Abstracts

Abstracts

Stefan Beck (European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin)
Transnational Lab-Benches: Transforming Experience

Drawing on three examples (a Turkish patient support group, a Cyprus-based international patient organization, and a collaboration between a Turkish and a US-American hospital characterized by knowledge franchising) the paper suggests that in these practices new bio-political spaces are created that tend to undermine the classical sovereignty modern states claim over a territory and a population: body politic is transformed into body cosmo-politic.


Aditya Bharadwaj (School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh)
Diffracting Reproduction: Infertility Encounters, Stratified Reproduction, Surrogacy and New Reproductive Technologies in India

The notion of Stratified Reproduction has significantly shaped anthropological engagements with reproduction and how it is conceptualised, theorised and politicized. This conceptual move among other things has brought into focus reproductive lives and futures of countless women around the globe. Ethnographic engagement with reproductive disruptions in India on the other hand suggests that stratifications imposed by patriarchal pro-natalist structures and strictures can often collapse stratified reproductive disadvantages imposed by gender, class and diffract both the reproductive lives of women and our ability as anthropologists to narrate these lives into multiple domains. Following Donna Haraway the paper argues how processes that stratify reproduction can be better theorised and understood when viewed through the diffracting lens. In so doing the paper shows ways in which anthropological thinking might confront, explain and politicize reproduction by embodying a critical consciousness committed to understanding 'difference' and heterogeneity underscoring reproductive destinies of women across cultures. The paper illustrates this by drawing on ethnographic excursions into the lives and struggles of infertile and surrogate women in India and shows how pro-natalist imperatives create diffraction patterns that push the boundaries of what is to count as stratified reproduction.


Sven Bergmann (Dept. of European Ethnology, Humboldt-University Berlin)
The Spatial fix of European Reproduction - Between Forms of Regulation and Practices of Circumvention

 "Fertility Tourism" is the journalistic eye-catcher focussing the phenomena of patient mobility in search of a reproductive treatment in another country by circumventing national laws, access restrictions or waiting lists. But it is not only about the transnational routes of travelling patients or air-shipped sperm samples. Also the clinical spaces could be described as a part of these processes relating to Europe's stratified landscape of reproductive technologies. My comparative and multi-sited-ethnography on IVF clinics in Europe as places where medicine, bio-capital, bodies and bodily substances, gamete donors and recipients intersect tries to follow their diffracted trajectories.
These do have an impact on so different domains as medical knowledge and practice, gender, heteronormativity, kinship, law, ethics... My speech will be based upon two ethnographic field case studies in a Czech and a Spanish IVF clinic (both operating on a national and an international level). How do clinics attract patients from abroad or become selected by them? What sort of ramifications does this have on clinical routines which are primarily regulated by national laws but also observed through networks and internet forums by patient-consumers? Drawing on my ongoing research I will discuss whether the emerging up-and-coming conceptual tools in current anthropological and STS writing are useful for an analysis of actual bio-medical/political settings in relation to the notion of trans-nationality.


Willemijn de Jong (Dept. of Ethnology, Zurich University)
The bad "child as a project". Contested Knowledge Practices about IVF in Switzerland

Legal and other institutional possibilities of making use of IVF in Switzerland are quite restricted compared to the UK and several other European countries. In my paper I would like to show that local knowledge practices on IVF in the urban context of German speaking Switzerland often imply the negatively valued folk concept of 'the child as a project'. Through the ongoing exchange of ideas on human reproduction in a transnationalized knowledge space, this hegemonial notion of 'the child as a project' as morally objectionable is contested by other voices. I will trace controversial knowledge practices about IVF, based on data from observations and interviews. As a first step, public statements of experts in the biomedical field of IVF (especially those connected with one of the Swiss state-funded university clinics) will be analyzed. As a second step, I will investigate how these current public meanings on IVF and 'the child as a project' are reflected in individual knowledge practices of persons with and without direct IVF experience. Finally, I will try to make some preliminary theoretical statements on IVF biosociality, particularly gendered heterosexual parent-child-relationships, and cultural informed knowledge of IVF in the German speaking part of Switzerland.


