Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on Jehovah’s Witnesses and analyzes ways in which religious groups could effectively deploy their own structures, such as Hospital Liaison Committees, in establishing trust between doctors and religious patients without compromising the health care outcome of such encounters.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on Jehovah's Witnesses (JWs), a globally active, yet anthropologically understudied religious community whose refusal of blood transfusions is often exemplified in bioethical and medical literature as particularly "troublesome" for the biomedical profession. Members of the JW community are constantly and diligently looking for hospitals and physicians who would be willing to refrain from blood transfusions. Such doctor patient encounters have been particularly imbued with "trust issues." Over 20 years ago, however, the Governing Body of JWs located in Brooklyn, NY, established a global network of Hospital Liaison Committees (HLCs). The network often assists in the patient's search by providing names of "collaborating" physicians. It thus helps patients to orient themselves in the local therapeutic landscape and provides interested physicians with relevant (mainly biomedical) literature on transfusion alternatives.

This paper draws on a nine month ethnographic research with Jehovah's Witnesses, including members of the HLCs, and physicians carried out primarily in Berlin, the city with one of the biggest HLCs in Germany. I argue that while "abstaining from blood" can be characterized as a "collectivizing moment" of biological citizenship (Rose 2007, Rose & Novas 2005) in the case of JWs, the network of HLCs plays an active role in constructing therapeutic citizenship (Nguyen 2005). By focusing on JWs, I attend to ways in which religious groups could effectively deploy their own structures, such as HLCs, in establishing trust between two parties―doctors and religious patients―without compromising the health care outcome of such encounters.