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This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Indian community in Houston, as part of a NIH-NHGRI-sponsored ethics study and sample collection initiative entitled \"Indian and Hindu Perspectives on Genetic Variation Research.\" At the heart of this research is one central exchange-blood samples donated for genetic research-that draws both the Indian community and a community of researchers into an encounter with bioethics. I consider the meanings that come to be associated with blood donation as it passes through various hands, agendas, and associated ethical filters on its way to the lab bench: how and why blood is solicited, how the giving and taking of blood is rationalized, how blood as material substance is alienated, processed, documented, and made available for the promised ends of basic science research. Examining corporeal substances and asking what sorts of gifts and problems these represent, I argue, sheds some light on two imbricated tensions expressed by a community of Indians, on the one hand, and of geneticists and basic science researchers, on the other hand: that gifts ought to be free (but are not), and that science ought to be pure (but is not). In this article, I explore how experiences of bioethics are variously shaped by the histories and habits of Indic giving, prior sample collection controversies, commitments to \"good science\" and the common \"good of humanity,\" and negotiations of the sites where research findings circulate.

What value does death acquire when body organs are pledged for transplantation? Deaths may be made public by a stated desire to donate, and a matter of public debate precisely because the desire is denied. This essay explores two case studies from India of attempts to donate organs: one of a condemned prisoner, and the other of a former Marxist chief minister of West Bengal. One of these attempts was idealized and exalted, the other thwarted; both gave rise to considerable public conversation. We treat the public nature of these deathbed wishes as moral dramas, for at the heart of each is a quite wrenching contest over the donor's soul-or its this-worldly equivalent, his legacy-that serves equally as an opportunity to reignite projects of social reform and (re)educate different social constituencies. We thus focus on the didactic functions of donation, where the principal issue at stake is the intention of the dying person to gift his or her organs. We ask, what does organ donation mean at the point of death? We argue that there is more at stake than just the possibilities of saving lives. Rather, these unfolding moral dramas become opportunities for, among other things, Brahminism to be rejected, superstition to be transcended, the values of a modernizing state to be reaffirmed, and a broad spectrum of civic virtues to be inculcated. Pledging one's body when death is imminent and inevitable becomes the final chance to rewrite the course of a life, to make a worthy biographical statement, and to turn the intimately personal into something of public value. How does the dying donor speak? As murderer, Marxist-or more?

The category of \"caste\" has had a long history both in and out of the Indian subcontinent, one that is frequently intertwined with that of \"race\" From H. H. Risley's use of late-nineteenth century European race science in anthropometric research, to Max Mueller's articulation of the Aryan theory of race and pan-Africanist expressions of racial solidarity with the lower castes of India, caste has frequently been redefined and politicized by being drawn into wider discourses about race. Informed by this complex history, this essay asks how \"race\" and \"caste\" have come to serve as key metaphors of socio-political struggle, illuminating one-another and emerging as potent rhetorical strategies of social critique, particularly in India but increasingly also in more global contexts. I argue that Dalit groups in contemporary India move their concerns into global forums such as the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism by appropriating ideas about caste and religion that have long been used to mystify the local and \"native\" inhabitants-ideas that are themselves the subjects of established ethnographic critique. As such, this essay remains aware of the difficulties of bringing anthropological concerns to bear on analyses of on-going political struggle.

How do consumption practices reconfigure work into an aspirational undertaking? This note considers how changing economic priorities, attitudes towards material progress, and labor relations in post-liberalization India produce a valuation of privatized, individualized forms of work imbricated with consumption, over older forms of labor. The realities of laboring and of labor relations are increasingly obscured by the recasting of work as both path to and mechanism of consumption. At the same time as consumption establishes the parameters for the imagination of the good life, it becomes the means by which to claim the value of work itself, thus nurturing what Appadurai has dubbed the 'capacity to aspire'. This note relies on the case of the Nokia manufacturing plant in the Sriperumbudur SEZ in order to study these processes. It reveals how work in the new economy invisibilizes labor realities, which are starkly and ironically revealed once again in the face of capital flight.

What value does death acquire when body organs are pledged for transplantation? Deaths may be made public by a stated desire to donate, and a matter of public debate precisely because the desire is denied. This essay explores two case studies from India of attempts to donate organs: one of a condemned prisoner, and the other of a former Marxist chief minister of West Bengal. One of these attempts was idealized and exalted, the other thwarted; both gave rise to considerable public conversation. We treat the public nature of these deathbed wishes as moral dramas, for at the heart of each is a quite wrenching contest over the donor’s soul—or its this-worldly equivalent, his legacy—that serves equally as an opportunity to reignite projects of social reform and (re)educate different social constituencies. We thus focus on the didactic functions of donation, where the principal issue at stake is the intention of the dying person to gift his or her organs. We ask, what does organ donation mean at the point of death? We argue that there is more at stake than just the possibilities of saving lives. Rather, these unfolding moral dramas become opportunities for, among other things, Brahminism to be rejected, superstition to be transcended, the values of a modernizing state to be reaffirmed, and a broad spectrum of civic virtues to be inculcated. Pledging one’s body when death is imminent and inevitable becomes the final chance to rewrite the course of a life, to make a worthy biographical statement, and to turn the intimately personal into something of public value. How does the dying donor speak? As murderer, Marxist—or more?

[...]an assessment, Witsoe shows, reflects a normative liberal reading of democracy which abstracts identities, individualizes rights, and relies on regulated, rational procedures-all in a context in which identities cannot be abstracted from local structures of dominance and subordination, entrenched inequalities complicate questions of rights, and rational democratic process appears either embattled or unsuited to coping with electorates less concerned with policy than with seizing power. [...]Witsoe suggests, rather than pronouncing the inherently illiberal character of Indian democracy, switch the frame-and the Bihar case starts not only to make better sense, but to teach us invaluable lessons about just how Indian electoral processes constitute distinctive modes of postcolonial democratic governance. [...]there are narrative choices that authors make for various reasons, but I cannot help but wonder if knowing how fieldwork unfolded sceneby- broad-scene-how Witsoe gained access to the top leaders in Bihar's state government, or what the tea shop scene abuzz with political machination might have been like as a vantage point or point of entry into studies of politics and state formation-would have helped bring even dry theoretical arguments more to life.

Reddy reviews Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum by Atreyee Sen.