Beyond daan: Ethnographic Ruminations on Debt (riin) in the Context of Organ Donation

Abstract

Ethnography of organ failure and the quest for remedy helps reframe the donor organ beyond its biological meanings and economistic valuations, and dismantle the narrative of unconditional altruistic donation to help locate the nuanced workings of a moral economy, conceiving of the act of receiving of a donor organ an act of incurring a serious debt (riin), rather than an unconditional gift or grant (daan). This further reframes the human organ as a contested entity, to be examined within as well as beyond the concrete space of the biological body into the discursive realm of the social. Encounter with the everyday suffering of individuals with kidney failure and their caregivers, and the quest for remedy through kidney transplantation foregrounds the impossibility of thinking empirical instances of subjective and bodily experiences of suffering, regardless of market discourses on bodies and organs. Taking market forces into account does not amount to a devaluation of the moral force of bodily pain and suffering. Rather, such gesture points to the dynamic presence of the 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, and entails varied biomoral trajectories of negotiation with the standardised market valuation of human organs, which aims to render the buying or selling of organs absolved of morality.