Lawrence Cohen
Weatherhead
Resident Scholar 2003-2004
“Operability”: Sterilization
and Transplantation as “Surgical Citizenship” in India
Through the burgeoning anthropological research on kidney transplantation,
global organ trafficking, and the shifting medical definitions of
life and death, Lawrence Cohen is focusing on the operation itself
as a social exercise with implications far beyond the realms of medicine
or health.
In Operability: Sterilization and Transplantation
as ‘Surgical Citizenship’ in India, Cohen is following an intuitive
thread through the web of relationships emerging from the commodification of
organ transplantation. His early analysis of arguments by “so-called bio-ethicists” describing
voluntary kidney sales as “a win-win situation” or “a gift
of life,” illuminated the broader economic and political context within
which this primary transaction takes place.
Bioavailability, operability, and as-if
modernity are some of the terms Cohen uses to describe unprecedented aspects
of experience created by this culture of commodified bodies. A progression of
medical advances reducing and finally suppressing the need for matching tissue
has allowed neoliberal entrepreneurs to troll for organ sale “recruits” in
marginal and impoverished populations who are deemed bioavailable.
Noting that a previous government’s use of sterilization
for development purposes linked that operation to access to social services,
Cohen posits operability as the degree to which a person’s relationship
with the state is mediated through invasive medical commitment.
With the concept of as-if modernity, Cohen
explores how an operation such as sterilization enables the state to by-pass
its failed project of transforming the reasoned practice of “the masses”—perceived
as capable of passion but not reason--and produce “a body that performs
as if it had undergone a transformation of reason, as if it were inhabited by
an ascetic will.”
Cohen is interested in the operation as a kind of citizenship, “and
by that I mean how a person secures a future in relation to the state. In some
cases, the scar becomes a passport one uses to imagine a certain kind of body-future
for one’s self and one’s family,” he says.
“If the operation becomes a form through which
constitutively marginal, pre-modern subjects can secure some form of modern participation
in the nation-state, it may become a critical desideratum.”
Affiliation at time of fellowship: Associate Professor, Departments
of Anthropology and of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University
of California, Berkeley
