David Samper

Cannibalizing Kids: Rumor and Resistance in Latin America

In recent years, stories of illicit traffic in children's organs have circulated in the international press; they allege that poor children are being mutilated and killed to procure healthy organs for wealthier ones. This article examines the "baby-parts" story in order to illuminate the role of rumors in building communal resistance and precipitating social movements. Rumors index collective fears and anxieties and participate in constructing these fears and anxieties as social problems—a process that sometimes leads to collective action, as rumors help build the social cohesion necessary to mobilize a public against perceived threats or social ills. Using the "baby parts" story in Latin America as a case study, Samper further argues that rumors occupy a middle ground between individual, covert tactics of resistance and community-based overt strategies. In this particular case, rumors led to a sustained international dialogue about inter-country adoption.

Véronique Campion-Vincent

Organ Theft Narratives as Medical and Social Critique

Organ theft narratives are popular worldwide because individuals find their core ideas credible. In debunking these legends, folklorists may forget that such narratives identify ethical issues that even medical specialists dealing with advances in transplant technology have not resolved. First, the conditions of a transplant often assume that organs are "gifts" from the living or the recent dead. However, such gifts cannot be reciprocated, and so the practice upsets the balance of customary social exchange. Further, there is concern about the growing power of medical experts to traffic in life and death. Both in legends and in popular culture more generally, doctors emerge as potential criminals who give life and wholeness to some individuals by stealing it from others. Second, organ transplants occur in a context of global economic disparity, where the concept of exploitation could plausibly include both inequitable commercial trade and the theft of healthy body parts from the poor. Such unresolved issues underlie stories of organ theft: those circulating in Third World contexts express the concerns directly, while those that appear in industrialized contexts may attempt to displace feelings of responsibility for this dilemma.

Bill Ellis

Why Is a Lucky Rabbit's Foot Lucky? Body Parts as Fetishes

The practice of carrying a rabbit's foot for luck was frequently recorded in Anglo American tradition beginning during the early twentieth century, and early records suggest that this custom was borrowed from African American folk magic. This study considers the rabbit's foot as a fetish—a material object invested with extraordinary spiritual forces that becomes a metonym for an implied narrative and that is used as a means of gaining control over complex social relationships. Early explanations of the custom stress that the rabbit's foot should be obtained under ritual circumstances in a graveyard; accordingly, Ellis analyzes the significance of the rabbit's foot in the context of related beliefs in both White and Black tradition that concern gravesite artifacts and animal body parts as substitutes for human body parts. For both White and Black fetish users, a core belief is that possession of a body part of an Other allows one to gain (or maintain) social power over that group. The author argues that the rabbit's foot can be interpreted as one of many traditions arising from the ambiguous social and political relationship between Black and White cultures in the early twentieth century, and that this seemingly insignificant practice is embedded in a range of beliefs and practices that reveal how social power is acquired and social relations negotiated.

Moira Smith

The Flying Phallus and the Laughing Inquisitor: Penis-Theft in the Malleus Maleficarum

Kramer and Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum [Hammer of Witches], written in the fifteenth century as a guide to prosecuting alleged witches, was a central source for the European witch craze. This article examines a narrative included in this work, one that relates how witches steal men's penises and keep them alive in birds' nests. In one case, Kramer and Sprenger record that a victim tried to choose a big penis to replace the one he had lost, but was told that it belonged to the village priest. This narrative has been derided often by scholars as a sign of the authors' instability, but in fact the story expresses several levels of traditional lore. This paper explores three of these: penis theft in traditional love magic; the representations of penis-as-bird in art, slang, and jokelore; and the image of the hypersexual priest in anti-clerical jokes from the Middle Ages to the present. Although Kramer and Sprenger believed that penis theft was a genuine psycho-medical phenomenon, the evidence shows that they recognized this story as a bawdy joke and meant their readers to do the same.