The Anthropology of Organ Transplantation

Anthropology has been involved with the field of organ transplantation almost since its inception. As a rapidly growing subfield within biomedicine, transplantation has been analyzed as one more example of the technological imperative: the development and application of new procedures and techniques that bring, in their wake, major changes in how humans relate to their bodies. Anthropologists have been especially interested in the psychological adjustment of organ recipients as they come to terms with the sacrifices or deaths that were necessary to provide them with organs and as they respond to the presence of an outsider in their bodies. Critical medical anthropologists have focused more on donor issues, raising ethical questions about transplant tourism and the commodification of organs and challenging the universal validity of brain death as the death of a person.