A few hours ago I was shocked to read that David Graeber has died. He was only 59 years old. Graeber was one the most known and most original anthropologists in the world. He was one of the leading figures of the Occupy movement and got famous among the general public with his books on Debt and Bullshit Jobs.
There is still no official information about what happened besides from that he died in a hospital, according to his wife who tweeted:
Yesterday the best person in a world, my husband and my friend .@davidgraeber died in a hospital in Venice.
David Graeber has always been one of my favorite anthropologists. I liked the way he combined anthropology with activism and search for alternatives to capitalism and other oppressive ideologies and systems. One of the first pieces I read by him was Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Everytime there was something in the news about him, I was eager to write about it (while I was still active blogging).
David Graeber in 2006. Photo: Lorenz Khazaleh
My first encounter with him was here on antropologi.info. He commented om some reviews about his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology that I linked to and criticized some of his points. Two years later, we met at a conference about anthropology and cosmopolitanism in Britain and chatted a bit about anthropology and the internet and probably also about conference culture. I stíll remember very well that his presentation was one of the highlights, not only because of its content (“Democracy is no Western invention“), but also because of his presentation style. In contrast to most other paper givers, he was actually able to communicate with the audience and use normal language to express complex ideas.
Three years after the conference, in 2009, we ended up in a little fight here on this blog. He had just just signed a petition calling for boycotting Israel and I had blogged about it, using his name in the headline. He did not like this exposure. On the one hand his reaction was surprising, on the other hand it was somehow understandable: His activism had caused him lots of trouble already. A few years before this blog post he was fired from Yale, most likely because of his activism.
The most recent publication by him that I enjoyed is the audio book of his bestseller Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. I listened to it on long walks last summer. “Such a wise book”, I often thought while listening. “You learn so much more than just about the book’s topic. I definitely should blog about it.”
Two books stand out from his impressive intellectual production:
– “Debt: the first 5000 years” – a masterly history of debt and how it has been leveraged against people and communities in historical and contemporary perspective.
– “Bullshit jobs: a theory” – a wide-ranging critique of the current system of worth and valuation of jobs that would make you think very differently about the “virtues” of the uncontrolled growth of managerialism and digitalisation in today’s companies and organisations. This work is particularly important to understand the current moment. As David noted in a recent Politico op-ed, the pandemic has clearly shown that those who perform the most important jobs are paid the least.
When he died, David had just completed his most recent book, one on which he worked for several years. He teamed up with British archeologist David Wengrow to challenge some of the more stubborn assumptions of mainstream social science. This was one of the most ambitious projects David embarked upon, and it should be published in 2021.
In Memoriam David Graeber by focaalblog with comments by several anthropologists, among others Don Kalb, University of Bergen:
David was the most important anthropologist of his generation and by far its most brilliant and effective public intellectual. He reached wider audiences than anyone of us, possibly even larger than Margaret Mead in anthropology’s heydays. His message was as revolutionary as hers, if not more so. It announced nothing less than an anthropology that would research, critique, and go beyond capitalism.
Or by Alpa Shah, London School of Economics:
I often thought of David Graeber as a genius. But of the many things that David taught me, it was that there is in fact a genius in each of us. We can’t see this because we don’t have the collective structures to realise the brilliance within us, because we live in a world that violently excludes the many, that reserves the acquisition of individual heroism for the few, a world today driven by finance capital.
For David, anthropology was important for it was a means to resurrect other possible more beautiful worlds, imagine societies other than our own exclusive one, figure out the larger implications, and then offer those ideas back to the world for an anti-capitalist politics.
In your intellectual life, you can sometimes get lucky, and be pulled into writings that give you the wonderful feeling of being released from your intellectual routines and shackles. Numerous people have seen this rupture as the necessary condition to engage in reflexive work. I remember experiencing this feeling more than a few times during my initiation into anthropology, and Graeber’s oeuvre never failed to make me feel that way.
(…)
What is about Graeber’s work that makes you look at your everyday routine, and that makes you feel like re-discovering it for the first time? And what is it that makes that perspective so important?
