Nancy Scheper-Hughes - Commodifying Bodies

Edited by
Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loc Wacquant

Originally published as Volume 7, Numbers 23 of Body & Society 2001

This edition first published 2002

Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loc Wacquant 2002

Published in association with theory, Culture & Society, Nottingham Trent University

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7619 4033 2

ISBN 0 7619 4034 0 (pbk)

Typeset by Typestudy, Scarborough, North Yorkshire

Printed in Great Britain by The Alden Press, Oxford

EDITORIAL BOARD

EDITORS

Mike Featherstone, Nottingham Trent University

Bryan S. Turner, University of Cambridge

REVIEW EDITOR

Roger Bromley, Nottingham Trent University

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

Anders Hg Hansen, Jo Naylor, Adam Peterkin and Inga Scharf

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Gary L. Albrecht, University of Illinois at Chicago

J.-M. Berthelot, Universit Ren Descartes Paris V, Sorbonne

Rosi Braidotti, State University of Utrecht

Robin Bunton, University of Teesside

Pasi Falk, University of Helsinki

Arthur Frank, University of Calgary

Sarah Franklin, Lancaster University

Ann Game, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Uta Gerhardt, University of Heidelberg

Rick Gruneau, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia

Mike Hepworth, University of Aberdeen

David Le Breton, University of Strasbourg

Mica Nava, University of East London

John ONeill, York University, Ontario

Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney

Britt Robillard, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Kevin Robins, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Chris Rojek, Nottingham Trent University

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, University of California

Michael Shapiro, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Chris Shilling, University of Portsmouth

Meenakshi Thapan, University of Delhi

Estella Tincknell, Nottingham Trent University

Loc Wacquant, University of California, Berkeley

While in the academy (as in this journal) the body is generally treated as a text or a trope or as a metaphor that is good to think with, in the larger society and in the global economy the body is generally viewed and treated as an object, albeit a highly fetishized one, and as a commodity that can be bartered, sold or stolen in divisible and alienable parts (see Berlinger, 1999; Sharp, 2000). The professions but especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, bioethics and biotechnology have been complicit in the process of commodifying bodies contributing to what Lawrence Cohen (1999) has called a new ethics of parts in which the divisible body (and its owners) respond rationally (it is presumed) to the demands of the market and to what I would call a politics of the belly, both contributing to new forms of late modern cannibalism (see Awaya, 1999; Scheper-Hughes, 1998a, 1998b).

Allow me to illustrate. In a Madras slum in South India several women explained to Cohen (1999) why they had taken the drastic step to sell a kidney. Forced to the brink by crippling debts or by the incapacity of a husband and primary wage earner, the women had sold a kidney to feed the family, the most common explanation given by kidney sellers world-wide. In Cape Town, South Africa, Dr Johan Brink, a transplant surgeon trained by Christian Barnard, explained to me why, under the old (apartheid) regime, human tissues and organs were harvested from black and mixed race bodies in the ICU (intensive care unit) without the familys knowledge or consent and transplanted into the bodies of more affluent white patients: The doctors were from conservative [i.e. Dutch reform] backgrounds and they followed a Christian family ethic. To them the idea of wasting a good organ was sinful, like wasting a good piece of bread. Last spring (2001), a middle-class couple from Orange County, California approached my organization, Organs Watch, for help they wanted to sell one of their kidneys to avoid losing their threatened family business, an outdoor flower stand. Coming from one of the most affluent counties in the United States, they tried to post the following ad on our Berkeley Organs Watch web site: Desperately need dentures! Will sell one good kidney left or right, your choice. In these troubling new contexts the commodified organ becomes an object of desire for one population and a commodity of last resort for the other and socially disadvantaged population (Scheper-Hughes, this issue).

So, while the body is a text it is always a great deal more than that and the articles collected for this special issue attempt to return sociological and anthropological thinking and practice to a consideration of the body as tangible, palpable and undeniably real material object. We are aware, however, that the desire to locate some essential truth, some basic ontological certitude of a Wittgen-steinian nature (If we do know that here is one hand, well grant you all the rest) in the irreducible reality of the body is always a dangerous move. Given the constant exchange of meanings between commodities as plain, matter-of-fact things-in-themselves and commodities as spirits and fetishes of human desire, all commodities possess what Lucas (see Taussig, 1980) called a phantom objectivity. So we are compelled to consider the commodified bodies discussed in these articles as both objects and as semimagical and symbolic representations. Above all, commodities are everywhere heavy with social meanings and significations (see Appadurai, 1986).

Meanwhile, commodification, the unifying theme of this issue, remains a problematic concept. What range of widely disparate body practices can be said to participate in the processes of commodification? The sympathetic magic of the primitive animist and his/her tool kit of purchased or stolen charismatic body parts (see Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999; Scheper-Hughes, 1998b)? The economically and psychologically costly open-casket funeral that demands a body, and preferably the correct one (Brandes, this issue)? Holy Communion? Eye, tissue and sperm