CONVICTIONS AND PERSUASIONS: TRANSFUSION TECHNOLOGY AND THE BLOOD DONOR IN MODERN IRAN

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore the emergence of blood transfusion technology in modern Iran. I examine how blood transfusion mediated the linkages between the very intimate and personal and the very public and collective. In doing so, I revisit the ways in which individuals in Iranian society related to the national collective in twentieth century. Drawing on archival research and oral history interviews conducted in Iran, I argue that the conviction that donating blood is a virtue, if not a duty, emerged out of several entangled historical processes that transformed Iranians from subjects governed by the sovereign to self-governed citizens with bodily autonomy. I explain that transfusion technology and science evoked pre-existing medical, religious, and political discourses about blood, and merged them with the ideas of kinship, intimacy, citizenship, and altruism in post-WWII Iran. With this argument and the sub-arguments derived from it, I contribute to two bodies of literature. First, I am in conversation with the contributions of those historians of medicine who took the physical human body as a contextual and contested category, with special attention to those who focused on blood transfusion. Through exploring the history of blood donation and transfusion in Iran, I explain the historical and discursive processes that configured voluntary blood donation as a virtue, thereby destabilizing the seemingly obvious link between blood donation and altruism. Second, by highlighting the concrete materiality of the individual and institutional relations that transfusions generate, I add a new layer of complexity to the long-lasting debates about citizenship, subject-formation, nation-building, and state authority in the historiography of modern Iran. This dissertation conceptualizes transfusable blood, a source of meaning and information, as a medium through which ordinary Iranians created their own concepts of selfhood, the other, and citizenship.