A few hours ago I was shocked to read that David Graeber has died. He was only 59 years old. Graeber was one the most known and most original anthropologists in the world. He was one of the leading figures…
Book Review. Consuming Space: Placing Consumption in Perspective edited by Michael K. Goodman, David Goodman & Michael Redclift. Ashgate, 2010.
Tereza Kuldova, PhD Fellow, Department of Ethnography, Museum of Cultural History, Oslo
Chicken industry in UK, the violent history of luxury teak wood in Burma, boutique hotels in New York, chewing gum and the ‘tropical paradise’ of Cancun, seduction and commodity fetishism, ethical local and organic food, Chilean wine in UK, internet and consumption…Wondering what they have in common? The answer is: they are all amazingly catchy cases for developing a theory of consumption, production and the role of space – and they are all to be found in one edited volume – Consuming Space: Placing Consumption in Perspective.
This edited volume is one of those in which one finds something new and valuable every time one returns to it. It is literally packed with both interesting facts and great theoretical insights. Even though most of the contributors work within the field of social geography, I believe that the volume contains many interesting perspectives for anthropologists.
The focus of the volume is on understanding the ways in which we produce and consume space, as much as ways in which we produce and consume nature – the various case studies all relate to this topic. It looks at the space of social practice, which is “occupied by sensory phenomena, including products of imagination, such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias, which describe and contain consumption cultures” (xi). It looks at how space is made and remade along the trajectories of the social relations of production and consumption, in other words, this volume is an exploration into diverse contemporary capitalist political economies.
I have selected several of the book chapters for the review. It is those chapters that I enjoyed reading the most and that also shed some light on the red thread that goes through the edited volume: the conceptualization of space in relation to consumption and production.
Michael Redclift looks at the ways in which the histories of production and consumption are tied to histories of particular locations in his chapter Frontier Spaces of Production and Consumption: Surfaces, Appearances and Representations on the ‘Mayan Riviera’.
He shows how a place, its nature and social relations were transformed first as a result of the emerging popularity of chewing gum and later on as a result of transforming this place into a globally popular tourist destination. He brings the reader to the Mexican Caribbean Coast and looks at its layered histories that point to the hybridization through which nature and society meet and refashion space.
Redclift weaves together a narrative of chicle – the raw material from which chewing gum was derived – a story that transformed the landscape and ecology of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. He shows that “the boom of chicle production eventually gave way to other forms of production and consumption, notably in the development of international tourism on an altogether more ambitious scale” (86). He then goes on to tell the story of how Cancun, the ultimate tropical ‘artificial’ paradise, was created, how it emerged as a major touristic destination and how it lost its appeal in the 90s.
This chapter shows the importance of setting the space which is consumed in a historical context. He reveals also how the “fortunes of New York are closely linked with those of the Mexican Caribbean, and those of the Caribbean are linked with generations of people elsewhere, especially in Europe and North America, whose daily life depend on connections that they were usually only dimly aware of” (94). The story that Redclift tells is complex and interesting and I encourage anyone with interest in Mexico, Caribbean or the workings of tourist industry, to look into it.
A brief video on the history of a chewing gum:
History of Chewing Gum
In The Cultural Economy of the Boutique Hotel: The Case of the Schrager and W Hotels in New York, Donald McNeill and Kim McNamara deal with another kind of space, namely the ‘boutique hotel’. The ‘boutique hotel’ has been one of the biggest stories in the hotel industry since the 1980s and its popularity has spread worldwide. The chapter maps its cultural economy and the processes of the ‘economy of qualities’, where the boutique hotels are perceived as having a life, or a career.
They show how the hotel’s lifecycle is “closely related to the specificities of local markets, the urban economic sectors that dominate central business districts, and the physical structure of existing buildings” (151) and thus how creation of particular spaces is always part of larger processes. They look in particular at the development of Ian Schrager’s boutique hotels in New York, which coincided with the transformation – from the 70s onwards – of the city into a fashion capital and the hub of music, art, design and disco-lit nightlife.
This chapter nicely portrays the shifts in aesthetics and design as much as in consumer demands and the ways in which desires are manufactured. It also portrays how the boutique hotel concept was appropriated by competitors and boutique hotels suddenly emerged all around the globe. I have stayed in many boutique hotels in India and this chapter definitely sets them into perspective for me.
