Bioethics & Organ Transplantation in a Muslim Society A Study in Culture, Ethnography, and Religion by Farhat Moazam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 264 pages.)

Abstract

FarhatMoazam was born in Pakistan and attended medical school there. For
many years, she pursued her surgical and pediatric training in the United
States, witnessing not only scientific progress in organ transplantation but
also the rise of modern secular bioethics, the advocacy of individual rights
and patient autonomy, and feminism(p. 175). Equipped with such privileged
knowledge, she obtained high-ranking positions back in Pakistan, reflecting
her competence as both a medical doctor and a medical ethics specialist.
While working on this dissertation (she received her doctorate in religious
studies from the University of Virginia in 2004), however, she employed a
third and quite unexpected quality: that of an ethnographer. ButMoazamhas
no ambition to contribute to the broader theoretical discussion of Marcel
Mauss’ The Gift (W.W. Norton & Co., 2000). Rather, she brushes aside the
applicability of reasoning in the tradition of the reception of Mauss (cf. pp.
126, 138, 143, and 218). Similarly, she is not concerned with theoretical ethnological
or sociological debates on globalization and its local appropriations,
although, ultimately, this is what the story is about.
To conduct her fieldwork, she chose to spend three months at a dialysis
and renal transplantation unit in her hometown of Karachi. This vanguard
institution for end-stage-renal-disease (ESRD) patients, part of her old medical
college, is now both the largest and the first institution of its type in
Pakistan. In addition, the country’s first renal transplant was performed there
in 1985. Financed to a lesser degree by the state, about 60 percent of the
institute’s budget has to be raised by sponsors (p. 46). Such services as dialysis,
transplantation, medication, and follow-up are free of charge (p. 37), so
there is a tremendous overflow of people in need.
The institute, having started its pioneering work in a traditional society
that is still strongly averse to posthumous donation, has to rely on live ...