ABSTRACT
In their Introduction to Conceiving the New World Order (1995), Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp describe the uneven spread and take-up of biotechnologies, such as the new reproductive technologies, both within and between global locales. Their seminal intervention remains an anthropological landmark. Ginsburg and Rapp alerted us to the presence of entrenched stratifications, which offer differing opportunities, conditions, and circumstances, that enable and disable, and include and exclude women from experiencing reproduction and the technological benefits brought about by globalization. They reflected on the structuring of reproduction across social and cultural boundaries, particularly at the intersections of the local and the global (Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995). Furthermore, they contended that this is in no way a unidirectional process. On the contrary ‘people everywhere actively use their local cultural logics and social relations to incorporate, revise, or resist the influence of seemingly distant political and economic forces’ (ibid.: 3). Local Cells, Global Science grapples with similar issues, albeit on a complex
scale of finely woven interplay between that which is often simplistically conceived as the local in relation to a description of the global. The rise of embryonic stem cell research in India, and the global economic, political, ethical and legal circuits that frame these scientific transformations, provide a rich illustration of how agents use their ‘cultural logics’, resist when such situated logics are discredited by competing cultural articulations, and ‘incorporate’ as well as ‘revise’ science, technology and discourses about ethics and morality in pursuit of health, healing and profit. The stratifications encountered en route are often embedded in a hierarchy of global locales, institutionalized ‘othering’ tropes within science, legal and philosophical registers, and the location of agents in diverse social, cultural and economic spheres. That these stratifications are being ‘scrambled’ in the new century, as a new geopolitical order takes shape, makes the intersections of the local and the global not only contested sites but also third spaces, in which one can witness the rapid transformation and enactment of new, sometimes unprecedented, stratifications.
