European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology

Jeanette Edwards, Carles Salazar, Jeanette Edwards, Carles Salazar

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781845458928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Interest in the study of kinship, a key area of anthropological enquiry, has recently reemerged. Dubbed 'the new kinship', this interest was stimulated by the 'new genetics' and revived interest in kinship and family patterns. This volume investigates the impact of biotechnology on contemporary understandings of kinship, of family and 'belonging' in a variety of European settings and reveals similarities and differences in how kinship is conceived. What constitutes kinship for different publics? How significant are biogenetic links? What does family resemblance tell us? Why is genetically modified food an issue? Are 'genes' and 'blood' interchangeable? It has been argued that the recent prominence of genetic science and genetic technologies has resulted in a 'geneticization' of social life; the ethnographic examples presented here do show shifts occurring in notions of 'nature' and of what is 'natural'. But, they also illustrate the complexity of contemporary kinship thinking in Europe and the continued interconnectedness of biological and sociological understandings of relatedness and the relationship between nature and nurture.

CHAPTER 1

KNOWING AND RELATING: KINSHIP, ASSISTED REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES AND THE NEW GENETICS

Joan Bestard

Tout se passe au milieu, tout transite entre les deux, tout se fait par médiation, par traduction et par réseaux, mais cet emplacement n’existe pas, n’a pas lieu. C’est l’impensé, l’impensable des modernes. (Latour 1991: 57)

Introduction

Before beginning my ethnographic discussion, I would like to define what I understand by kinship and how we can relate it to the public understanding of new genetics from an analytical point of view. I consider kinship as a tool that enables the anthropologist to analyse the capacity of certain ideas about human nature and the transmission of its substances to build social relations. The advantage of this type of analytical tool is that it is neither in the domain of nature nor in the domain of culture, but rather between the two and making the intermediation a domain that is neither within nor without, that is, a set of networks of unrelated entities, such as a network linking gametes, donors, parents, names, localities, identities and properties (Edwards and Strathern 2000). The advantage of conceiving kinship in terms of networks is that it implies no determinism, such as the determinism of genes on behaviour or of culture on relationships. Instead of expressing the problematic of kinship in terms of two pure transcendences (‘nature’ and ‘culture’), thinking of kinship in this way allows us to ethnographically approach the existence of networks in both domains. Instead of attempting to explain kinship as a mixture of pure transcendences, the activity of the intersection of kinship becomes the source from which the domains of nature and culture originate (Latour 1991). For Latour, the social is not a special domain of reality, but a principle of connection between heterogeneous entities (2005: 13). In this way, the analytical pathway of kinship moves away from modernist ideologies that mix domains and attribute determinism to one (as the ideology of genetic essentialism does), and instead allows me to place ideas about human nature and entities coming from the technologies of reproduction within the formation of relationships.

As far as ‘the public understanding of genetics’ is concerned, I refer neither to the general public nor to a lay public as opposed to experts. I mean a particular ethnographically sited public, namely, couples wanting to have children through techniques of assisted reproduction (Bestard et al. 2003). By ‘public understanding’, I refer to what is understood in anthropology as culture, that is, the capacity to establish meaningful relationships between different domains of social life. It has more to do with the substantive rationality than with the formal rationality of the debate emerging from government advisory commissions (Evans 2002).

By ‘new genetics’, I mean the new knowledge stemming from the recent mapping of the human genome. This knowledge has opened up new possibilities for predicting and treating disease and genetic disorder. It has also opened up new ways to relate genes and human behaviour and new means of understanding human nature and society. It crosses the boundaries of two domains (subjects and objects) that have been separated in modernity. With the arrival of new hybrid entities coming from the new genetics, it is difficult to hold fast the modernist opposition between nature and culture. The ‘natural’ and the ‘social’ are no longer to be seen as ontologically different (Rheinberger 2000). The huge and complex organisation of the human genome can be compared with the complexity that anthropologists have discovered in society and cultural life. The complexity of kinship systems with only a few recombinant elements but hugely diverse meanings in different societies can be compared with the simple elements but complex organisation of the human genome. As François Jacob (1972) remarked, nature works to create diversity by means of unlimited combination of bits and pieces, namely, the four bases of DNA. New networks can be revealed between reproductive materials coming from laboratories, genes and the appropriation of them by people using assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in order to create new kinship relationships.

