Abstract
If one were a newcomer to the field, I guess it would seem legitimate to ask why some ubjects and some types of exchange cause few public controversies, while others instigate hype, hope, and fear as well as legislative reactions. Nevertheless, few scholars explore the differences in the attention given to exchange systems handling, for example, hair, spittle, breast milk, skin, cornea, bone marrow, bone, tendons, blood, plasma, cord stem cell blood, embryos, gametes, organs, heart valves, arteries, muscle tissue, tumors, brain tissue, or dura mater, as they unfold in different arenas regionally, institutionally, and historically. It is obvious from even the most casual observation that some types of ubject exchange, blood samples used in research, for example, provoke controversy, and stimulate “ethics debates” in some contexts and periods (e.g., genetic research in the 1990s), while exchange of the “same” ubject in other contexts provoke no noticeable reactions (e.g., nutritional research or diagnostic biobanks in the 1980s and 1990s). Also, there are clear differences in the public attention given to, for example, heart transplantation and hair extension, as well as to transplantation of whole hearts versus arteries and heart valves. For me, at least, such differences provoke a basic curiosity, and I believe that such puzzles are important for understanding all the fuss about “markets in human body parts.” Since it is clearly not every “body part” generating controversy, we cannot assume that “body parts” hold some inherent, universal, and undeniable moral quality. In fact, as argued in Chaps. 3 and 4, it is never clear what is “part of” a body, and even metal and heat are good candidates. By choosing “ubject” as our analytical term, rather than “body part,” we can begin to investigate patterns in the work involved in making an ubject into a body part so that it becomes related to a subject (or, alternatively, make it into a plain material resource).
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Notes
- 1.
One obvious exception is of course Waldby and Mitchell’s, book Tissue Economies in which they make a brief comment which I will cite in its full length:
“Tissues that we consider essential to the body’s integrity and function—organs, blood, skin, the limbs—are strongly invested with ontological significance, and their loss is a catastrophe for the subject. Tissues that are routinely shed or expelled by the body—hair and nail clippings, nasal secretions, saliva, pus, skin particles, urine, feces, sweat—are either ontologically neutral (hair clippings) or ontologically repugnant (urine, feces, pus), the opposite of self value” (p. 84).
This treatment has some value to it and resonates also with what I have been arguing about the sense of control. However, it remains too superficial. Nail and hair clippings are known to be central for self-value in some cultures and time periods (think also of Bynum’s work on medieval theories of resurrection), just as blood and skin can appear ontologically insignificant in certain situations. As argued in Chap. 3, there is no reason to presume a clear ontological difference between ubjects; they all operate on the border of the self.
- 2.
The debates following the textual turn in ethnography in the 1980s baffled ethnography so that it took decades to reinvigorate anthropology as a theoretical discipline; see Hastrup (1995).
- 3.
- 4.
See also Clarke (1995).
- 5.
Landecker (2007).
- 6.
Blumer (1971).
- 7.
In line with the reasoning presented in Chap. 1, only that which is seen as having been part of the body has been included, though many tools, machines, and even clothes could be seen as ubjects ambiguously related to persons. Also, I have not included food on the list, though it can be thought of as ambiguously related to the body of a given person. Consider, for example, how Foucault explored the shift in technologies of self from a focus on food intake as an essential practice to sex in The History of Sexuality, volumes two and three (Foucault 1986, 1992).
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
See discussion in Chap. 3 of classical anthropological studies of dangerous bodily products as well as Bynum’s work on the concern with nail and hair in medieval theology.
- 11.
- 12.
http://www.lifegem.com/ (last accessed April 22, 2010) and http://www.koerperwelten.de/ (last accessed April 22, 2010). See also Linke (2005).
- 13.
See, for example, discussion of provocative uses of embryos in art in Morgan (2009).
- 14.
Hecht (2003). Consider also how half a century earlier Jeremy Bentham as one of the most influential utilitarians in the Anglophone world had insisted on being publicly dissected. When Hecht uses the term “belief system,” she makes a provocative analogy between science and religion. I do not wish to suggest that secular, scientific beliefs are similar to religion. When in the following I write belief system, I refer to the knowledge-axis of biopower. The rise of a scientific belief system implies a set of practices and ways of approaching what counts as knowledge very different from religious reliance on divine authority. For a comparison of science, magic, and religion as belief systems, see Nader (2006). For alternative studies of how current views of the body influence what can be exchanged, see Sanner (2001) and Schicktanz (2007).
- 15.
