Sharon Kaufman, Ph.D.

Sharon Kaufman

Email: Sharon.Kaufman@ucsf.edu
Telephone: (415) 476-3005

Dr. Sharon Kaufman is Professor of Medical Anthropology (in Residence) in the Institute for Health & Aging, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

She has several lines of inquiry:

identity and subjectivity and how they are produced, contested and negotiated, for example, among the very old, frail and demented, in the context of illness, within health care bureaucracy and the biomedical research enterprise, and for persons who are neither “dead” nor “alive” but are maintained by medical technologies.
the culture of medicine, including the evolution of goals, values, ethics in medical practice and research; the ways in which health care delivery systems and biotechnologies are changing understandings of “illness,” “the patient,” “life extension” and “life enhancement;” the relationship of clinical practice to clinical trials; the changing nature of medical responsibility and the doctor-patient relationship; and the discursive biomedical enterprise as one source of subjectification.
the ways in which cultural narratives and rhetoric -- about individualism, dignity and suffering for example -- can be used to think about the boundaries of the moral and the practical in medicine, and how they operate as “background” assumptions through which individual stories and societal discourses are lived, constructed, and told.
the anthropology of “life itself,” that is, the fact that all kinds of life forms (such as, the gene, the stem cell, the embryo, the fetus, the disabled, the comatose, the demented, the old) are culturally malleable and negotiable, the result of scientific manipulation, market pressures, commodification and political debate, and the ways in which medical, legal, religious and commercial forces are brought to bear on the meaning and value of those life forms.

Her current primary area of research (supported by NIA/NIH) centers on the kind of people we are becoming in an aging society in which medical technique plays a central and powerful role.

She is particularly interested in the ways in which medical techniques link ethics to intervention and consumption, and how the substance of the body and its ever-greater malleability become implicated in care, love, and the understanding of value.

Dr. Kaufman' teaches students in the fields of anthropology, sociology, gerontology, medicine, nursing, public health and social welfare. She has served on the UCSF Committee for Human Research and the Chancellor's Committee to investigate the Second World War radiation experiments conducted on patients at UCSF Hospital.

She is the author of numerous articles and three books:

The Ageless Self: Sources of Meaning in Late Life (1986);
The Healer's Tale: Transforming Medicine and Culture (1993); and
. . . And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life (2005).

Dr. Kaufman is currently investigating the ways in which life-extending medical procedures in late life shape knowledge and practices surrounding normal aging, lifespan, family and obligation.

Publications

Books

2005 Kaufman, S. . . . And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life. NY: Scribner, 2005.

1993 Kaufman, S. The Healer's Tale: Transforming Medicine and Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1994: U Wisconsin Paperback.

1986 Kaufman, S. The Ageless Self: Sources of Meaning in Late Life. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1987: Trade paperback edition, New American Library. 1988: Japanese edition. 1994: U Wisconsin Paperback.

Selected Articles

2006 Kaufman, S., J. Shim and A. Russ. Old age, life extension and the character of medical choice. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences: 61B: S175-S184.

2006 Kaufman, S. Aged Bodies and Kinship Matters: The Ethical Field of Kidney Transplant. American Ethnologist: 33:1:81-99.

2006 Kaufman, S. Dementia-near-Death and “Life Itself.” In Thinking about Dementia: Culture, Loss and the Anthropology of Senility. Eds. L.Cohen and A. Leibing. Rutgers U. Press, pp.23-42.

2005 Kaufman, S. and L. Morgan. The Anthropology of the Beginnings and Ends of Life. Annual Reviews in Anthropology. Vol. 34.

2005 Russ, A. and S. Kaufman. Family Perceptions of Prognosis, Silence and the Suddenness of Death. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 29(1) 103-123.

2004 Kaufman, S., J. Shim & A. Russ. Revisiting the Biomedicalization of Aging: Clinical Trends and Ethical Challenges. The Gerontologist, 44(6).

2003 Kaufman, S. Hidden Places, Uncommon Persons. Social Science & Medicine, 56:2249-2261.

2003 Tschann, J., Kaufman, S., Micco, G. Family Involvement in End-of-Life Hospital Care. J.American Geriatrics Society 51:835-840.

2003 Kaufman, S. Dying and Death. In Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology. Eds. C. Ember and M. Ember. Boston: Kluwer/Plenum, pp. 244-252.

2002 Kaufman, S. Ethnography of the Particular: The Individual Case and the Culture of Death in America. In Qualitative Gerontology: A Contemporary Perspective, eds. G. Rowles and N. Schoenberg, NY: Springer, pp. 68-92.

2002 Kaufman, S. Death and Dying. In Encyclopedia of Aging. Eds. D.J. Ekerdt et al. NY: Macmillan, pp.314-318.

2002 Kaufman, S. A Commentary: Hospital Experience and Meaning at the End of Life. The Gerontologist 42, special issues III:34-39.

2001 Kaufman, S. Clinical Narratives and Ethical Dilemmas in Geriatrics. In Bioethics in Social Context, ed. Barry Hoffmaster, Temple University Press, pp. 12-38.

2000 Kaufman, S. Senescence, Decline, and the Quest for a Good Death: Contemporary Dilemmas and Historical Antecedents. Journal of Aging Studies, 14:1-23.

2000 Kaufman, S. In the Shadow of “Death with Dignity:” Medicine and Cultural Quandaries of the Vegetative State. American Anthropologist, 102:69-83.

1999 Kaufman, S. Narrative, Death, and the Uses of Anthropology. In Handbook of the Humanities and Aging, 2nd Edition, eds. T.R. Cole, R. Kastenbaum, and R.E. Ray, NY: Springer, pp. 342-64.

1998 Kaufman, S. Intensive Care, Old Age, and the Problem of Death in America. The Gerontologist, 38:715-725.

1997 Kaufman, S. Construction and Practice of Medical Responsibility: Dilemmas and Narratives from Geriatrics. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 21:1-26.

1997 Kaufman, S. The World War II Plutonium Experiments: Contested Stories and Their Lessons for Medical Research and Information.

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