Local virtue and global vision: The practice of eye donation in contemporary Sri Lanka
A death radically rearranges kinship, debt, obligation, and responsibility, and it also triggers prescribed routines for mourning and material disposal of the corpse. It is into this complex and fraught unfolding of events that the rhetorics of corporeal charity must be introduced and acted upon. In this article, I describe practices and practicalities of cornea donation in Sri Lanka in relation to ideas about merit and the nation state. In contrast with discourses about ‘shortages’, corneas, which are often elsewhere a particularly difficult tissue to elicit because of their links to the eye, appearance, identity, and inner consciousness (Hayward and Madill 2003), are in Sri Lanka not in short supply. Nor is religion an impediment to donation but rather, the day-to-day practice of Sinhala Buddhists provides an extremely compelling affective, moral, and political justification when it comes to pledging to donate. The article illustrates how and why this is the case.