Most people can hardly imagine that it is possible to enjoy life up in Northern Norway, in Tromsø for example where I once stayed and studied at the northernmost university in the world for one year: Too cold, too remote, too boring – these are conventional misconceptions.
But Northern Norway is nothing compared to the fieldsite that anthropologist Zdenka Sokolíčková has chosen: Svalbard, an island that is located two plane hours north of Tromsø in Northern Norway, halfway on the way to the North Pole. An island that consists 60% of ice, where the sun disappears for more than three months below the horizon and where you always have to be prepared to meet polar bears (and therefore carry a gun).
Nevertheless, after two years of fieldwork, anthropologist Zdenka Sokolíčková tells in an interesting interview with Radio Prague International: “It will be quite painful to leave” – and – this is about the need to de-exoticize – “It’s just an ordinary town very high up north”.
Coal mining has been the key industry at Svalbard ever since Norway won sovereignty over the archipelago in 1920 – until 2021 at least. Photo: Ashok Boghani, flickr
Svalbard and its only town Longyearbyen with 2300 inhabitants (from 50 nations!) is popular among researchers. One reason is that it is a good place to study climate change. It is the fastest-heating place on earth. Since 1971 the average temperature has risen by 4 degrees in summer, and 7 in winter.
How do people cope? What changes have they observed? How does it affect their life and and their relation to the environment? These are some of the important questions to ask. As anthropologist, she explains, she is interested in peoples’ stories about these changes, Zdenka Sokolíčková explains in the interview.
We get more details about her findings in two conference presentations she uploaded on her Youtube channel.
One of the many good things with the global pandemic is that we get videos like these ones. Instead of standing in a boring conference room the researcher is taliking utside directly in her fieldsite, the buildings and mountains of her current home town Longyearbyen nicely visible in the background. Due to the pandemic the conference was held online only. (But as she explained
she would anyway not have travelled such long distances for environmental reasons).
As outsider one might be tempted to think that climate change also might be a good thing. This is only partly true, she explains. -20 instead of -35 degrees are easier to adapt to, but the problem are the more unstable weather conditions that have become more common. Higher temperatures mean less sea ice, it becomes more difficult to move around with snow scooters. Even in winter there are sometimes periods with rain or even strong rains. “Our worst nightmare is dark season with rain, you know no sun, rain, dark soil, nothing to do becasue you can’t go outside. This does something to you. You think this is not the place to be”, one of the inhabitants, who has been living there for a long time, told her. “Also when it rains and then frost comes back, the tundra gets hard and icy and that makes grazing for reindeers difficult”, the anthropologist adds. “Seing the starving animals coming to the town is heartbreaking.”
Also interesting: While of course not all inhabitants care for climate change, there is a widely shared notion of the inappropriateness oif human settlement. Living there is unsustainable and has a high ecological footprint – even after the end of coal mining was announced that has been the key industry at Svalbard ever since Norway won sovereignty over the archipelago in 1920. Tourism has become more important instead, which also has a huge negative environmental impact. The impact of the researchers themselves, no small number either, should also not be neglected.
Most people can hardly imagine that it is possible to enjoy life up in Northern Norway, in Tromsø for example where I once stayed and studied at the northernmost university in the world for…
I found it therefore particularily interesting to talk to Theodoros Rakopoulos who is currently studying the thriving solidarity economy in Greece: an economy based on mutual aid, cooperation, bartering and collective welfare.
Time banks, volunteer-run health clinics and pharmacies, alternative currencies, food distribution without middlemen: People “mostly from humble economic backgrounds” are experimenting successfully with alternatives to austerity policies that have been dictated by the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Theodoros Rakopoulos has been on fieldwork among the anti-middlemen movement, one of the most successful solidarity economy initiatives that popped up in Greece since 2010.
Strangely enough, I haven't heard about these developments before. I suppose it's because media was more interested in reporting about the rising xenophobia in Greece. But the researcher explains that the new solidarity economy has "arguably a wider impact on peoples’ daily life than the much talked about rise in far-right parties like Golden Dawn”.
Anthropologist Knut Christian Myhre is currently writing a book about unusual bureaucrats. Instead of reviewing laws and policies in their offices, they tour the country, hold public meetings and communicate with citizens via social media. This initiative, Myhre thinks, can serve as example for other countries wishing to revive local democracy and expand their political and legal repertoire.
