Unmaking of kinship. The modern technology contribute

Unmaking of kinship. The modern technology contribute PDF

Author: Johannes Lenhard

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2013-07-23

Total Pages: 9

ISBN-13: 3656464707

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Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Pedagogy - Theory of Science, Anthropology, grade: 2:1, University of Cambridge, language: English, abstract: The two Boleyn girls struggled to keep up with King Henry VIII’s demands in the fifteenth Century. Mary having been the King’s mistress for assumingly two years, her sister Anne takes over to enchant the Henry and become Queen. Her fertility was, however, not exactly appropriate in the eyes of the King – no son was ever to be born from her womb. Henry had to find ways to get rid of her and her unbearable ‘inability’. So at least runs the story that Justin Chadwick tells about the ‘two Boleyn girls’. In their case, new reproductive technologies and genetic prediction would have ‘made’ kinship indeed. Would it only have been possible to help a little bit with the pregnancy, would it have been possible to predict (and change) the gender of the heir, the Boleyn family could have had a glorious future. NRTs had ‘made kinship’, had sustained it and potentially given Anne the chance to live on. Strathern (2002:1) describes this synthesising character, the ‘making of kinship’ on the first page of ‘Reproducing the Future’; she proposes a “contrast between traditional biology that could only get a handle on what life is through analysis – taking things apart to observe the composition of characteristics – and the possibilities afforded by computer simulation. Here one can synthesise various characteristics to observe the effect of combining them”. Traditional biology as a discipline can only analyse, take apart, while new technologies help to synthesis and produce.

Transnational Commercial Surrogacy and the (Un)Making of Kin in India

Transnational Commercial Surrogacy and the (Un)Making of Kin in India PDF

Author: Anindita Majumdar

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-06-29

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0199091420

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As commercial surrogacy in India dominates public conversations around reproduction, new kinds of families, and changing trends in globalization, its lived realities become an important aspect of emerging research. This book maps the way in which in vitro fertilization (IVF) specialists, surrogacy agents, commissioning couples, surrogate mothers, and egg donors contribute to the understanding of interpersonal relations in the process of commercial surrogacy. In this book, Majumdar draws from a context that is enmeshed in the local–global politics of reproduction, including the ways in which the transnational commercial surrogacy arrangement has led to an ongoing debate regarding ethics and morality in the sphere of reproductive rights. In weaving together the diverse, often conflicting experiences of individuals and families, the transnational commercial surrogacy arrangement comes alive as a process mirroring larger societal anxieties with reference to technological interventions in intimate relationships. It is these anxieties, dilemmas, and their negotiations to which the book is addressed.

Critical Kinship Studies

Critical Kinship Studies PDF

Author: Charlotte Kroløkke

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2015-12-11

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1783484187

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In recent decades the concept of kinship has been challenged and reinvigorated by the so-called “repatriation of anthropology” and by the influence of feminist studies, queer studies, adoption studies, and science and technology studies. These interdisciplinary approaches have been further developed by increases in infertility, reproductive travel, and the emergence of critical movements among transnational adoptees, all of which have served to question how kinship is now practiced. Critical Kinship Studies brings together theoretical and disciplinary perspectives and analytically sensitive perspectives aiming to explore the manifold versions of kinship and the ways in which kinship norms are enforced or challenged. The Rowman and Littlefield International – Intersections series presents an overview of the latest research and emerging trends in some of the most dynamic areas of research in the Humanities and Social Sciences today. Critical Kinship Studies should be of particular interest to students and scholars in Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Medical Humanities, Politics, Gender and Queer Studies and Globalization.

Kinship as Fiction

Kinship as Fiction PDF

Author: Anindita Majumdar

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-25

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1040154379

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Bringing together emerging ethnographies on kinship in South Asia, this book explores the idea of kinship as ‘fiction’ in intimate relationships. Fictions and fictive kinship within anthropology are contested ideas. Increasingly, research suggests the idea of intimate relationships has to extend beyond the biological assumption of kinship relations. The idea of fiction is also not free from the biological imagination or the persistent dichotomy of nature-culture/nurture-nature. This edited volume resurrects the idea of fiction and fictive-ness to understand how intimate relationships may use these particular labels, translate into practices, or create an experiential understanding around relationships. The chapters in this book reengage the idea of fiction by exploring the ambiguity within household relationships, the process of making and engaging with a craft and skill, and the intricacies of making children through IVF and third-party involvement. They challenge societal norms of marriage and being married by reframing shared substances and the relationality they carry and by remembering deceased ties through acts of resurrection. Through vivid illustrations of life and living in South Asia, each chapter contributes to an understanding of how fiction and reality are mutually creating each other. This book will be beneficial to students, academics and scholars of anthropology, particularly those interested in kinship and the sociology of the family. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Contemporary South Asia.

Contingent Kinship

Contingent Kinship PDF

Author: Kathryn A. Mariner

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0520299566

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.

