Strange Harvest

by Sharp, Lesley A.

• ISBN13: 9780520247864
• ISBN10: 0520247868
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-10-20
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

Strange Harvestilluminates 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.

Author Biography

Lesley A. Sharp is Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: Strange Harvest	p. 1
The Ideological Underpinnings of Organ Transfer	p. 7
Studying Transplantation in American Contexts	p. 29
We are the Dead Men: Mind Over Matter	p. 42
A Most Peculiar Death	p. 47
Reconstructing Donor Histories	p. 74
Body Economies	p. 92
Memory Work: Public and Private Representations of Suffering, Loss, and Redemption	p. 101
Recipient Suffering and Renewal	p. 107
Honoring the Dead in Safe, Public Places	p. 123
The Private Lives of Donor Kin	p. 136
Public Encounters as Subversive Acts	p. 159
Bureaucratic Constraints on Social Desire	p. 161
The Ties That Bind	p. 181
Claiming the Donor Body	p. 190
Human Hybridity: Scientific Longing and the Dangers of Difference	p. 206
Dangerous Miracles	p. 207
Professional Desires to Cultivate Nature	p. 211
Denatured Bodies and Transformed Selves	p. 227
Nature's Body	p. 235
Epilogue	p. 242
Notes	p. 247
Glossary	p. 263
References	p. 269
Index	p. 299
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