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Migration and Paying with Bodies

Summary/Abstract: While previously humans moved from one place to another to find more fertile lands and more prosperous settlements, later they have migrated due to wars, epidemics and famines. Following the formation of industrial capitalism, the modern human has also migrated from one place to another owing to the reasons such as land enclosures, epidemics, wars, and the construction of nation states and their xenophobic policies, the efforts of the states in chastening the criminals and enemy classes (gulags etc.) in the colonies or in forcing nomadic tribes into the settled life and so on. In the 2000s, especially due to the developments such as the occupation of Iraq by the US, the Syrian civil war, and the Taliban’s oppressive policies on Afghan people, for migrants and asylum seekers, Turkey has emerged as a bridge between Europe and the Middle East. In addition to Middle Eastern migrants, the emergent ethnic conflicts at various countries across African countries have made the Sinai peninsula the epicentre of transnational migrations. These migrants and refugees that seek a better life in more prosperous places were left with any option but to exchange their bodily organs with travel tickets, visas or residence permission documents. In this article, through the lenses of grotesque histories of war, poverty, and colonialism, I will examine the development of technologies of organ donation since the 1960s in order to show how human body itself has become an exchange value.

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