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“The Heavier Selves”: Embodied and Subjective Suffering of Organ Sellers in Bangladesh
Author(s) -
Moniruzzaman Monir
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
ethos
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.783
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 1548-1352
pISSN - 0091-2131
DOI - 10.1111/etho.12236
Subject(s) - embodied cognition , dignity , harmony (color) , organ donation , narrative , organ transplantation , aesthetics , sociology , transplantation , psychology , law , medicine , political science , epistemology , surgery , philosophy , art , visual arts , linguistics
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.”