Social Trends

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Social Trends is an interdisciplinary refereed journal, published annually by the Department of Sociology, North Bengal University. All rights reserved. No part of the articles, excepting brief quotations in scholarly works, can be published/reproduced, without the written permission of the editor.

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Author: search.filters.author.Roy, PinakiSubject: search.filters.subject.Human organs

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    Of Debt and the Spectrality of the Donor Organ Tracing the Dynamics of market and morality in organ donation
    (University of North Bengal, 2025) Roy, Pinaki
    Myriad possibilities can be traced into the situated narratives of individuals who are exposed to the experiences characteristic of organ failure, donation and transplantation. Such narratives are replete with meanings which offer alternative possibilities of tracing the parallel co-existence or mutual inter-implication of the forces of moral and market valuation of human bodies and organs in the context of organ donation and transplantation. Ethnographic encounter with the suffering of individuals with organ failure and their care-givers, and the quest for remedy through organ transplantation, foregrounds the impossibility of thinking empirical instances of subjective, bodily experiences of suffering irrespective of the dynamic presence of human body and organs across multiple registers of valuation – the market and the moral-ethical, the economic and the non-economic, the utilitarian and the experiential. The category of debt (riin in Bengali), as it pervasively emanates from the ethnographic context of organ failure and donation and the discursive milieu or locale of the study, to be more specific, renders this dynamic more prominent and serves as the conceptual and methodological lynchpin in the analysis.
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    ItemOpen Access
    Encumbered Ontology: An Intimate Foray into the Sociality of Human Organs
    (University of North Bengal, 31-03-2023) Roy, Pinaki
    Appadurai’s (1986) “social life of things” approach helps conceptualize human organs as not merely biological but deeply embedded in complex social relationships, and implicated in the associated hierarchies within which they acquire significance. Disputes in the interpersonal realm in immediate, everyday contexts of ailment, disease and its management foregrounds the encumbered ontology of bodies and organs – their entanglement in relational disputes articulated in and through the ailing body and failing organ. Drawing on unanticipated moments in the life-trajectory of the researcher – an essentially unconventional source of data in now canonized practices of sociological and anthropological research, this paper demonstrates that people who are ill or afflicted with some disease which requires personalized care and group attention, physical involvement and financial expenses, often become objects of dispute over issues of care, support and responsibility. Such discourses reaffirm the social – the responsibility of the family and friends or the wider kin group towards the ill, as much as they are discourses of contention over issues like who is ideally responsible for taking care of the ill and dependent? How the responsibility is to be shared or distributed within the family or amongst immediate kin members? And if the responsibility is not to be divided equally, what are the plausible grounds for waiving or discounting one over another? Engagement with unanticipated yet immediate situations of kidney failure and its familial management reveals that such disputes need not always seamlessly centre on the question of ownership of property of the ailing beyond death, but around the failing or afflicted organ itself, in that it serves as the material-symbolic locus of disputes which frames the human organ as encumbered property.