Notes on Session 14: Circulation of substances: body, relationality, personhood

The readings, together, bring focus to the body, and ideas of personhood, and some of the fundamental epistemological problems it has created for the ‘Western’ secular systems of knowledge, particularly with respect to science and law.  The body becomes a source of tension and contestation for these domains particularly because ideas of ‘personhood’ come to be located in its biological substratum, substances, and processes, in a bid to delink it from earlier religious and non-material explanations, as Farman suggests. However, while both science and law base their practices on a materialist conception of the person/self, with science (and/or law) not having been able to go the full distance in explaining phenomena such as consciousness, free will, reason, morality, Farman explains that it has resulted in the development of divergent conceptions of the person (i.e., materialist- scientific, and rationalist-legal, which itself is based on non-materialist assumptions), which come into contestation in the practice of science and law. Within the domain of the everyday, these differences constantly bring challenges and questions on how to conceptualise persons and the relationships between them (e.g., the relation between the body and body-parts; their partitioning; whether individual organs/substance have the same status and rights as the whole body, or constitute the person in the same way that the whole does; whether miniscule substances from the body are enough to answers questions of cultural variation, etc. These various questions come up in the light of practices such as cryogenics discussed by Farman; organ donation, discussed by Scheper-Hughes;blood donation discussed by Carsten, and SNPs by Reddy). They also throw up questions on ‘rights’ (e.g., rights over the body and the knowledge that may be determined from its, as discussed by Reddy in describing the HGDP and HapMap project). Within these contexts made possible by scientific advancements, the body is constantly imbricated in ethical dilemmas over the capitalist / neoliberal exploitation of persons, and the commodification of the self, which all throw light on the social-political constitution of identities and status of personhood, unlike what materialist conceptions of science would like to believe. They also raise metaphysical questions about what can be accepted as a ‘free gift’, under such conditions of exploitation (not only of third world, poor populations as in the case of organ donation discussed by Scheper-Hughes, but also in the case of more elite and educated subjects, such as the Indian gujaratis discussed by Reddy, who may be subjected to a restricted access to the knowledge derived from their own bodily substances).

What seems to appear strongly across these set of articles that discuss the commodification of the body in different ways, is the way in which law and science are forced to engage with alternate concepts of the ‘gift’ (as gift of ‘greater good’, gift of  knowledge or gift of life), within these gray areas, where science, yet, has no answers (e.g., the possibility of immortality with cryoscience, or the knowledge to be gained from HapMap), and where the law has, yet, no object/subject to regulate (e.g., the head, detached from the body, which is seen to contain all information vital to living, as discussed by Farman). Thus, in this context, as Farman, Scheper-Hughes, and Reddy show, science constantly skirts around the edges of law, leading to a constant making and re-making of itself, as well as of law (based on ‘bio-ethics’), as Reddy argues, challenging the Western myth of  the ‘gift’ as ‘pure’, itself.

The idea of the gift appears in these new configurations of bio-ethics as a gift of life (e.g., in the organ-donation case or cryogenics case), or as a ‘greater good’ through a gift of knowledge (as in the HapMap case). This idea of genetic mapping and organ donation as a gift itself needs to be invoked in order to hide its commercial and ethical implications. However, this idea of the gift is also not the one that is held by the West that separates the person and thing, and understands the gift  to be wholly ‘pure’ and unreciprocated. Rather, only by drawing on alternate conceptions of the gift as not ‘pure’, but ‘unencumbered’ in its circulation, as not ‘free’, but ‘ought to be’, and linking this to the idea of science as not free, but ought to be, can legal issues, problems of bio-ethics, and the demand and supply for commercial transactions based on the body be managed, and a motivation for sacrifice for the larger good be created. The larger concerns of ethics (understood as general principles that must guide human behaviour on matters such as representation of knowledge, right to knowledge, the inherent dangers and risks of such research, or consequences of these scientific practices) can then give way to moral concerns (understood as local ways of being and worldviews that inform action). Thus, addressing ethical questions can become questions of research design and sample efficacy, ethical protocols for dealing with human cases can be addressed by partitioning the body (with individual parts not receiving the full status of the whole), and practices such as organ trafficking can completely escape questions about the power differentials and exploitation couched within medico-legal definitions and frameworks of the body that don't take into account the social relations that make up the person, and his ‘free will’.  

