6 R.M. Shaw
For anatomists and pathologists, the biological value and clinical sig-
nificance of specific organs and body tissues depends on their attribution
as vital and essential, or non-vital ‘junk’ or waste material (Jones 2002 ).
The classification of various organs as vital, semi- or non-vital‚ and ves-
tigial reflects, as Nikolas Rose ( 2008 : 40) would say, ‘different registers
of value’, interlinking biological, economic and ethical concerns. The
ranking and ontological status of body parts and fragments is thus inde-
terminate and depends on what is done with and to these materials as
they transition through various alienable and inalienable states. As Arjun
Appadurai ( 1986 : 17) has argued with respect to the commodity, an
object or entity is not necessarily ‘one kind of thing rather than another,
but one phase in the life of some things’. An object or thing therefore
moves in and out of various states throughout the course of its social
life or ‘career’ history. Bodily material is not only accorded different
social values and meanings as it moves between laboratories, institutions,
and across geographical locations and cultural spaces, its vitality can be
diverted from its in vivo location‚ transformed into derivatives during
the course of travel‚ and redeployed to other bodies‚ spaces and times
(Waldby and Mitchell 2006 ). These shifts‚ coupled with biomedical and
technological innovations in tissue exchange‚ such as the way blood is
now processed‚ discarded‚ reformulated‚ or fractionated for use in multi-
ple products (Busby‚ Kent and Farrell 2014 ) have precipitated rethinking
around the ethics of tissue donation and its incentivistion.
The contributors to this volume all argue, to varying degrees, that the
scale and extent to which biological vitality or ‘life itself ’ (Rose 2001 ,
2007a) can now be regenerated means that the movement of biologi-
cal materials in and out of value-differentiated states is highly complex
and constantly in flux. Rather than addressing these diverse mobile bod-
ily economies at a general level of analysis‚ the authors in this volume
contend that donation and transplantation practices are not everywhere
the same. As such‚ they call for ethnographic and sociological study of
tissue provision and transaction that is attentive to the specificities of
socio-political and geographical location, site and context. A point of
confluence for the essays in the collection is the examination of ideals
around altruism, which underscore public discourses and social policy
around body part and tissue donation as gifts, particularly in advanced
post-industrial democracies.
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