His main focus was the so-called Shivji Commission that in 1991 was appointed by President Ali Hassam Mwinyi to inquire into the state of land conflicts in Tanzania. For one year this commission toured around the country, held 277 public meetings in 145 villages and 132 urban centres in all of mainland Tanzania’s 20 administrative regions. Around 83,000 members of the public took part in the process. Local researchers and experts prepared six major studies, while the commission made visits to Kenya, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Korea to learn from their experiences.
We are living in times characterized by increasing mobility and transnational connections — or so it seems, at least, for some people in the richer parts of the world. Anthropologist Heike Drotbohm has been on fieldwork among people for whom the opposite is true.
My story about her research begins like this:
"When Jacky was deported from the USA to Cape Verde, his life came to a sudden standstill. Within a short time his face grew deep wrinkles; it looked resigned, exhausted, and drained. Merely at his age of 45, Jacky looked like an old man.
Anthropologist Heike Drotbohm is looking at a recent picture of Jacky and is puzzled. She met him six years ago and now she can hardly recognize him. While peering at more pictures of deported migrants she met between 2006 and 2008 on Cape Verde during her fieldwork, she is compelled to make the same conclusion. All of these people seemed to have aged disproportionally fast.
Their faces, it seems, tell us uncomfortable stories about the transition from a mobile and independent life to the forced immobility on Cape Verde: an arrow-shaped archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean that the men left many years ago."
I also interviewed most of the researchers that were invited to hold seminars. One of the texts that for me was most fun to write was about the research by sociologist Caroline Knowles. For seven years, she has been following a pair of flip-flops around the world. This flip-flops taught her a lot about the biggest migration streams in history, inequality and the difficulties of “studying up”.
The text starts like this:
The woman, who is sinking up to her knees in rubbish in the middle of the huge landfill in the outskirts of Addis Ababa, is not one of the hundreds of scavengers who are searching for things they can use or eat like old airline food and plastic bottles.
The woman is a sociologist.
She has travelled all the way from London to this giant, murky, grey-brown raised area of partially decomposed rubbish. For her, it is the end of a long journey that started several years ago in the world’s second largest oil field in Kuwait.
During the recent (nearly) two years, I've been interviewing researchers that are part of the research project Overheating. The three crises of globalisation: An anthropological history of the early 21st century at the University of Oslo, starting…
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is currently working on finishing her book, which will summarize more than ten years fieldwork on organ trafficking. In this interview she tells us about A World Cut in Two: Global Justice and the Traffic in Organs and she shares her reflections on challenges of doing and disseminating multi-sited research.
AB: What is your upcoming book about?
– It’s about trafficking – trafficking kidneys and other organs and tissues from people living on the edges of the global economy.
– There is also a chapter on the body of the terrorist, which is about cases of the medical abuse of enemy bodies harvested for usable tissues and organs at the Israeli forensic institute, as well as in Argentina during the dirty war and in South African police mortuaries during the anti-apartheid struggle when Black bodied piled up in the morgues.
– So I’m looking also at the harvesting of the dead body during periods of warfare and other conflict, a story that is a hidden subtext of modern warfare. Sometimes this is done as a kind of retaliation or retribution or as a punishment or as way to reinforce the fabric of individual bodies and the Body Politic.
– Since Margaret Lock did such a wonderful work on brain death, I also tell some stories about the very different ways that brain death is calibrated and understood from country to country. You can be brain dead in one country and not in the country next door. Or in US, you can be brain dead in one state, but not in another.
– So this is a very indeterminate form of death and this continues to contribute to people’s anxieties about donating organs. People sense this indeterminacy. How do you know he’s really dead? And the answer might be: “It depends on whether you are in Philadelphia or in New York City how dead you are”. And that is not very consoling answer.
AB: When can we expect your book?
– I am completing two books next year, one in January and the other in June. Right now I am working on a small monograph based on one of the chapters, which was too big for the organs trafficking book. It is about a war within the dirty war in Argentina, a war against the population of mentally and cognitively impaired at the war national asylum, Colonia Montes de Oca. It is called: “The Ghosts of Montes de Oca: Naked Life and the Medically Disappeared”.
AB: The working title of your trafficking book, “A World Cut in Two”, which refers to the countries of buyers and the countries of sellers, the rich and the poor, but also the world of the body, as you said. Speaking of body – if we move back to your article on three bodies you wrote with Margaret Lock in 1987. Has your view on the body in anthropology changed after your work with organ trafficking?
