Commodity Fetishism in Organs Trafficking

Bibliographic Data

ID3125883
AuthorsNancy Scheper-Hughes (University of California, Berkeley), Nancy Scheper‐Hughes (University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume7
Issue2-3
Pages31-62
Publication date2001-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBody & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1357-034X • E-ISSN: 1460-3632
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1357034x0100700203
OpenAlexW2110713150
LanguageEN
Citations received62
References cited19

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

Aesthetics · Anonymity · Art · Commodity · Economics · Environmental ethics · Fetishism · Market economy · Organ donation · Political science · Rhetoric · Sacrifice · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · History · Law · Medicine · Organ and Tissue Transplantation Research · Organ Donation and Transplantation · Transplantation