L A Sharp
Biographic Data
| ID | 28648 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L A Sharp |
| GIVEN NAMES | L A |
| FAMILY NAME | Sharp |
| SIGNATURE | SHARP L A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Barnard College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3262-1218 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 441 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1924 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Disrupting the “near human” in contemporary xenotransplantation
Engineering organs, hopes and hybridity: Considerations on the social potentialities of xenotransplantation
The development of replacing human organs with those from genetically modified pigs holds immense potential for alleviating the shortage of organs necessary for patients in need of transplants. This medical advancement is also accompanied by significant social changes, including the emergence of a bioeconomy, new modes of biotechnology governance, altered human-animal relations and increased public engagement. Some aspects, such as the impact on …
Primate nation: The (after)lives of iconic creatures in American space science
Care and the Cowboy Boot: Interspecies Responsibility and the Wobbly Boundaries of Lab Animal Personhood
Of what relevance is a cowboy boot to understandings of the moral underpinnings of lab animal care, value, and personhood? I trace the movement of chimpanzees from laboratories to sanctuaries, wherein associated forms of care in the latter expose efforts to foster emergent chimpanzee personhood. Staff of one sanctuary view chimps' former lives as constrained by standardized, impersonal forms of care: as lab subjects, they were confined to small q…
Death and Dying in Carceral America: The Prison Hospice as an Inverted Space of Exception
In America's prisons, long-term incarceration carries fears that one could die in prison alone and abandoned. Death by incarceration looms as inescapable for myriad inmates who are terminally ill or "graying" in prison. These realities inform this study of a prison-based hospice program staffed by male inmate volunteers in a mixed medium/maximum security facility. Of special concern are the experiences of the men who sit by the bedside of others …
Animal research unbound: The messiness of the moral and the ethnographer’s dilemma
Interspecies intimacy defines an inescapable reality of lab animal research. This essay is an effort to disentangle this reality's consequences-both in and outside the lab-as framed by the quandaries of ethnographic engagement. Encounters with lab staff and, in turn, with audiences unfamiliar with laboratory life, together provide crucial entry points for considering how the "messiness of the moral" might facilitate an "unbounded" approach to lab…
Abraham Rosman (1930-2020)
Paula G. Rubel (1933–2018)
Shelley McKellar, Artificial Hearts: The Allure and Ambivalence of a Controversial Medical Technology
Shelley McKellar’s engaging work Artificial Hearts offers a compelling and informative history of the high-stakes field of mechanical cardiac device design, with special focus on those that, when implanted, bear promises of temporarily or permanently replacing ailing human hearts. From the first page, one encounters a well-informed, trusted and non-partisan interloper determined to chronicle the complexities inherent in a highly experimental real…
Interspecies Engagement in Medical Anthropology
Human-animal interdependencies define longstanding concerns for anthropologists. Within this vast terrain, medical anthropologists claim rights to a significant portion, marked most notably, perhaps, by our sustained attention to nonhuman species as pathogens, vectors, and reservoirs of disease. Our discipline, nevertheless, has been slow to engage with contemporary theorizing about interspecies entanglements, a deficit this volume's collection s…
The Other Animal of Transplant's Future
As an anthropologist, I have long been interested in highly experimental science, with my work engaging the moral underpinnings of xenoscience and, more recently, lab animal research. The possibility of employing animals as human “matches” sparks enthusiastic responses among researchers who imagine various creatures as lucrative “donor species” or “source animals” whose organs might replace the failing parts of humans and render obsolete any futu…
Animal Ethos: The Morality of Human-Animal Encounters in Experimental Lab Science
What kinds of moral challenges arise from encounters between species in laboratory science? Animal Ethos draws on ethnographic engagement with academic labs in which experimental research involving nonhuman species provokes difficult questions involving life and death, scientific progress, and other competing quandaries. Whereas much has been written on core bioethical values that inform regulated behavior in labs, Lesley A. Sharp reveals the imp…
The Moral Lives of Laboratory Monkeys: Television and the Ethics of Care
Ethnographic burnout, spirited curiosity and the search for the uncanny in realms of human organ transfer
Anthropology and Moral Philosophy: A Symposium on Michael Banner's The Ethics of Everyday Life
