‘I DO IT FOR THE CHOCOLATE’

Abstract

In this article, blood donation in Denmark is analysed with the theoretical perspective on exchange developed by Pierre Bourdieu. In most western countries blood donation is based on free donations given by voluntary donors to an unknown recipient. However, this supposedly non-economic donation cannot be seen isolated from the wider web of bioeconomical relations in which it is embedded. In the blood bank donors are met with hospitality and small counter-prestations also highlighting it as part of a symbolic economy. Ethnographic data mainly consisting of interviews and observations collected at a blood bank can thus with Bourdieu be said to show the relationship between donor and bank as one that is maintained and characterized by strategies of reciprocity employed by blood bank personnel to ensure that donors keep coming back. These strategies are essential in the social construction of the ideas of altruism and the ‘pure gift’. Finally the article elaborates on Bourdieu's contribution to the debate on die gift by discussing the importance of die acceptance and reception of the gift itself.

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