The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in "Fresh" Organs

Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 145-167

  Scheper Hughes, Nancy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Drugs; Economic globalization; Global markets; Modernist; Social relations

Indexed keywords

EID: 84889413079     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1002/9780470696569.ch9     Document Type: Chapter

References (41)

1. On biological citizenship, see Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton University Press, 2002)
2. on sexual citizenship, see Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "AIDS and the Social Body," Social Science & Medicine 39(7), 1994, pp. 991-1003.
3. See Elizabeth Roberts, "Examining Surrogacy Discourses; Between Feminine Power and Exploitation," in Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Caroline Sargent, eds., Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 93-110.
4. See Francis Delmonico, Robert Arnold, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, et al., "Ethical Incentives-Not Payment-For Organ Donation," New England Journal of Medicine 346(25), 2002, pp. 2002-2005.
5. For example, Alan Shewmon, a respected pediatric nephrologist at UCLA, has argued persuasively that on neurological grounds alone, while the brain dead are incontestably and probably irreversibly dying, they are quite simply not yet dead. Margaret Lock, who has exhaustively explored the topic of brain death, refers to the brain dead as "as good as dead." Alternatively, I call them the "good enough" dead. But the point is that the brain dead are not dead in the more usual "deader than a door nail" sense of the term.
6. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
7. See John Stuart Mill, "Utilitarianism," in Ethical Theories: A Book of Readings, A. I. Melden, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 391-434.
8. Jeremy Bentham, "An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation," in Ethical Theories: A Book of Readings, A. I. Melden, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 367-390.
9. Michael Friedlaender, "The Right to Sell or Buy a Kidney: Are we Failing our Patients?" The Lancet 359, March 16, 2002.
10. This is a reference to Primo Levi's description, in his book The Drowned and the Saved, of the extent to which inmates of the concentration camps would collaborate with the enemy in order to survive.
11. This project has been a thoroughly collaborative one. Lawrence Cohen and I co-founded Organs Watch in November 1999 as a research, documentation, and medical human rights project. In each of the nine countries in which I have worked, I have collaborated with younger anthropologists, medical students, and law students, as well as with human rights workers, political journalists, and documentary filmmakers.
12. See Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Parts Unknown: Undercover Ethnography on the Organs-Trafficking Underworld," Ethnography 5(1), 2004, pp. 29-72.
13. In one of his last public lectures, delivered in Athens in the summer of 2000, Pierre Bourdieu embraced the life of the "engaged and militant intellectual," by which he meant direct political engagement in new social movements as well as with labor movements in a united struggle against the forces of globalization. See also Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "The Primacy of the Ethical: Towards a Militant Anthropology," Current Anthropology 36(3), 1995, pp. 409-420.
14. Jagdish Bhagwati, "Deconstructing Rotten Trade," SAIS Review 22(1), 2002, pp. 39-44.
15. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
16. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, eds., Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
17. See Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
18. The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) allows 5 percent of organ transplants in U.S. transplant centers to be allotted to foreign patients. However, only those centers reporting more than 15 percent foreign transplant surgery patients are audited.
19. See, for example, the Arabic (as well as Hebrew and Japanese) version of the university's advertisement; http://www.umm.edu/transplant/arabic.html
20. In Sao Paulo Hospital, Mariana Ferreira and I encountered Dombe, a Suyá Indian from the forest of Mato Grosso who, to our amazement, faced kidney transplant (including two rejection crises) with remarkable equanimity and calm. See Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Mariana Leal Ferreira, "Domba's Spirit Kidney-Transplant Medicine and Suyá Indian Cosmology," in Disability in Local and GlobalWorlds, eds. B. Ingstad and S. Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, in press).
21. See Paul Rabinow, "Artificiality and Enlightenment: from Sociobiology to Biosociality," in Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 91-111.
22. See Marina Jimenez and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Doctor Vulture-The Unholy Business of Kidney Commerce," part one of a three-part series in The National Post (Toronto), March 30, 2002, B1, B4-B5.
23. See Flavio Lobo and Walter Fangaaniello Maierovitch, "O Mercado dos Desperados," CartaCapital, January 16, 2002, 30-34.
24. UNOS, the United Network for Organs Sharing, and EUROTRANS, are organizations that manage the capture and distribution of organs in the U.S.A. and Europe. UNOS is an official government-regulated program in the U.S.A., while EUROTRANS is a voluntary association among several European countries.
25. Both Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 2-3
26. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958), pp. 12-49, treat the translation from ancient Greek to Church Latin in slightly different ways.
27. Francis Fukuyama, Our Postmodern Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), p. 204.
28. "Offering Money for Organ Donation Ethical, HHS Committee Says," December 3, 2001.
29. See David Rothman et al., "The Bellagio Task Force Report on Global Traffic in Human Organs," Transplantation Proceedings 29, 1997, pp. 2739-2745.
30. See Janet Radcliffe-Richards et al., "The Case for Allowing Kidney Sales," The Lancet 352, 1998, p. 1951.
31. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "The Cutting Edge: Trans-Atlantic Transplants," The Center for Latin American Studies Newsletter, Berkeley, California, May 14, 2002, pp. 14-17.
32. Radcliffe-Richards et al., "The Case for Allowing Kidney Sales," p. 1951.
33. "Man Keeps Vigil for Comatose Wife who Gave him Kidney, Life," The Holland Sentinel, February 15, 2001.
34. "The Live Donor Consensus Conference," Journal of the American Medical Association 284, 2001, pp. 2919-2926.
35. See Madhav Goyal, R. Mehta, L. Schneiderman, and A. Sehgal, "The Economic Consequences of Selling a Kidney in India," Journal of the American Medical Association 288(13), 2002, pp. 1589-1593.
36. Javaad Zargooshi, "Iranian Kidney Donors: Motivations and Relations with Recipients," Journal of Urology 165, 2001, pp. 386-392.
37. Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 314.
38. See Ong's commentary in Current Anthropology on Scheper-Hughes, "The Primacy of the Ethical."
39. See Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Ishi's Brain, Ishi's Ashes," Anthropology Today 17(1), February 2000, pp. 12-18.
40. Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
41. also Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Two Feet Under and a Cardboard Coffin," Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 249-264.