CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Bacsadi, Zsofia |
|---|---|
| Title | The Value of Blood: The Shifting Meanings of Gift and Commodity in Hungarian Plasma Donation |
| Summary | Even though plasma is a component of whole blood, plasma donation as a social practice is very different from blood donation. Since plasma donation involves financial compensation and the harvested plasma goes through more complex biotechnological treatments and global economic transactions until it reaches its recipients, the Titmussian model of ‘blood as gift’ and donation as citizen-making (1970) cannot be adopted in this case. In Hungary, plasma is procured by profit-oriented organizations which creates tensions and interconnections between altruistic and economic motivations and narratives, both in the case of donors, staff, and the institution itself. Rather than extinguishing each other or the economic factors eliminating the altruistic ones, the two work in tandem in the different stages of procurement. The thesis explores how these tensions are generated and managed in a Hungarian plasma center in Budapest, how plasma is both presented as gift and commodity. Through the methods of carnal sociology (Wacquant 2014), participant observation, and semi-structured interviews it is revealed how the certain material traits of plasma, the process of donation, the interactions within the center, and the communication of the institution itself emphasizes, suppresses or ties together the altruistic or commercial aspects of plasma donation. Diverging from the previous, mostly donor-oriented studies, the thesis combines the analysis of human and non-human (plasma) interactions, and briefly considers material factors that enable commercialization or altruism. Keywords: plasma donation; altruism; gift; commercialization; biological labor |
| Supervisor | Sopranzetti, Claudio; Judit Sándor |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/bacsadi_zsofia.pdf |
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