Exchanging Human Bodily Material: Rethinking Bodies and Markets

This book introduces both pro-and anti-market positions in the debate about exchange of human body parts. It concludes that a different analytical approach is needed to better understand the mechanisms when organizations exchange organs, tissues and cells.

This book addresses the debate usually tagged as being about 'markets in human body parts' which is antagonistically divided into pro-market and anti-market positions. The author provides a set of propositions about how to approach this and shows a way out of the concrete impasse of it. Assumptions about markets and bodies that characterize this debate are analyzed and described while the author argues that these assumptions are in fact constitutive for exchanges of human bodily material but in unacknowledged ways. It is concluded that what we need is a different analytical approach to better understand the mechanisms at play when organizations exchange organs, tissues and cells for use in transplantation and fertility medicine.

First book to give a comprehensive introduction to pro-and anti-market positions in the debate about exchange of human body parts Serves as entry point to the literature on human body part exchange across disciplinary fields Serves as an inspiration for empirical ethicists and other ethnographers working on other topics characterized by similar antagonism?

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. What is a market?.- 3. What is a human body?.-4. Ubject exchange as everyday practice.- 5. Ubjectology.- 6. Conclusion.