– Well, I always said that three was simply the magical number. People remember it. But I liked what Per Fugelli said – about the “missing body” in anthropological writings – the body in nature. And that would be not a naturalized, universalized body but the body as it is lived /interpreted in different times and places, as part of, and responding to, the given natural world. And I think that’s more important than all the promises inherent in genomics, biotechnologies and biosocialities.
– Nonetheless there was a truly radical breakthrough on the particular day in Berkeley that Paul Rabinow had an a-ha! moment when he recognized following a particular class meeting on the AIDS epidemic as it was emerging in San Francisco that people in afflicted communities, who grappling with an epidemic that was not yet well understood, were forming social movements, alliances, identities, and affinity groups based on their T cell counts, that is on something that was invisible and unknown to them about human biology prior to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Thus, bio-sociality.
– So these other understandings of the body go beyond the ‘three bodies’ that Lock and I wrote about in ‘The Mindful Body’. Foucault anticipated it, of course. But I think that were I to revise the ‘Mindful Body’ today it would definitely include the body in nature, as both Per and Benedicte Ingstad have paved the way in their writings.
– And of course I would have to talk about biopolitics and biosociality and its effects. The advent of genomics, personalized medicine which also connote a different kind of body, a body that is potentially infinitely malleable. And in case of organs and organs transplant, which has been with us already quite a long time, the idea of the body is seemingly endlessly renewable.
– My colleague Lawrence Cohen refers to bodily “supplementarity”, this is the idea that I can supplement my body with your body parts and with all the bio-available materials I can get, legally or not, ethically or not, from the living or the dead.
– Bio-supplementarity is a more theorized version of what I called neo-cannibalism, to refer to the conditions under which I may have permission or assume the right to cannibalize you. While neo-cannibalism or compassionate cannibalism derives from a long anthropological tradition, it proved quite offensive to some readers, as you might imagine.
– And I suppose if I wanted to add a fifth body, it would probably be the body in debt. Because everywhere I go on behalf of the Organs Watch project I find that debt, debt peonage, debt to family, debt across generations is the cause of the redefinition of the duty to donate organs while still living, a phenomenon I have called the “terror and the tyranny of the gift”.
– The duty to survive and the duty to deliver organs has created a new and alarming form of embodied debt peonage. The debtors are the kidney sellers who, even as they dispose of their organs, no longer feel that they own them, there are claims being made on their bodies that they are unable to resist.
AB: Do you think these books will change anything or you feel that you’ve done enough and people who should know about the situation of the organ trade already have this knowledge?
– Well, I don’t know. What I really wanted to challenge and to change was the international transplant profession. I wanted them to acknowledge what was happening within their field, how it was being transformed by organs markets. And I think that that I have accomplished that.
– Indeed, I know I have gotten the profession to move beyond its initial denials – first that it was an urban legend that did not exist at all; then that it was the result of a few bad apples in the field; and third, and the most dangerous, the problem is small and we have corrected it.
– Now, since the Istanbul Summit on Organs Trafficking in 2008 (in which I, as director of Organs Watch, participated) the transplant world reached a consensus that accepted the reality of human trafficking in organs and the role that surgeons have played, knowingly or not, in its development. They acknowledged that trafficking in humans for organs is not like other forms of medical migration or medical tourism. It is unique.
– But as for the general public, so to speak, I think there are many people who still think this trafficking in organs is surreal, that is grist for horror movies not for scientific study. I have worked on several excellent documentaries on various dimensions of human trafficking in organs, but many people say: “I’m so surprised”.
AB: Who do you see as readers of your upcoming book?
– We used to say that we wanted to aim for a broadly educated public, “the readers of the New Yorker Magazine”. Easier said than done because we have dual obligations to write for anthropologists and social scientists, to develop social theory, and at the same time to educate and engage the public. To be a good citizen, to be a public intellectual. And these dual obligations often come into conflict.
– So, my book combines narratives within narratives, some aimed for the anthropologist and some for the public. It has plot, character development and is an anthropological detective story, you might call it a social thriller, perhaps. A new genre of ethnography. And why not?
– As in my previous ethnographies, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics and Death without Weeping, I want there to be food for thought for people who want to read ‘thick description’, thick interpretation, and others who will skip that and go for the action. I hope they will enjoy reading about some of the unforgettable characters that I have had the good fortune to meet along the organs trafficking trail.
