonds, her book is a reaction to the wounds families suffer whenever they dare to revel in their difference. A rejoinder to rhetoric that defines adoptees, adoptive kin, and their family intimacies as inferior and inauthentic, Steeped in Blood's view through the lens of critical adoption studies decentres our cultural obsession with the biological family imaginary and makes real the possibility of being family in the absence of blood. (shrink)

John Cleland’s 1740s pornographic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure repeatedly depicts and eroticises the act of defloration. As such it is a revealing illustration of what Ivan Bloch termed the ‘defloration mania’ of the eighteenth century. This article maps narrative events on to contemporary medical depictions of first intercourse to show the ways that the theories and ideas presented in medical and pseudo-medical texts transferred into erotic fiction and demonstrates how in some instances the bloody defloration scenes can (...) be read as being sex during menstruation, an act which was culturally forbidden at this time. (shrink)

With advances in medical technology, the potential uses for human blood have proliferated, and in turn, so has the demand for blood. Blood and blood products circulate in a medical marketplace as a `good' that can be bought and sold to meet various health and commercial demands. Nevertheless, its point of origin — or `production' — remains the individual human body, and reliance on voluntary blood donation remains a cornerstone for meeting this growing market demand. (...) This article examines the contradictions surrounding blood donation in the ethnographic context of contemporary urban China. Specifically, it focuses on both how the circulation of blood outside the individual body interfaces with its circulation in the Chinese social body, and how individual Chinese conceptualize their acts of donation in this process. In ethnographic interviews for this project, many urbanites describe donation as both voluntary and as meeting a social obligation. Yet their donation practices remain structured by meeting work unit quotas and are compensated with monetary and food donations and paid time off. Their descriptions of the mechanisms for motivating and compensating donors echo the socialist calls for contributing to society's greater good typical of the Maoist era propaganda. These descriptions highlight the complexities of sociocultural change in what has come to be described in much of the literature as a `postsocialist' Chinese society characterized by a burgeoning consumer culture and increasing emergence of individual autonomy. Our interviews suggest that the socialist workplace remains a critical social and economic structure in China through which workers' production is transformed into a social `good'. This transformation originates within the individual bodies of workers (not on the factory floor) and is extracted through exhortations to contribute to better society via the work unit and one's obligations to the work unit. Rather than a shift to individual autonomy and self-improvement, or a re-emergence of traditional values — both of which have been described as hallmarks of the postsocialist era — this process highlights the role that the socialist work unit plays in defining Chinese citizenship, consumer culture and embodied desires. (shrink)

Feminist analysis of cultural mythology surrounding organ donation offers a critical perspective on current U.S. transplant policy. My argument is three-pronged. First, I argue that organ donation is appropriately understood as a sacrifice. Structurally, donation accords both to general and to specifically Christian archetypes of sacrifice. The characterization of donation as sacrifice resonates in the cultural psyche even though it is absent in public rhetoric. Second, I characterize widespread feminist concerns about the over-glorification of sacrifice. These concerns provide a helpful (...) framework for considering whether the sacrifice of organ donation is over-glorified in our culture. Third, I consider several specific aspects of organ recruitment and organ allocation. Each demonstrates an over-glorification of sacrifice that leads to a dangerous "routinization" of sacrifice. None of these excesses are addressable without due attention to the symbolic import of organ donation and transplantation. I close by suggesting lessons my analysis offers to Christian churches who support donation, to the discourse of bioethics, and to the general public. (shrink)

This article contributes to our understanding of the rise and nature of French anti-slavery thought through a close analysis of ‘Observations sur les Négres esclaves’, an essay written by Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Fusée-Aublet and published in his Histoire des plantes de la Guiane françoise. A botanist, Fusée-Aublet worked in the Isle de France and French Guiana during the 1750s and 1760s in service to the Compagnie des Indes. A close comparison of a surviving draft and the published essay shows how he drew (...) on his observations of colonial slavery, east and west; how he responded to contemporary intellectual currents and publications critical of slavery; and how he modified his draft for publication to satisfy the expectations of a metropolitan audience. Reflecting the influence of Rousseau, both versions combined a withering critique of French empire with a spirited, quasi-ethnographic defence of the moral character and culture of Africans. After detailing his travels and the evolution of his antipathy to slavery, the article details how Fusée-Aublet combined sentimental and economic arguments to craft an essay whose themes engaged with larger debates over luxury and political economy, citizenship and patriotism. (shrink)

