Subtitle: Blood Donation and Religious Experience in North India
Author: Jacob Copeman
Subject: Anthropology , Asian Studies , Religious Studies
Paper ISBN 978-0-8135-4449-6
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8135-4448-9
Pages: 264 pages , 13 illustrations
Series: Studies in Medical Anthropology
Publication Date: February 2009

“An excellent piece of scholarship that synthesizes classic themes in the indological literature—sacrifice, gift-giving, caste, asceticism, guru/chela relationships—with the very contemporary and iconically modern, biomedical procedure of blood donation.”—Joseph S. Alter, University of Pittsburgh

“No book covers the same terrain or anything close to what Copeman accomplishes with Veins of Devotion. It is an extraordinarily smart book that sets the standard for future work on biomoral exchange in anthropology.”
—Lawrence Cohen, University of California, Berkeley

"A very impressive achievement. Copeman quite brilliantly illuminates some of the most dramatic and important developments in contemporary Indian public life."
—James Laidlaw, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

"…Fascinating…Copeman’s richly comceptualized study, in which he nimbly moves from his underlying frame of the Indian notions of gift and service to touch on a range of related topics, from national integration to Indian notions of asceticism, sacrifice, sin, and caste…lucidly connects a range of Indian spiritual idioms to the seemingly unlikely, mundane context of voluntary blood donation."—Journal of Asian Studies, February 2010

"Veins of Devotion is a fascinating ethnography of everyday tissue exchange in urban India. For medical anthropologists, Copeman expands the dimensions of ideology, structure, and agency in bodily donation. For scholars of religion and South Asia, he provides a new venue for analyzing the shifting domains of sacred and secular in contemporary urban India. Accessibly written, this volume is eminently teachable for a graduate or upperdivision undergraduate course. It is an excellent work of scholarship." —American Ethnologist

Veins of Devotion tells the story of recent remarkable collaborations between guru-led devotional movements and public health campaigns to encourage voluntary blood donation in northern India. Focusing primarily on Delhi, Jacob Copeman carefully situates blood donation practices within the context of religious gift-giving, sacrifice, caste, kinship, and nationalism. The book analyzes the operations of several high-profile religious orders that organize large-scale public blood-giving events and argues that blood donation has become a site not only of frenetic competition between different devotional movements, but also of intense spiritual creativity.

Despite significant tensions between blood banks and these religious groups, their collaboration is a singular success story—the nation’s blood supply is replenished while blood donors discover new devotional possibilities.

Drawing on the rich tradition of South Asianist scholarship, while also engaging with recent innovations in social theory, Veins of Devotion represents a striking and original contribution to the anthropology of South Asia and to medical anthropology and religious studies more generally.

Jacob Copeman is a research fellow at Jesus College at Cambridge University in England.