The Foetal Condition

A Sociology of Engendering and Abortion

Luc Boltanski, Luc Boltanski

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745647319, 9780745647302
• eBook ISBN: 9780745683492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Abortion is a contentious issue in social life but it has rarely been subjected to careful scrutiny in the social sciences. While the legalization of abortion has brought it into the public domain, it still remains a sensitive topic in many cultures, often hidden from view and rarely spoken about, consigned to a shadowy existence.

Drawing on reports gathered from hospital settings and in-depth interviews with women who have had abortions, Luc Boltanski sets out to explain the ambiguous status of this social practice. Abortion, he argues, has to remain in the shadows, for it reveals a contradiction at the heart of the social contract: the principle of the uniqueness of beings conflicts with the postulate of their replaceable nature, a postulate without which no society would achieve demographic renewal.

This leads Boltanski to explore the way human beings are engendered and to analyze the symbolic constraints that preside over their entry into society. What makes a human being is not the foetus as such, ensconced within the body, but rather the process by which it is taken up symbolically in speech - that is, its symbolic adoption. But this symbolic adoption presupposes the possibility of discriminating among embryos that are indistinguishable. For society, and sometimes for individuals, the arbitrary character of this discrimination is hard to tolerate. The contradiction is made bearable, Boltanski shows, by a grammatical categorization: the "project" foetus - adopted by its parents, who use speech to welcome the new being and give it a name - is juxtaposed to the "tumoral" foetus, an accidental embryo that will not be the object of a life-forming project.

Bringing together grammar, narrations of life experience and an historical perspective, this highly original book sheds fresh light on a social phenomenon that is widely practised but poorly understood.

1

The Anthropological Dimensions of Abortion

The comparatist approach of George Devereux

To refer to practices in their most general – that is, anthropological – dimension is to invite disapproval from today’s social sciences, which have probably never before insisted as strongly as they do now on separating disciplines oriented towards culture from those oriented towards nature. In the current view, the latter disciplines have full responsibility for identifying the invariants whose universal character is thought to depend on their biological roots (and especially on the biological underpinnings of the mind) or, put another way, on the effects that constraints determined by the biological characteristics of human beings (who eat, reproduce, die and so on) bring to bear on life in society. The disciplines oriented towards culture, in contrast, have the task of establishing the inventory of what is left over, that is, the differences between human groups that are thought to result chiefly from their adherence to different systems of belief. In the order of nature, everything is understood to be the same everywhere; in the order of culture, everything is understood to be different. It was precisely in reaction against this split, which positivism had made so compelling, that general sociology and social anthropology were constituted over a century ago, with a project defined from the start as comparatist. General sociology and social anthropology thus took their principal task to be cataloguing the ways in which practices that appeared to manifest a kind of family relationship could nevertheless be substantiated differently in different societies (in the case of Émile Durkheim and his followers, for example, these practices would include sacrifice, prayer, exchange, kinship, practices of classification, oaths, crime and so on). The same can be said for psychoanalysis: at least after its encounter with cultural anthropology, and without abandoning its fundamental concepts (the unconscious, repression and so forth), psychoanalysis had undertaken to examine, for example, how different schemas for organizing unconscious drives could correspond to different practices of socialization, or how taking into account the tensions proper to each culture made it possible to trace pathways leading from collective myths to individual dreams and vice versa.

