© Columbia University Press
Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer
Paper, 144 pages, 12 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-13839-0
$19.50
/ £11.50
October, 2006
Cloth, 144 pages, 12 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-13838-3
$25.50
/ £15.00
"Sharp makes a complex topic comprehensible." — Donna Chavez, Booklist
"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
"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, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz