By Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Department of Anthropology, University of California,
BerkeleyCentre, nsh@berkeley.edu
Elsewhere1 I have described the criminal aspects of the traffic in humans for their disposable organs and tissues. I have publicized the scars left not only on the ruined bodies of disillusioned sellers but on the geo-political landscapes where the illicit transplant trade has taken root. In an effort to get the attention of medical professionals, human rights organizations, regulatory agencies and government officials I have used forceful language. I have described organs buying and brokering as ‘neo-cannibalism’, as biolust, body theft, and, even as bio-terrorism. I have called surgeons involved in brokered living donor transplants as ‘outlaws’, ‘vultures’, part of an international “organs mafia” and their local recruiters as ‘kidney-hunters’. I described the buyers – the transplant tourists and travelers as the ethically impaired, giving no more thought to helping themselves to kidneys purchased from depressed, displaced, disgraced and debt-ridden slum and shantytown dwellers than if they were actually dead bodies rather than proxy-cadavers.
At the heart of my decade long, multi-sited project on the global traffic in organs, tissues, and body parts is an anthropological analysis of post-modern forms of human sacrifice. Neo-liberal global capitalism, alongside the spread of advanced medical and biotechnologies have incited new tastes and desires for the skin, bone, blood, organs, tissue and reproductive and genetic material of the other. The darker side of organs harvesting and transplant, focusing on the ‘fetishized kidney’ the new ‘blood diamonds’ in the global trade in organs. This new commodity is an organ of opportunity and an organ of last resort for both the buyers and the sellers.
Finally, I have over the past decade mapped on the ground the traffic in humans for ‘fresh’ organs, and identified the key players in the medical under-world of transplant tourism. This traffic is fueled by a neo-liberal economy that values humans as commodities and the ‘self’ as a market mechanism – suppliers, brokers, buyers, sellers, and processors – of re-usable body parts, pushing human agency and hyper-individualism to their extreme limits. I will discuss organ sharing for transplant in terms of the unruly desires, demands and obligations it has released with respect to procuring ‘fresh’ organs and tissues from living people. The situation puts one in mind of the absurd Monty Python skit from The Meaning of Life2 (“We’re here for your liver.”“But I’m still using it!”) that captures a truth that is concealed within the rhetoric on the ‘gift of life’ – a demand for self-sacrifice. Whereas altruistic (gifted) and commercial (sold) organs for transplant are normally treated as very different phenomena, I will emphasize their common features. Both operate from within the same economic and moral imperatives.
Pp. 5-16 econ_soc_11-1.pdf