Transplanting Care: Shifting Commitments in Health and Care in the U.S.
Rutgers University Press, 186 pp.
Heinemann’s work eschews the dramatic moment of transplant surgery in favor of detailing the transplant process as it occurs across space and time, always intertwined within the rhythms and realities of everyday life. Based on 24 nonconsecutive months of fieldwork …
Lissa: A Story About Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution
Written by Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye
Illustrated by Sarula Bao and Caroline Brewer
Lettering by Marc Parenteau
University of Toronto Press, 2017. 304 pages.
For several years many anthropologists have engaged in questions about the possibilities of a graphic anthropology. “Graphic,” here specifically references comics and graphic narratives and …
Domesticating Organ Transplant: Familial Sacrifice and National Aspiration in Mexico
Duke University Press, 2016, 336 pages
In Domesticating Organ Transplant: Familial Sacrifice and National Aspiration in Mexico, Megan Crowley-Matoka carefully grapples with the symbols and everyday practices of organ transplantation in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her research focuses on transplantations that take place in two resource poor yet key …
It was recently reported by the Guardian that there has been drop in organ donation rates in the UK.[i] It was also reported at about the same time that a woman successfully argued in the courts that her mother’s last will and testament should be over-ridden so that she might receive a bequest that her mother never wanted her …
New Organs Within Us: Transplants and the Moral Economy
by Aslihan Sanal
Duke University Press, 2011. 244 pp.
Sensitively written and deeply insightful, Aslihan Sanal’s ethnography of kidney transplantation in Turkey in the 1990s and 2000s is an intimate stitching of life histories, national and institutional narratives, and shifting meanings of life, death, and the body. Sanal takes the …
On July 3 of this year, the face became an “organ”. Changes to US Federal health policy came into effect, moving face transplantation into the jurisdiction of medical procedures governed and administrated by the agencies that oversee the US national transplant system – the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network (OPTN) and the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS). This policy …