Desire, duty and medical gifting: how it became possible to long for a useful death

Abstract

It is common in social science critique of medical uses of the body to portray donation of the dead body as a sacrifice. In contemporary Denmark, however, some people claim to desire post-mortem utility. Here we argue that the articulated desires for utility should not be written off as false consciousness hiding a ‘real’ sacrifice. People use medical promises to reinvent the meaning of death; and, in turn, they make promises to medical institutions by signing up as donors. Registrations of post-mortem donations serve to uphold a sense of control; ensure post-vital dignity, and to align people with wider socially engrained ideals of productivity and agency. We build our argument on interviews conducted in Denmark 2007–2018.