The Global Traffic in Human Organs

Abstract

Inspired by Sweetness and Power, in wbich Sidney Mintz traces tbe colonial and mercantilist routes of enslaving tastes and artificial needs, tbis paper maps a late-aoth-century global trade in bodies, body parts, desires, and invented scarcities. Organ transplant takes place today in a transnational space witb surgeons, patients, organ donors, recipients, brokers, and intermediaries—some witb criminal connections—following new patbs of capital and technology in the global economy. The stakes are high, for tbe technologies and practices of transplant surgery bave demonstrated tbeir power to reconceptualize tbe buman body and the relations of hody parts to tbe wbole and to the person and of people and bodies to eacb other. Tbe phenomenal spread of these technologies and tbe artificial needs, scarcities, and new commodities (i.e., fresb organs) tbat they inspire —especially witbin tbe context of a triumphant neoliberalism—raise many issues central to antbropology's concern with global dominations and local resistances, including tbe reordering of relations hetween individual bodies and the state, hetween gifts and commodities, between fact and rumor, and between medicine and magic in postmodernity.