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ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s the northern part of Shaanbei (northern Shaanxi Province) and neighbouring areas of Inner Mongolia have been experiencing a huge economic boom, thanks to the discovery and successful extraction of coal, oil, and natural gas. While conducting fieldwork on the revival of popular religion in this region in the mid- and late 1990s, I came across various stories relating to suspicions of human organs being transported in large oil tank trucks going out of Shaanbei. Could there have been a link between what is invisible that lies underneath the surface of the earth (coal and oil) and those that lie within human bodies but then allegedly taken out and transported in oil tank trucks (human organs)? This article proposes an ‘extractological’ approach that brings together yet diverges from the methodological and theoretical concerns in anthropological studies on extractive industries and the commercialisation of human organ transplants. In analysing the image of ‘human organs in oil tank trucks’ in juxtaposition with various other pertinent extractological scenarios, an analytical tack emerges, crucially drawing upon Carlo Severi’s work on images and pictography, that goes beyond (or by-passes?) the anti-extraction politics of indignation and points towards an anthropology of conceptual interfacing and articulation (through investigating various kinds of ‘conceptual clutches’).
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I thank Giovanni da Col for his many engaging comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Carlo Severi and two earlier anonymous journal reviewers for their encouraging comments, and to Mitch Low and Nicholas Harney for their editorial input. The Shaanbei-related sections in this article are based on materials collected during 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Shaanbei between 1995 and 1998.
2. See Heidegger ([Citation1927] Citation1996, 157–159) on ‘idle talk’ and Stewart (Citation1996) on breeze-shooting as world-making activity.
3. The film first appeared in 2004 as part of an ensemble of three films and then was released as a full-length feature film in 2005. The plots of the two versions differ in some ways. The version I use here is the first, shorter one.
4. This section is drawn from Chau (Citation2013a).
5. Barend ter Haar (talk in the China Research Seminar Series at Cambridge on 6 February 2013).
6. This section is based on Chau (Citation2010).
7. Over time these sariras became dispersed through gift-giving and other processes (most famously through King Asoka, who gathered all the Buddha’s relics and redistributed them to 84,000 different locations in his empire, housed under 84,000 stupas) and some were brought to China and other lands that came under Buddhism’s influence.
8. In nineteenth-century China rumours of missionaries extracting body parts from unsuspecting Chinese fuelled violence against missionaries and Chinese Christian converts (see Kuhn [Citation1990] and ter Haar [Citation2006] on discussions on such rumours).
9. The more elaborate versions of ‘body snatching’ stories did circulate widely in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s about visitors from Hong Kong being victims of such schemes across the border in the booming new city of Shenzhen. And then there are of course the accusations in recent years by Falungong practitioners against the Chinese government for systematically persecuting Falungong practitioners in mainland China and illegally taking their organs for transplants (see Ownby Citation2008, 223–226).
10. It is quite unlike Deleuze and Guattari’s famous Artaud-inspired formulation of ‘Bodies-without-organs’ (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987).
11. However, one could say that the ‘human organs in oil tank trucks’ enhances people’s grasp on conceptual relationships (between organs and bodies, ‘spare parts’, and containers), which is a deep level of cultural transmission.
12. An image of a clutch can be viewed at http://www.dansmc.com/starter_clutch2.jpg (accessed on 1 April 2013).
13. The clutch bag allows a similar dynamic between engagement and dis-engagement between the hand (or hands) and the bag (http://photos.posh24.com/p/1627815/z/lady_gaga/lady_gaga_black_and_white_patt.jpg, accessed on 1 April 2013).