Sarah Franklin (Bios-Centre, London School of Economics)
5 Million Miracle Babies Later: The Cultural Legacy of IVF

The 30th birthday of Louise Brown provides an important occasion to revisit the cultural legacy of IVF - a technique that has gone from being novel, threatening and revolutionary to being normal, unremarkable and ubiquitous in a relatively short period of time. Practised worldwide, and allegedly responsible for as much as 3% of the birthrate in some countries, IVF has proven to be a popular and successful technique, resulting in the births of more than 5 million children. But how do we assess the cultural legacy of IVF in terms of how we model the relationship between technological innovation and social change? While the stigma of reproduction 'by design' more commonly attaches to PGD, it is arguably IVF that has done more to change ideas about kinship, reproduction and genealogy than any other form of
assisted conception. In a nutshell, 'the facts of life' have become redesignable. The somewhat unexpected legacy of IVF, in the form of the biological reserve of stored human embryos now available for stem cell research, is but one measure of the as-yet ill-defined question of the true extent to which IVF has altered not only 'who we think we are' but 'who we think we might become' in the future.


Zeynep Gürtin-Broadbent (Centre for Family Studies, University of Cambridge)
"Modern Technologies": Infertility, IVF, and the Donor Sperm Taboo in Turkey

In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research, including extended observations in a fertility clinic and 50 formal interviews with IVF patients, to attempt a description and analysis of contemporary Turkish attitudes towards assisted reproduction.
I argue that IVF is currently seen as the normal, and normative, response to infertility in Turkey, and unpack some of the discourses that have contributed to its acceptance and growth in this particular cultural context. Furthermore, I argue that the cultural taboo against donor sperm, and the corollary ban on the use of donor gametes in ARTs, has played an interesting role in this normalization, proving crucial to 'localizing' a global technology.  
The arguments of this paper are informed by Goffman's (1963) exploration of stigma; the explanatory insights of Carol Delaney's (1991) 'seed and soil' procreation metaphors in Turkey; and the broader 'honor and shame' (Peristiany, 1965; Gilmore, 1987) values ascribed to Mediterranean cultures. However, led by data, I reject some of these (dated) claims, and update others, in order to explain complex contemporary attitudes and the status of this 'modern technology' in Turkey.    


Bernhard Hadolt (Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna) &
Viola Hörbst (Ethnology and African Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich)
ART-Practices in Comparative Perspective: Case Studies from Austria and Mali

In order to describe and analyze how local practices around various assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and its different appropriations emerge, we use a comparative perspective drawing on case studies from Austria and Mali. The empirical material about these case studies stems from ethnographic fieldwork which Hadolt conducted in Austria between 2000 and 2002 and Hörbst is carrying out in Mali since 2004. We first lay out ethnographic descriptions concerning each appropriation context by drawing on cases of involuntarily childless women and men who use ART in Austria and Mali to get children. We then compare our case material along the dimensions of the problem configurations and the scope of actions geared towards a solution, by which people deal with their predicaments. We show how both the problem configurations and the scopes of actions are profoundly shaped by particular value-ideas, national legal and political factors, as well as economic and organisational aspects which transcend national borders. We argue that the practical availability of technological ART-applications is key for the extent and form of transnational spaces of clinical ART-practices and ask how practical availabilities are produced and connected to (transnationaly) distributed forms of financing and of the organisational and medico-technical accomplishment of ART applications.


