New Organs Within Us

Aslihan Sanal is a cultural anthropologist who focuses on science and medical technology. She received her PhD from MIT in 2005, and is currently working as an independent scholar. This is her first book.

“New Organs Within Us is a tour de force. A brave, nuanced, and caring journey into the lives of transplant patients and the new worlds of meaning they tentatively inhabit. Soulfully written, the book changes the way we think about inner life and well-being, technology and human agency, and the impact of the global biomedical enterprise on local health systems. Social scientists and medical practitioners will have to reckon with this exceptional analysis for years to come.”-JoÃo Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment and Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival “I learned a great deal from this brilliant book. There is nothing else like it in the ethnographic literature on comparative high-tech medicine. Aslihan Sanal reaches far beyond the story of transplant patients and the organ trade in Turkey, taking in global flows of knowledge and ethics around brain-death, organ donation, and standards of care, as well as the worldwide organ trade, in which organs are exchanged legally and on the black market.”-Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Professor of Social Medicine, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School “New Organs within Us: Transplants and the Moral Economy is a richly ethnographic and soulfully written book that plunges its audience into the world of transplant patients and physicians…. The book is an important contribution to the burgeoning field of organ transplant.” - Monir Moniruzzaman (American Ethnologist) “New Organs within Us is an important contribution to the fields of science and technology studies and the anthropology of health and illness.” - Aysecan Terzioglu (American Anthropologist) “This is a brilliant book about organ transplantation in Turkey, not only as a journey into the experiences of patients, donors, and relatives of the decease, but also as a political-economy engagement that sheds light on how coping mechanisms are segregated between the poor and the rich. I learned a great deal from this book, and would like to recommend it to students of social sciences, social medicine, and political economy in Turkey.”  - Fikret Adaman (Turkish Studies) "Sensitively written and deeply insightful, Aslihan Sanal’s ethnography of kidney transplantation in Turkey in the 1990s and 2000s is an intimate stitching of life histories, national and institutional narratives, and shifting meanings of life, death, and the body." - Elizabeth DeLuca (Somatosphere)

• Prologue. The Accurate Nature of Things xiIntroduction. What Makes the World Our Own 1The Book 6In the Field 7Part One. The Desirable 15Half a Human 15From the Earth, Through the Quake 21Against the Tide 26Traveling to the West and the East 30Within the Experiment 36Close to Death 41Internal Objects 44Words of Life 46The Biopolis 50East of "Reason," West of "Eternal Life" 54Regulating Human Affairs, Fears, Emotions 63The Economy of Human Flesh and Bones 85The Biopolis's Vocations 95Twice Inert, Lifeless, and Life-less 108Part Two. The Impossible 111Spaces of Death 111The Pool of the Dead 118Mehmed 122Insanity 128Kadavra 130Beyond the Mirror 134Dissection and Disenchantment 140Burial 143Rites of Diffusion 146Reburial 150Suicide 153Dying Metaphors 160Sacrifice 165The Possible 175Conclusion. New Life 179Epistemic Passages 180Benimseme 191Acknowledgments 197Notes 201Bibliography 221Index 233