A brief video on boutique hotels:
In Manufacturing Meaning along the Chicken Supply Chain: Consumer Anxiety and Spaces of Production, Peter Jackson, Neil Ward and Polly Russell look at a different dimension of space. They analyze spaces of production in relation to consumption to understand how meaning is manufactured in this process.
They reexamine the contemporary trends of re-connecting producers with consumers, where consumers increasingly wish to make qualified choices, where for instance – those with capital – prefer eggs from free roaming hens, or meat from small local producers. This chapter focuses on “identifying where and how the distinctive cultural meanings of food are created and negotiated” and it argues that “this process of ‘manufacturing meaning’ has direct economic consequences in a commercial climate where food is increasingly ‘sold with a story’” (164).
They thus set out to explore “role of subjective ideas, like myth and memory, within contemporary understandings of food industry” (164). They map the terrain of the intensive (broiler) chicken industry, an industry which epitomizes the recent industrialization of agricultural production.
The interesting question they ask is when and under what conditions chicken becomes perceived as either a sentient living being or as commodity – a question of the commodification of nature. They show how the “food producers are not simply manufacturing a product (broiler chicken) but they are also simultaneously attempting to manipulate the meanings which consumers attach to that product” (169).
They approach this through life history interviews with people who have been for years involved in the chicken industry; some of these interviews are certainly interesting and point to the ambivalent relationships between these people and chickens, which are often understood in terms of profit, as a commodity, but still – a special type of commodity, a living commodity.
These life histories show that “the ‘invisibility’ of chicken production has direct consequences for the way consumers relate to the product” (173) and that “the mechanization and acceleration of poultry production creates a distance from any emotional connection with live chickens intended for slaughter” (174).
They argue that “in managing the risks associated with chicken production, (…) the food industry is faced with a number of tensions most readily apparent in the desire to justify premium prices through revealing more about animal welfare, quality and provenance without making consumers ‘squeamish’ by providing too much information” (184). According to them, consumer anxiety is “an inevitable consequence of the intensification of the industry, a direct result of the commodification of nature and the increasing distance separating consumers from producers” (184).
For an interview with broiler farmers see this video:
Industrial Chicken Farming
In Consuming Burmese Teak: Anatomy of a Violent Luxury Resource, Raymond L. Bryant looks at how space as much as people’s lives have been transformed and even devastated by the desires of elites for luxury wood.
This chapter brilliantly uncovers how the history of the premier world luxury wood – the teak tree – has been implicated in a history of violence, oppression, exploitation, and civil war. He shows the dark side of the story of this luxury commodity which nowadays adores the yachts of the wealthy.
In Burma, “political interests centered on controlling teak forests and their inhabitants. Burma’s rulers – pre-colonial monarchs, British officials, post-colonial civilian and military elites – have all grappled with this problem, even as forest residents – shifting cultivators, villagers, timber traders – have sought to evade central control. In short, teak has been a perennial focus of struggle” (240).
His version of the story of the teak is certainly not the ‘official one’. He calls the Burmese teak a blood timber – “a resource whose record of exploitation can be viewed as a bad thing” (240). The accounts he argues against in this chapter are those “written by and/or for elites”, accounts that “present one particular version of history that is ‘factual’ in tone, partial in scope and de-politicized in presentation” (240).
In pre-colonial Burma teak tree was preferred by the Burmese royalty and nobility; it was used in ship-building and the 18th and 19th century were marked by a thriving export trade. “As a valued timber, there was a royal monopoly on teak from at least the eighteenth century that was enforced in the forests by specially appointed guards empowered to fine or arrest anyone involved in its illegal extraction” (241).
The British in search for new timber supplies to build war ships discovered the potential of Burma, the home to the largest teak forests in the world. And so “from the mid-nineteenth century to the Japanese invasion of Burma in early 1942, the consolidation of British control went hand in hand with the elaboration of the world’s leading export-oriented teak industry.
As such, teak became prime imperial resource” (242).
