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Abstract
This introduction surveys existing literature on South Asian tissue economies and reflects on engagements with diverse modes of biological exchange in the subcontinent. It elaborates the aims and themes of this special issue, which presents essays on caste, gender, and blood donation in Pakistan (Mumtaz and Levay), DNA testing amongst a former Untouchable community in south India (Egorova) and amongst diasporic Indians in Houston, Texas (Reddy), body (cadaveric) donation in India (De Looze), the use of fake blood in Bangladeshi cinema (Hoek), the mobilisation of blood, hearts, and ketones to protest the Indian government's failure to provide redress or care to victims of the 1984 Bhopal industrial disaster (Banerjee), and blood-based political portraits in south India (Copeman). Extending the parameters of classic accounts of the role of substance transactions in the production of South Asian personhood into investigations of contemporary tissue economies, it examines the foundational work of Lawrence Cohen in this area and proposes a set of relations between the double-ness of substance (its promise, as a locus of hope, emerging precisely from its capacity to debase) and its productivity within discourses of civil society and ‘modernisation’.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Deepa Reddy without whose help and guidance this special issue would not have come to fruition. For incisive readings of earlier drafts of this introduction I thank Dwai Banerjee, Lotte Hoek and Aya Ikegame. For encouragement and assistance I thank Adi Bharadwaj, Nate Roberts and Bob Simpson. Warm thanks also to John Zavos for his editorial care and attention in guiding this issue through to publication. I am obliged most of all to Lawrence Cohen: the influence of his work is visible throughout this special issue; it has been a privilege to engage with it.
Notes
1 A turn of phrase after van Hollen (Citation2011, 499).
2 More a provocation based upon lines of flight from the reviewed texts than a ‘position’.
3 For, to be clear, these are not oppositions posited by Cohen himself.
4 After Douglas' famous definition of dirt as ‘matter out of place’ (Citation1966).
5 The Hindu (Chennai), 25 September 2000.
6 Indeed, it has long been known that bodily secretions in the subcontinent are frequently ‘charged with power that can be both menacing and protective’ (Bayly Citation1989, 127, my emphasis).
7 For instance, see Copeman (Citation2013, S164) on the mixing of Bajrang Dal activists' blood for a blood portrait of Ram that also explicitly constituted a threat of further bloodshed: ‘If one can give blood (for the cause [of the painting]) he can shed it as well’.
8 Simpson's work has also encompassed eye banking, new reproductive technologies, and more recently clinical trials.
9 The site of a 17th-century observatory, Jantar Mantar is a street sanctioned by state authorities as the space within which groups can make public displays of civil dissent (Banerjee, this issue).
10 The production of ketone-bodies – compounds produced by the body when carbohydrate intake drops dangerously – helps keep the depleted faster alive but after roughly three weeks may themselves result in fatal complications (Banerjee, this issue).
11 Whether based upon blockage of intake or intentional extractive measures.
12 The phrase is Banerjee's personal communication, February 6, 2013.
13 The final spark that precipitated the conflict is widely believed to have been soldiers' concern that the cartridges provided by the British had been greased with fat from cows and pigs.
14 A ‘subset of a wider intellectual or information commons’ as Reddy (this issue) describes it.
15 She is citing Chakrabarty (Citation1991, 20).
17 ‘Professional longing’ is borrowed from Sharp (Citation2006, 211).