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From the Field
- Public Culture
- Duke University Press
- Volume 15, Number 1, Winter 2003
- p. 209
- Article
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from the field
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
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Tony (not his real name) was among the first residents of Bagong Lupa, a huge shantytown built over a polluted harbor, to sell his kidney to a foreign transplant patient at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in downtown Manila. Afterward, his surgeon enlisted him as a kidney hunter to locate other men willing to part with a kidney for $1200. Tony gets a small fee for each kidney located but not enough to support his family. Since selling his own kidney Tony has been unable to return to his previous work as a stevedore. The pain in his side "never stops aching" he told me. Tony insists on wearing a mask because the transplant surgeon he works for asked him not to talk to outsiders about his work as an organs broker.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author (with Loïc Wacquant) of Commodifying Bodies (2002). She is the director of Organs Watch, a research and documentation project she founded with Lawrence Cohen to monitor justice, equality, and human rights in organs procurement and distribution.
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