Organ Trade Symposium

Why should an ethnomusicologist care about the organ trade in South Asia? Exchange, exchange, exchange, baby. Political economy, the trajectory of commodities, the social life of things, social networks, 
etc. This is all stuff that we have not looked at when dealing with music recording and distribution. So...

The NYU Critical Perspectives on South Asia Series, the Department of
Anthropology, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
present:

Lawrence Cohen
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley

"Two Reflections on Operable Life:
Anthropological Surgery and Bodily Commitment"

Thursday, April 12th
5:00-6:30 pm

Room 300 Silver Center
100 Washington Square East


Since 1997 Lawrence Cohen has studied and written about the global
market
in transplant organs, with a focus on understanding emergent practices
of
rendering specific populations "bioavailable" to others. In this talk,
Cohen takes his work on operability in two new directions. He begins to
attempt a genealogy of surgical reason over the twentieth century.
Second,
Cohen turns to the frequently offered linkage in his south Indian
fieldwork (or the refusal of a linkage) between selling a kidney and
"prostitution," to ask how different kinds of givings over the body
come
to be articulated in relation to one another.