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...Western culture. work has generated important insights into contemporary discourse about the social and cultural implications of reproductive technology. However, treating nature as a cultural domain exacerbates the tendency to divorce kinship from biology. An analysis of the stated motives of women who become gestational surrogates is presented here to support an argument that a focus on emotion, and its manipulation, can help anthropologists to better integrate human nature and culture in the study of kinship. (Surrogacy, kinship, nature, culture)
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Peletz (1995) dates the end of "essentialist thinking" in the study of kinship to Needham's (1971) Rethinking Kinship and Marriage. That volume effectively decentered the field well before postmodernism, that indefatigable enemy of essence, reared its head in anthropology. The old view, held since Morgan, that kinship is something specific built from a combination of discrete elements (terminologies and rules of descent, marriage, and residence) gave way to an emphasis on context, where kinship is seen to be embedded in specific constellations of gender, power, difference, contradiction, paradox, and ambivalence. Contemporary analyses of gay families and surrogate motherhood in Western culture bring these points home, as they demonstrate how destabilized the building blocks of kinship in our own societies have become.
Peletz (1995:366) approves dismantling the "building blocks" approach and kinship's anticipation of the postmodern critique, but criticizes an associated development, that anthropology has "turned its back" on biology. He sees this as especially unfortunate because new developments in reproductive technology make "'nature' and biology more relevant to our analytic thinking about kinship than they have been since Morgan." Surrogate motherhood provides particularly good opportunities for a reappraisal of the relationships between the "natural" and sociocultural aspects of reproduction and kinship.
The opportunity to revisit some unresolved issues arises because the split between gestational and genetic motherhood has opened a range of new reproductive options. Conception and pregnancy can be separated and turned into commercial transactions and professionally managed procedures. A woman can give birth to her own grandchild, for example, by carrying a pregnancy from her daughter's egg. Embryos can be frozen and a child brought into the world long after its genetic parents are dead. The existence of such choices makes once apparently secure connections between biology, folk biology, conception ideology, and kinship categories less stable than they were. Does culture bend to accommodate these changes or, to paraphrase Ragone (1996:363), is surrogacy placed inside tradition?
Overall, the anthropological literature about the new reproductive technologies takes a strongly culturalist view, one that illustrates Peletz's (1995) point about the antipathy toward biological models in recent kinship literature. Ragone (1998:2) links biological explanations with determinism, androcentrism, and ethnocentrism as factors behind the tunnel vision of previous anthropological accounts of reproduction. Ragone (1998:120) notes, "Reproduction is concerned with topics no less central than world view, cosmology and culture ... definitions of personhood; and the production of knowledge." Quoting Schneider, whose critique of the idea that kinship is anchored in procreation was as influential in undermining the building-blocks approach as Needham's, Ragone (1998:124) says, "It has become increasingly clear that 'biological' elements have primarily symbolic significance ... [whose] meaning is not biology at all."
Newer work, stimulated by Strathern's (1992a, 1992b) treatment of kinship as something that connects nature and culture, continues to elaborate these themes. Franklin and McKinnon (2001:16, 20) note that Strathern's view of kinship as "the site for producing what will count as the difference between nature and culture" challenges "the distinction between biological and social facts." Thompson (2001:197) very clearly and concisely summarizes the issues raised by this position.
It has become commonplace to talk of the implosion or collapse of nature and culture: to claim that all concepts of nature, including scientific ones, are always already shaped, marked, and interpenetrated with the imprimatur of culture and ... that all concepts of culture invoke legitimising natural grounds for their systems of classification. Critics of these postmodern sensibilities rightly distrust the looseness or voluntarism that this seems to imply.
Having said this, Thompson (2001:198) then emphasizes that her work at infertility clinics shows that when it comes to ordering the chaos that assisted reproduction brings to kinship categories, actors compose narratives that interweave the constraints of both nature and culture. But this focus on nature as an ingredient of narrative discourse is precisely what constitutes its culturalization. Social and biological facts are conflated, rather than united, in this body of literature.
The entry of Robin Fox (1993, 1997) into the literature on surrogacy seemed to provide an opening for the kind of debate about biology and kinship in the new reproductive technologies that Peletz (1995) envisioned. Fox, who has long championed a biosocial view of kinship (e.g., Fox 1967), devoted a chapter of his Reproduction and Succession (Fox 1993) to the famous case of Baby M., in which the surrogate refused to turn over the child she carried to the commissioning couple. They sued to enforce the contract. Fox filed an amicus curae brief with the court in the state of New Jersey. He argued that to uphold such an agreement would be unnatural, and that proceedings of this kind constituted part of a historical pattern of attack by states on kinship itself. His main point was that it is wrong to expect surrogate mothers to honor contracts to hand over children, because pregnant mammals bond to their fetuses well before parturition. Even in...
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