At the heart of the scholarly critique of organ transplant is an unshakeable conviction that the zeal for transplantation stems from a misguided endeavour to resist death indefinitely and unnaturally. Based on ethnographic research with recipients about the religious or spiritual import of their transplant, this article argues that the immortality organ recipients seek is not a simple hunger to live longer but a complex rendering of eternal life founded on embodied experiences of illness and transplant and the social networks these experiences give rise to. Post modern medicine does not solve the problem of death, but it does contribute to new understandings of life after death.
/ MACDONALD
Abstract:The dissertation is an ethnographic study of religion as conceived and experienced by organ transplant recipients. It is also a cultural study of North America's collective expressions of transplant as found in Christian journals, popular media, advocacy literature and public policy statements. The study finds evidence that religious metaphors and directives, cosmological figures and theological arguments, rituals, scriptures and places of worship are actively, vociferously, and consciously engaged with organ transplant discourse and with the experience of giving or receiving organs.While the transplant recipients under study cannot be considered representative (being largely advocates for transplant and almost exclusively of Christian background or affiliation), this group was articulate about the ways their new organ invoked the sacred: they described new metaphysical understandings, they spoke of a closer relationship with God, the universe and other human beings, they divulged inexplicable incidents and mystical states of being, they articulated a complex set of ethical prescripts. "Thinking how many times you should have been dead and you're still here" was for many an imperative to "start to find out why."I argue that these spiritual seekers traverse a 21 st century terrain shaped by the practices and discourses of what Foucault termed "biopower". The private and public production of sanctified donors and 'redeemed' recipients is inextricably bound to the desires of transplant professionals and government officials, and cannot hope to escape the very real commodification of the body that transplant represents.This seeming paradox of 'the sacred in the secular' does not make transplant's religious constructions inauthentic or irrelevant. Religion remains an active and inventive register for the recording of potent bodily experiences of illness, loss and conditional regeneration. Further, the religious activity around transplant affords a window on emerging rites, on contemporary understandings of death and immortality, and on new conversations about miracles and morality. Circuits of biotechnology are not immune to religious influence and inflection -but, simultaneously, contemporary religious meanings, practices and experiences are indelibly shaped by our newfound ability to transplant organs.
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