In this essay I argue for the role of positive, community-based black identities in the creation and maintenance of black solidarity. I argue against Tommie Shelby’s attempts to reduce the notion of black identity as it relates to solidarity from something social or cultural to something entirely political—“thin” black identity. As an alternative, I propose a model for the relationship between “thin” and “thicker” identities based on Rawls’ contention that the stability of overlapping political consensus isproduced by different groups’ adherence (...) to, rather than denial of, a plurality of comprehensive doctrines. I also discuss the benefits of positive, community-based black identities in terms of “black love” and show why, even if not possessed by each and every black American, such identities are ultimately indispensible to any black solidarity project. (shrink)

Background Residual dried blood spots (rDBS) from newborn screening programmes represent a valuable resource for medical research, from basic sciences, through clinical to public health. In Hong Kong, there is no legislation for biobanking. Parents’ view on the retention and use of residual newborn blood samples could be cultural-specific and is important to consider for biobanking of rDBS. Objective To study the views and concerns on long-term storage and secondary use of rDBS from newborn screening programmes among Hong (...) Kong Chinese parents. Methods A mixed-method approach was used to study the views and concerns on long-term storage and secondary use of rDBS from newborn screening programmes among Hong Kong Chinese parents of children 0–3 years or expecting parents through focus groups (8 groups; 33 participants) and a survey (n = 1012, 85% mothers) designed with insights obtained from the focus groups. We used framework analysis to summarise the themes as supportive factors, concerns and critical arguments for retention and secondary use of rDBS from focus group discussion. We used multiple logistic regression to assess factors associated with support for retention and secondary use of rDBS in the survey. Results Both in focus groups and survey, majority of parents were not aware of the potential secondary use of rDBS. Overall secondary use of rDBS in medical research was well accepted by a large proportion of Hong Kong parents, even if all potential future research could not be specified in a broad consent. However parents were concerned about potential risks of biobanking rDBS including leaking of data and mis-use of genetic information. Parents wanted to be asked for permission before rDBS are stored and mainly did not accept an “opt-out” approach. The survey showed that parents born in mainland China, compared to Hong Kong born parents, had lower awareness of newborn screening but higher support in biobanking rDBS. Higher education was associated with support in rDBS biobanking only among fathers. Conclusion Long-term storage and secondary use of rDBS from newborn screening for biomedical research and a broad consent for biobanking of rDBS are generally acceptable to Hong Kong parents given their autonomy is respected and their privacy is protected, highlighting the importance of an accountable governance and a transparent access policy for rDBS biobanks. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the heuristic value of the concept of ethics of complexity, chaos, and contingency by applying its framework to the analysis of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Everyday human moral choices are outcomes of a moral impulse, and such an impulse is grounded in moral competence shaped by moral literacy. This literacy is constructed on the basis of a body of knowledge of culture, social context, environment, and the universe. It also includes the knowledge of religions and religious (...) and secular ethical codes. I also distinguish between the social and cultural aspects of ethical systems. Both societies and cultures provide resources and constraints for the development of literacy and competence. An intentionally developed multifaith and multidisciplinary coalition may help us move away from various forms of social speciation and toward sociological mindfulness. This could help us remake the world into one that has more courage to care. (shrink)

The Anger of Achilles, Robert Graves’ 1959 translation of Homer’s Iliad, has been variously dismissed by classical scholars as an ‘outrageous sortie into the field of translation’ and a work of ‘sheer egotism’, marred by its author’s ‘scattered yapping’. And yet, it can be read with greater understanding if we approach it not merely as a literary anomaly, but as a refraction of Graves’ experience of ‘Shell Shock,’ or PTSD, following his front line service during the First World War. This (...) paper proposes that the act of translation can itself be cathartic, creating a formalized textual space in which the translation of traumatic memory into narrative memory becomes viable, and that Graves used Homer’s epic as a tool to access his own occluded, traumatic past. By comparing The Anger of Achilles to R. Lattimore’s relatively literal translation of the Iliad, it will illuminate the ways in which the former is deeply rooted in Graves’s experience of combat, his ensuing neurasthenia, and the personal Myth by which he made sense of both – the matriarchal mythopoetics of The White Goddess. (shrink)

