This article focuses on ethical issues surrounding the selling and buying of human organs. The author argues that most people who sell their organs in India do so in order to pay already existing debts. The transaction is only temporarily an exchange of “life for life,” and most “donors” are back in debt soon after the operation. The author discusses the flexible ethics that reduce reality to dyadic transactions and the purgatorial ethics that collapse real and imaginary exploitation in the (...) service of complex interests. He also offers a sophisticated discussion of the ethics of publicity and public ethics. He emphasizes the lack of factual information, intentional manipulation of information, and the dissemination of kidney panics and kidney scandals, especially by the new developing bioauthorities and bioethical brokers. (shrink)

This article links ethnographic exploration of commodified renal transactions in India to their articulation in Hindi film as practices re-animating kinship in the face of the death or diminishment of the father. To think through the work such organ stories do, I contrast the `transplant film' with the `transfusion film'. I argue transfusion narratives offer a liberal developmentalist recoding of social relations under the sign of a Nehruvian project of national recognition, while transplant narratives abandon the project of development for (...) an imaginated return to tradition. To understand the stakes in this shift, I trace the genealogy of modern transplant medicine through the relationship between recognition and suppression and through the return of the surgical as a metonym for care. (shrink)

Defacement asks what happens when something precious is despoiled. In specifying the human face as the ideal type for thinking through such violation, this book raises the issue of secrecy as the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of surface.

This article examines how perceptions of what semen is thought to contain affect its value as a marketable product. I explore how donor altruism, intelligence and ethnicity traits thought to be transmitted in sperm are perceived and transacted among representatives of the sperm banking industry, as well as among women who purchase semen for insemination and show how the linkages between the reproductive industry and the sex industry further heighten the commodity-quality of semen donation. I argue that the emphasis placed (...) on altruism, is an attempt to redefine the commodity quality of semen as gift, in order to imbue it with higher emotional and moral value. (shrink)