With respect to my topic, the social anthropologist and psychoanalyst George Devereux was the first to undertake a systematic study of the practice of abortion by considering it both in its general dimensions and in the specific forms it has taken in different societies. As Devereux explains in his introduction to A Study of Abortion in Primitive Society, his primary aim was theoretical, or rather ‘methodological’ (Devereux 1955). He sets forth four goals: (a) to provide empirical support for the validity of the ‘axiom that cultural diversity demonstrates the tremendous plasticity and variability of human behavior’; (b) to furnish empirical data in support of ‘the methodological thesis that the intensive analysis of the context and implications of a particular institution in a single tribe … can … yield universally valid conclusions’ (with reference to Durkheim and Freud) and, conversely, to show that ‘the self-same propositions could also be derived from a study in breadth of the variations of the same culture-trait or institution in a large number of societies’, in such a way as to justify ‘simultaneously, and by identical means, both studies in depth and studies in breadth’ (ibid., vii); (c) to demonstrate the compatibility of the anthropological and psychological approaches, owing to the fact that a precise correspondence exists between cultural behaviours and affects¹ (Devereux views abortion as a practice that lends itself particularly well to the demonstration he intends to conduct because – and it will become clear why this feature is important for my project – ‘abortion does not occupy anywhere a focal position in culture’ [ibid., viii], so that, not being the object of ‘culturally’ precise and explicit prescriptions, it leaves wide open the possibility of a great diversity of individual behaviours); finally, (d) to present a more or less exhaustive set of materials about abortion in order to facilitate future research.

George Devereux gathered (and methodically published in the annex to his book) a corpus bearing on four hundred ‘pre-industrial societies’. He used Yale University’s Human Relations Area Files as his principal source, under the guidance of Ralph Linton (who joined Yale’s Department of Anthropology late in his life), and especially George Peter Murdock, the anthropologist who had set up the Area Files, starting in 1938, with the goal of developing a comparative and ‘transcultural’ anthropology. Devereux completed his documentation by drawing on his personal archives and on oral and written communications supplied by various colleagues. The Area Files are a huge set of dossiers derived from an exhaustive study of virtually all known anthropological literature (found in books, articles or unpublished manuscripts) and also of what can be called an important pre-anthropological literature (narratives written by travellers, missionaries, colonial administrators and so on) deemed to have sufficiently reliable documentary value. The data were recorded in these files according to a dual classification system: by cultural zones and societies on the one hand, by themes on the other. There is an entry devoted to questions pertaining to pregnancy and abortion and a subentry indexing abortion.² Since Devereux constituted his corpus, the Area Files have continued to grow. There is a copy in the Laboratory of Social Anthropology in the Collège de France, in three different formats (depending on the age of the files and the format of digital transcription): the material is available on paper, on CD-ROMs and by subscription on the Internet, so that by consulting these files one can complete the information in George Devereux’s work (or verify it, if doubts arise).³

The data contained in the Area Files do not lend themselves well to systematic – let alone statistical – treatment, chiefly because the information is very heterogeneous and of unequal value: it was collected in different periods in widely divergent societies and according to disparate methods by people who were as dissimilar in their ethnographic skills as in their theoretical orientations. As Devereux notes, observations about the same society made by different observers are sometimes in conflict. As a result, one must resign oneself to regarding assertions drawn from these materials as assumptions rather than as factual certainties.

Without necessarily sharing Devereux’s theoretical presuppositions or assenting to all the developments (which sometimes contain remarkable intuitions) in a book that is rich in detail but rather disconcerting in structure, one can nevertheless use some of the observations and remarks included in this survey, along with the results of complementary investigations into the Area Files, as a basis for sketching out a rough framework apt to highlight some of the principal questions that the practice of abortion raises for sociology. For my part, I have chosen to emphasize, at least as a working hypothesis, four properties of abortion that are not explicitly singled out by Devereux, or at least not stressed, but towards which numerous indications in his material – and also, occasionally, in his analyses – nevertheless converge.

A practice universally understood to be possible

A first property, this one clearly affirmed by George Devereux, is the presumably universal character of the practice.⁴ Devereux notes that information about abortion is available for about 60 per cent of the societies included in the Area Files. This of course does not mean that abortion is absent from the remaining 40 per cent; given the very heterogeneous character of the information in the files, it simply means that ethnographers have not always taken this dimension of existence into account in their monographs, or that their informants did not mention it. What seems universal, moreover, is less the practice of voluntary abortion – which is very unevenly attested, it would seem, varying according to the society and the era (although solid statistical data can almost never be established) – than acknowledgement of the possibility of this practice. There are no examples in the corpus of a situation in which an informant, male or female, when questioned on this point, did not know what the question referred to or who, when an explanation was offered, expressed astonishment that such a thing could exist. The possibility of making a foetus exit the womb before birth for the purpose of destroying it thus seems to belong to the fundamental framework of human existence in society.

