ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the act of giving within the context of biotechnological practices. It is concerned with the pivotal role of the body and its parts as things increasingly to be exchanged. The exchange in the story is one that establishes the grounds of a gift that will ostensibly give Janvier's mother and sister a much better life. The entangled acts of requesting and giving are, at once, intensely complex personal, social, political and moral phenomena that always have consequences far beyond the immediacy of the initial exchange. For anthropologists, exchange relationships are neither discrete nor dyadic, but are woven into and so are deeply reflective of the social fabric out of which they are made. Instances of gift-giving fulfil complex demands and expectations that structure and give form to the everyday lives of families, communities and societies, as the ethnographic record richly attests.
