This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Erwin, K. Articles by Le, P. Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Glorious Deeds: Work Unit Blood Donation and Postsocialist Desires in Urban China

Research Program Application and Review Center in the Office of Research at the University of California, kathleen.erwin{at}ucop.edu

Vincanne Adams

Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California San Francisco, adamsv{at}dahsm.ucsf.edu

Phuoc Le

Harvard Medical School, phuoc.v.le.98{at}Alum.Dartmouth.org

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.

Key Words: socialism • postsocialism • Chinese medicine • commercialization • reciprocity • consumerism

Body & Society, Vol. 15, No. 2, 51-70 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X09103437


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?