A01=Lesley A. Sharp
anthropologists
anthropology
Author_Lesley A. Sharp
Category=JHM
death and mourning
denatured bodies
donor families
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographers
ethnographic study
genetically altered bodies
interviews
mechanical body replacements
medical science
medical taboos
medical technology
modern medicine
nonfiction
organ donors
organ harvesting
organ transplantation
organ transplants
rebirth
social analysis
social intimacy
social science
transformation
transplant recipients
Product details
- ISBN 9780520247864
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 04 Oct 2006
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Strange Harvest illuminates the wondrous yet disquieting medical realm of organ transplantation by drawing on the voices of those most deeply involved: transplant recipients, clinical specialists, and the surviving kin of deceased organ donors. In this rich and deeply engaging ethnographic study, anthropologist Lesley Sharp explores how these parties think about death, loss, and mourning, especially in light of medical taboos surrounding donor anonymity. As Sharp argues, new forms of embodied intimacy arise in response, and the riveting insights gleaned from her interviews, observations, and descriptions of donor memorials and other transplant events expose how patients and donor families make sense of the transfer of body parts from the dead to the living. For instance, all must grapple with complex yet contradictory clinical assertions of death as easily detectable and absolute; nevertheless, transplants are regularly celebrated as forms of rebirth, and donors as living on in others' bodies. New forms of sociality arise, too: recipients and donors' relatives may defy sanctions against communication, and through personal encounters strangers are transformed into kin.
Sharp also considers current experimental research efforts to develop alternative sources for human parts, with prototypes ranging from genetically altered animals to sophisticated mechanical devices. These future trajectories generate intriguing responses among both scientists and transplant recipients as they consider how such alternatives might reshape established--yet unusual--forms of embodied intimacy.
Lesley A. Sharp is Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College. She is the author of The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar (UC Press) and The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity, and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town (UC Press).
