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Lesley A. Sharp, associate professor of anthropology at Barnard College, will talk about “The Binding Nature of Organ Donation: Transforming Strangers into Intimates in the Transplant Arena” 4:10 p.m. today in Oechsle Hall room 223.
Author of Within the Possessed and the Dispossessed as well as The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar, Sharp will focus on the social consequences of the way that transplantation establishes intimate — and unexpected — connections between strangers.
Free and open to the campus community, the lecture is sponsored by the health care and society program and the department of anthropology and sociology.
“I’d like to focus on various taboos that are pervasive in the world of transplantation,” says Sharp. “Among the most significant is the belief that transplant recipients and donor family members should remain anonymous to one another. Over the years I have encountered a growing desire among these parties to correspond with one another and, in many instances, to meet one another, face-to-face. During my talk I will focus on this phenomenon.I hope that it will enable us to talk a bit about bureaucratic versus private or personal understandings of death, and to explore, too, how each of these parties think of deceased donors.As we’ll see, for some, the donor lives on in others; in other contexts, it is the donor who provides the bridge for creative ways to re-imagine the meaning of family in a world where body parts are, quite literally, scattered about the nation.”
For more than a decade, Sharp has been exploring some of the social complexities arising from the practice of organ transplantation in the United States. Her research is interdisciplinary, analyzing technology and biomedicine from a sociocultural perspective. She believes that organ donation raises crucial problems relating to the limits of the body, definitions of the self and personhood, the distinction between gifts and commodities, and ideas about kinship and social connection. In particular, Sharp has used ethnographic techniques of research to analyze the specific ways that the experience of organ recipients and donor kin differ from transplant professionals.
“Much of my work as an anthropologist concerns questions surrounding the symbolics of the body — that is, its social and, at times, political relevance in a range of cultural contexts,” says Sharp, noting that her earliest work in Madagascar, for example, explored the political significance of spirit mediumship in a booming migrant town.
“Here, female spirit mediums may wield significant power (as social leaders, as healers, and as political advisers to royalty) by virtue of their ability to ‘channel’ (as we would say in our own culture) the spirits of deceased rulers. In essence, then, their power is activated through the displacement of their own selves or spirits so that their bodies may then be inhabited temporarily by spirits of the dead. These spirits express their desires and opinions openly, speaking through the medium as they do so.
”At first glance this project in Madagascar may seem a bit far-fetched when considered in reference to my work on organ transplantation.In fact, though, I’ve found that I frequently revisit the Madagascar material as a way to make sense of what is happening in this highly technocratic realm of biomedicine in the U.S.”
Sharp’s work on organ transplantation began in 1991, focusing almost exclusively in the first few years with the experiences of patients who had received organ transplants from deceased donors. She found that transplant patients’ experiences bore an uncanny resemblance to that of spirit mediums because such patients often think of themselves as harboring at least a part of another person within their own bodies.Some go so far as to give their organs a name; others think of their personalities as being altered by the presence of a part of an anonymous organ donor.A man, therefore, may speak of being gentler or more nurturing now that he has the heart of a woman inside his chest.
When Sharp moved to New York City in 1994, she decided to look at other arenas that received relatively little attention in the research literature.
“Keep in mind that transplantation itself is a glorified realm of medical practice — it is, after all, astounding that we can take parts from dead people, put them in living human beings, and then prolong the lives of the latter,” she notes.“As a result, transplantation is often described as truly ‘miraculous.’I had begun to wonder, however, about the realm of organ procurement. Who are the people engaged in convincing people to say yes to donation, and how do they think about their work, and about donors, and most of all, about death, as they labor at the bedsides of patients declared brain dead? No one seemed to want to talk about this or study this aspect of transplantation, and thus it defined the focus of my own activities as an anthropologist for two full years.”
By 1998, Sharp had identified members of a third party crucial to the success of transplantation, but who appeared to be silenced, especially in public arenas: the surviving kin of organ donors.Very little had been written on their experiences, and Sharp was told repeatedly by professionals of all stripes that they should be left alone because they had already suffered enough.
“After talking to a few donor family advocates, however, I learned that many family members actually wanted very much to be heard, if for no other reason than to be able to talk about their losses,” she says. “And, thus, I shifted my attention to their experiences.”
Sharp earned a Ph.D. in medical anthropology in 1990 from University of California at Berkeley through a joint degree program with University of California at San Francisco.