Today, medical anthropologist Nancy Scheper Hughes came to campus to speak about organ trafficking. I was familiar with Scheper-Hughes through reading Death Without Weeping, an ethnographic account of maternal-child relationships in Brazil.
Nancy Scheper Hughes is director of Organ Watch, a group that monitors and makes an effort to document organ trafficking.
Some points she brought up that I would like to further explore include...
RELATING TO ORGAN TRAFFICKING
- invisible sacrifice
- donors as "biodisposables"
- "fresh organs" (from living donors)
- Ethical Transplant Committee
- Bellagio Taskforce (http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/iwpList302/87DC95FCA3C3D63EC1256B66005B3F6C)
- Israel as a special case because of political/cultural attitude (brain death is not death) -->Zaki Shapira -->http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/334/7601/973
- -->Israel formally outsourced kidney transplants (but it is contentious to report on this because of "blood libel" and tension towards Israel)
- Argentina's Colonia Montes de Oca
- India
- -->bio-availability
- -->bio sociality
- -->emergence of cyclosporine as key
- -->Lawrence Cohen's scholarship (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_n8_v107/ai_21191220/)
- -->medical citizenship
- -->economic involvement
- Surgical medical diplomacy
- GLOBAL VALUES
- -->how do values travel?
- -->attitudes towards market solutions
- -->body as commodity
- -->human dignity and human freedom
- -->lethal injection as medicalized; mix of medicine and criminal justice
- -->ex] China didn't understand what's wrong with using executed prisoner population for transplants
- -->transparency as a Western value
- -->neoliberal defense of organ sales
- -->Anthropological Defense against organ trafficking
- ----->global social justice
- ----->equity
- ----->solidarity
- ----->values at stake
- Neoliberal versus anthropological values
- -->humanitarianism vs utilitarianism
- Lancet article about kidney transplants
- Kidney as a commodity
- -->circulation follows flow of capital in many ways!
- Good article--> "This Little Kidney Went to Market"
- "scars on geopolitical"
- "neocannibalism"
- "kidney half life"
RELATING TO PRACTICING ANTHROPOLOGY
- "scholarship with commitment"
- ethics of anthropology-->criminology & undercover
FURTHER SCHOLARSHIP
- Francois Rabelais (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Rabelais)
- Jean Comaeroff (http://anthropology.uchicago.edu/faculty/faculty_comaroff_jean.shtml)
My Questions--Answered
- Do sellers see their contribution as a gift of life?
- -->not the sense of "transplant altruism" that we typically perceive
- what is coercion?
- -->could just be montary incentive
- Should there be regulation?
- -->big question, maybe a watchgroup is enough ?!?!
- -->it seems countries have set their own legal precedents
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