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On Organ Theft Narratives

As a folklorist researching organ theft narratives (Campion-Vincent 1990, 1993, 1997a, b, n.d.), I have some critical comments on Scheper-Hughes’s (CA 41:191–244) important paper. I agree that the appearance of these rumors in Latin America in the late 1980s is strongly linked to the harsh plight of the poor there and then, which made the organtheft stories plausible. Having coined the expression “dark legends” to designate these “mobilizing tools that bring social problems to collective consciousness” (Campion-Vincent 1997a:33), I fully share her view that organstealing rumors are a weapon of the weak, challenging medicine and the state (p. 202). But this is not the whole story. Scheper-Hughes’s position as an activist explains why she is content with a brief description of “the organstealing rumor,” lumping together very different rumors and neglecting the fact that they occur in First World settings and amongst the affluent as well as amongst the destitute in the Third World. Two short sentences only (p. 202) address the fact that these clusters of rumors have a history and have recurred in many different social contexts and that comparison of these different occurrences is necessary to understand them. Folklore, the unofficial culture that permeates our universe, has shown surprising resilience. It has not, as predicted by the 19th-century founders of the discipline, disappeared with the rural society in which it was first systematically described but mutated so that one of its major expressions is the urban legends that have replaced the folktales of yesterday. The important folkloric concept of ostension, that is, pointing to behavior that imitates the scripts of rumors or urban legends, is useful for understanding the dynamic of these stories and often comes to mind when one is reading the anecdotes that Scheper-Hughes’s informants report. Rather than “rumors,” these narratives should be considered “legends,” as they are mostly expressed through developed narratives, involving the teller through circumstantial evidence situated in his/her close environment and resorting to the ubiquitous validating character of a friend of a friend.