In the USA, this latter notion is currently taken to a new thrilling extreme in the cryonics movement described by Romain as consisting of a group that could be seen as contemporary American heirs of the position previously held by the members of SMA: “Cryonics is a particular American social practice, created and taken up by a particular type of American: primarily a small fraction of white male, atheist, Libertarian, middle- and upper-middle-income, computer/engineering ‘greeks’ who believe passionately in the free market and its ability to support technological progress” (Romain 2010:196). Cryonics supporters fiercely support a personal right to their own body in eternity and freeze it down with the expectation that future technological progress will facilitate continued life.
- 16.
Durkheim (2008:37, original emphasis).
- 17.
See pp 38 and 318.
- 18.
Durkheim (2008:318). For the modern reader, this sounds more like Latour’s purification work and the constant overflow of hybrids, and indeed, I happily incorporate Durkheim’s point about societal ordering along lines of the sacred and profane into my own framework without feeling obliged toward his delineation of a particular religious realm.
- 19.
Zelizer (1979:44).
- 20.
Seremetakis (1991:47).
- 21.
Edgell et al. (2006) have shown that the least accepted position on faith in the USA is atheism, and they argue that religion serves as a cultural model designating society membership. In American sociology, the Scandinavian countries are occasionally seen as totally irreligious (despite Denmark having a state church), mainly because reference to faith is rarely made in public and not as part of the political life (Zuckerman 2008).
- 22.
As argued in Chap. 2, we should be careful not to think of belief systems as determining the mode of production and exchange. The arrows of causation could in fact be turned around, and rather than claiming that, because they are more religious, Americans can exchange some ubjects more like things, the US preference for dogmatic religion could be ascribed to a need for differentiating the worthy ends from the plain resources exactly because so much is fungible and dependent on merit rather than inherent value. That is, the mode of production and exchange could be seen as promoting a need for religious belief and divine order.
- 23.
- 24.
Kass (1997).
- 25.
- 26.
It is often unclear what belongs and does not belong to the medical domain. Sometimes reference to “medicine” can form part of attributing legitimacy to ubject-producing interventions, but it may not always have the desired effect if people do not expect biomedical research to serve their needs. When the Human Genome Diversity Project first began collecting DNA samples, it set out to research ancestry, but when the project was met with opposition, it began highlighting potential medical advantages of knowing human variation. This attempt backfired, however, as activists pointed out that medical research tended to be driven by commercial incentives and would therefore not be in the interest of the indigenous people from whom samples would be taken (Reardon 2005).
- 27.
- 28.
Mulkay (1993).
- 29.
Naomi Pfeffer (forthcoming) has explored in detail the ways in which “waste” has fueled the ubject industry in a century-long pursuit of rationalization through which slaughter houses and morgues have become productive sites of post-vital living. As pointed out also by Michael Thompson in his book Rubbish Theory waste is never a permanent state; it is a state of potentiality (Thompson 1979); see also discussion in Hetherington (2004). Waldby and Mitchell suggest that the category of waste plays a key role in the creation of value by facilitating ownership. This recycling of waste to value is paradigmatic for neo-capitalist ideals of perpetual growth. Waldby and Mitchell make the point through the examples of foreskin from circumcision used for skin grafts and placentas used for cosmetic products; see also Cooper (2007, 2008) and Waldby and Mitchell (2006:115). The category of waste can be trusted no more than the unruly ubject, however, as illustrated also by Pfeffer. That an ubject can be disposed of is not the same as making it reusable without contestation.
- 30.
Bencard (2009), Ehrich et al. (2008), Morgan (2009), Palmer (2009), and Parry (2009). In a more indirect way, Everett (2002, 2007) also describes how her understanding of cells taken from her own son continuously changes making her position herself differently toward their usage and mode of distribution. For a call for using presence and materiality to move beyond textual interpretation, see Gumbrecht (2004).
- 31.
Parry (2008).
- 32.
- 33.
Freud (1978). This and the following quotation are from pp 241 and 230.
- 34.
I would like to thank Omi Tinsley for pressuring me to think more about the role of laughter.
- 35.
Anne Carter has reminded me of Freud’s (1999:400) suggestion that those things we cannot bear to confront ourselves with produce a comic effect as a “surplus to be discharged in laugher,” that is, a mode of letting a repression go.
- 36.
Bakhtin (1965).
- 37.
Durkheim (2008:412).
- 38.
This interest in ambiguity and also what it produces is also what stimulates the recent volume on Social Bodies by Lambert and McDonald (2009).
- 39.
Weber (1947).
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Hoeyer, K. (2013). What Makes “Markets in Body Parts” So Controversial?. In: Exchanging Human Bodily Material: Rethinking Bodies and Markets. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5264-1_5
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