Blood Rhetorics: Donor Campaigns and Their Publics in Contemporary Sri Lanka

In this article, I focus on an aspect of voluntary blood donation that has received relatively little attention, namely the spaces - public, moral and political - that connnect individual donors with the recipients of blood. More specifically I focus on five distinct but related modalities of blood donation - internationalism, Buddhism, familism, nationalism and anti-commercialism. These rhetorics are highly significant, yet they are often missed in accounts of the link between donor and recipient and how individuals account for and justify their actions within wider, shared imaginings of family, community and nation.