Commodifying Bodies

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Loic Wacquant, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Loic Wacquant

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780761940340, 9780761940333
• eBook ISBN: 9781446236079
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists - have been pliant partners in this accelerating commodification of live and dead human organisms. Under the guise of healing or research, they have contributed to a new ?ethic of parts? for which the divisible body is severed from the self, torn from the social fabric, and thrust into commercial transactions -- as organs, secretions, reproductive capacities, and tissues -- responding to the dictates of an incipiently global marketplace.

Breaking with established approaches which prioritize the body as ?text?, the chapters in this book examine not only images of the body-turned-merchandise but actually existing organisms considered at once as material entities, semi-magical tokens, symbolic vectors and founts of lived experience. The topics covered range from the cultural disposal and media treatment of corpses, the biopolitics of cells, sperm banks and eugenics, to the international trafficking of kidneys, the development of ?transplant tourism?, to the idioms of corporeal exploitation among prizefighters as a limiting case of fleshly commodity.

This insightful and arresting volume combines perspectives from anthropology, law, medicine, and sociology to offer compelling analyses of the concrete ways in which the body is made into a commodity and how its marketization in turn remakes social relations and cultural meanings.

Index

Acosta, Isidro, 63–4

adoption, 141

Agamben, G., 22, 44

alienation, 69, 94, 170–1

altruism, 144, 148–51, 153, 155–6, 157, 158

Amar Akbar Anthony, 15

Anatomy Act 1831, 67

animal husbandry, exploitation of boxers as, 183–5

antirejection drugs, see cyclosporine

Apollo hospitals, India, 16–17, 21

Appadurai, A., 94, 140, 141

appropriation, 166, 174, 177

Ashkenazi Jews, 95, 107

autonomy of body, 58

autopsies, 131–2

Barnard, Christiaan, 68

Becker, G., 138

Bellagio Task Force on Transplantation, Bodily Integrity and the International Traffic in Organs, 32–3

Ben-Gurion, David, 96

Bentham, Jeremy, 67, 68

Berkeley Organs Watch, 2, 34–5, 51

Bhat, A., 69–70

bioethics, 31–2

biopolitics, 22

of transplantation, 10, 13–14

biotechnology, 5, 94–5, 107

blood, 69, 76, 83

caste and, 5, 14, 21

from indigenous populations, 79

blood donation, altruism of, 148–9

blood transfusion, portrayal in Indian films, 14–15

body, truth and, 121, 122, 123, 132

body parts,

alienation of, 65–70

commodification of, 43–9, 71, 94

disputation about, 65, 57

objectification, 72–3

reification of, 71–2

sale of, 1, 3, 4, 20, 24, 25, 52

see also, kidneys

body snatching, 3, 67, 68

Bourdieu, P., 132

boxers, exploitation of, 7–8

accommodation in, 185–91

language of, 182–5, 186

boxing managers, as pimps, 182–3

brain death, 22

in Japan, 73

Brandes, S.,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Body & Society
• Bodies for Sale – Whole or in Parts
• The Other Kidney: Biopolitics beyond Recognition
• Commodity Fetishism in Organs Trafficking
• The Alienation of Body Tissue and the Biopolitics of Immortalized Cell Lines
• The Immigrating Body and the Body Politic: The ‘Yemenite Children Affair’ and Body Commodification in Israel
• The Cremated Catholic: The Ends of a Deceased Guatemalan
• Bodies that Don’t Matter: Death and Dereliction in Chicago
• Semen as Gift, Semen as Goods: Reproductive Workers and the Market in Altruism
• Excess, Scarcity and Desire among Drug-Using Sex Workers
• Whores, Slaves and Stallions: Languages of Exploitation and Accommodation among Professional Boxers
• Index