Whose Body After Death? Narratives, Culture, and Organ Donation in India

Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on Modern Approaches in Humanities and Social Sciences

Year: 2026

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Whose Body After Death? Narratives, Culture, and Organ Donation in India

Dr. Ujjayinee Aich

ABSTRACT:

Organ donation research is predominantly framed through a language of deficit, emphasizing low awareness, infrastructural limitations, cultural reluctance and mistrust. This study intends to shift attention from barriers to more fundamental questions: how is the dead body constituted and through what competing claims does it acquire meaning? It conceptualizes the post-mortem body as a contested and socially negotiated site where authority over “body,” as colloquially referred to the dead in India, is claimed by biomedical regimes, kinship structures, religious imaginaries and state imperatives. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, interpretive approach. It employs a multi-sited narrative analysis that brings into dialogue the empirical and cultural. Empirical material is drawn from in-depth interviews with donor families, transplant coordinators, and doctors, analyzed thematically with attention to language, metaphor and moral reasoning. This is complemented by an interpretive analysis of popular cultural texts, ritual practices and public discourse, treated as sites where meanings of the dead body are produced and circulated. The analysis demonstrates that biomedical constructs like brain death, which render the body simultaneously dead and clinically viable, remain ontologically unstable within familial and cultural contexts where the body is perceived as sacred, relational and indivisible. Rather than reflecting a simple lack of altruism, resistance to organ donation emerges from competing moral logics and contested claims over bodily integrity and ownership. Reframing organ donation as a struggle over meaning than compliance, this study calls for fresh approaches and research that recognize the deceased body as a symbolically saturated and socially consequential entity.

Keywords: Bioethics ; Brain Death ; Embodiment ; Moral Economies; Qualitative Research