What Moral Theology (and Moral Philosophy) Needs from Social Anthropology Michael Banner The Ethics of Suffering in Everyday Life Lesley A. Sharp Ethical Narrative and Moral Theory Richard Madsen Specifying the Relationship between Social Anthropology and Moral Theology John H. Evans The Ethics of Everyday Life: The Next Word J. Derrick Lemons Reading Michael Banner on Moral Theology and Social Anthropology Thomas J. Csordas Descriptions, Norms, …
Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt
Imagining transpecies kinship in xenotransplantation
Xenotransplantation, as a highly experimental realm of science, is plagued by serious moral concerns: driven in part by the imperative to alleviate human suffering in a medical realm plagued by a scarcity in human organs, xeno experts must nevertheless quell public concern over the use of animals as ‘donor’ species, and the potential threats xenografting poses to human body integrity. Embedded within the language of xeno science is an intriguing …
The Invisible Woman: The Bioaesthetics of Engineered Bodies
Biomechanical engineering is marked by highly experimental efforts to craft mechanical devices that might one day alleviate the scarcity of transplantable organs in the USA. A pronounced desire among bioengineers involves melding humans with machines, bearing the promise of perfecting the natural yet messy flaws of the 'natal' body. Not all bodies are considered equal within this field, however. Visual renderings of heart devices - as an unusual …
Monkey Business
Within contemporary realms of experimental medicine, xenotransplantation ranks as the quintessential example of attempts at interspecies science. Driven by widespread anxieties over national (and, increasingly, global) scarcities in transplantable human parts, xenotransplantation is driven by the moral imperative to alleviate human suffering by culling reusable parts from primate and, most recently, porcine species. Themes of longing and desire p…
Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in Twentieth-Century America (review)
Reviewed by: Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in Twentieth-Century America Lesley A. Sharp Susan E. Lederer. Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 224 pp. Ill. $35 (978-0-19-516150-2). In her latest work, Flesh and Blood, medical historian Susan E. Lederer offers detailed accounts of the transfer of body parts and fluids, part…
Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs by Kieran Healy
The Road to Clarity: Seventh-Day Adventism in Madagascar
The Road to Clarity: Seventh-Day Adventism in Madagascar. Eva Keller. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. 286 pp
Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self
Strange Harvest illuminates the wondrous yet disquieting medical realm of organ transplantation by drawing on the voices of those most deeply involved: transplant recipients, clinical specialists, and the surviving kin of deceased organ donors. In this rich and deeply engaging ethnographic study, anthropologist Lesley Sharp explores how these parties think about death, loss, and mourning, especially in light of medical taboos surrounding donor an…
The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar
Endangered Species: Health, Illness, and Death among Madagascar's People of the Forest
The Commodification of the Body and its Parts
The human body-and its parts-has long been a target for commodification within myriad cultural settings. A discussion of commodification requires that one consider, first, the significance of the body within anthropology and, second, what defines a body "part." After exploring these initial questions, this article outlines dominant theoretical approaches to commodification within anthropology, with Mauss and Marx figuring prominently. The discuss…
Organ Transplantation as a Transformative Experience: Anthropological Insights into the Restructuring of the Self
Transplantation represents in the popular mind the pinnacle of biomedical knowledge and skill. Its feasibility depends upon the management of conflicting cultural values surrounding death and dying, where diverse parties consider bodies and their parts to be personal property, sacred entities, or offerings to the common good. Specifically within the specialized transplant community, viable organs are scarce, socially valuable resources. The ideol…
Commodified Kin: Death, Mourning, and Competing Claims on the Bodies of Organ Donors in the United States
A pronounced disjunction characterizes symbolic constructions of the cadaveric donor body in the United States, where procurement professionals and surviving donor kin vie with one another in their desires to honor this unusual category of the dead. Of special concern is the medicalized commodification of donor bodies, a process that shapes both their social worth and emotional value. Among professionals, metaphorical thinking is key: death and b…
The Sacrificed GenerationYouth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar
Youth and identity politics figure prominently in this study of personal and collective memory in Madagascar. A deeply nuanced ethnography of historical consciousness, it challenges many cross-cultural investigations of youth, for its key actors are not adults but schoolchildren. This book refutes dominant assumptions that African children are the helpless victims of postcolonial crises, incapable of organized, sustained collective thought or act…