The means used to this end are themselves very numerous; they are fairly well known today, not only in societies studied by ethnology but also in ancient societies, especially those of Graeco-Roman antiquity, as well as in medieval and modern Western societies,⁵ in China and in Japan (La Fleur 1992).⁶ The most widespread procedures involve the use of abortifacient medications, usually drawn from plants (with emetic, laxative, purgative or astringent effects among others; these are known in practically all societies for which information is available); the use of mechanical means, either internal (introducing a stalk or stick into the vagina) or external (jumping up and down, striking the abdomen or compressing it with a belt, applying hot materials such as water, ashes or stones to the abdominal wall, and so on); or a combination of these procedures (such as introducing medications into the vagina or manipulating the sex organs). These various chemical or mechanical procedures have to be understood in each case in relation to the local theories about reproduction and gestation on which confidence in the effectiveness of a given procedure is based. Magical means are also used (sitting under a certain tree, consuming a certain food or drink, wearing an amulet, and so on): customarily distinguished from mechanical and chemical means, recourse to magic very often requires carrying out a transgressive act (for example, eating a forbidden food). Devereux points out the possible existence, among the Hopi Indians, of a means he calls ‘psychosomatic’, in which the intense desire to abort is viewed as having abortifacient effects in and of itself. In most of the societies about which information is available, the means available for the practice of abortion seem to belong to common knowledge, even if certain persons (who usually act as midwives as well) are considered more knowledgeable or more skilful than others. In fact, many of the means used for abortion are hard to handle and known to be more or less dangerous. They arouse fear. And yet this does not keep them from being called on when the need to abort appears compelling.

The object of general condemnation

A second property of abortion is that it is very often subject to condemnation.⁷ Only rarely is abortion accepted as a matter of principle, even in societies where it is frequently practised. Reactions go from shocked disapproval to the most violent indignation towards this ‘shameful’ or ‘horrible’ act; moreover, its practice is often attributed to neighbouring peoples or to the inhabitants of bordering villages while presented as unknown ‘among ourselves’. Such indignation does not seem to be merely feigned in order to satisfy the expectations of a foreign observer who is deemed a priori to be opposed to abortion (for example, in cases where the information comes from travel narratives or missionaries’ recollections); it is also noted in reports by highly professional ethnographers. Nor is it an attitude specific to men, for women often manifest the same ‘horror’ when the act is mentioned, although their indignation might be interpreted as a sign that they have internalized masculine values. Abortion is not something one talks about, at least not without embarrassment; when people do discuss it, their intent is most often to make clear that, even though they know that the practice exists, it surely cannot concern their intimate circle – members of their kinship group – or even the collective body to which they belong.

The degree of disapproval expressed ultimately seems to vary not only from society to society but also according to circumstances within a given society, in relation to a casuistics that depends on cultural characteristics: for example, generally speaking, disapproval may be less pronounced when incest or coupling with an animal is suspected (among the Navajo), or when it is presumed that the mother will give birth to an illegitimate child (especially in patrilinear societies), or when a multiplicity of potential fathers makes it impossible to identify the true father and obliges him to marry the pregnant woman (except in societies that recognize multi-paternity⁸), or when the mother is thought to have been impregnated by a demon and destined to give birth to a monster (among the Jivaro and many other groups⁹). References to attenuating circumstances based on characteristics of the foetus – features that were unknown and unknowable before the advent of modern imaging techniques – must not be taken too literally, moreover, as would be the case if they were linked to specific controlled tests; they are best viewed rather as sketching the contours of an argumentative register that can be mobilized whenever someone seeks to attenuate the disapproval directed towards abortion. Thus the argument that a woman had an abortion because the child she would have delivered would have been illegitimate (in many traditional societies, this meant that it would have had neither a name nor a kinship group¹⁰) always seems ‘self-evident’ in some respects, even though in practice there are always other possibilities, such as finding the pregnant woman a husband who agrees to take on the paternity of the child she is carrying.

