How does the symbolic power of blood and its naturalizing capacities contribute to the emotional persuasiveness of political ritual and rhetoric? Blood donation practices provide one line of connection between kinship and politics that highlights the political and emotive capacities of blood.
How do political ideas acquire their emotional power, and what makes them persuasive? How are citizens moved to sacrifice themselves through notions of belonging? These apparently well-worn questions remain potent, I think, partly because of the way social scientists divide up their worlds, separating kinship from politics.[1]
Blood’s multiple associations with kinship and everyday life, as well as with sacrifice, violence, and death, provide it with animation and power across different fields. Bringing together kinship and politics allows us to understand in new ways how sanguinary and other metaphors can render political worldviews familial and natural, as well as how the familial is inescapably political.
Bodies, Kinship, Memory, Politics
Funerary practices and the close associations between bodies and the land in which they are buried provide, through ideas about local and national belonging, one pertinent avenue between kinship and politics.
Katherine Verdery’s The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (1999) offers some illuminating suggestions about these lines of connection in the context of political rituals of reburial in postsocialist Eastern Europe. Verdery shows how these rituals carry powerful evocations — they may inaugurate or legitimate new political claims, but they also convey complex associations of deep historical ties between people and land, serving to undo claims of political legitimacy from the socialist era.
One striking feature of blood symbolism is how the multivocality of blood is also multi-temporal. Thus, Weston shows how the blood imagery used to depict the 2008 financial crisis refers not only to the circulatory model of blood in the body but also to much earlier corporeal models. So, images of ‘circulation’, ‘flow’ and ‘pressure’ occur alongside references to ‘blood-letting’, ‘haemorrhaging’ and ‘lifeblood’.
One point that emerges very clearly in Verdery’s analysis is the significance of remains, named and unnamed bodies or their parts, or images of human forms, and the association of these, through burial customs, with land that is inscribed with national identity. She shows how claims to national identity are made or remade in such rituals. Memory would thus seem to be a key area for exploring the links between kinship and politics.[2]
Verdery delineates how the iconography and practices of political reburials vividly evoke for participants not just feelings of national pride or belonging but also their experiences of more personal or familial funerals and the acute grief and loss with which these are associated. This seems crucial to the symbolic power of these political rituals and their call on the emotions of participants.
We can expand these insights to think about more everyday practices in which similar kinds of emotional associations are present. Here, I focus on bodily substance as providing a potentially rich symbolic repertoire that links individual persons to kin and to wider national polities.
Amongst the kinds of bodily stuff we might consider, blood is perhaps the most obvious since it is such a pervasive and widely-occurring metaphor for life, kin, and nation. In English, as in many other languages, blood imagery may be used to evoke both close familial ties and more expansive political bonds — the blood of the nation. ‘Blood ties’ are one common way of describing kinship relations that are often taken to be synonymous with ‘biological’ aspects of kinship.[3]
Partly through links with communion and sacrifice, blood is also frequently imbued with magical or religious connotations and with ideas about violence and suffering — as is particularly clear in Christianity.[4]
In fact, the ubiquity of blood symbolism and metaphors is in itself misleading because it seems to invite us to assume that we already know and understand what such metaphors signify. The many meanings of blood are hardly self-evident, and this is clear from the layered connotations of blood in different cultural and historical contexts.
Blood Ties
Blood donation practices are one starting point for investigating the power of blood because the blood in evidence here is apparently uncompromisingly literal rather than metaphorical. Blood donation is also quite an everyday occurrence. Many people have, at one time or another, given blood — or tried to. Actually, we might dispute the everydayness of it precisely because, as those who have been turned away by blood donation services know, the procedures are not totally straightforward.
By no means is everyone deemed suitable for blood donation, and furthermore, you may be considered as acceptable at one point in time but not at another, or under the rules of one country while unsuitable in another. Nevertheless, donation is a routine procedure, and blood transfusion services are anxious to convey the idea that many of us could and should give blood on a regular basis. To encourage us, walk-in donation centres as well as mobile blood drives are familiar global phenomena.
But how exactly did they come to be so? And what persuades donors to give up their bodily substance? Turning to the first of these questions, the available historical accounts make clear that the twentieth-century history of how blood donation was established and routinized in different countries is considerably culturally inflected.[5]
One example of this is the way that, in the face of increasing rationalization and pressure on blood supplies, those running transfusion services in the UK during the Second World War were concerned about mitigating the negative effect that anonymity had on donation rates, leading to a fall in the numbers of donors.[6]
Fictional accounts of recipients, therefore, were designed to arouse feelings of connection in potential recipients. These publicity stories and images used the rhetoric of the gift and sacrifice and also deployed ideas about kinship and locality to promote such connections. The ‘stranger’ invoked was thus a particular kind of figure in the context of anonymous donation — both mythical and ambiguous.
