This special issue of Body & Society explores critical issues arising from enactments of blood donation and transfusion in different parts of the world. 1 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.Though it is a truism that ethnographic exploration of biotechnology in non-Western locations is necessary to forestall a situation where 'what the north thinks and feels, and how the north anguishes over the ethical issues, defines the agenda for all thought about biotechnology' (Jackson, 2002: 149-50), it remains

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.

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

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 'management' 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 giftgiving 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.

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