Teak was shipped to markets in both Europe and British India, where it was used in everything from park benches, railway sleepers to warships. After 1900 the forests in Burma were ‘privatized’ and became dominated by foreign companies, a fact that generated considerable local resentment. “Official revenue earned from the lucrative teak industry was used to sustain the British Indian colonial administration (of which Burma was a part)” (243).
After Burma gained independence, the situation has not changed much, it in fact worsened. “As in pre-colonial and colonial times, post-colonial teak production generates enormous profits that are not reinvested in the economic improvement of the country, but are rather used to improve the lives of those who control Burmese State as well as their political and economic allies” (243):
“Even as teak wood contributed to imperial grandeur and post-imperial fine living by providing a marker of distinction for both the already well-to-do and the socially up-and-coming, it was also the focus of vicious strife in the forests from where it came. (…) Burmese teak extraction has been a brutal and tawdry tale of state repression, local displacement, popular fear and loathing, and out-and-out murder” (248). This story of production of teak, is a story of production “whose anatomy combines extinction and distinction in a way and to an extent that perhaps only violent luxury goods can do” (253).
An interesting older video:
The Ethnic Minority Fighting a Burmese Onslaught (1992)
The last chapter which I have selected is – paradoxically – one of the introductory chapters. These chapters are all theoretically oriented and are definitely a must read. Yet one of them stands out in my view and that is The Seduction of Space by David B. Clarke.
All the above case stories suggest the omnipresence of the commodity and the saturation of space with commodity. There is literally no escaping commodity and the market. In this situation, it is most appropriate to reexamine Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, and that is what Clarke does in his chapter.
This notion has become over time unpopular among many social scientists that tend to favor the idea of full consciousness of the consumer eliminating thus any traces of false consciousness. Yet Clarke shows that Marx is “undoubtedly far closer to acknowledging unconscious effects than many recent theorizations of consumption” (57).
Taking this as a starting point he then goes on, using Lacan, to focus on the alignment of the pleasure principle and reality principle. In the final section he looks at the way in which “the reality principle and the pleasure principle have been deflected by their due alignment”, which manifests itself in the “deregulation of the reality principle and the consequent emergence of an unprincipled reality” (58).
To reach to this point Clarke uses Baudrillard’s notion of seduction – seduction, and not consumption, is here opposed to production. Seduction diverts, takes aside, it is everywhere and at all times opposed to production. Clarke then argues that “fetishism has come to saturate social space in its entirety” (59), and looks at the shift from the scene of consumption to its obscenity, from the production of space to the overexposure of pornogeography.
Clarke nicely shows through his chapter that “it is simply not the case that these polarized positions – either full consciousness or false consciousness – are the only alternatives on offer. Indeed the particular framing merely reproduces the terms of a longstanding idle debate – by beginning with the unquestioned premise of a pre-given individual who may or may not be duped, and coming down on one side of the argument or other” (63).
He shows the potential of approaching the issue of fetishism through psychoanalysis, which “acts transversally to this misleading opposition by refusing to begin with a pre-given subject. For psychoanalysis, the subject is constituted as much as it is constitutive and it is never fully present to itself” (63).
This discussion then goes on to attack the core of consumerist logic, in which, as Zygmunt Bauman pointed out, “a satisfied consumer is neither motive nor purpose” (66) and at which “heart lies a fundamental contradiction between the promise of satisfaction and the persistence of unfulfilment, the proffering of pleasure and its withdrawal” (68).
He then goes on to talk about the desire, which is created through the creation of something that the subject supposedly lacks – to repair this lack the subject has to go and shop – for Lacan desire is the metonymy of want-to-be. Clarke argues that the fundamental importance of fetishism lies in its “seductive potential, which relates purely to its form” (74) and so as Baudrillard puts it ‘fetishism is actually attached to the sign-object, the object eviscerated of its substance and history, and reduced to the state of marking a difference, epitomizing a whole system of differences (Baudrillard 1981: 93)’. “It is this characteristic that is responsible for the seductive power exerted by consumerism” (74).
This chapter is all in all a great mixture of Marx, Lacan, Baudrillard and Bauman, and though this little tasting does not do it full due, I hope that it at least draw your attention to it.
Here is a nice video on commodity fetishism:
References:
Baudrillard, J. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign St. Louis Telos.
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.
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– 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.
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