This chapter interrogates Hollywood film as a powerful public pedagogical machine and as an influential component of the broader media culture, that serves as a primary terrain where the authority of violence and the violence of authority expresses, justifies, and legitimates itself in the U.S. Allegiances to, identifications with, beliefs in, desires for, and attitudes about violence, authority, militarism, and power are largely constructed, imbued, directed and shaped through dominant media formations as they create images and spectacles of violence, either (...) real or fabricated. During a time of continuing imperial aggression, expanding Pentagon budgets, increased international violence, growing authoritarian tendencies, and when an “imperially ambitious” United States has embarked on what Anatole Lieven calls a policy of “unilateral global domination through absolute military superiority,” the inculcation into the mass consciousness of the justification for, identification with, acceptance and pursuit of mass violence through military aggression becomes all the more crucial. (shrink)

I begin and conclude the article by arguing that culturalisation has contributed significantly to the decline of the Left and its universal ideals. In the current climate of public opinion, ‘race’ is no longer used, at least openly, as a scientific truth to justify racism. Instead, ‘culture’ has become the mysterious term that has made the perpetuation of racist discourse possible. ‘Culture’, in this newracist worldview, is the unquestioned set of traits continually attributed to the non-White Other, essentially to de-world (...) her Being and de-individualise her personhood. In other words, ‘culture’, as it is used in the old anthropological sense, is the magic incantation with which the Other is demonised, mystified, and/or ridiculously oversimplified. I focus on the phenomenon of ‘culturalisation’ as a common new-racist method of de-politicising the Other’s affairs and surrounding socio-political phenomena. The article is an attempt to discredit the paradigm of ‘culture’ as a pseudo-concept used commonly in cultural racism. This cultural racism routinely assumes ‘culture’ to be a natural given almost exactly as the pseudo-scientific paradigm ‘race’ was (and is still) used in some discourses of biological racism. If mentality X attributes categorical differences to different groups of people based on A and A is assumed to be natural, ahistorical, and/or metaphysical, then X is a racist mentality. Obviously, A does not have to be skin-color or ‘blood’ in order for X to be racist. (shrink)

Blood is now essential for a widening repertoire of therapies and with this comes new forms of regulation and governmentality focused on the collection, use and storage of blood. Here blood begins to lose its `natural' underpinnings as it is drawn into the realms of the synthetic and the scientific. However, this change in theoretical lens obscures the ways that, in practice, constructing a `modern' blood compatible with the demands of the global biopolis is elided with (...) prosaic uses of blood donation that convey powerful cultural and political messages at the local level. In a setting where, in recent decades, war, violence and the threat of social disintegration have been woven into the project of development and modernity, attempts at an alignment, or what might be characterized as the haemato-global assemblage, reveal significant tensions. The main one that I explore in this article is that between the aspiration to create an international blood donation service in which ideas of citizens and national solidarity are articulated through freely and altruistically gifted blood on the one hand and, on the other, the more potent and symbolically loaded ideas of blood, which come to the fore when connection and identity are threatened. (shrink)

Whilst there have been serious attempts to locate the practice of male circumcision for religious motives in the context of the (respective) religion's narrative and community, the debate, when referring to a clinical context, is often more nuanced. This article will contribute further to the debate by contextualising the Islamic practice of male circumcision within the clinical setting typical of a contemporary hospital. It specifically develops an additional complication; namely, the child has a pre-existing blood disorder. As an approach (...) to contributing to the circumcision debate further, the ethics of a conscientious objection for secular motives towards a religiously-motivated clinical intervention will be explored. Overall, the discussion will provide relevance for such debates within the value-systems of a multi-cultural society. This article replicates several approaches to deconstructing a request for conscientious refusal of non-therapeutic circumcision by a Clinical Ethics Committee (CEC), bringing to light certain contradictions that occur in normatively categorizing motives for performing the circumcision. (shrink)

