268 C. Kierans
2006 ; Rose 2007 ), as well as the various processes of capitalisation on
which they simultaneously depend and give rise to. While not wish-
ing to gloss over what is a complex, growing and internally differenti-
ated literature, the theoretical and conceptual advances made via this
literature are often reflective of biotechnical developments (Haw 2015 ;
Waldby and Mitchell 2006 ) and closely related forms of public partici-
pation (Novas 2006 ; Rabinow 1996 ) in Anglophone countries. Similar
to other neologisms, such as “biopolitics” or “bioeconomy”, these new
master categories run the risk of producing overly standardised, homog-
enised or ideal-typical accounts of what may be happening in vari-
able locations or, indeed, assume that there is something intrinsically of
value/value-able or market capitalist about the body and its parts (Birch
and Tyfield 2013 ). My work offers a departure by treating value as an
emergent category, one that takes its meaning in relation to the con-
texts, practices and sites where value is made relevant. By attending
to the ordinary practices of Mexico’s poor, a population only partially
visible to a state apparatus, unlike in Anglophone countries (Kierans
2015 ), we can empirically follow how value emerges from the labour of
patients and their families, making visible the ways in which biotechno-
logical interventions, such as transplant medicine, are specifically bound
up with the work of economy, the state and politics.
In working, therefore, with a concept of value, and considering its
capacity to illuminate the benefits and costs of transplantation, this
chapter will take, as its focus, the second conception of value as set out
above; that is, that which is generated out of forms of exchange and
embedded in forms of situated practice. Specifically, it will focus on the
exchange of organs between living-related kidney donors in Mexico—
the principal means by which organs are procured in this country. The
chapter draws attention to how this mode of procurement is situated
within a particular political economy and intermeshed with the pro-
duction of surplus value, as that which is produced over and above the
long-term benefits of the so-called gift given and its capacity to pro-
duce that most sought after value: health. The chapter will conclude
with a short discussion on the importance of the Mexican case for help-
ing to interrogate what happens in other contexts, notably in the UK.
The reason for doing so is to avoid taking the “smooth functioning” of