Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer

by Lesley Sharp

Overview

In the United States today, the human body defines a lucrative site of reusable parts, ranging from whole organs to minuscule and even microscopic tissues. Although the medical practices that enable the transfer of parts from one body to another most certainly relieve suffering and extend lives, they have also irrevocably altered perceptions of the cultural values assigned to the body.

Organ transfer is rich terrain to investigate—especially in the American context, where sophisticated technological interventions have significantly shaped understandings of health and well-being, suffering, and death. In Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies, Lesley Sharp probes the ideological assumptions underlying the transfer of body parts, the social significance of donors' deaths, and the medico-scientific desires surrounding complex forms of body repair. Sharp also considers the experimental realm, in which nonhuman species and artificial devices present further opportunities for recovery and for controversy.

A compelling scientific investigation and social critique, Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies explores the pervasive, and at times pernicious, practices shaping American biomedicine in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231138390
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/31/2008
Series:	Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lesley A. Sharp is professor of anthropology at Barnard College, and senior research scientist in sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Good Death
Managing and Memorializing the Dead2. Body Commodities
The Medical Value of the Human Body and its Parts3. Human, Monkey, Machine
The Brave New World of Human HybridityEpilogue
The Future of the Body TransformedNotes
References Cited
Index

What People are Saying About This

Renée C. Fox

These essayistic lectures grow out of Lesley Sharp's long, ethnographic immersion in the realm of organ transplantation, procurement, and donation, and her continuous search to understand the deep cultural, societal, and existential meaning of what she calls this 'wonderful and strange' phenomenon. She does not deny that organ transfer raises serious interpersonal, social, and moral questions, but with anthropological acumen and humanity, she conveys how out of acts that entail depersonalizing, disassembling, and 'commodifying' an individual's body, and transposing parts of it into the bodies of others, new forms of life, remembrance, intimacy, kinship, and 'medicalized communion' are created, and new clinical hopes, 'scientific longings,' and 'technological dreams' are forged.

— Renée C. Fox, Annenberg Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences, University of Pennsylvania

Renee C. Fox

These essayistic lectures grow out of Lesley Sharp's long, ethnographic immersion in the realm of organ transplantation, procurement, and donation, and her continuous search to understand the deep cultural, societal, and existential meaning of what she calls this 'wonderful and strange' phenomenon. She does not deny that organ transfer raises serious interpersonal, social, and moral questions, but with anthropological acumen and humanity, she conveys how out of acts that entail depersonalizing, disassembling, and 'commodifying' an individual's body, and transposing parts of it into the bodies of others, new forms of life, remembrance, intimacy, kinship, and 'medicalized communion' are created, and new clinical hopes, 'scientific longings,' and 'technological dreams' are forged.

Nancy N. Chen

Lesley Sharp deftly traces the social life of biomedical technologies, specifically organ transfer, and its consequences for extending life in the present. Though medicine is a secular technocratic profession, the intensity of cultural meanings and rituals linked to the body facilitate a 'medicalized communion' that reconstitutes personhood and redefines kinships based on body parts. In this trilogy of interwoven essays on the good death, commodified body parts, and animal-human-machine hybrid bodies, Sharp reveals how biotechnologies are accompanied by creative strategies of embodiment and expanded forms of biosociality.

— Nancy N. Chen, Scripps College

Editorial Reviews

Sharp makes a complex topic comprehensible.

Booklist - Donna Chavez

Sharp makes a complex topic comprehensible.

— Donna Chavez

Booklist