Life and Death

Life and death – simple in appearance, these two words carry much more meaning than they seem to look like. It is a challenge to this day to find a universal definition of the two words. Depending on your culture, education, and beliefs, the meaning of life and death can vary in so many different ways that it would be impossible to encompass all of them into one general definition. Lesley Sharp’s ethnography Strange Harvest helps us understand how life and death can have different cultural meanings across various groups. Strange Harvest examines the complicated implications of life and death through the world of organ transfer, and its effect on the people involved.

Life to the average person may begin from the moment they breathe their first breath, and continues on until the moment they take their last, come death. But in the world of organ transfer, it cannot be so easily defined. There are many ongoing debates over the medical definitions of death versus the social definitions of death. In the US, brain death is legally sanctioned as true death in medical terms. Within the medical framework, it is understood that the mind and “self” is located at the brain, which is what defines someone as a person, gives an individual personality. In this sense, when a brain ceases to function, the “self” disappears and the body is nothing but an empty shell. Therefore, the label of death is applied even though an artificially ventilated donor-patient remains warm to the touch, appears to breathe, and has a heart that continues to beat within its own chest (Sharp 2006: 44).

However brain death criteria still lead to a lot of questions, such as the exact definition of brain death. How much, or what part of the brain should be damaged in ord...

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...gan donation. They offer the messages saying that donors can live on in others, granting new or “second” lives to transplant recipients who, in turn, frequently describe their own surgeries as “rebirths” (2006: 83). Through this definition, death begets life.

Just within the context of organ transfer, there are so many meanings of life and death across the different types of associated groups. Sharp succeeds in emphasizing how cultural, emotional, and medical factors play an important role in how people define life and death. While brain death criteria may still be unsettling in some aspects, we have to realize that the assertion that brain death is “true death” is a consequence of embracing organ transfer as an act of great social worth (2006: 99). Therefore, organ donation certainly provides unique ways to experience and perceive life and death in America.