Tolerance for abortion

A third important property of abortion can be seen in the fact that condemnation of the practice quite often seems to go hand in hand with considerable tolerance for it on the part of the very persons who express indignation when it is mentioned. Although it is not hard to find examples, in various domains, of gaps between articulated norms – or laws, in societies where a written body of law exists – and the pragmatic expression of their implementation, in the case of abortion the gap between the rule and its application seems particularly striking, and it seems to be found in one form or another in most of the societies for which information is available. Only very rarely are serious efforts made to identify, pursue and punish the persons responsible. And we shall see in chapter 3 that this feature is also characteristic of Western medieval and modern societies dominated by Christian churches whose Fathers had condemned abortion, but in which, before the second half of the nineteenth century, roughly speaking, the authorities could fulminate against that act or call for its prohibition without having much concrete effect: their condemnations neither triggered police investigations nor modified practices.¹¹ The fact that women who had abortions and those who helped them do so were most often not pursued or punished does not mean that the practice went unsanctioned, however. In many societies, the informants mention the existence of sanctions, but these are either immanent to the act itself (such as sterility) or diffuse penalties that affect the kinship group or even the collective body as a whole¹² (for example, in the wake of an act of vengeance carried out by the spirit of the aborted foetus), as is often the case when transgressive practices affect the order of the world.

A compilation of ethnographic data makes it possible to identify another intriguing feature that is congruent with the indignation–tolerance pairing. Where abortion is practised, it is usually carried out in secret, or at least in the shadows. But most often it appears as what can be called an open secret. This situation can draw our attention to an opposition that plays an important role with regard to our object, one whose implications I shall try to develop in chapter 3: the opposition, analysed in depth in Pierre Bourdieu’s ethnological work, most notably in the texts devoted to kinship, between what belongs to the official order and is endowed with a ‘public, solemn, collective’ character, and what stems from the unofficial order and is condemned to a ‘shameful’ or even ‘clandestine’ mode of existence.¹³ This opposition may involve the distribution of different types of action or different forms of power. In Pierre Bourdieu’s study of Kabyl society, it is associated with the opposition between men and women, between masculine society and feminine society. Men hold official power over what is explicitly collective and public, and in particular over representations of kinship (Bourdieu emphasizes that the realm of kinship has an eminently political character in traditional societies); women exercise a power that, while genuine (especially where marriage is concerned, according to Bourdieu), remains hidden and leaves ‘the appearance of power … to men’ (1972, 41).

The distinction between the world of men, the official realm of written or common law, religion, politics and the public square – the exterior world – and the world of women, the unofficial realm of the home, magic and witchcraft – the interior world – has been thematized by many anthropologists who have studied forms of masculine domination,¹⁴ and it seems to be made quite generally in human societies. It encompasses first and foremost everything that has to do with gestation and birth, a realm that in most traditional societies is confined to secrecy within the female context, the one situated in the home (inside as opposed to outside, consistent with the private–public opposition); within the home itself there is a space reserved for women,¹⁵ one that in many societies (for example, the Achuar, studied by Philippe Descola [1996], or the Baruya, studied by Maurice Godelier [1996]) is off limits to men.¹⁶ The space of the home is exempt from the political logic of the polity, that is, from the realm of justice and, more profoundly, from ‘society’ in the modern sense of the word.¹⁷

This distinction between the official and the unofficial, it must be noted, is particularly relevant to my topic. Among the set of practices associated with the feminine pole, abortion is probably one of those most forcefully kept out of the public space; it takes place in the shadows, exclusively among women. This explains why information about it is so scarce and so difficult to verify, at least in comparison to the information available about kinship nomenclature, for example; the latter is part of masculine knowledge and can be communicated fairly readily by male informants to anthropologists of the same sex. (Until the feminization of the profession of anthropology over the past several decades, moreover, it i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• TitlePage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Anthropological Dimensions of Abortion
• 2. The Two Constraints on Engendering
• 3. Understandings
• 4. The Parental Project
• 5. Constructing Foetal Categories
• 6. The Justìfication of Abortion
• 7. The Experience of Abortion
• Conclusion: Forgetting Abortion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index