Our society currently faces many complex and perplexing issues related to biotechnology, including the need to define the outer boundaries of genetic research on human beings and the need to protect individual and group rights to human tissue and the knowledge gained from the study of that tissue. Scientists have increasingly become interested in studying so-called “population isolates” to discover the nature and location of genes that are unique to particular groups. Indigenous peoples are often targeted by scientists because “the (...) relative isolation of the communities ensures minimal gene flow.” Such studies raise a number of issues related to privacy rights, property rights, informed consent, and group rights versus individual rights. These issues recently came to light in a case brought by the Havasupai Tribe and its members over the use of blood samples, handprints, and genealogy information initially taken by researchers at Arizona State University for a diabetes project. These materials were then allegedly used by researchers at ASU and other institutions for a multitude of unauthorized purposes, including research into the frequency of mental health disorders and the origin of human populations. Consequently, the affected members sued for damages under several legal theories. However, underlying all of these claims was the allegation that this unauthorized use of genetic resources and data not only injured the individuals who gave samples, but also caused a collective harm to the Havasupai Tribe and the cultural and spiritual beliefs of its members. (shrink)

Medical researchers must continue to develop and test non-blood oxygen-transport products. Resources provided by the Jehovah's Witness Hospital Assistance Line must be consulted. Sickle cell researchers must continue to test non-blood treatment. Information about non-blood treatments must be disbursed. Ways to enhance parental comport as the laws further and further support children's best interest must be provided. Information regarding cultural diversity must be disseminated. Hospitals and healthcare agencies that have not done so must institute the use of (...) ethics consulting or ethics committees. Nurse ethicists must continue development of the role of educating staff; mediation, arbitration and negotiation; problem solving; obtaining legal opinion; providing patient, family, or staff advocacy; and helping to reduce suffering on the part of the providers. Difficult ethical decisions should continue to be debated.Were the staff at X Med Center correct in overriding parental wishes and breaking tenets of their faith? In the doctor's, nurse's lawyer's, and judge's view they were. The child, now eight years old, is alive and well. The stroke resolved, and imminent death averted. The parents' and child's views are not presently available. Whether the family is suffering from the child's loss of his relationship with God, or are secretly relieved in their hearts that they are not, like Rita Swan, mourning their dead son, is unknown. What is known, is that this was a difficult case for all involved, and that such cases will continue to present themselves in the future. (shrink)

This article examines the intercultural context of issues related to genetic research on Native peoples. In particular, the article probes the disconnect between Western and indigenous concepts of property, ownership, and privacy, and examines the harms to Native peoples that may arise from unauthorized uses of blood and tissue samples or the information derived from such samples. The article concludes that existing legal and ethical frameworks are inadequate to address Native peoples' rights to their genetic resources and suggests an (...) intercultural framework for accommodation based on theories of intergroup equality and fundamental human rights. (shrink)

The article describes the way in which law-related events are represented in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Based on a narrative analysis, the paper will posit that In Cold Blood played a particular role in originating and shaping an innovative mode of representing law-related events, a mode that was widely employed since, in various artistic mediums and in popular culture. As the paper further elaborates, Capote’s work paved new ways for challenging the conventional boundaries between “reality” and “fiction” (...) with regard to the representation of law-related events. The paper will also maintain that in addition to its contribution to the law and literature discourse, In Cold Blood can be also seen as an early prototype to the digital legal spectacles that are now common. Revisiting In Cold Blood reveals not only its standing as originating model of many present-day cultural representations of the legal system in action, but also the essential difference between the almost unrestrainedly produced digital law-related content, to a artistic enterprise, characterized by poetic distinctiveness. (shrink)

In June 1931, on the eve of the invasion of Manchuria, the Japanese mass media announced the winner of the first Miss Nippon contest. Applicants were limited to rank amateurs whose photographs, and not bodies, were judged by a panel of mostly elderly men who regarded the contest as `culture work'. A second contest was held in 1934. One of the main objectives of the Miss Nippon contests was to locate and record photographically, young women whose allegedly `pure blood' (...) and ideal bodily proportions demonstrated the success of eugenics and social hygiene programs launched decades earlier. Japan's imperialist aggression in Asia and the Pacific forms the backdrop to this study on the centrality of popular cultural events and media in the state's attempt to improve the `Japanese race' through technologies of eugenics and social hygiene. The article explores the politics of blood, body and beauty, three interrelated subjects, framed by the Miss Nippon contests, that were common to the colonial project and the discourse of eugenics alike. (shrink)

