ABSTRACT
The anthropological imagination has variously conceptualised the constructed nature of the biological, organic, natural and their shifting meanings. Alongside biosociality (Rabinow, 1992) conceptual incisions like the hybrids (Latour, 1993), juxtapositions (Strathern, 1992) and cyborgs (Haraway, 1990, 1991) have similarly problematised the post/late modern bioscapes. That is, a terrain of analysis examining the fundamental rupture, implosion of the social and that which was conceptualised as the domain of the natural in the post-Enlightened Euro-America. These insights have on the one hand enriched the social sciences conceptually and methodologically but on the other privileged the existence of one among many other possible cultural biographies of human biology. The very act of demolishing the hegemonic formulations of nature/culture oppositions in the Euro-American worldview has unwittingly led to the ‘anthropologisation’ of an equally dominant model of the biological and the social that continually bleed into each other. When globalised such conceptual tropes present hitherto unexamined complexities.1 For example, the ‘biological’ encountered in Indian in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and stem cell laboratories is often an amalgam of multiple ‘indigenous’ notions of the body and bio-scientifi c models of human biology (invoked by clinicians and scientists trained in ‘Western and Indian’ academies). This is in distinction to a vulgar nature/culture split or a more nuanced nature/ culture implosion. In other words, while nature is being produced and remade as culture in the ‘local moral worlds’ of anthropologists, such conceptualisations have little purchase in the globally dispersed lives of scientists and ‘patients’ whose bodies become points of technological application. I have observed in various IVF and stem cell research laboratories, for instance, how ‘patients’ and clinicians/scientists alike tend not to view critically the implosions of nature and culture. Instead they continually appropriate the supposed difference into familiar categories (such as kinship and relatedness). Thus for the anthropologist this is something new in the making, i.e. kinship, family, parenthood is itself being remade by fracturing older conceptualisations.2 In contrast, in the everyday lived experience of the ‘Indian infertile patients’ this is yet another instance of improvisation in their efforts to re-establish the normative and the
ideologically compliant. The secrecy surrounding donor gamete conception in Indian IVF has led me to conclude that ‘kinship authorises just as it authors the process of conception’ (Bharadwaj, 2003). That is, by subsuming the process of donor assisted conception in silence, individuals and couples are able to craft normatively unproblematic kinship. Assisted conception can create separate and new categories such as social, genetic, gestational or biological parents and kin (Strathern, 1992: 20). In the Indian context, however, it is not seen as instantiating the ‘new’ but rather facilitating and enabling the ‘familiar’ i.e. socially visible parenthood where biological is misrecognised in favour of social relations (Bharadwaj, 2003).
