Of Debt and the Spectrality of the Donor Organ Tracing the Dynamics of market and morality in organ donation

Abstract

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.