... [T]hings are thick with politics. And I mean politics with a lowercase

“p”: not the politics of politicians, but a broad range of politics, from

the micro to the macro scale, that are related as much to the power of

humans as to the power of ideas and things. Recognizing that things are

thick with politics also draws attention to the crucial relation of things to

people, of things needing to be embedded in a culture if you want them

to work. (Bijker 2007 : 123)

In writing about technologies which manage water, Wiebe Bijker shows
how dikes and levees produce “technological cultures”, cultures which
reflect different histories, but also different values, and which speak to
issues of vulnerability, risk, uncertainty and inequality (Bijker 2007 ).
Bijker shows, as others have also shown, that technological “things” can
only be understood within their social context, and crucially as constit-
uents of and within fields of human action.

11

Valued Matter: Anthropological Insights

on the (Bio)Political Economy of Organ

Exchange

Ciara Kierans

© The Author(s) 2017
R.M. Shaw (ed.), Bioethics Beyond Altruism,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55532-4_11

265

C. Kierans (*)
Department of Public Health and Policy, University of Liverpool,
Liverpool, England
e-mail: [email protected]

http://www.ebook3000.com