DISCUSSION AT OU TO EXAMINE HUMAN ORGAN TRAFFICKING 

Norman – We’ve all heard the legends regarding the harvesting of organs from unsuspecting victims.  While that story may have achieved the level of urban legend in the United States, the basis of it is rooted in the very factual trade of human bodies and organs that takes place from Brazil, Argentina and Cuba in Latin America to Israel and Turkey in the Middle East, to India, South Africa and the United States.

On Friday, Feb. 13, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Chancellor’s Professor in Medical Anthropology; head of the doctoral program in medical anthropology; and director of Organs Watch at the University of California at Berkeley, will visit the University of Oklahoma Norman campus to discuss “what journalists describe as ‘transplant tourism,’ which involves more than consenting individuals engaged in intimate bodily exchanges and backdoor transplants that are privately arranged.”

A brown bag luncheon will take place beginning at noon in the Regents and Associates Rooms of Oklahoma Memorial Union, 900 Asp Ave.  The title of the noon discussion will be “A Talent for Life: Reflections of Human Vulnerability and Resilience,” which will draw on Scheper-Hughes’ work in the shanty towns of northeast Brazil, Ireland South Africa and the U.S.

Her evening discussion, “Trafficking With the (Organs) Traffickers: Global Justice and the Traffic in Humans for Transplant,” will begin at 6 p.m.  in Room 2030 of Gaylord Hall, 395 W. Lindsey St..

As Scheper-Hughes explains, “Each illicit transplant involves an extensive and highly organized criminal network of well-placed intermediaries with access to willing transplant surgeons, excellent public and private hospitals, laboratories, offshore bank accounts, police protection and even tacit approval or blessing of government and/or health officials.

“My paper, based on fieldwork in Recife, Durban and Jerusalem, explores the following questions: What kind of moral worlds do kidney hunters and organs traffickers and their clients inhabit? How do they justify their actions?  These intimate exchanges of life-giving body parts concern more than medical necessity and individual life-saving. In the case under study they entail complicated histories of debt peonage on the one hand (as in Brazil), and of genocide, race hatred and mass death (as in Israel) on the other.”

The lecture is sponsored by the Friends Of the College of Arts and Sciences, Barbara B. and William G. Paul Enrichment Fund, James H. and JoAnn H. Holden Enrichment Fund and the Department of Anthropology.

“The Department of Anthropology has invited Dr. Nancy Scheper-Hughes to speak at OU because of her tremendous stature in contemporary anthropology,” said Pat Gilman, chair of the department.  “Her current work on the international traffic in human organs powerfully joins her lifelong concern with social inequality and the plight of the poor with her award-winning scholarship as a medical anthropologist, tracing connections that span the globe.  Her lectures will be of interest to a broad range of scholars in the OU community, including law and the medical and biological sciences, journalism, international and area studies, and, of course, the social sciences.  We eagerly anticipate her visit.”