Lesley A. Sharp         Professor of Anthropology

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

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

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

As a medical anthropologist by training, 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 experimental efforts to develop replacement organs of non-human origin, ranging from those culled from genetically altered swine to mechanical prototypes and organs grown from cell cultures.

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 (Theories of Culture; Ethnographic Field Research in New York City). Graduate seminars include The Anthropology of Affliction and The Commodified Body.

Selection Publications

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

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

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

Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self
(California 2006)

Articles
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
Babes and Baboons
Commodified Kin
Denying Culture in the Transplant Arena

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