– The hardest thing for me was that there were so many sites and so many countries I visited that the book was fragmented. Is there such a thing as a multi-sited over-load factor? If so, I have certainly suffered from it. And then, the world of transplant trafficking was always in flux, always moving to new sites, new organs, new arrangements. So I have written the book three times. I am now revising a fourth version. And some of it is still a bloody mess because I am jumping from Turkey to Israel or to the Philippines, to Europe.
– It’s like seeing the world through the animated kidney. Part of the book is also a reflection on the role of the anthropologist in studying organized crime and kidney pirates.
– A friend and former owner of a famous book store, Codys, in Berkeley, that (like so many other bookstores) collapsed under the pressure of Amazon.com suggested that I change the title of my book to “Kidney Hunter”. That is with reference both to the kidney traffickers and to the anthropologist who is another sort of kidney hunter. Or Notes of an Apprentice Anthropologist-Detective”. So I am playing with writing a sequel along those lines.
AB: But aren’t you afraid that when you are jumping from one place to another that we don’t get enough knowledge of each of these locations?
– You get to know enough about what you need to know to understand the meaning of transplant and the body in that particular location or country. I am not an ethnographer of Turkey or of Israel or Moldova, or of Argentina, or South Africa but I am an ethnographer of global organized crime, an ethnographer of global outlaw transplant. So perhaps it’s not traditional ethnography but it is anthropology, if you can accept that distinction.
– It is not a Malinowskian ethnography and has no pretence to be that. But it is using all the tools of anthropology and of ethnography, which is approaching people as having local worlds, local ethics, local morals, local bodies, and those are the ones that I have to understand, having at least minimal empathy for everyone involved which I always have.
AB: In many occasions you, as well as other anthropologists doing multi-sited fieldwork, have been accused of not being anthropologists for that anymore. How do you meet these comments?
– The problem for traditional ethnography is globalization, of course, which impacts all of our former research sites and populations. The people want to study are in movement, small communities are in flux, they are influenced more by what goes on outside their villages and slums and cities than what goes on inside them. So, we follow different objects.
– If I am following kidneys, others are following migrant labor, or looking at other forms of border crossing, at tourism, or financial markets, or humanitarian workers, or soldiers of fortune, all the ways that people are involved in maintaining lives at all levels of society.
– What’s happened to the practice of traditional ethnography is also the legacy of the savage attacks on the authority of the anthropologist and on the history of our discipline and its links to colonialism and, in USA, the relationships of some anthropologists with defense work and collaborations with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and so forth. We weren’t always on the right side of things.
– Beginning in the late 1960s we tried, my generation in particular, to “reinvent” anthropology, to address colonialism and imperialism and the Vietnam War as critics. Then, in the 1980s we began to turn those critics on ourselves as agents and to engage in brutal self-critical reflexive writings, deconstructing the objects and aims of anthropology.
– In the end we were deconstructing ourselves, as anthropologist, as Americans, as gendered persons, as social classes, to the point that we became so self-conscious of our personal, cultural baggage that many anthropologists simply gave up doing ethnography and became moral philosophers of a different sort.
– The idea that fieldworkers could, in fact, become friends, co-producers, co-workers, colleagues and even comrades, was thrown out as an affectation an artifice of the anthropologist. How could you really develop anything more than methodological empathy with the people you were studying? Younger scholars became uncomfortable with the idea of the anthropologist as both “stranger and friend”, as my mentor, Hortense Powdermaker put it. Where does the authority of the ethnographer come from, what gives one the right to infiltrate a community and to use intimacies to generate theories?
– Well, I still think that doing traditional fieldwork is essential, but I would say in the last few generations of our graduate students think that ethnography is an archaic approach. The world is no longer localized. There are always local communities but they are more influenced by what goes on outside of it than what’s going inside of it. So you have to engage these communities through what my colleague Laura Nader calls vertical slice, that is looking at power relations, at relation to the state, global relations.
– Today, in medical anthropology many graduate students now do science studies and they do so for variety of reasons. They believe that biotechnology is totally transforming bodies, psyches (the inner life), what is means to be human. Ethics, power, meaning – all of these seem linked to the possibilities of biotechnology. They also feel, following Paul Rabinow, that the only way to truly have a friendship with ones informants is to share knowledge experience and a social class relation.
