“I find it funny to compare blood to jam”. Reflections on ethnographic attempts with donors and blood workers

I will present some audio-visual attempts I proposed during my doctoral fieldwork in anthropology on blood collected for therapeutic purposes, so that the actors talk about it, their practices and the emotions experienced, but also to propose another format of restitution of the research.
Long abstract:
For this paper, I will present a few audio-visual attempts prepared during my thesis in anthropology on blood collected for therapeutic purposes in Belgium. Elaborating a social biography (Kopytoff 1986) of blood, I followed it throughout the stages it goes through between donation and transfusion. The aim was to understand the work of blood throughout the transfusion chain, for the different actors who contribute to it often without knowing each other. Through the concept of operating chain (Leroi-Gourhan 1964) and autoscopy, I decided to develop visual supports based on my ethnographic materials.

Using photography, video or audio recordings, I sometimes composed photo and video editing that I submitted to certain key actors to add their comments to it. Indeed, initially, I had noticed that it was not always easy for the different actors to deliver their point of view on blood or their practices. If I had used photography as a tool for keeping a record of what I saw in the field, I also wanted to used it as a "talk starter" to generate other materials, or more if possible. We'll discuss the idea that this created device could be a useful way to lead research on uncanny objects, but also to collaborate with the participants and open the possibility for people to contradict, correct our interpretation and co-create a more complex understanding of our research objects.