Recovering the Nation's Body: Cultural Memory, Medicine, and the Politics of Redemption
Recovering the Nation's Body: Cultural Memory, Medicine, and the Politics of Redemption. Linda A. Hogle. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. ix. 242 pp., figures, tables, appendix, notes, glossary, bibliography, index
The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town
This finely drawn portrait of a complex, polycultural urban community in Madagascar emphasizes the role of spirit medium healers, a group heretofore seen as having little power. These women, Leslie Sharp argues, are far from powerless among the peasants and migrant laborers who work the land in this plantation economy. In fact, Sharp's wide-ranging analysis shows that tromba, or spirit possession, is central to understanding the complex identitie…
Ancestors, Power and History in Madagascar
The peoples of Madagascar are renowned for the prominence they give to the dead. In this edited volume, regional specialists reassess the significance of ancestors for changing relations of power, emerging identities, and local historical consciousness. Case-studies include The Royal Bath of 1817 (Pier Larson), Succession in an Urbanized Sakalava Kingdom (Lesley Sharp), The Antankaraìa Ritual Cycle (Michael Lambek, Andrew Walsh), Nineteenth-Centu…
Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession
How might anthropologists understand cultural basis of knowledge? This is Michael Lambek's task in this detailed and often engrossing study from Mayotte, an island of Comoro archipelago in Indian Ocean, between East Africa and Madagascar. Based on careful field research spanning approximately 20 years, Lambek argues for an understanding of interrelatedness of three traditions, each with its own conception of knowledge: Islam, cosmology and spirit…
Exorcists, psychiatrists, and the problems of possession in northwest Madagascar
Playboy Princely Spirits of Madagascar: Possession as Youthful Commentary and Social Critique
Lesley A. Sharp, Playboy Princely Spirits of Madagascar: Possession as Youthful Commentary and Social Critique, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 2, Possession and Social Change in Eastern Africa (Apr., 1995), pp. 75-88
The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town
Death and Dying in Carceral America: The Prison Hospice as an Inverted Space of Exception
In America's prisons, long-term incarceration carries fears that one could die in prison alone and abandoned. Death by incarceration looms as inescapable for myriad inmates who are terminally ill or "graying" in prison. These realities inform this study of a prison-based hospice program staffed by male inmate volunteers in a mixed medium/maximum security facility. Of special concern are the experiences of the men who sit by the bedside of others …
Children and the Politics of Culture
Children and the Politics of Culture. Sharon Stephens, ed.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University press. 1995. 355 pp.references, apto pendix, contributors, index
Laboring for the Colony and Nation: The Historicized Political Consciousness of Youth in Madagascar
Throughout the colonial era in Francophone Africa, male youth were prime targets for exploitative labor practices, and Madagascar stands as an especially pertinent example, where young men and boys were regularly forced to serve the French empire as foot soldiers and corvée laborers. Their work efforts - and lives - were essential to the defense of France in wartime; further, it is they who built the complex infrastructure that simultaneously ser…
Wayward Pastoral Ghosts and Regional Xenophobia in a Northern Madagascar Town
In the plantation region of the Sambirano Valley in north-west Madagascar the spirits of wandering foreign dead haunt the region's forests. They are the displaced ghosts of migratory Antandroy, drawn here in search of employment. As pastoralists from the island's distant, arid south, Antandroy as an ethnic category are juxtaposed to self-perceptions voiced by indigenous Sakalava, whose kingdom coincides with this Valley. Tandroy difference is def…
Interspecies Engagement in Medical Anthropology
Human-animal interdependencies define longstanding concerns for anthropologists. Within this vast terrain, medical anthropologists claim rights to a significant portion, marked most notably, perhaps, by our sustained attention to nonhuman species as pathogens, vectors, and reservoirs of disease. Our discipline, nevertheless, has been slow to engage with contemporary theorizing about interspecies entanglements, a deficit this volume's collection s…
Youth, Land, and Liberty in Coastal Madagascar: A Children's Independence
Independence Day is by far the most important state holiday in Ambanja, a prosperous town in northwest Madagascar. Although clearly a celebration of national liberation, it is nevertheless fraught with ambiguity. Events climax in a morning parade, when legions of school youth march through town in military formation. This procession's historical antecedents are extraordinarily complex, where current stagings of independent state power rely heavil…
Royal Difficulties: A Question of Succession in an Urbanized Sakalava Kingdom
