Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies and the Transformed Self.

• Author: Miller, Bradley T.
• Position: Book review

REVIEWING STRANGE HARVEST: ORGAN TRANSPLANTS, DENATURED BODIES, AND THE TRANSFORMED SELF. By Lesley A. Sharp. Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 307. $24.95.

As its title may suggest, Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self (1) is not the type of book with which one is likely to curl up at the beach this summer. It is a serious work of medical anthropology on the modern practice of organ transplantation in the United States. Written by Lesley A. Sharp, professor of anthropology at Barnard College and senior research scientist in sociomedical sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, Strange Harvest documents the experiences of--and probes anxieties particular tom organ transplant recipients, their deceased donors' surviving kin, and clinical specialists in the field. As an anthropologist, Professor Sharp is descriptive rather than prescriptive in her approach to this subject, but her observations and insights provide a rich body of knowledge that will be useful to current and future generations of organ transplantation physicians and policymakers.

Strange Harvest represents the culmination of over a decade's worth of ethnographic research conducted by Professor Sharp. Her findings, culled from participant observation, one-on-one and group interviews, survey work, and archival research, thus tilt more towards the qualitative than the quantitative. (2) Professor Sharp provides only a minimum of technical background to the science of transplant medicine. She instead sets her sights on the role of this practice in the broader context of American culture. Following its lengthy yet informative introduction, Strange Harvest is "composed of four essays, each of which focuses on an unusual, and thus remarkable, set of social relationships between donor kin and organ recipients that arise specifically in response to the presence (or absence) of the cadaveric organ donor." (3) As distinguished from a living organ donor, a cadaveric organ donor is one whose act of donation follows a declaration of brain death (also known as brain stem failure) and withdrawal of life support. (4)

That essentially one person must die for another to live in just one of the many tensions inherent in organ transplantation that unsettle relations between donor kin and transplant recipients. (5) In spite of such underlying tensions, Professor Sharp theorizes a form of fictive kinship...