MAT http://medanthrotheory.org/read/10566/exciting-waiting-transplantation[27.11.18, 12:37:14] MAT ≡ Exciting waiting Exploring liver transplantation in Germany — Julia Rehsmann 25 Apr 2018 Photo by Justin Lim on Unsplash I felt a bit like an undercover detective (though I was not), wriggling about on the plastic chair, pricking up my ears. Here, in the transplant clinic’s waiting room, amidst the chit-chatting about waiting times, health conditions, and family life, I hoped things would begin to unfold. I had expected a murmur of voices, interrupted only by nurses and doctors calling patients in and the confidential whispering of more intimate details. In these whispers, I had anticipated rumours, stories of people travelling abroad for a transplant. But it stayed damn quiet. The concept of transplantation is based on the movement of one body part to another. Accordingly, much has been written in anthropology on movingorgans, bodies, and body parts for transplantation (for overviews see Ikels 2013; Kierans 2011). Whereas most of these anthropological accounts focus on kidneys, I was interested in the liver, an organ that has not yet gained much attention within the discipline. In this essay, I reflect on how my research interest shifted over the course of my fieldwork, how I had to depart from the initial plan because the Menu