Bloodstream: Notes towards an Anthropology of Digital Logistics in Healthcare

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research in northern Ghana, this article explores the complex logistics of blood and the ways in which the availability of blood has been transformed through the introduction of drones. We explore how drone services affect this ecosystem of supply and contribute to reshaping the practices of physicians, nurses, facility pharmacists and stock managers, as well as the expectations and experiences of patients and their families. Situated at the interface of medical anthropology, critical studies of infrastructure and anthropological studies of digital innovations in healthcare, our paper attends to the emerging anthropological research on medical logistics as a means of connecting people with medical resources. It demonstrates the fundamentally ambivalent nature of technological innovation: on the one hand, drones have fueled health workers’ hopes and transformed access to blood. On the other hand, their introduction has also led to connectivity without stock. In line with STS scholarship, we highlight the important role of the physical properties of objects such as blood in shaping their circulation.

Biographical Notes

Marian Burchardt (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)

Marian Burchardt is Professor of Sociology at Leipzig University. As a cultural sociologist, he is interested in how diversity shapes institutions and everyday life. His research engages with the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, urban sociology, and theories of modernity, and draws on qualitative and ethnographic methods. He is especially interested in how notions of diversity influence social life and public space through nation-state regulations, law, and urban policy. He is the author of Regulating Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood in the Secular West (Rutgers UP, 2020) and Faith in the Time of AIDS: Religion, Biopolitics and Modernity in South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan 2015).

Edwin Ambani Ameso (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)

A medical anthropologist with an interest in public and global health, he studied at the University of Nairobi, the University of Aarhus and the University of Oslo. He now works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leipzig.
He researches on “off-the-grid”: Infrastructures, processes of spatialization, and drones in Africa. His areas of research include health insurance, social protection and welfare, digital health technologies, infrastructures of care.