“…As my research would not have been possible without the organ broker's support, I argue that a key informant technique is beneficial in gaining access to hidden populations. (See a detailed discussion of my research methodology: in particular, how I gained access to organ sellers; Moniruzzaman , , , , . )…”
Section: Fieldwork In the Black Marketmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…When the borrowers defaulted on their loan payments, the creditors used verbal, mental, and physical tyranny for loan recovery (see also Karim ; Rahman ). It was then that organ sellers exchanged debt for dignity (see Moniruzzaman , , ). As liver seller Kobul noted: I could have run away from the moneylender.…”
Section: Embodied Sufferingmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…As my research would not have been possible without the organ broker's support, I argue that a key informant technique is beneficial in gaining access to hidden populations. (See a detailed discussion of my research methodology: in particular, how I gained access to organ sellers; Moniruzzaman 2010Moniruzzaman , 2012Moniruzzaman , 2013Moniruzzaman , 2014Moniruzzaman , 2016 In this research, I used participant observation, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and case study methods to collect data. My interviews with kidney sellers were open-ended, and my conversations with transplant recipients, organ brokers, and medical specialists were semistructured.…”
The rapid growth of organ transplantation has created an illegal market for human organs sourced from the destitute poor predominantly in the developing world. Drawing on challenging fieldwork, I investigate the lived experiences of organ sellers who sold their bodily organs on the black market of Bangladesh. Sellers’ narratives reveal that living without an organ is not just a bodily alteration, but instead it results in embodied suffering and ontological impairment of being in the world. Organ sellers reported that they experienced embodied suffering due to selling their vital organs, which violates long‐standing cultural practices, such as bodily integrity, body ownership, and human dignity. In addition, these sellers faced subjective suffering due to selling living parts of themselves. As they felt, selling an organ divided their whole body into two halves, which destroyed their homeostatic balance, ontological harmony, and affinity with recipients. Sellers referred to these embodied and subjective sufferings as “heavier selves.”
“…As my research would not have been possible without the organ broker's support, I argue that a key informant technique is beneficial in gaining access to hidden populations. (See a detailed discussion of my research methodology: in particular, how I gained access to organ sellers; Moniruzzaman , , , , . )…”
Section: Fieldwork In the Black Marketmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…When the borrowers defaulted on their loan payments, the creditors used verbal, mental, and physical tyranny for loan recovery (see also Karim ; Rahman ). It was then that organ sellers exchanged debt for dignity (see Moniruzzaman , , ). As liver seller Kobul noted: I could have run away from the moneylender.…”
Section: Embodied Sufferingmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…As my research would not have been possible without the organ broker's support, I argue that a key informant technique is beneficial in gaining access to hidden populations. (See a detailed discussion of my research methodology: in particular, how I gained access to organ sellers; Moniruzzaman 2010Moniruzzaman , 2012Moniruzzaman , 2013Moniruzzaman , 2014Moniruzzaman , 2016 In this research, I used participant observation, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and case study methods to collect data. My interviews with kidney sellers were open-ended, and my conversations with transplant recipients, organ brokers, and medical specialists were semistructured.…”
The rapid growth of organ transplantation has created an illegal market for human organs sourced from the destitute poor predominantly in the developing world. Drawing on challenging fieldwork, I investigate the lived experiences of organ sellers who sold their bodily organs on the black market of Bangladesh. Sellers’ narratives reveal that living without an organ is not just a bodily alteration, but instead it results in embodied suffering and ontological impairment of being in the world. Organ sellers reported that they experienced embodied suffering due to selling their vital organs, which violates long‐standing cultural practices, such as bodily integrity, body ownership, and human dignity. In addition, these sellers faced subjective suffering due to selling living parts of themselves. As they felt, selling an organ divided their whole body into two halves, which destroyed their homeostatic balance, ontological harmony, and affinity with recipients. Sellers referred to these embodied and subjective sufferings as “heavier selves.”
“…In this endeavour, we focused on online newspapers circulated in South Asia, the region known as a major organ trade hub for more than two decades. 10–13 We focused on kidneys as opposed to other organs since kidney sales encompass most cases of organ trade involving living sellers. In total, we accessed 24 online newspapers published between January 2016 and May 2019 to build transnational kidney trade networks, consisting of: (1) seller’s nationality; (2) buyer’s nationality; and (3) location of the surgery.…”
Kidney trade has been on the rise despite the domestic and international law enforcement aiming to protect the vulnerable population from potential exploitation. Regional hubs are emerging in several parts of the world including South Asia, Central America, the Middle East and East Asia. Kidney trade networks reported in these hot spots are often complex systems involving several players such as buyers, sellers and surgery countries operating across international borders so that they can bypass domestic laws in sellers and buyers’ countries. The exact patterns of the country networks are, however, largely unknown due to the lack of a systematic approach to collect the data. Most of the kidney trade information is currently available in the form of case studies, court materials and news articles or reports, and no comprehensive database exists at this time. The present study thus explored online newspaper scraping to systematically collect 10 419 news articles from 24 major English newspapers in South Asia (January 2016 to May 2019) and build transnational kidney trade networks at the country level. Additionally, this study applied text mining techniques to extract words from each news article and developed machine learning algorithms to identify kidney trade and non-kidney trade news articles. Our findings suggest that online newspaper scraping coupled with the machine learning method is a promising approach to compile such data, especially in the dire shortage of empirical data.
The rapid growth in organ transplantation has created an illicit trade in human organs. The kidney trade has flourished in the last few decades, but in the last few years this has been coupled with an emerging liver trade. This article examines the liver trade sourced from poor sellers in Bangladesh. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I investigate how a landless farmer and a village housewife both sell their liver lobes on the black market, and how the recipients undergo liver transplants in Bangladesh and India. I reveal that liver selling, like kidney selling, is primarily driven by the sellers' debt. What is surprising, though, in this anthropological analysis is that microcredit, a Nobel Prize-winning economic operation, has negatively contributed to organ selling in Bangladesh. I discover that the liver trade leads to tragic outcomes for both sellers and recipients: the sellers could not repay their loans by selling a liver lobe, while one of the recipients died just over a month after the surgery. I therefore argue that liver trade is advancing through a series of disturbing ironies, resulting in bioviolence, exploitation, and suffering for the vulnerable victims.
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