According to biomedical discourse, cord blood has been transformed from ‘waste’ to ‘clinical gold’ because of its potential for use in treatments. Private cord blood banks deploy clinical discourse to market their services to prospective parents, encouraging them to pay to bank cord blood as a form of ‘biological insurance’ to ensure their child’s future health. Social scientists have examined new forms of (bio)value produced in biological materials emergent with contemporary biotechnologies. This paper contributes to this literature (...) by examining the social and technical production of value in cord blood units collected for private banking. Value, in this paper is defined as a socio-cultural concept in which an object is made meaningful, or valuable, through its relations with social actors and within specific regimes of value. I draw on in-depth interviews with women who banked cord blood and key informants in private banks in Canada, to analyze how social actors produced cord blood as a valuable biological object. I show that a cord blood unit holds promissory value for women who bank and profit value for private banks and that these values are folded into each other and the biological material itself. Analyzing how specific cord blood units are made valuable provides insight into the multiple and possibly competing values of biological materials and the tensions that may arise between social actors and forms of knowledge during the valuing process. (shrink)

Sun Yat-Sen was a Chinese philosopher and politician, who served as the provisional first president of the Republic of China, and first leader of the Kuomintang. He argued that common blood, language, customs, religion and livelihood were the five essential elements that constituted a nation. Sun was influenced by social Darwinism in his understanding that socio-cultural forces could override the innate characteristics of race. Thus, he employed racially defined nationalism by invoking anti-Manchuism. Although China’s modernisation in the first decades (...) of the 20th century was attributed to Sen, this paper shows that his insistence on the consanguine Han race produced inconsistencies, as his racially defined nationalism and republicanism were mutually exclusive, the latter being based on the inclusion of all citizens regardless of their ethnic background. Indeed, modern nations are constituted by both naturally inherited and culturally acquired qualities of the people. Since China consists of many ethnic groups, Sen’s emphasis on consanguine Chinese race has produced a racially exclusionary nation and has caused racial conflict. (shrink)

Italian Life sciences in post-WWII faced important challenges: the reconstruction of a scientific panorama suffering heavily after two decades of Fascism and the damages of war. Modernization was not only a matter of recreating a favorable environment for research, by modernizing Italian biomedical institutions and connecting the Italian scientists with the new ideas coming from abroad. The introduction of new genetics required a new array of concepts and instruments, but also, the ability to connect to international networks and to become (...) active members of a broader scientific community. Because of the several socio-cultural issues involved (eugenics, racism, religion, politics), human genetics is a good case study in order to analyze how Italian life sciences managed the transition towards a new research system, and the influences Italian human geneticists received. The paper focuses primarily on the development of the early career of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, probably the most prominent scientist in post-WWII human genetics in Italy, and his friend and colleague Ruggero Ceppellini. In following their path, a healthy mix of local traditions and international stimuli emerges, allowing for the establishment—within and beyond national borders—of the discipline. (shrink)

Tempuutn Senarikng is one Indonesian mythical folklore telling the origins of humans in the Dayak Benuaq and Tunjung tribal communities. This research aims to represent the cultural values in Tempuutn Senarikng. This study is qualitative research using an ethnographic approach and interactive model data analysis techniques. The results show that Tempuutn Senarikng contains cultural values of the Dayak Benuaq and Tunjung tribal communities explaining that (1) the nature of the Dayak Benuaq and Tunjung people’s life is to try to avoid (...) being cursed by praying and performing ceremonial rituals. (2) The nature of the work of the Dayak Benuaq and Tunjung tribes is oriented to being a living. The work commonly carried out by the Dayak Benuaq and Tunjung people is farming. (3) Human nature in space and time is oriented to the future so what they do now will also have an impact on the future. However, they do not forget the past as part of life lessons. Therefore, they always make offerings in the form of sacrificial animal blood and cooked food in every ceremony to be grateful for what they have obtained in life, to avoid disaster, and to facilitate all hopes. (4) The nature of human relations with nature is by always maintaining harmony. They always conduct various ceremonial activities to get rid of disturbing spirits from human life, and vice versa, they are always accompanied by good spirits. In other words, the folklore of Tempuutn Senarikng is the forerunner of the traditions and culture of the Dayak Benuaq and Tunjung tribal communities continuing to be undertaken to this day.Contribution: The article results can be used in scientific research in verbal literature, folklore, and ethnology fields. (shrink)

