Week 5: Failed Recipients: Extracting Blood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital - Alice Street

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 Failed Recipients: Extracting Blood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital

 ALICE STREET

 This article, explores ideas of kinship obligation in the wider context of anonymised voluntary blood-donation and how that can lead to ideas of community and kinship. A study is made of a system often used to encourage the donation of blood for society-members’ relatives in hospital, with the family often feeling pressured to donate in order to replace blood the hospital had used to treat their relative.

This article looks at the implied and express systems of obligation that can arise as a result, with a focus on a particular hospital (Madang, in Papua New Guinea) as a prime example. However, this blood-exchange based on indirect kinship, is much more complex than first appears as, often, hospital staff have to act as negotiators in order to bring about the blood ‘transaction’ as the blood donated by a family member, often with a specific patient in mind, may not be compatible and has to be re-allocated. However, at the same time, in order to maintain the efficiency of the blood donation scheme for the hospital, the hospital has to conceal the re-allocation from the donors in case they object Therefore hospitals use the strong kinship obligation to help fellow members of the Wantok.

Qualitative data is the main type of data used via participant observation leading to advantages of analysis in giving a higher degree of authenticity to the findings and a better contextual sense of the participants’ involvement.

Also, close bonds had been established between Alice the ethnographer and the residents at the hospital in Papua New Guinea which meant that the trust gained  over the time by Alice led to the data  produced being more reliable as, for example, the hospital patients were happier to share their anxieties regarding their stay in the hospital. 

Patients in the medical ward of the hospital talked about their anxiety that their relatives forgot them when they entered the hospital, that they did not visit them, bring them gifts of garden food or cold water, or donate blood. Patients also expressed anxieties that while they were away people would raid their gardens or their houses.