New reproductive technologies have to do with procreation and also with kinship, and my aim is to analyse how, in the context of assisted reproduction, kinship can be used to give meaning to a gamete’s genetic endowment. Focusing on gamete donation, I address two questions. First, what is understood by a gamete? And second, what other materialities is it related to? My starting point is the methodological assumption that an object becomes meaningful in its relationship to other entities. Public understanding of scientific issues is not based on the content of the issue itself, but rather on the relationships it has with other heterogeneous entities. I understand kinship as a matrix that allows us to understand some of these matters by relating them to other unrelated entities, for instance, a network linking a gamete, a woman who is an egg donor, a legal mother, a name, a town and an identity. Thus placed, a gamete becomes one element in a network of relations. It is one element in a network of meaningful relationships and not only the recognition of a substance with a genetic endowment. Kinship knowledge is not the recognition of the facts of nature, but a tool to set up relations between divergent domains of life. It does not directly reflect the facts of nature, but relates what is ‘given’ and what is ‘made’ in social life.

The Ethnographic Meaning of a Gamete

The ethnographic question I wish to raise is simply, what is meant by a gamete? And, in particular, what is meant by an oocyte?

Berta is a woman from a town in the south of Spain. Every year she travels to Catalonia for a period of six or seven months in order to undergo infertility treatment and specifically a process of in vitro fertilisation (IVF). She and her husband take temporary jobs in the Costa Brava in the service sector. When we met her, Berta was working in the laundry of a hotel. Her husband had a temporary job as labourer in the construction industry. The rest of the year they have temporary jobs in agriculture in their village in southern Spain. Doctors had suggested that Berta should resort to oocyte donation. Despite the fact that gamete donation is anonymous in Spanish law, Berta was asked to look for a donor from whom she would receive the gametes. Because of the shortage of egg donors, this request is normal procedure in assisted reproduction clinics in Spain. The donor she brings to the clinic is meant to give her gametes to another anonymous woman and in exchange she will receive oocytes from another anonymous donor. Berta refuses to look for a donor on the grounds that she comes from a small town. Indeed, the closer a town comes to forming a community the stronger the feeling that everyone knows each other and is related to each other. This identity of mutual acquaintance comes precisely from the fact that residents were all born there and brought up together. Acquaintance, upbringing and kinship become one and the same thing. Referring to the possibility of finding a donor, our informant said:

Maybe I am wrong, but what happens is . . . if I look for a woman . . . and besides if I look for her here [in Barcelona], they may not know about it in my town . . . But if I looked for a woman in my town, because it is a small town, they would forever be saying . . . that my child, for instance, is not mine. Maybe I’m too conscious of what people would say. But if I came here and I was told: ‘Look, if you like . . . I will give them to you, or if you like I could . . .’, maybe I would. But having to look for a woman myself, no . . . and besides, knowing, for instance, what they say that the one I find . . . won’t be the ones that they’ll give me.

