Intimate gifts and ‘bad’ deaths

Abstract

This article is an ethnographic perspective on organ donation in the western Indian state of Gujarat. It suggests that debates around organ donation—from the perspective of religion as well as state—become critical to an understanding of not just how a global discourse translates into a local cultural context, but also how it configures specific cultural subjectivities around religion, death and violence. Through a discussion on how organ donation is framed by law and society as a desirable social good in general and as dan in particular, the article concludes that the emergent public discourse on organ transplant finds an ‘elective affinity’ with Hindu and Jain debates on death, rendering itself as a discourse that excludes Gujarat’s Muslims. Given the violence that configures recent Gujarati Muslim experiences of death, the article asks what the social consequences of organ donation discourses are for those who cannot share in the discursive construction of organ donation as a celebratory exercise in gift giving.