While the erasure of class distinctions was an essential feature of British wartime propaganda to encourage blood donation, in the US, the development of blood typing provided a funnel for anxieties about the racial mixing of specific types of blood.[7] These and other examples from different cultures tell us something about the political contexts of blood donation and the rhetoric deployed in order to encourage ordinary people to donate, but they tell us less about donors. To look at what motivates ‘ordinary donors’, I turn to contemporary Malaysia.
Giving Blood
Blood donors whom I met in Penang in 2007-16 often spoke of their donations in the stock phrases of public education campaigns, media accounts, political speeches, and hospital posters, which exhorted potential donors ‘to save a life’ or ‘to help people’. Such posters were prominently displayed in blood banks and at other donation sites, including mass campaigns.
But more persistent questioning illuminated how motivations were tied to the life stories and kinship relations of donors. When I asked one middle-aged woman who had regularly been giving blood for the previous eight years what had first motivated her to donate, she told me that her father had regularly done so — he had donated more than 100 times. When he died, she had decided to begin donating blood herself as a way of honouring his memory.
Other stories revealed further interconnections of kinship and memory. Often, donors told me that they had been donating for many years and had started to donate with members of their families. They had first done so when a family member was ill and needed a blood transfusion but had continued on a regular basis, sometimes with the same companions, sometimes alone. The marking of birthdays or the commemoration of particular kin through acts of donation were suggestive of the way such resonances could be amplified through time in a personal register.
While donors did not make explicit analogies or metaphorical links between the giving of blood and the importance of blood as a symbolic marker of kinship, it was nevertheless clear that acts of blood donation were already inserted into a nexus of kinship relations or into life stories and narratives of kinship.
One might think that these narratives were particular to Malaysia, and indeed, some aspects of them are recognizably so.[8] However, when I conducted interviews with blood donors in Edinburgh in 2009-10, I was struck by the echoes I found there of such personal stories of kinship or friendship. Often, I was told by a donor that he or she had begun to donate blood when a close relative or friend was ill or required a transfusion.
While the particular contours of kinship and the broader social contexts were different, there was a similar interweaving of more political references (here, often to the NHS) with familial and other ties. The mixing and assimilation of a conventionalized rhetoric of national or community service with intimate narratives of family and relatedness, illness, loss, and suffering were likewise striking.
The idea that moments of national catastrophe may be accompanied by calls to give blood is familiar. One unusual example of this is an exhibition of portraits painted in the blood of martyrs to Indian independence, exhibited in Delhi’s Red Fort in 2009-10.[9] This exhibition simultaneously commemorated the heroic sacrifice of fighters for Indian independence and also encouraged viewers to think that they might be called upon themselves to make similar sacrifices of blood for the nation in the future.
Indeed, when the portraits began to fade in 2008, the painter (who had originally used his own blood for the paintings) organized a blood donation camp to collect blood for their retouching, and this was modelled on, and employed the rhetoric of, collecting blood for the original martyrs themselves and intended as a memorial to them. The literal presence of blood in the paintings evokes the multiple symbolic meanings that underlie a move from personal emotion to a more overtly political register.
Politics and Kinship
Thinking further about the motivations that donors articulate and the mixing of evocations in political and familial registers, one might want to speculate on the ways in which the donation of blood lends itself to this kind of interplay.
Kath Weston (2013), tracing how metaphors of blood are invoked in depictions of global finance, writes suggestively of the ‘ricochet effect’ whereby metaphors of blood interact with its materiality; metaphors evoked in one context accumulate and segue into other domains and then rebound, accumulating layers of referents as they travel. She uses the term ‘meta-materiality’ to connote ‘both the generative possibilities of blood and its ability to pre-empt debate as it naturalizes social processes and perfuses multiple domains’ (Weston 2013: 33).
One striking feature of blood symbolism is how the multivocality of blood is also multi-temporal. Thus, Weston shows how the blood imagery used to depict the 2008 financial crisis refers not only to the circulatory model of blood in the body but also to much earlier corporeal models. So, images of ‘circulation’, ‘flow’ and ‘pressure’ occur alongside references to ‘blood-letting’, ‘haemorrhaging’ and ‘lifeblood’.
The exhibition of blood portraits in Delhi simultaneously evoked the blood of martyrdom in the past, present and future registers. Among the medical lab technologists I spent time with in clinical pathology labs in Penang, there were similar layerings of idioms of blood from different historical eras.