L'A. s'interesse a un edifice situe sur la plage d'Ankify dans le nord de Madagascar. Sur cet edifice, on peut lire l'inscription en francais: Palais royal. Il est devenu un des symboles de la dynastie locale Bemazava-Sakalava. Cet exemple montre que la recherche anthropologique doit reposer la question de la gestion d'un acquis etranger par les cultures contemporaines. Dans le cas du Palais royal, il est evident que le royaume Bemazava soumet a …
Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt
The Invisible Woman: The Bioaesthetics of Engineered Bodies
Biomechanical engineering is marked by highly experimental efforts to craft mechanical devices that might one day alleviate the scarcity of transplantable organs in the USA. A pronounced desire among bioengineers involves melding humans with machines, bearing the promise of perfecting the natural yet messy flaws of the 'natal' body. Not all bodies are considered equal within this field, however. Visual renderings of heart devices - as an unusual …
The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar
Bodies, boundaries, and territorial disputes: Investigating the Murky Realm of scientific authority
(2002). Bodies, boundaries, and territorial disputes: Investigating the Murky Realm of scientific authority. Medical Anthropology: Vol. 21, No. 3-4, pp. 369-379
Care and the Cowboy Boot: Interspecies Responsibility and the Wobbly Boundaries of Lab Animal Personhood
Of what relevance is a cowboy boot to understandings of the moral underpinnings of lab animal care, value, and personhood? I trace the movement of chimpanzees from laboratories to sanctuaries, wherein associated forms of care in the latter expose efforts to foster emergent chimpanzee personhood. Staff of one sanctuary view chimps' former lives as constrained by standardized, impersonal forms of care: as lab subjects, they were confined to small q…
Anthropology and Moral Philosophy: A Symposium on Michael Banner's The Ethics of Everyday Life
What Moral Theology (and Moral Philosophy) Needs from Social Anthropology Michael Banner The Ethics of Suffering in Everyday Life Lesley A. Sharp Ethical Narrative and Moral Theory Richard Madsen Specifying the Relationship between Social Anthropology and Moral Theology John H. Evans The Ethics of Everyday Life: The Next Word J. Derrick Lemons Reading Michael Banner on Moral Theology and Social Anthropology Thomas J. Csordas Descriptions, Norms, …
The Road to Clarity: Seventh-Day Adventism in Madagascar
The Road to Clarity: Seventh-Day Adventism in Madagascar. Eva Keller. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. 286 pp
A study of school marks
The following outline presents a brief resume of topics discussed: 1. Why the Study Was Made. 2. The Nature and Scope of the Study. 3. How the Data Were Secured. 4. How the Data Were Treated. 5. The Distribution of School Marks by Teachers and Subjects. 6. The Meaning of School Marks. 7. The Distribution of School Marks by Subjects. 8. The Distribution of School Marks by Years. 9. A Comparison of the Distribution of School Marks by Sex. 10. Summa…
The value of standards in grading examination papers
Two phases of the reliability of teachers' ability to grade examination papers are examined in this study: first, the reliability of teachers' estimates of the difficulty of examination questions compared with the actual difficulty as shown by the number of times each question is answered right, the number of times it is missed, and the number of times it is omitted by pupils taking the examination; second, the distribution of grades assigned by …
The use made of the demonstration school by the college teachers of the north Texas state teachers college
This study was undertaken with a threefold purpose: First, to discover the extent to which the college teachers were using the Demonstration School; second, to discover their interest in using the Demonstration School; and third, to discover, if possible, how the Demonstration School could be made to function so as to render the maximum service to the college teachers and their pupils. HOW THE STUDY WAS MADE
Possessed and dispossessed youth: Spirit possession of school children in Northwest Madagascar
Handmaidens of the Lord: Pentecostal Women Preachers and Traditional Religion
Elaine J. Lawless. Handmaidens of the Lord: Pentecostal Women Preachers and Traditional Religion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. ISBN 0812212657. Paper, $18.95. ISBN 0812281004. Hardcover, $41.95. Pp. xx+272
The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity, and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town
This finely drawn portrait of a complex, polycultural urban community in Madagascar emphasizes the role of spirit medium healers, a group heretofore seen as having little power. These women, Leslie Sharp argues, are far from powerless among the peasants and migrant laborers who work the land in this plantation economy. In fact, Sharp's wide-ranging analysis shows that tromba, or spirit possession, is central to understanding the complex identitie…
The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity, and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town
