Gift Relationship

Book: Richard Titmuss. The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy

Description

From David Bollier at http://onthecommons.org/node/1182

"In 1970, British scholar Richard Titmuss wrote a landmark book, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, which explained why a gift economy of blood tends to produce higher quality blood than markets. Blood donation is seen as a way to assert national solidarity and human altruism; markets could not mobilize such motivations, but instead tend to elicit blood from alcoholics, drug addicts and others who need cash.

Titmuss' book was influential in staving off attempts to turn blood donation and distribution into a marketplace, and to defend the social welfare state against incipient Thatcherism. As M. Callon put it, blood is “entangled” with all sorts of emotional, social, moral and ontological meanings. A person is willing to donate blood because the blood is imbued with positive, high-minded feelings. For these reasons, a gift economy in blood was largely seen as good and the market as dubious. Treating blood as a commodity was seen a an attack on all sorts of noble values.

Yet the arrival of the AIDS crisis, the development of new blood-separation technologies, and the rise of international blood markets have introduced all sorts of complications to the moral economy of blood. Once blood could be “fractionated” (separated) into plasma, the clotting factor fibrinogen, albumin and other components, people’s donations of “whole blood” became much less common. Donation was not an altruistic act to an anonymous stranger of the same nationality because blood components were becoming marketable commodities on a global scale (with genuine therapeutic benefits). The spread of the HIV virus, meanwhile, somewhat changed the meaning of the gift economy of blood. Donation was no longer a simple act of “biological citizenship”; it became a calculated risk of exposure to a deadly virus.

As Waldby and Mitchell write, “Blood safety could no longer be guaranteed by social trust between citizens in a defined national space, but rather was hostage to intricate and mutable forms of circulation and transformation throughout the globe.” (http://onthecommons.org/node/1182)

More Information

For an update on this issue, see the book Tissue Economics