Assisted Reproductive Technology

This weeks readings can be put in three groups:
1) Two articles by Franklin and one by Inhorn & Birenbaum-Carmeli, which discuss the implications of the “new biologies” (particularly new reproductive technologies) for kinship studies, a crucial site of traditional anthropological study
2) Three excellent articles (by Kahn, Inhorn and Handwerker) that explore the distinctive practice of ART in three different cultural, religious and legal contexts: Israel, the Middle East, and China.
3) A (to my mind remarkably silly) article by Stefan Helmerich which attempts to trace the purported breakdown of a longstanding connection between genealogy and classification in biology, through an examination of “lateral gene transfer” in marine biology. Helmreich identifies an emergent biopolitics organized around a “politics of transmission” rather than “practices of sex”.

Inhorn & Birenbaum-Carmeli’s piece is largely a review of some of the assisted reproductive technologies (IVF, including donor conception, surrogacy, PGD, the posthumous use of gametes and embryos) that are transforming notions of relatedness. ARTs represent a “brave new world” for anthropologists of kinship, because they denaturalize and blur the nature/culture intersection. They emphasize two major findings from anthropological research on ARTs. First, is that biogenetic relatedness is privileged (perhaps even fetishized) in the Euro-American culture. (I find their description of this biogenetic fetishism as a specifically Euro-American phenomenon strange, given that Inhorn’s own research on ARTs in the Middle East amply demonstrates that biological relatedness is even more highly valued in that context than in the West). The second finding is that pluralized notions of relatedness are emerging from the use of ARTs. Third party assisted conception and surrogacy are reformulating the notions of motherhood and fatherhood and multiplying modes of relatedness, in which genetic, gestational, and social parenthood do not necessarily coincide. Various socio-legal practices are emerging to cope with this fracturing and multiplication of parental relations (as when the law defines parenthood, or secrecy is adopted as the strategy for concealing donor origins).

The two articles by Franklin focus on the ways in which feminist studies of science are challenging conventional anthropological accounts of the nature/culture divide that had previously been foundational to kinship studies (of which Schneider’s Kinship in America is exemplary). Schneider saw kinship as comprised of two components – at base the biological facts of heredity, and an additional (we might say “super-structural”) symbolic dimension supplementary to biological facts. This account is challenged by authors (such as MacCormack and Strathern and Donna Harraway) who “shift away from the notion of biological facts and toward an examination of the knowledge practice through which such claims acquired legitimacy, authority and “obviousness”’. These authors stress the “constitutive effects” or “world building consequences” of biological knowledge. This whole conceptual shift in thinking about the nature/culture relationship is informed by the feminist inversion of the sex/gender relationship (exemplified in the work of Judith Butler). Where sex had been previously seen as the (immutable) biological basis upon which (contingent) cultural formations of gender identity are erected, some feminists claimed that the scientific “facts” about biological sex are cultural products, the effects (rather than the causes) of gender categories. This tradition opens up a new line of enquiry for thinking about the “new biologies” and ARTs; namely, as a means of constituting biological categories and concepts of relatedness (such as male and female, father and mother). According to Franklin, emergent practices like the formation of alternative families through ART “undoes the very fixity the biological tie used to represent”. With a lengthy excursus on Haraway’s use of the metaphor of kinship, Franklin argues that they also prove disruptive of the discipline of anthropology.

I am a little skeptical of the radical deconstuctionist or “postmodern” conception of natural facts as constituted by social knowledge. This is a point on which Latour’s injunction against attributing biological facts to “society” is instructive. I would not be so quick to dismiss elements of the older view that sees kinship as the symbolic processing of biological facts, as they are understood at a particular point in time, and analyses the reformulation of conceptions of kinship resulting from ARTs’ disruption of the temporal, spatial and bodily configurations that govern 'natural' reproduction. In addition, so much of this kind of work seems to reply upon rhetoric rather than rigorous analysis. So, for instance, Franklin approvingly quotes Hayden’s claim that various kinds of biotechnology form “a rich narrative field in which kinship, nature, and culture are woven together in complex and historically dense ways”. What does a “complex and historically dense” weaving actually mean?

I very much enjoyed the three articles which directly analyze the distinct ways in which ART is practiced in specific locales, and the extent to which different social, religious, and legal considerations shape the use of these technologies. However, I found both the Kahn and Inhorn articles a little unclear on the exact relationship between religious edicts and secular (i.e. state) law. For instance, Kahn begins by noting that eggs and wombs are “the determinants of maternal, religious and national identity in Israel”, and claims that “there is a direct correlation between the social construction of motherhood and the social reproduction of the nation”, specifically because Israel accords citizenship to all Jews. However, although she clearly demonstrated the unresolved dilemma of locating motherhood with reference to Halakhic law, it was not clear to me whether any such ambiguity exists in terms of the attribution of citizenship by the state of Israel. Is there any legal ambiguity about the citizenship of a child born to a Jewish woman who is an Israeli citizen, but who uses a donor egg from a non-Jewish Russian woman? Or, for instance, has the right of return been extended to the children of non-Israeli and non-Jewish parents who are the recipients of a donor egg from a Jewish woman? Similarly, reading Inhorn’s article, I was not quite clear on the extent to which the ART provisions set down in fatwas are enforced by the state.