This finely drawn portrait of a complex, polycultural urban community in Madagascar emphasizes the role of spirit medium healers, a group heretofore seen as having little power, and whom, the book argues, are far from powerless among the peasants and migrant laborers who work the land in this plantation economy. In fact, the book's wide-ranging analysis shows that tromba, or spirit possession, is central to understanding the complex identities of…
Exorcists, psychiatrists, and the problems of possession in northwest Madagascar
Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession
How might anthropologists understand cultural basis of knowledge? This is Michael Lambek's task in this detailed and often engrossing study from Mayotte, an island of Comoro archipelago in Indian Ocean, between East Africa and Madagascar. Based on careful field research spanning approximately 20 years, Lambek argues for an understanding of interrelatedness of three traditions, each with its own conception of knowledge: Islam, cosmology and spirit…
The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town
This finely drawn portrait of a complex, polycultural urban community in Madagascar emphasizes the role of spirit medium healers, a group heretofore seen as having little power. These women, Leslie Sharp argues, are far from powerless among the peasants and migrant laborers who work the land in this plantation economy. In fact, Sharp's wide-ranging analysis shows that tromba, or spirit possession, is central to understanding the complex identitie…
Playboy Princely Spirits of Madagascar: Possession as Youthful Commentary and Social Critique
Lesley A. Sharp, Playboy Princely Spirits of Madagascar: Possession as Youthful Commentary and Social Critique, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 2, Possession and Social Change in Eastern Africa (Apr., 1995), pp. 75-88
Freedom by a Hair's Breadth: Tsimihety in Madagascar. Peter J. Wilson
Authors' Responses to Commentaries
One blood: The Jamaican body
Organ Transplantation as a Transformative Experience: Anthropological Insights into the Restructuring of the Self
Transplantation represents in the popular mind the pinnacle of biomedical knowledge and skill. Its feasibility depends upon the management of conflicting cultural values surrounding death and dying, where diverse parties consider bodies and their parts to be personal property, sacred entities, or offerings to the common good. Specifically within the specialized transplant community, viable organs are scarce, socially valuable resources. The ideol…
The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town
The Work Ideology of Malagasy Children: Schooling and Survival in Urban Madagascar
Royal Difficulties: A Question of Succession in an Urbanized Sakalava Kingdom
L'A. s'interesse a un edifice situe sur la plage d'Ankify dans le nord de Madagascar. Sur cet edifice, on peut lire l'inscription en francais: Palais royal. Il est devenu un des symboles de la dynastie locale Bemazava-Sakalava. Cet exemple montre que la recherche anthropologique doit reposer la question de la gestion d'un acquis etranger par les cultures contemporaines. Dans le cas du Palais royal, il est evident que le royaume Bemazava soumet a …
Children and the Politics of Culture
Children and the Politics of Culture. Sharon Stephens, ed.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University press. 1995. 355 pp.references, apto pendix, contributors, index
People of the Sea: Identity and Descent Among the Vezo of Madagascar
The Vezo, a fishing people of western Madagascar, are known as 'the people who struggle with the sea'. Dr Astuti explores their identity, showing that it is established through what people do rather than being determined by descent. Vezo identity is a 'way of doing' rather than a 'state of being', performative rather than ethnic. However, her innovative analysis of Vezo kinship also uncovers an opposite form of identity based on descent, which sh…
Two Studies of Spirit Possession in Niger
Spirit Possession and Personhood among the Kel Ewey Tuareg. Susan J. Rasmussen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 178 pp.Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa. Paul StoIIer. New York: Routledge, 1995. 226 pp
Keeping House in Lusaka
Keeping House in Lusaka. Karen Tranberg Hansen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 228 pp
Royal Difficulties: The Anxieties of Succession in an Urbanized Sakalava Kingdom
Ancestors, Power and History in Madagascar
The peoples of Madagascar are renowned for the prominence they give to the dead. In this edited volume, regional specialists reassess the significance of ancestors for changing relations of power, emerging identities, and local historical consciousness. Case-studies include The Royal Bath of 1817 (Pier Larson), Succession in an Urbanized Sakalava Kingdom (Lesley Sharp), The Antankaraìa Ritual Cycle (Michael Lambek, Andrew Walsh), Nineteenth-Centu…
Recovering the Nation's Body: Cultural Memory, Medicine, and the Politics of Redemption
Recovering the Nation's Body: Cultural Memory, Medicine, and the Politics of Redemption. Linda A. Hogle. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. ix. 242 pp., figures, tables, appendix, notes, glossary, bibliography, index
Sociology (44 works) · History (30 works) · Political science (23 works) · Law (21 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (19 works) · Anthropology (18 works) · History (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Philosophy (16 works)