In a slightly different vein, but still drawing on these questions of the materiality of the body and its relation to the self, seeking to understand how blood as a bodily substance is( or is not) linked to kinship systems, Carsten shows us how bodies are mutable as are the relationships between them as persons.The transfer of particular body substances can mark the boundaries of relationality( thus, concerns of incest may be raised if children who have breastfed from the same mother seek to marry later and deep discomfort arises when bodily fluids are transferred outside of permissible domains as in the making of ‘mommy cheese’).  Blood as a substance whose transfer may occur in the everyday as well as on ritual occasions or as a marker of sacrifice lends itself to several medical, political and religious associations.  Given the multi-layered entanglements of the act of donating blood, it seems impossible to separate out the altruistic from the instrumental. Considering blood as a substance that moves between domains that are otherwise kept separate, she compares it to two non-bodily substances that share the property- money and ghosts. As blood cannot sustain life by itself, ghosts are ‘incompletely dead’. With money, blood shares the association of traversing domains as well as holding metaphorical potential to represent life and vitality.  Materiality of bodily substances( softness, fluidity, contexts of occurrence) is important in invocations of relationality and yet, this does not mean the registers of nature and law( or substance and code as proposed by Schneider) are clearly distinguishable in practice. Even if blood as a metaphor of relationality is used in diverse cultures with considerable consistency, Carsten asks for a reflective anthropological engagement with the specificities of locution in the usage of phrases such as ‘blood-relative’ or ‘blood-relations’.

   Finally, taking a slightly different route, Weston attempts to examine what the extension of metaphors drawn from the body/blood do/can do in informing our understanding and legitimising actions within the realm of the socioeconomic. Weston argues that for modern capitalist theories, there has never been a question about whether the economy is characterised by flows, but always about how best to capture this and its political implications.Drawing attention to how knowledge of the blood and circulation is drawn as a metaphor, analogy, synedoche, in conceptualising the economy, he points to how the economy is always conceptualised as a living, self regulating organism, that must be brought back to health, stimulated after a cardiac arrest, must be pumped with stimulus packages, in order to keep it fit, and alive. In drawing comparisons, he points to how ‘cadavers’, ‘corpses’, and ‘death’ never frame the understanding, even while alternate conceptions of ‘purging’ (drawn from Galenic understanding of circulation) may be used as a way forward to recovery. In this myth of a cyclic, self-recovering system that is created, what is hidden is often the violence and blood-shed that is left in the aftermath of economic expansion, foregrounding the economy as ‘lifeblood’ alone. The power of this metaphor lies in the manner in which our naturalised understanding of blood and the circulatory system has also naturalised our understanding of the economy, and the manner in which its imposition on to the economic provides a constant sense of flows and vitality attributed to the economic. However, drawing attention to  the meta-materiality of these metaphors, as in the case of the Thailand Red Shirt protesters, who sought to purge the government of its excesses after the Asian Financial crisis, he also points to the alternate possibilities of engagement opened up by the use of such metaphors, coupled with a careful anthropological analysis.

Thus, the readings together raise certain central questions about personhood, examining what constitutes a person and how this is related to the materiality of the body. Within the secular tradition of science and law, the question largely remains unresolved- with the ‘non-material’ being central to the epistemologies that create the secular person, and the hope to find it within the materiality of the body( as in the case seeing the brain as the center of preservation of personhood). Discourses of the body, which are articulated within the tradition that seeks to overcome the cartesian dualism finds itself located firmly within it. To understand gifts ‘from’ and ‘of’ the body requires again the resolution of the question of how the person may be distinguished from the body, and if at all such a distinction is possible. If gifts embedded within societies are never really ‘free’, how does the person(constituted, at least in part, by the body) seek social relationships through gifts?

- Savitha and Maithreyi