– So the idea of studying up as Lauren Nader called it many years ago became the fashion. You studied Wall Street, insurance companies, bankruptcy courts, and global pharmaceutical companies, not the underdog, the exploited and the oppressed. But that was a misrepresentation of what Laura Nader was really saying. She said, study both. Don’t just study sugar cane cutters. Study the owner of the sugar plantations. Don’t just study the sweat shops workers in Asia. Study the American corporations that are using, buying and consuming their products.
– So as result of all these different forces, how you situate yourself, who you are, your class position, your historical background, it almost naturally emerged that people would do much more fragmented, partial and mobile approach to ethnography.
– So maybe the idea that we now engage in studying global assemblages and leave behind traditional ethnography is an over reaction. But it’s a real reflection of what the world looks like now. And, personally, I think it would be completely tragic to give up the Malinowskian approach altogether. I tell that to my students all the time. Some of the students of Benedicte Ingstad said: “What I learned from Benedicte was to write about what you know, and what you know well”.
– In that empirical, interpretive and Clifford Geertzian notion of thick description you cannot do thick description doing multi-sited anthropology. You can do thick theoretical analysis, you can do a lot of analytical work, but the thick description requires that you just dig in your heels, as we say, and stay. Stay as long as necessary. With many happy returns.
Spring 2011 I attended seminar “Engaging medicine” at the University of Oslo in honor of one of the most prominent medical anthropologists in Norway – Benedicte Ingstad. One of the speakers was Nancy Scheper-Hughes with a paper “Medical Migrations – From Pilgrimage and Medical Tourism to Transplant Trafficking».
Since I got engaged in medical and critical anthropology, Scheper-Hughes has been to me a constant source of inspiration and provocation. As an anthropologist who supports and has been doing public and applied anthropology she co-founded Organs Watch, a medical human rights project focusing on organ trafficking. In more than ten years she has been working on the global organ trade. Following the illegal flow of kidneys, she has mapped the tragic network of rich buyers and poor sellers all over the world.
I always wondered how her adventure with kidneys started. She answers:
– It was a very different kind of a project and it was not one that I ever could have imagined spending so much time on.
– I wrote an article that emerged from chapter 6 of my book “Death without weeping” where I write about bodies in dangers, the dead body and favela residents’ fears and their feelings of ontological security or insecurity of the body. And I was studying the emergence of local death squads that were operating after the end of the military period, taking the place of the militarized state. I found that there was real medical mistreatment of poor bodies in clinics, in forensic institutes, and in the graveyard. And above all of this was hovering a terror that people had that their bodies would be used for organs. So I wrote some articles trying to explain why people thought they would be subject to kidnapping for the purpose of organ theft.
– At the time I still thought that this was mainly an urban legend. But then underneath the legend were these real experiences that poor people encountered in forensic medical institutes or police morgues where the unidentified, unclaimed body was, in fact, state property, and (to be crude) chopped up and harvested. So the people were right in fearing that their bodies were not safe.
[teaserbreak]
– Then I was invited to the Rockefeller Institute’s Bellagio Conference Center in 1996 for a high powered international meeting with transplant surgeons from several countries, North and South, East and West. And my job was, I think, to reinforce the confidence of these transplant surgeons that there was really no need to worry about theft of organs, that it was an urban legend but this is why people believe it. And because I was the only anthropologist and the meetings were long, I took walks with several of the surgeons from Russia, USA, Israel, Taiwan and elsewhere. And each one told me stories that led me to realize that the traffic in organs was real. Then, in 1997 on a trip to Israel I heard about the transplant and organ brokers.
– So bit by bit I began to realize that this was serious business. By the end of this Bellagio meeting, I was nominated to do some ethnographic work on that subject. In fact it was simply to discover and to document: what in world is going on?
Since the Bellagio meeting, Scheper-Hughes has traveled all over the globe and followed the organ transplant community:
– In the early days when I thought: “Oh God, this traffic is really damaging people, both the buyers and the sellers, I need to stop this”, I would go to the International Transplant meeting, then I would go to the American transplant meeting, to the Canadian, Polish, Brazilian. But then I said: “No, I can’t spend the rest of my life going to the transplant meetings”.
