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Managing Potential in Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Reflections on Gifts, Kinship, and the Process of Vernacularization

Simpson, Bob

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Abstract

Assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) offer an ever-widening repertoire of possibilities for how bodies, substances, and relationships might be brought together in the accomplishment of reproduction. This article reflects on the tensions that arise around universalizing and secularizing discourses (e.g., bioethics, regulation, and the law) and those of vernacularization whereby these discourses are rendered into local idioms of kinship, body, and exchange. The examples used to illustrate this are drawn from Sri Lanka (Sinhala Buddhist) and the United Kingdom (Pakistani Muslims). In both instances, United Kingdom–inspired guidance on the delivery of services meets with very particular visions of hope and becoming as they figure in ideas of reproductive potential. This encounter introduces areas of mismatch and dislocation that are made evident through ethnographic inquiry and analysis. The article concludes with a discussion of gift and debt relationships in the context of gamete donation, connecting these with wider processes of cultural transformation in complex plural democracies. Those engaged in this negotiation are characterized not just as moral pioneers but as social pioneers locating their own beliefs and practices within the global diffusion of ARTs and their ethical and clinical governance.

Citation

Simpson, B. (2013). Managing Potential in Assisted Reproductive Technologies: Reflections on Gifts, Kinship, and the Process of Vernacularization. Current Anthropology, 54(Supplement 7), S87-S96. https://doi.org/10.1086/670173

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Oct 7, 2013
Deposit Date May 10, 2013
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Current Anthropology
Print ISSN 0011-3204
Electronic ISSN 1537-5382
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 54
Issue Supplement 7
Pages S87-S96
DOI https://doi.org/10.1086/670173

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