Marcia Inhorn (Middle Eastern & North African Studies, University of Michigan)
"Assisted" Motherhood in Global Dubai: Reproductive Tourists and their Nannies

In the contemporary Middle East, more and more elite women achieve normative motherhood through various forms of "assistance."  This paper examines two such forms of "assisted motherhood"-namely, technological assistance via in vitro fertilization (IVF) and its variants, and social assistance via the employment of maids and nannies, who often relieve elite women of their motherhood responsibilities.  The interconnection between these two forms of assisted motherhood will be examined within the context of Dubai, the glimmering "city of gold" on the Arabian peninsula and the current site of intense globalization and global "flows" of people.  Among the people pouring into this cosmopolitan emirate are "reproductive tourists," who travel from other parts of the Middle East, Africa, and Europe to access assisted reproductive technologies.  Many of these global elites hope to achieve motherhood of a test-tube baby, which they will then turn over to the care of non-elite nannies, who are imported from poorer countries in Africa, South, and Southeast Asia. This contemporary configuration of Middle Eastern "assisted" motherhood highlights numerous inequalities and oppressive intersections based on nation, class, gender, race, and religion. The disturbing realities of assisted motherhood will be described, based on intensive fieldwork carried out in the United Arab Emirates during 2007.


Maren Klotz (European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin)
Kinship Knowledge'Management' during Assisted Conception: Reflections on Potential 'Crosstalk' between Regulation and Local Familial Practices in Germany and the UK

In my talk I want to pose the hypothesis that biological kinship data has become a topical regulatory problem, for instance in cases where the state monopoly on certain kinship information is – potentially - being eroded through various, often internet-based, research activities of local actors. The regulatory handling of kinship data is also currently being "Europeanised" through the implementation of the EU Tissue Directive. I shall present some first empirical "spotlights" on how these regulatory issues resonate in local familial practices surrounding kinship "information-management" and local practices in German fertility centres. This shall lead me to further ask some more theoretical questions regarding the potentially reflexive relationship between the regulatory handling of kinship data and the local practices of dealing with kinship information in families who have used assisted conception. The talk is based on aspects of my early-stage PHD project, in which I research the tensions between management practices surrounding kinship information on the official bureaucratic level and in affected families who have used donated gametes or adopted in Germany and the UK.


Eva-Maria Knoll (Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna)
Reproducing Hungarians - Reflections on Fuzzy Boundaries in Reproductive Tourism

A new rise of cost oriented fertility tourism to Eastern countries was predicted in the course of EU enlargement in 2004. Hungary, with its already well established reputation as a medical tourism destination, raised attention as a potential trading place for egg cells. By tracing the shadowy existence of transnational flows of patients and of egg donation in Hungary I shall discuss the fuzzy boundaries of IVF as a global form. Boundaries of national belonging will be discussed and the somehow elastic legal frame regarding altruistic acts of giving/gifting versus commodifying ova on the one hand and regarding known versus unknown donors on the other.


Marit Melhuus (Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo)
Works of the Imagination: Reproductive Technologies, Kinship and the Law

This paper focuses on the way reproductive technologies have been received, incorporated and enabled in Norwegian society. I argue that imagination has been a central dimension in these enabling processes - and that this has been provoked by the potentialities that reproductive technologies entail. I work from two different yet interconnected sites: a legislative process and the involuntary childless. What brings these sites together is their differing visions of kinship and relatedness. The Norwegian case demonstrates that the very imaginations that biotechnology and reproductive technologies have kindled, have also prompted legislators to pass a restrictive law. Yet the very restrictions that are intended to immobilise certain procreative practices, move people to act otherwise. By evoking the imagination as both discursive field and social practice, the transnational dimensions of a specific procreative universe - as well as the concomitant localising processes - become apparent.  This tension (between a global field of possibility and a local appropriation of biotechnologies) is variously articulated and in itself relevant for a better understanding of the meanings of reproductive technologies in contemporary Norway.