Berta argues that, if the egg donation is not anonymous, the donor could be considered the mother. Her town, where she was born and brought up, would immediately recognise the donor by just looking at the child and would therefore establish a relationship of descent, since in kinship a biological relationship is also a social relationship and a relationship of belonging is made via the model of concrete recognition of the kinship. In this case, only by remaining anonymous can the kinship relationship and the genetic relationship without social recognition be kept separate. Berta refuses to know the donor because this knowledge has consequences about her identity as mother. As Marilyn Strathern remarks, kinship knowledge is a form of constitutive rule: ‘once known [it] can not be laid aside’ (1999: 79). Berta exercises her right not to know by looking for an anonymous donor. Note also that she has in mind a hypothetical donor who is not from her hometown, where everyone knows each other and is related to each other. She has in mind someone from the city, another type of social conglomeration, where personal acquaintance between each of its members is impossible and which thus offers the anonymity she seeks. Our informant seeks a donation outside the actual relations of mutual acquaintances which, for her, are what kinship is. If the donation makes it possible to establish kinship it must be at a different level of knowledge from the relation with the donor of her village, that is, relations between individual persons. She is looking for an abstract sociality, that is, an anonymous and nameless relation (Konrad 2005). That is why she associates the egg donation with the anonymity of the city, and not with the face-to-face community of her town. If it became known in her town, people would say the child was not hers. Gamete donation implies identity, and donation is an alienation of something that carries with it the identity of the donor. In contrast, in the city identity remains anonymous and social relations are abstract. That is why she thinks it is easier to find an abstract, anonymous and nameless donor in the city. Thus she comes closer to goods circulating freely on the market than to donation where a particular relationship is established between the donor and receiver through the gift. The debt of the gift is to an anonymous donor, not to an individual person from her hometown, even if kinship is a way to establish relations outside market commodities.

The paradox in Berta’s narrative is how to understand the relationship stemming from a donation and how another woman’s gamete can become an element in her own descent. Here I would like to emphasise the point that an issue concerning genetics can lead to a series of associations between heterogeneous entities – a gamete, a donation, the town, the city, an identity and a property. How does the relation between a gamete and a given person manage to become the relation between the receptor and her offspring? For Berta, the donation from a woman in her hometown would suppose identification between the person and the object donated. That is why, for her, the anonymity of the city is a resource with which she can think about this transformation.

Ben Amar and Rahisa, a Moroccan couple living in Catalonia, repeat this association between the gamete and the donor. ‘I think the child would be another person’s,’ says Ben Amar, and he insists on the relationship between offspring and ‘blood’. ‘Surely [I want] the child, but from my own blood, I insist, from my own blood.’ He considers the association between offspring and one’s own blood, and a donation and the relationship with another person, as a cultural relationship: ‘It would become engraved on my brain that this child was not mine.’ It is as if he would not be able to recognise himself in a possible offspring conceived through a donated gamete. Genetic discontinuity requires a reconsideration of the continuity of descent expressed in the idea of ‘one’s own blood’. When I refer to culture I do not refer to a system of meanings differentiating one ethnic group from another, but the relationships that are established through the possibility of donation: gametes related to a donor as opposed to blood, male descent and knowledge.

Esperança, who has recently given birth to a child thanks to ova donation, felt the rejection of a friend towards her child because ‘she must have seen that my part was missing . . . It has been difficult for her to relate to my child’. Relating is culture’s work, through which it opens windows that establish relationships between a gamete, the recipient and her offspring. By not being able to relate to the child immediately, Esperança’s friend perceives two separate bodies and cannot establish a relationship because she cannot visualise the connection between mother and child. Offspring are perceived to be the result of the relationship between two people. ‘It’s a bit of each’, said Isa, who, with two children from a former relationship, wanted to have a child with her new partner. If the link with the oocyte is not known, it is difficult to establish a relationship between mother and child. The anonymity of the donation brings about an immediate paradox. As Isa narrates her experience as recipient, she says that, ‘since the genes are from an unknown source’ and ‘we don’t know where the genes come from’, you ‘don’t quite regard it as your own. I see it as foreign’. A gamete is also a relationship. It is not merely a biological substance making new individuals possible, but is located within the scope of kinship relations. Because it is relational, it has to do with the donor. In our research, the term ‘genetic mother’ was never mentioned, but, in the case of oocyte donations, the genes clearly come from another woman, and therefore from an unknown and perhaps unknowable relational chain. This gap in knowledge poses practical problems such as not knowing what to tell the paediatrician when he or she asks about family history illnesses, or not knowing what to say to the child in the future.