The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology

The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology PDF

Author: Maja Hojer Bruun

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-03-23

Total Pages: 809

ISBN-13: 9811670846

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This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised around some of the most important characteristics of anthropological studies of technology today: the diverse knowledge practices that technologies involve and on which they depend; the communities, collectives, and categories that emerge around technologies; anthropology’s contribution to proliferating debates on ethics, values, and morality in relation to technology; and infrastructures that highlight how all technologies are embedded in broader political economies and socio-historical processes that shape and often reinforce inequality and discrimination while also generating diversity. All chapters share a commitment to human experiences, embodiments, practices, and materialities in the daily lives of those people and institutions involved in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and/or use of particular technologies. Chapters 11 and 31 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology

A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology PDF

Author: Cecilia Coale Van Hollen

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2025-04-01

Total Pages: 566

ISBN-13: 1119845386

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Provides fresh perspectives on the past, present and future-facing contributions of the anthropology of reproduction. A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology provides a timely and comprehensive overview of the anthropological study of reproductive practices, technologies, and interventions in a global context. Exploring the medical and technological management of human reproduction through a sociocultural lens, this groundbreaking volume reviews past and current research, discusses contemporary debates and recent theoretical developments, introduces key themes and trends, examines ongoing issues of equity, inclusivity, and reproductive justice around the world, and more. The Companion brings together essays by multidisciplinary scholars in fields including sociocultural anthropology, medical anthropology, reproductive health, global public health, Science and Technology Studies (STS), gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, and environmental studies, to list but a few. Five thematically organized sections address reproductive practitioners and paradigms, global reproductive health and interventions, reproductive justice, the life-course approach to the study of reproductive health, and the future of reproductive technology and medicine. Using clear, jargon-free language, the authors investigate pregnancy and childbirth; fertility treatments; birth control, contraception and abortion; COVID-19 and reproduction; reproductive cancers; epigenetics; social discrimination; gender and sexualities and reproduction for LGBTQIA+ communities; race and reproduction; migration and reproduction; reproduction and war; reproductive health financing; reproduction and disabilities, reproduction and the environment; and other important contemporary topics. A cutting-edge guide to the modern study of reproduction, this groundbreaking volume: Provides an overview of the links between anthropological study and progressive work in medicine, healthcare, and technology Addresses both the challenges and opportunities facing researchers in the field Identifies gaps in current scholarship and offers recommendations for future research topics and methodologies Highlights the importance of ethnographic research combined with critical engagements with other disciplines for the anthropology of reproduction Explores the impact of socioeconomic conditions, environmental challenges, public policy, and legislation on reproductive health outcomes Traces the history of the field and demonstrates how anthropologists have engaged with issues of reproductive justice Part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Companions to Anthropology series, A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology is an essential resource for undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and scholars in medical anthropology, science technology and society, cultural anthropology, ethnology, and gender studies, as well as medical practitioners, policymakers, and activists involved in global and public health and reproductive justice.

Life, Illness, and Death in Contemporary South Asia

Life, Illness, and Death in Contemporary South Asia PDF

Author: Matsuo Mizuho

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-02-22

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1000838382

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This book explores the experiential and affective dimensions of structural transformation in South Asia through contemporary and historical accounts of life, ageing, illness, and death. The contributions to this book include analyses from various regions in South Asia, and topics discussed uncover how people’s experiences of life, ageing, illness, and death are entangled with the technology of governance, biomedicine, neoliberal restructuring and other national/international policies. Structured in three parts – governance, technology, and citizenship; well-being and restructuring of the social; waiting, hesitation, and hope as attitudes in facing the precariousness and fundamental uncertainty of life – the book brings to light the ways in which people face and continue to engage with their own and others’ lives cautiously, waveringly, but with a sense of hope. A novel contribution to the study of how people struggle or navigate their lives through the conditions of inequity and precariousness in South Asia, this book will be of interest to researchers studying anthropology, sociology, history, medical and development studies of South Asia, as well as to those interested in cultural and social theory.

Reproductive Technologies as Global Form

Reproductive Technologies as Global Form PDF

Author: Michi Knecht

Publisher: Campus Verlag

Published: 2012-07

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 3593391007

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In the thirty-five years since the first +test-tube baby,[&½] in-vitro fertilization and other methods of reproductive assistance have become a common aspect of family life and medicine in affluent nations and, increasingly, throughout the world. How do persons seeking treatment, donors, and medical experts make use of these reproductive technologies? How in crossing borders between nations do they manage to evade legal and bioethical regulations? And how do they make sense of these new modes of making kinship against the backdrop of diverse world-views and social settings? --

Intimate Strangers

Intimate Strangers PDF

Author: Veronika Siegl

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2023-07-15

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1501769944

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Zooming in on commercial surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine, Intimate Strangers addresses market expansion into the intimate spheres of life that play out on women's bodies as mothers and workers. Veronika Siegl follows the inner workings of a surrogacy market marked by secrecy, distrust, and anonymous business relationships. She explores intended mothers' anxious struggles for a child in light of stigmatized infertility and the aggressive biopolitics of motherhood; the uncertain but pragmatic pathways in and out of fertility clinics as surrogates navigate harsh economic realities and resist being objectified or morally judged; and the powerful role of agents and doctors who have found a profitable niche in nurturing and facilitating other people's existential hopes. Intimate Strangers discusses these issues against the backdrop of ultra-conservatism and moral governance in Russia, the rising international popularity of the Ukrainian surrogacy market, and the pervasiveness of neo-liberal ideologies and individualized notions of reproductive freedom.