– But each place I traveled as an anthropologist I would learn very different notions of the body, organs, what is acceptable and what is ethical. I was surprised to learn that in France there is very little living kidney donations; it is just not done. And I am talking about within loving families and altruistically. “No”, I was told, “That’s barbaric, why would we ask healthy people to sacrifice a body part to someone else when we should be getting from the dead?” And also, some transplant coordinators in some countries say that dealing with deceased donation is also very difficult. “It’s too hard because you have to deal with people in grief and mourning, it’s undignified to be asking them over the dead body. It’s easier to ask living people”.
– But then you go to countries where living donation is common and people will say: “You know, it’s good for the solidarity of the country for people to do this”. So you really see these alternative ethics that work. So some of these travels were really important.
Working on the organ trade she became interested in understanding commodification process and the reification of parts and body parts. These interests resulted in “Commodifying Bodies” co-edited with Loïc Wacquant. She also developed interest in the body itself, the meaning of scars and the differential experiences of selling a kidney.
She gives an interesting example:
– In the Philippines the scars of the surgical removal of a kidney means you are person of honor. It means: “I have taken care of my family”. As opposed to Moldavians who are ashamed of being caught up in the transplant trade and they say they had an accident when I looked at their scars. Or in Brazil where the kidney sellers who were recruited to South Africa to provide kidneys to wealthy transplant tourists, they are called the mutilated ones because the beautiful body is so important to Brazilians. Men and women love their bodies. It’s interesting how they defend themselves in neoliberal, but it really is pre-neoliberal notion of “it’s my body”. It’s almost an anarchy of the body, of the self.
When I asked if I understood correctly that she doesn’t see all the organ sellers as victims she said she had two answers:
– Yes, the kidney sellers were exploited. Pure and simple. They were deceived. They were considered objects. Sometimes they have personal relationships with the brokers. So in that sense, yes, they were victims.
– But is there still agency? Yes, of a limited sort. I usually rephrase Marx: people make history but they don’t make it just as they please. Or under conditions of their making. Well, people here are making choices but not just as they please.
– The kidney sellers in Manila want to sell an eye, a whole eye ball. They want to sell a testicle. They want to sell any organ of which they have two. Why? Because if it’s a job, if they are commercial workers, a kidney is a one off deal. It is not reproducible. The only other option for a kidney seller who is still in debt is to allow their teenage children to sell, or their wives to sell, and by recruiting within their family, they can get a little bonus of about $50.00 for handing them over to the organs brokers. Not very pretty. Structural violence gets reproduced within the household.
– But the Brazilian kidney sellers don’t want publicly to be called victims. Brazil has a pretty good organized system for the capture of organs, but the bureaucracy is corrupted in different parts of the country and the waiting lists there were a mess.
– And this was leading to what I would call patron-client kidney donations. They are people who are life long retainers, household servants, nannies and cane cutters with their bosses asking them to provide kidneys. What kind of choice is that? But it fits very well into a very classic patron-client relation. And the people would say that they gave their consent: “Oh, willingly”. Or: “Of course I would give to this household I’ve been serving”. Because their livelihood, their very survival depends on their bosses. So they must do it. It doesn’t even make any sense to think that you wouldn’t do it.
– So choice is there, but if choice were the only thing that mattered the answer is very simple – that everybody sells. But choices are not the only thing that matters because the choices are over determined, part of the logic of a bad faith economy, as Pierre Bourdieu would put it.
Scheper-Hughes is critical towards the jargon used by transplant community and terms like “organ scarcity”, which contributes to the development of the moral obligation to be a donor. She responses with term “artificial scarcities”, which expresses the socially and politically created phenomenon.
This term arises strong reactions. She is also criticized by many of the potential kidney buyers who accuse her of «producing extraordinary suffering in the world» as she is against the black markets. In a response to one of the many letters she receives she wrote a brochure on what you should think about before you buy or sell a kidney. She explains:
– It’s not a cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, but “embodied, therefore I am”. So the first principal is that you have a right to your body. You are existentially thrown into the world with your body. Sometimes they are imperfect. Sometimes they are disabled bodies. But they are your bodies. And they are your treasure, your legacy. You do have a right to donate. But you don’t have an obligation to donate. No one has a right to demand it of you. Because that demand is a kind of invisible sacrifice that’s being asked. And it puts the asker, the demander into a moral and ethical gray zone. You know, making demands of another in the desire for self-survival.