The following article analyzes two novels, published recently by a new, powerful voice in Irish fiction, Lisa McInerney: her critically acclaimed debut The Glorious Heresies (2015) and its continuation The Blood Miracles (2017). McInerney’s works can be distinguished by the crucial qualities of the Irish Noir genre. The Glorious Heresies and The Blood Miracles are presented from the perspective of a middle-aged “right-rogue” heroine, Maureen Phelan. Due to her violent and law-breaking revenge activities, such as burning down the (...) institutions signifying Irishwomen’s oppression (i.e. the church and a former brothel) and committing an involuntary murder, Maureen remains a multi-dimensional rogue character, not easily definable or even identifiable. The focal character’s narrative operates around the abuse of unmarried, young Irish mothers of previous generations who were coerced to give up their “illegitimate” children for adoption and led a solitary existence away from them. The article examines other “options” available to “fallen women” (especially unmarried mothers) in Ireland in the mid-twenty century, such as the Magdalene Laundries based on female slave work, and sending children born “out of wedlock” abroad, or to Mother and Baby Homes with high death-rates. Maureen’s rage and her need for retaliation speak for Irish women who, due to the Church-governed moral code, were held in contempt both by their families and religious authorities. As a representative of the Irish noir genre, McInerney’s fiction depicts the narrative of “rogue” Irish motherhood in a non-apologetic, ironic, irreverent and vengeful manner. (shrink)

Long since forgotten, Walter Flex's war-time novel The Wanderer Between the Two Worlds was one of the most popular publications during the First World War and, indeed, one of the best selling German novels in the 20th-century. While Flex's novel contributed to the sacrificial and nationalistic discourse that dominated the spiritual mobilization of German writers and intellectuals during the war, the aim of this paper is to revisit Flex’s exemplary novel in order to outline a new matrix of intelligibility for (...) an understanding of the discourse of sacrifice during the First World War. Although the focus here remains on Flex’s Der Wanderer and its German context of nationalism, this proposed analysis serves as a case-study of sacrificial discourse within the broader horizon of the relations between sacrificial discourse, the secular religious enterprise of nationalism, and the shaping of political affects. As this paper seeks to demonstrate, couched within an ideological mythologization of the experience of war, Flex’s novel nonetheless contains anthropological and cultural insights into the tenacity of sacrificial discourse for nationalism and modern social solidarity. (shrink)

I propose this account of community formation, which finds bodies, ungraspable difference and the expression of meaning inextricably linked, in order to address a neglect of the sociality of the body in current models of community. That neglect, I submit, explains why some models of community, while keen to promote multiculturalism and tolerance of difference, can tend toward the opposite. This is true of communitarianism and related models that would base community on the commonality of meaning and unity of identity. (...) Against the emphasis on individualism in liberal political theory, communitarians understand community to be built through shared practices, dialogue, common social meanings and traditions, and on the interrelation, mutual recognition, and knowledge of the other as derived from a Hegelian notion of identity formation. (shrink)

In this issue, Ahmadi1 reports on the practice of hymenoplasty—a surgical intervention meant to restore a presumed physical marker of virginity prior to a woman's marriage. As Mehri and Sills2 have stated, these women ‘want to ensure that blood is spilled on their wedding night sheets.’ Although Ahmadi's research was carried out in Iran specifically, this surgery is becoming increasingly popular in a number of Western countries as well, especially among Muslim populations.3 What are the ethics of hymen restoration?Consider (...) the role of the physician. Two of the doctors interviewed by Ahmadi reported being in ‘a perpetual state of guilt because of the surgery's inherent aim at deceiving the groom’ and noted their ‘personal conflict’ at being involved in this deception. Yet: "None of the doctors believed that the surgery was unethical, arguing that the girl could be ‘abused’ and ‘can even die’ if she is discovered not … ". (shrink)