Anthropology, organ transplantation and the immune system: Resituating commodity and gift exchange

This article reflects on contributions from medical anthropology to our understanding of the bio-social and bio-political implications of renal transplantation. Taking up the idea of transplantation as a ‘complex’, a vast assemblage of people, places, practices and procedures which intersect medical, social and cultural domains, I point to a reliance in the anthropological literature on overly pre-determined conceptual frameworks, organised around a distinct polarisation between organ giving and receiving, where one side (supply) takes analytical, and indeed moral, precedence over the other (receipt). These frameworks tend to fail us when it comes to thinking about the wider social, cultural and political implications of transplant technologies. In an attempt to offer a less polarised view, I draw attention to the material and symbolic role of the immune system in transplantation and the ways in which it simultaneously shapes opportunities for procurement and the lived realities of recipiency. This helps us see the many complex ways in which suffering and inequality are constituted all along the variegated chains of supply and demand that are internal to, and made possible by, transplantation practices themselves.

► Analyses the ways in which organ transplantation is conceptualised cross culturally.
► Pays attention to how understandings of organ exchange are constrained by commodity and gift-exchange frameworks.
► Finds organ suppliers and receivers are often positioned, in polarity, with suffering on one side taking precedence over the other.
► Developments in immunology show how inequalities and suffering have to be seen all along the chains of supply and demand.