Suchergebnisse

My article begins with a brief history of the Organs Watch project, its anthropological, ethnographic, and public engagements as an example of what Pierre Bourdieu called "scholarship with commitment." I explain the heterodox methods required including undercover research and criminological studies into the grey zones of organized organ transplant trafficking. How do our normative obligations to our research informants differ when our informants happen to be criminals? When crimes are being committed, to whom does one owe their divided loyalties? Finally, I address the role of medical anthropologists and other committed social scientists in making public a hitherto invisible issue.

This autobiopic piece chronicles Scheper-Hughes's early voluntary service with the Peace Corp in Brazil, followed by her early academic career and coming to Berkeley, and then her ongoing engagement and activism in standing up for, and standing with, others. This welled up into community activism and advocacy for the homeless together with Berkeley Catholic Workers, eventually resulting in a café inside of Berkeley's People's Park in 1989, providing rationale for Scheper-Hughes's own well-known applied anthropology and activism, which has made her famous as one of today's leading anthropologists.

Moshe Tati, a sanitation worker in Jerusalem, was among the first of more than a thousand mortally sick Israelis who signed up for illicit and clandestine 'transplant tour' packages that included: travel to an undisclosed foreign and exotic setting; five-star hotel accommodation; surgery in a private hospital unit; a 'fresh' kidney purchased from a perfect stranger trafficked from a third country. Although Tati's holiday turned into a nightmare and he had to be emergency air-lifted from a rented transplant unit in a private hospital in Adana, Turkey back to Israel, Moshe (now deceased) became a poster-boy of transplant tourism for the next decade. João Cavalcanti was among the first of 38 residents of the slums of Recife recruited by retired military Captain Ivan da Silva and his sidekick Captain Gadddy Tauber (of Israel) to travel to Durban, South Africa to provide a spare kidney to an Israeli transplant tourist in Durban. This article examines the logics and practices through which kidney buyers and kidney sellers, organs brokers, surgeons and their accessories convince themselves that they are engaged in an illegal but still mutually beneficial 'medical-recreational' adventure, an 'extreme medical sport' of sorts. While life, health and survival motivate 'transplant tourism', a euphemism for human trafficking in spare body parts, the freedom to roam, mobility, is an essential feature of transplant tours for kidney buyers and kidney sellers.