Nancy Scheper-Hughes studies the covert activities surrounding organ transplants by renegade surgeons, international organized crime networks, local kidney hunters and so called transplant tourists engaged in ‘back-door’ and illicit transplants. Her Organs Watch project blends genres and transgresses long-standing distinctions between anthropology, documentation, journalism, scientific reporting, political engagements, and human rights. Nancy Scheper-Hughes is The Chancellor’s Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. Her next book, A World Cut in Two: the Global Traffic in Organs(University of California Press) is forthcoming. This event was co-Sponsored by the NYAS Anthropology Section and the Wenner Gren Foundation.
Posted: October 6th, 2008
Trafficking the Traffickers: Undercover Ethnography in the Organs Trafficking Underworld
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[...] Trafficking the Traffickers: Undercover Ethnography in the Organs Trafficking Underworld [...]
[...] One of the most shocking aspects of the sprawling corruption bust that brought down several New Jersey mayors yesterday, was the arrest of Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn for attempting to arrange a donation of a kidney for $160,000. Moreover, it was apparently UC Berkeley’s Nancy Scheper-Hughes who, in 2002, first tipped off the FBI to her knowledge of Rosenbaum’s role as the principal US broker in an international kidney trafficking ring. The donors/victims included Moldovan villagers who were apparently promised manual labor jobs in the US and then coerced into “donating” their kidneys to recipients who posed as relatives. Scheper-Hughes came upon this over the course of a decade-long research project on the illegal organs trade, which is the topic of a forthcoming book entitled A World Cut in Two: Global Justice and the Traffic in Organs. In addition to a handful of academic publications, Scheper-Hughes discussed the project at length during a recent lecture at the New York Academy of Sciences, available for viewing here. [...]