This article draws on a five-year, multi-sited transnational research project on the global traffic in human organs, tissues, and body parts from the living as well as from the dead as a misrecognized form of human sacrifice. Capitalist expansion and the spread of advanced medical and surgical techniques and developments in biotechnology have incited new tastes and traffic in the skin, bones, blood, organs, tissues, marrow and reproductive and genetic marginalized other. Examples drawn from recent ethnographic research in Israel, the (...) Palestinian Authority and Turkey serve to cast light on the dark side of organs harvesting and transplantation. The article focuses on the dangers of the `fetishized kidney' for both sellers and buyers, for whom this new commodity has become an organ of opportunity and an organ of last resort. The bodily sacrifice is disguised as a donation, rendered invisible by its anonymity, and hidden under the medical rhetoric of `life saving' and `gift giving'. It suggests that the ultimate fetish as recognized long ago by Ivan Illich is the idea of `life' as object of manipulation. (shrink)

Analytical ethnography does not presume a principal analytical frame. It does not know (yet) where and when the field takes place. Rather, the ethnographer is in search for appropriate spatiotemporal frames in correspondence with the occurrences in the field. Accordingly, the author organizes a dialogue between conceptual frames and his various empirical accounts. He confronts snapshots of English Crown Court proceedings with models of event and process from micro-sociology and macro-sociology. A range of–more or less early or late, relevant or (...) irrelevant, contingent or predetermined–processual events serves as the vantage point to access event and process relations. In this line, Crown Court proceedings serve as an introductory and exemplary field for analytical ethnography, because they involve both: (strong) events and their process and (strong) processes and their events. (shrink)

Drawing on in-depth interviews with thirty-six lesbians, this article offers a feminist qualitative analysis of lesbian conception practices. The article examines the ways lesbian actors negotiate biomedical discourse in ways that reveal the co-constitutiveness of nature and culture, bodies and technologies, and biomedical and subjective knowledge. The article offers the concept of hybrid technologies, which are described as lesbian pragmatic negotiations of shifting control loci of technoscience. The author argues that lesbians' pathways to pregnancy are characterized by a negotiation of (...) discursive elements from alternative health discourses and biomedical knowledge, of various forms of technology, and of what is often termed the authoritative, objective, and scientific with the subjugated, subjective, and the embodied. In doing so these actors complicate through multiple agencies what is often interpreted as a totalizing force of biomedicalization. (shrink)