Biomedical Practices, Religion, and the Law

This book deepens our understanding of the social, legal, and anthropological issues that arise from the global proliferation of advanced biomedical technologies and how they enable people to use their bodies to express individual and collective identities. The volume approaches these issues through the lens of three contentious and ethically fraught biomedical techniques: gender surgery, medically assisted reproduction, and organ donation and transplantation. It combines anthropological understandings of the body as a site for claiming and safeguarding identities with perspectives from legal and medical experts to address the bioethical concerns associated with these technologies and to challenge assumptions regarding the universality of normative principles, such as personal autonomy, consent, and justice. The two regions that are the focus of this volume – the Middle East and Europe – allow the authors to explore cross-cultural comparisons and what they can tell us about how the symbolic dimension of the body, as a locus of identity, impacts medical practices. This is becoming especially relevant now, as contact among widely diverse cultures and communities is becoming ever more frequent and intense due to increasing migration, rampant urbanization, and internal displacement. The book will be of interest to researchers, academics, and policymakers working in the areas of legal anthropology, comparative law, law and religion, medical anthropology, medical law and ethics, and sociology of medicine.