Contemporary South Asia, 2013 Vol. 21, No. 3, 195-213, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2013.826628 ROUTLED GE Routledge Taylor & Francis Group INTRODUCTION South Asian tissue economies Jacob Copeman* Social Anthropology, Edinburgh University, Edinburgh, UK 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'. Downloaded by [University of Edinburgh] at 06:42 11 September 2013 Keywords: substance; biomedicine; South Asia; tissue economies; civil society This special issue of Contemporary South Asia explores questions generated by the extrac- tion, circulation, valuation, and technical manipulation of biological substances in a broad sense - what Waldby and Mitchell (2006) have termed 'tissue economies' - in order to gain new insights into the meanings of humanness, life, value, and relationality in South Asia. These questions have been spurred by new technologies that (promise to) dramatically increase the 'bioavailability' (Cohen 2004) of human tissues and populations while also producing complex and sometimes ethically troubling interactions of commerce, biomedi- cine, religio-cultural beliefs and moralities, and legality. Taking our cue from recent studies that have brought questions of the social impli- cations of biotechnology strongly to the analytical fore and drawn attention to the varie- gated biopolitical milieus of South Asian tissue economies (Cohen 1999, 2001, 2004, 2010, 2011a, 2011b; Bharadwaj 2000, 2003; Simpson 2004a, 2004b, 2009a, 2009b, 2011; Sunder Rajan 2006; Reddy 2007; Bharadwaj and Glasner 2009; Glasner 2009; Egorova 2010; Mumtaz, Bowen, and Mumtaz 2012), this special issue ranges widely - theoretically, thematically, and regionally - in examining South Asian variants of and engagements with diverse modes of biological exchange: caste, gender, and blood donation in Pakistan (Mumtaz and Levay), DNA testing amongst a former Untouchable community *Email: jacob.copeman@ed.ac.uk @ 2013 Taylor & Francis
196 J. Copeman 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