Idioms of Ownership: to Have One’s Own Child

Thus far, I have dealt with one important aspect regarding the way kinship knowledge is organised. It is a relationship that looks back to the past. Memories, stories of the past and inheritances are all elements linked with the past. People are our relatives because we relate them to a common ancestor. Nevertheless, kinship also has to do with the present and the future. Relatedness not only arises from the past, but is also built in the present and looks towards the future (Bestard 1998). Descent not only implies ancestors, but also descendants. In this case, descent is personally constructed in that it is clearly desired and planned. This element of agency in kinship is very much present in the context of assisted reproductive technologies (ART). After all, it involves men and women who desire a child. That is, they have imagined their offspring and seek, in ART, the possibility of making their ‘dream for a child’ come true. In this context, a ‘donated gamete’ does not mean a connection in the present with another person, but the possibility of a new relationship in the future. ‘I then found myself pregnant,’ says the woman who had doubts about the identity of the embryo that results from a donated ova. At the moment of finding herself pregnant she establishes a relationship with her future child. From here on, connections are made into the future, that is, the model of establishing kinship creates links between various entities: gametes, pregnancy, child-rearing, ownership and identity.

This element of agency in the establishment of relationships is well expressed by Esperança who keeps a diary in the form of a letter to her future child before starting an IVF cycle. First, the offspring is conceived in the mind and then the desire is materialised in the body. The diary begins like this:

Dear child,

I have wanted you for so long that now it is difficult to write thinking of you as a reality, though we are still far from that moment . . . Maybe I should introduce myself first: if everything goes right, I’ll be your [el teu o el vostre] (maybe there will be more than one of you) mother. Today it still seems difficult – though possible – that someone should name me like this, but then, I want it so badly! . . . Actually, I’ve had this desire to be a mother inside me for so long that I cannot recall the first time I felt it . . . Now in a way you are already here among us, as a thought, as a construction of the future.

This diary becomes a highly reflexive process of how to establish new kinship relations. It constitutes a reflexive process, which is also very characteristic of people entering into cycles of assisted reproduction, as they must relate and make the reproductive substances that the clinic manipulates in the laboratory meaningful, out of the context of the relations that give meaning to the body and its reproductive substances. Faced with oocyte donation, Esperança reflects in her diary on how to explain the donation to her friends:

I debated in my mind for some days whether to tell everyone or just my closest friends, those who could better understand that you would be born in my belly, but with another woman’s genetic endowment. It is true I debated whether to tell them or not because it was also difficult for me to accept it myself. I had been secretly thinking of you for so long that I had begun to project my wishes; for instance, that you would inherit my nose, which is a distinguishing mark of our family, that you could have my father’s blue eyes (your grandfather, whom you will never meet). I was also afraid that your father could one day argue that you were genetically his child in order to take you away from me.

Faced with a donation and a future child having ‘the genetic endowment of another woman’, she is forced to question different forms of relationship, family identity and belonging. With a bit of nostalgia for continuity with the past, Esperança thinks her child will not have that nose so characteristic of her family, or her father’s eyes. She also thinks this discontinuity will make it possible for her child not to ‘inherit certain things I don’t like at all of my family’. Notice that family inheritance is totally amoral, you inherit for good and bad. Any discontinuity opens, therefore, the possibility of a greater diversity and variability in the future. Nevertheless, genetic continuity is a powerful tool when one thinks about belonging. She is torn between immediate belonging, which makes genetic continuity possible (homologous to genealogical continuity): ‘The first thing I thought’, she says, ‘was that it will be his, not mine.’ Her husband can establish a genetic continuity, but she has to repair this discontinuity. Her husband, a Latin American emigrant of Spanish origin, told me the first time we met that his family in Latin America was very happy about the new baby because it would be the first grandchild born in Spain after three generations. Continuity is genetic and territorial. For him, the ius sanguinis of citizenship law has met again with ius soli, after a three-generation gap. Esperança, however, looks at it from a different angle: how will the child become ‘mine’? In other words, how will she establish continuity between present and future? When her child was born, she explained – not without irony – that people visiting them, and without knowing about the egg donation, were talking of the likeness between her and the child. They were making connections of likeness across her family lines. She concluded by saying how important p...