Final Year Project

Project Title

Gift Paradigm in Organ Donations

Description

In this paper, we borrow noted economic anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s (1923) theory of Gift Exchange as a blueprint to understand if contemporary capitalist societies are capable of and undertake such forms of exchange. We aim to study how the practice of organ donation and transplantation can constitute a form of modern gift exchange. We begin with an introduction to the key debate between formalists’ conceptualisation of a market society and the substantivists’ framework of a gift society. we will then attempt to contextualise the human body and its potential for framing in the exchange relations of gifting, followed by a brief examination of how live body transplantation fits better into the gift-model compared to cadaveric transplantations. A critical aspect of the paper is a multi-pronged discussion to examine whether organ donations contain the three elements of giving, receiving and reciprocity, essential for the exchange to be considered a Maussian gift. At the end, we will also analyze the practice of Potlatch to understand how both practices are similar/different, as well as investigate the contentions of certain scholars regarding the framing of organ donations and transplantations within the gift paradigm.