Lesley A. Sharp         Professor of Anthropology

Additional Affiliation: Senior Research Scientist, Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University

 Ph.D., 1990, Medical Anthropology, University of California/Berkeley (joint degree UC/San Francisco)

 Telephone: (212)-854-5428       Email: lsharp@barnard.edu

As a medical anthropologist, I am most concerned with critical analyses of the symbolics of the human body, where my research sites range from cosmopolitan medical centers within the United States to urban centers in sub-Saharan Africa. From 1986 until 1995, my work as an Africanist was based in a polycultural plantation community of northwest Madagascar, where initial research addressed spirit mediumship and the gendered nature of healing. This formed the basis for a book entitled The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity, and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town. I later returned to the same site in the mid-1990s to examine other forms of affliction, most notably the effects of the State's short-lived socialist project in shaping the historical and political consciousness of Malagasy school youth. This work culminated in a second book, The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar.

Beginning in 1991 (and extending to the present) I have also been engaged in research on organ transplantation, procurement, and donation in the United States. Key foci include medical ideologies, body commodification, and the transformative properties of organ transplants specifically in reference to the social construction of the self. My current research explores the nature of the scientific imagination specifically in reference to highly experimental efforts to develop organs of non-human origin, ranging from those culled from genetically altered simians and swine to mechanical prototypes (especially those that assist or replace the heart). This work has generated two book-length studies: Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self (awarded the 2008 New Millennium Book Prize by the Society for Medical Anthropology); and Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Real of Human Organ Transfer (the 2004 Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures, Columbia University).

The undergraduate courses I teach include those focusing on aspects of medical anthropology (The Body and Society; Madness and Civilization), on Africa (Societies and Cultures of Africa; Youth and Identity Politics in Africa), as well as theory and field methods in Anthropology (Anthropological Theory I; Ethnographic Field Research in New York City). Graduate seminars include The Anthropology of Affliction and The Commodified Body.

Selection Publications

Books
The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity, and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town
(California 1993)

The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar
(California 2002)

Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self
(California 2006, awarded the 2008 New Millennium Book Award, Society for Medical Anthropology)

Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Real of Human Organ Transfer
(Columbia 2007,the 2004 Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures at Columbia )

Articles
2009 "Bioengineered Bodies and the Moral Imagination," The Lancet (Art of Medicine column), September 19, 374:970-1.
2001 "Commodified Kin: Death, Mourning, and Competing Claims on the Bodies of Organ Donors in the United States," 103:112-133.
2000 "The Commodification of the Body and its Parts". Annual Review of Anthropology. (PDF)
1999 "A Medical Anthropologist's View on Posttransplant Compliance and the Underground Economy of Medical Survival" (Transplantation Proceedings. (PDF)
1995 "Organ Transplantation as Transformative Experience: Anthropological Insights into the Restructuring of the Self" (Medical Anthropology Quarterly.

PDFs
Bioengineered Bodies and the Moral Imagination
Babes and Baboons
Commodified Kin
Denying Culture in the Transplant Arena

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