Conceptions of the body are central not only to substantive work in medical anthropology, but also to the philosophical underpinnings of the entire discipline of anthropology, where Western assumptions about the mind and body, the individual and society, affect both theoretical viewpoints and research paradigms. These same conceptions also influence ways in which health care is planned and delivered in Western societies. In this article we advocate the deconstruction of received concepts about the body and begin this process by examining three perspectives from which the body may be viewed: (1) as a phenomenally experienced individual body‐self; (2) as a social body, a natural symbol for thinking about relationships among nature, society, and culture; and (3) as a body politic, an artifact of social and political control. After discussing ways in which anthropologists, other social scientists, and people from various cultures have conceptualized the body, we propose the study of emotions as an area of inquiry that holds promise for providing a new approach to the subject.

In bracketing certain "Western" Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoreti cally a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, anthropologists may be "suspending the ethi• cal" in our dealings with the "other." Cultural relativism, read as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live, and anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at all, must be ethically grounded. This paper is an attempt to imag ine what forms a politically committed and morally engaged an• thropology might take.

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Inspired by Sweetness and Power, in which Sidney Mintz traces the colonial and mercantilist routes of enslaving tastes and artificial needs, this paper maps a late-20th-century global trade in bodies, body parts, desires, and invented scarcities. Organ transplant takes place today in a transnational space with surgeons, patients, organ donors, recipients, brokers, and intermediaries-some with criminal connections-following new paths of capital and technology in the global economy. The stakes are high, for the technologies and practices of transplant surgery have demonstrated their power to reconceptualize the human body and the relations of body parts to the whole and to the person and of people and bodies to each other. The phenomenal spread of these technologies and the artificial needs, scarcities, and new commodities (i.e., fresh organs) that they inspire-especially within the context of a triumphant neoliberalism-raise many issues central to anthropology's concern with global dominations and local resistances, including the reordering of relations between individual bodies and the state, between gifts and commodities, between fact and rumor, and between medicine and magic in postmodernity.

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