These multi-temporal evocations of blood strikingly echo Verdery’s discussion of the importance of temporality in the reburials of national figures in postsocialist Eastern Europe. Such reburials, she suggests, involve ‘reconfiguring time’ because they both alter understandings of temporal process and involve the revision of history — all the more powerful for the fact that the revision of history had earlier been a prominent feature of communist rhetoric and practices (1999: 112-15).[10]
I suggest that blood offers a narrower and more condensed version of the political force of repertoires of time that are encapsulated in material objects and of the capacity of bodily matter for this kind of elaboration.
The substance of citizenship is entangled with the substance of kinship in myriad ways. These entanglements are so dense that they are challenging to prise apart or to discern clearly. The naturalizing effects of blood are ‘already’ present in discourses of citizenship because of the way they are imperceptibly layered into ideas about kinship, interwoven with religion and suffering, and ideas about the nation (where they may evoke the sacrifice and loss of soldiers in warfare). This is one source of the emotional response that calls to national unity may elicit.
Bodily stuff provides a potent set of symbolic associations that can readily link personhood, family, kinship, and nation. Bodily matter is not, of course, the only means by which ties between political rulers and their followers are created or legitimized, nor is blood the only bodily substance that has this kind of symbolic power.
Verdery (1999: 113) observes that, through their concreteness, the physicality of bodily remains affords a privileged site for accessing the truth about the past that has been hidden in the untruths of the communist era.
And this corresponds with the ascription of blood with particular truth-telling powers that was articulated to me in Penang. Blood’s connotations of vitality and its excess of meanings give it a particularly rich symbolic potentiality.[11]Personal memories, land, and place are entangled in all of these fields. The density and lack of closure to these connections offer a way to understand the apparently surprising capacity of strident political rhetoric to summon the emotions of listeners.
Conclusion
The myriad links between politics and kinship are not hidden from us; they are woven into our most routine and everyday understandings. Kinship is very much part of the politics of contemporary life.[12] Although exceptional moments of political reburials provide enticing material for unravelling these connections, it is equally important to be attentive to the more subdued ordinary practices through which they are made and remade in our everyday worlds. Blood donation might take its place beside family funerals or the telling of family stories in such excavations of politics and kinship.
The emotional power that kinship lends to political ritual and rhetoric is reinforced through such very ordinary and understated connections to the realms of personal experience. That kinship is understood to be incontrovertibly a repository of moral values[13] means that it has a uniquely legitimizing force when it is silently or explicitly evoked in political rhetoric or ritual.
Partly through the kinds of processes I have described here, through the deep temporality of material substances and long genealogies of kinship, it also affords a naturalizing effect whereby the abstractions of nation and citizenship can be understood and made personal.
I have not provided an explicit discussion here of the potential links that blood furnishes between religion, race, and kinship.[14] Significantly, in contemporary Europe, immigration provides politicians with an exceptionally potent set of issues to garner the emotional engagement of citizens. Here, land, memory, the limited resources of the state, as well as personal and familial ties can all be called upon to attract the support of voters.
Kinship is already embedded in this chain of associations partly because, as a set of technologies, practices of care, repositories of memory, and of hopes for the future, it is necessarily multi-temporal and linked to place.
Such rather abstract chains of connection are lived and made concrete through bodily material, which has the capacity to naturalize and make legitimate the abstractions of political representation and the idea of the nation. These kinds of associations do not necessarily need to be articulated; they may be implicitly present in the vial of blood in a lab, in the ideas that bring donors to a blood drive, or in the perceived unfolding of a financial crisis.
Endnotes:
[1] See, for example, Anderson 1983: 15; Carsten 2004: 155; Verdery 1997.
[2] See Carsten 2007; Pine, Kaneff and Haukanes 2004.
[3] See, for example, Schneider 1980.
[4] See Anidjar 2014; Bynum 2007; Mayblin 2013.
[5] See, for example, Krementsov 2008; Lederer 2008; 2013; Starr 1998; Whitfield 2013.
[6] This summary is drawn from the work of Nicholas Whitfield (2013).
[7] See Lederer 2008, 2013.
[8] See Carsten 2019.
[9] This account is drawn from Copeman (2013).
[10] See also Ssorin-Chaikov 2006 on ‘heterochronicity’ in the context of birthday gifts to Stalin in the Soviet era. These authors suggest how temporality is woven through the legitimising effects of political ritual.
[11] See Carsten 2011; 2013.
[12] See McKinnon and Cannell 2013.
[13] See, for example, Fortes 1969; McKinley 2001; Lambek 2011.
[14] See, for example, Essner 2013.
References
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