11 Valued Matter: Anthropological Insights ... 275of a growing transplant industry. It is the labour of Mexican patients
and their families, which makes the social relations at the heart of trans-
plant medicine in Mexico visible and understandable for the anthropol-
ogist ethnographer.
As families like Carlos’s journey between various public and private
healthcare providers, clinics and laboratories, they pay for everything:
hospitalisation; surgical procedures; routine check-ups and tests; dialysis;
pre-transplant protocols and tests; biopsy needles; stitching for wounds;
disinfectant; antibodies and medications. All of this on top of travel
costs, dietary costs, structural costs for home dialysis, informal care-giv-
ing and the loss of formal earnings. Resources are obtained by lobbying,
by paying insurance premiums, by appeals to networks of family and
friends, by selling land, property and inheritances and by begging—all
channelled back into the systems which necessitated the labour in the
first place and which will continue to demand it into the future.
At the heart of this labour is the human body, more specifically the
place of the donated organ within it—the actual thing which the activ-
ity of uninsured Mexican families consolidates around. The collective
efforts involved in the transfer of this organ from one body to another
effectively transforms the body into an extended “worksite”, one which
is then harnessed to generate surplus value: capital for others over and
above the use value of the organ itself. This is done via an elaborated
infrastructure of diagnostic tests, pharmacological treatments, surgical
interventions, medical supplies, etc., all of which help to link up public/
private and state/market relations. The capacity of a donated organ to
bring a range of other goods and benefits into circulation raises impor-
tant analytical questions about whether organs can ever really acquire
much stability as gifts or commodities, objects of exchange around
which we might imagine distinct constituencies of givers and receivers
or buyers and sellers (Kierans 2011 ; Moazam et al. 2009 ; Sharp 2006 ;
Waldby and Mitchell 2006 ). These distinctions which are often drawn
upon in descriptions of organ transfer tend to fail us when we begin
to chart empirically the increasingly complex ways in which the body
and its parts are taken up and used for medico-corporate ends. Such
accounts do not reflect our complex negotiated relations to contempo-
rary modes of exchange (Parry 2008 ).
http://www.ebook3000.com