– If you have absolutely made up your mind that you must have, as one of the potential buyers calls it, “a fresh native kidney” from someone, and you say that you don’t want to ask a relative and it’s better to pay somebody who is doing it for a living, I will make one adjustment to that. I’m not against money. We live in a world where markets mean a lot of different things to different people, I mean desires and friendship and sociability, as in many parts in the Middle East. And of course markets can be a good thing.
– So, why can’t we maybe bargain over a kidney? Well, I have argued that the kidney is not a redundant organ, that there is no such thing as a ‘spare’ kidney. You pay a big price in bartering over the value of your ‘spare part’. So I would ask the buyers that if they feel it is what you must do, then pay a relative, pay a dear friend. Because you’ll make then sure you will look after them. Pay your wife. Put a nephew through college who has no way of going to college.
– Is there any objection to that? Families are doing it all the time in different ways, circulating money through wedding obligations, making loans. And being indebted to someone is not necessarily servitude. There were times and places where gifts and debts were the same. And so, a gift is a kind of debt after all. That’s what Marcel Mauss is all about. So why not kidney debts within families?
– But just be sure you are not asking a sacrifice. People are not angels. They are not sprits, they have a body and its organs are limited. They have a right to those organs. But if they are in a relationship with kinship and affection and love, don’t just take it. Give something back that really matters to you and that obligates you to further gifting and responsibility for each other’s welfare and wellbeing. Don’t pay a stranger to whom you owe nothing but a one off payment.
– So I think these are anthropological questions. They have to do with kinship, with nature of gifting, the nature of debt and body debts.
The engaged anthropologist has been addressing the uncomfortable truth about the organ trafficking to transplant surgeons, politicians, the House of Lords etc. What was the major challenge with addressing her work to these groups? What were the reactions? Do they want to hear all that? Do they get angry?
– Well, it’s changed. Sure they get angry. Often, in the early days, I was in the international transplant meeting and transplant coordinator got up and called me a kidney terrorist because I was preventing kidneys from being moved around.
– I used to say to some transplant people, if you are satisfied living in a world where the third world have to pay a body tax to help the rich and you are satisfied with that, then I have nothing else to say to you. If that worries you a little bit than I think we can sit down and have a conversation.
– But of course there is resistance. Since the Istanbul Summit in 2008 there are now a key core of transplant doctors who really are rephrasing everything that I’ve been saying over the years. So I feel like a good part of my job is over. I mean, I don’t think that any profession can totally police itself without some outsider perspectives. I think that transplant profession needs help from social scientists who are critical thinkers and independent of medicine. It is not a job for bioethicists because they often share a worldview with the surgeons. They are not critical or independent enough. But basically I feel that more or less political job is done.
2010 - Body and State - Buying and Selling the Body, Pt 1 | The New School
Video: Nancy Scheper-Hughes at the Body and State conference, Buying and Selling the Body
Scheper-Hughes is done with research on organ trade now and she is making plans for new projects:
– Well, I have a lot of unfinished work. I would probably go back to South Africa. I have a series of essays about the transition from Apartheid to the new South Africa that is historical now because I was first there in 1993–1994, but I was working in one newly formed shantytown. And I visited there several times since and I have witnessed many changes there. So I would probably go back. And I have also a draft, a manuscript, which may end up being a series of essays. But that will be my next project.
– And then I’m still always working in the Pernambuco town I call Bom Jesus da Mata. I have been asked to bring my book “Death without weeping” up to date because the situation has changed so completely there. The death of infants is not happening anymore, because of the demographic transition that all of Brazil has experienced in the past two decades. So I want to put it in a more historical perspective. But also to maybe write a book on the death squad that has terrorized the town. On this particular squad and how it came to take over the entire government of the municipio. Not just of a favela. But in an area that includes rural hamlets of 50.000 people, not gigantic but a substantially sized town.
– The judiciary, courts, the town counselors and the prefeito – everybody was in the hands of and employed by the death squad. How did it happen? In a town which was fairly distinguished as a sugar plantation town, which also had some shoe factories, that had an educated class, they were educated outside the place, that had also a radical class of organic intellectuals, had a lot of resistance, had very strong liberation theology movement – how was it possible? And that’s the question I’ve been asking and still don’t have the answer. They don’t have the answer.
– So I want to return. I think in terms of understanding violence that is beyond the everyday violence – how vigilantes can come to become the governing force? It’s seems to me a large enough question.
