276 C. Kierans
For Gloria to donate her kidney as a “gift” to Carlos, she had to
resource it, financially and morally.^7 For Carlos to receive this gift
from his mother, it had to be bought back through similarly complex
financial and moral arrangements. The nature of the exchange tak-
ing place does not suggest a gift given freely, but one leveraged at great
cost and on several levels at once. This is a gift that is both predicated
on and generative of capital, one which proliferates further commodi-
ties (medications, catheters, biopsy needles and so on), all of which are
incorporated in momentarily fixing the organ in place as a “gift”. The
compromised, multiply-hybridised character of these “actually exist-
ing” forms of exchange create difficulties in working with attenuated
use-value and exchange-value distinctions associated with structuralist
or classical political economy perspectives (for further discussion, see
Foster 2011 , 2013 ; Tsing 2009 , 2013 ). They teach us that value cannot
be automatically attributed to organs as things that can be exchanged
pointing us instead to how the particular processes of exchange, and the
social relations which underpin them, create the conditions for value
production, indeed show it to be parasitic on the ordinary labour of
others (Jones and Mair 2016 ). In turn, we also see the exploitation of
such labour is neither static nor uniform (Taussig 1980 ; Wolf 1982 ).
Anna Tsing takes up similar concerns in her work on the multi-
plex relations of production and exchange which underpin the supply
and transformation of the Matsutake mushroom. Tsing questions the
taken-for-granted logics at play when commodities are understood to
define the value system under capitalism “with little consideration over
the processes of transformation that they undergo” (Tsing 2013 : 22).
In the course of her work, she demonstrates the importance of under-
standing how the production and exchange of things internally relate
to value production, as part of the economic heterogeneities which
underpin capital rather than as processes which are already pre-formed
and determining in character. These processes of transformation, to
borrow from Appadurai, might be described as “tournaments of value”,
“complex periodic events that are removed in some culturally well-
defined way from the routines of economic life” but are nevertheless
central to it (Appadurai 1983 : 21). While the value produced by the
appropriated labour of poor Mexican families might well be removed