Michal Nahman (Sociology and Criminology, University of Western England, Bristol)
"Embryos are Our Babies": Condensing the Body in Israely Ova Donation

This paper is based on a nine-month ethnographic study of egg donation practices in Israel and Romania. It takes as its starting point an image from the wall of a private IVF clinic near Tel Aviv, where ova were being imported from Romania. This image, a hand-drawn, militarized baby with the words 'embryos are our babies' adjacent to it, is a 'low-tech' representation of a 'high-tech' practice. Using ethnographic description of the clinic's practices and self-representation, I argue that this representation is one way in which the clinic promotes hope for the procurement of ova and embryos rather than for a baby. The shift in this narrative about scientific practice (as evidenced in the image of the baby described above) away from the 'high-tech' erases the labour and global politics inherent in the procurement of ova and positions some ova recipients as more eligible for this hope technology.
Drawing on the work of feminist anthropologists such as Sarah Franklin, Gaylene Becker, Marcia Inhorn and Charis Thompson regarding the 'hope' and 'promise' of IVF, the paper documents ways in which the daily practices of this clinic also condense the idea of a baby into embryos. This condensing, in imagery and practice, shifts attention away from the effectiveness of scientific technique toward intended effectiveness. However it also shifts attention away from technique toward body parts. In terms of its local significance, this example indicates how the privatization of Israeli medicine facilitates a global assemblage of nations, bodies and science. The paper thus builds on anthropological perspectives about reproductive technologies by documenting one example of how the hope in the global technology of IVF moves away from technique toward body parts.


Elizabeth Roberts (Inst. for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan)
Institutions that Matter: IVF, Abortion and Reproductive Governance in Ecuador

In this paper on IVF and abortion in Ecuador I track complex forms of reproductive governance where official state policies are constantly flouted but still produce intimate and corporally durable effects on citizens.  Ecuadorian state institutions, (the legislature, judiciary, the ministry of health) are intensely engaged in life politics exemplified by their positions regarding abortion and IVF.   On demand abortion is illegal, and recent legislation has made some IVF practices technically illegal.  Despite these policies, clandestine abortion is ubiquitous and relatively easy to attain in Ecuador, and the IVF industry continues to flourish without oversight.  Nevertheless, state health care policy has contributed to the massive expansion of privatized medicine in Ecuador.  Even people with relatively few economic resources strategize on how to pay out of pocket for private health care in order to avoid state funded medicine.  IVF practitioners make it easier for poorer patients to participate in IVF by discounting their services or arranging installments plans. The lack of resources of many Ecuadorian patients in IVF clinics becomes evident in ways beyond their inability to pay in full.  Many of the poorer women who come to IVF clinics were effectively sterilized through the side effects of unsafe abortion.   Abortion's illegality, then,  become a form of corporeal punishment that some women attempt to overcome through expensive, private and unlawful forms of assisted reproduction.


Bob Simpson (Dept. of Anthropology, Durham University)
Transnationality and Locality in the Regulation of Reproductive Technologies: Holding the "Helping Hand" in Contemporary Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is a small nation state that lies, not so much at the techno-hub, as the techno-rim, of contemporary developments in reproductive medicine.  It is also currently known for a long and vicious internal conflict in which elements of the Tamil community are struggling against the Government of Sri Lanka to establish a separate state in the North of the Island.  In this paper I present a brief overview of the development of IVF treatment against a backdrop of 'scientific lag' on the one hand and national, civil strife on the other.   However, this account is not of the development of IVF practice per se but more an exploration of how the motivation to regulate has played out against this backdrop: where does regulation come from, who does it and why?  Central here is an understanding of 1) local constructions of risk 2) the nature of international collaborations and 3) the quest for 'culturally appropriate' regulation.  The conclusion drawn from a consideration of these particular aspects of reproductive medicine as global assemblage is that it is not merely the demonstration of technological achievement that serves as a badge of modernity and development in this setting but, increasingly, the bureaucratic rituals which demonstrate competent ethical governance in relation to these activities.  Patient well-being is often cited as being fundamental to these endeavours.  However, beyond this rhetoric can be glimpsed the operation of a deeper bio-political rhetoric in which practices are 'held' within ethical frameworks that are improvised and eclectic.  The operation of these frameworks serves not only as a discriminator when it comes to trans-national standards but, crucially, operate to establish hierarchy and distinction internally.