I found Handwerker’s analysis of ARTs in the context of China’s one-child policy fascinating. But I was less convinced by her discussion of China’s “new eugenics”. Firstly, her evidence is highly anecdotal. Moreover, the desire for a “morally and physically superior baby” can be identified in media discourse around IVF (especially with relation to PGD) all over the world. Second, her contention that “the most recent development in NRTs, which include choosing the sex of one’s embryo, may create devastating consequences for female embryos in China” is specious. Couples who use IVF for other reasons may choose to add sex selection to their treatment (although this adds tremendous expense to a round of IVF). In general though, the cost of using PGD for sex-selection is far too high for this technology to have even the most marginal impact on the gender ratio; ultrasound and selective termination will remain the means to procure a male child, although ‘sperm sorting’ technologies and DI may be taken up as a relatively inexpensive means of selecting for male offspring while avoiding selective termination of an established pregnancy.

Research Proposal

I'm working on trying to get caught up on the blog posts, but having just read the ART readings, I thought I might put up a research proposal for a paper I am working on this semester, on the regulation of PGD. The readings prompted me to think that i need to include a section on the impact of religion on the regulation of PGD in certain contexts (particularly in the Middle East, where the distinction between religious edicts and legislation seems rather blurry).

The proposal is a little long for a blog post, so here is a link to a google doc: Neame PGD Research Proposal

Excellent review of Latour's Science in Action

I'm attaching this review of Latour's Science in Action, by Olga Amsterdamska, because it expresses so eloquently precisely what I was trying to convey in my claim in class that Latour's whole argument rests on an obfuscation of whether he is talking about "nature" or "nature's representation", as in Rule of Method #3. Moreover, she actually unpacks the logic behind this equivalency, and demonstrates how it is a repeated mode of argumentation throughout the book. Now I just have to think of something to write myself!

Edit: Dang, I can't see how to upload a pdf, which would probably violate copyright anyways. Here is the ref:

Olga Amsterdamska, "Review: Surely You Are Joking, Monsieur Latour!" in Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 495-504.
Available on JSTOR.

Latour's Laboratory Life

Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts is an anthropology of scientific practice that seeks to explain “how facts are constructed in the laboratory” (p40). Latour’s target is the realist view of science (and the idealisation of facts and objects that goes with it). From this perspective, science discovers and/or explains a pre-existing reality through such normatively regulated procedures as controlled experiment, value-free observation, and logical deduction. The realist view of science presumes that ‘science proper’, its methods and practices, as well as its outputs (facts, theories, explanations) cannot be subject to sociological analysis. The sociological investigation of science is thus limited to instances in which science is impinged upon by social factors (for instance, the study of scientists as individuals and social actors, subject to psychological motivations or professional incentives; or of science as a socially-embedded practice, where social norms, political imperatives, or economic considerations shape the types of questions asked, or the range of plausible solutions). To get away from this approach, Latour attempts to ‘defamiliarise’ science by suspending the ontological assumptions and epistemological framework that positions science as an exceptional and privileged site of rationality (p29).

Laboratory life is an important early text in the sociology of scientific knowledge. The view that emerges from this perspective is of science as a craft by which facts are made rather than discovered. But Latour’s argument goes beyond a claim about the production of facts as true statements: he contends that facts’ referents - the objects of scientific inquiry, the bits of ‘nature’ recruited into the laboratory - are also constructed by scientific craftwork. Facts, and the objects they describe, exist only where the networks (comprised of inscriptions, techniques, tools, prior knowledge, all of which are the stabilised or even ‘reified’ products of prior scientific craftwork) that produce and sustain them are extended:
If we ask whether this statement works outside science, the answer is that the statement holds in every place where the radioimmunoassay has been reliably set up. This does not imply that the statement holds true everywhere, even where the radioimmunoassay has not been set up… One can believe that somatostatin has this effect and even claim by induction that the statement holds true absolutely, but this amounts to a belief and a claim, rather than to a proof (182-183).

According to Latour, science does not appear, either to scientists or non-scientists, as a craft. This is because the production of scientific accounts entails the post hoc reconstruction of (actual) scientific craftwork as ‘science proper’ (an idealised rational practice): “The process of construction involves the use of certain devices whereby all traces of production are made extremely difficult to detect” (176)…
"The result of the construction of a fact is that it appears unconstructed by anyone; the result of rhetorical persuasion in the agonistic field is that participants are convinced that they have not been convinced; the result of matierialisation is that people can swear that material considerations are only minor components of the “thought process”; the result of investments of credibility is that participants can claim that economics and beliefs are in no way related to the solidity of science; as to the circumstances, they simply vanish from accounts being better left to political analysis than to an appreciation of the hard and solid world of facts!" (240)

Crucially, Latour claims that it is through this process of inversion that ‘reality’ is attributed with a stable, independent existence prior to science. This is the most (in)famous argument of Laboratory Life: ‘Reality’ (the world as an objectively existing ‘out there’, passively awaiting discovery and explanation by science) is itself a product of scientific craftwork. Latour inverts the realist assumption that scientific facts describe a pre-existing reality: “Reality cannot be used to explain why a statement becomes a fact, since it is only after it has become a fact that the effect of reality is obtained” (180). According to Latour, facts and reality attain their respective status in the process of their construction: facts as true (because they correspond to what is actually ‘out there’) and reality as the ‘out there’ to which scientific facts correspond. The many interrelated components involved in science as a craft practice are purified to produce the realist view, which stabilises the demarcation between science and nature.

In its claims about the construction of facts (that is, the process by which statements are stabilised to the point of appearing as true descriptions of an external and pre-existing reality), Laboratory Life seems very much like an intensification and extension of Kuhn’s claim’s about ‘extradordinary science’ to normal science. Let me briefly re-cap Kuhn’s argument: Scientific practice is situated within ‘paradigms’ that include rules for the production and validation of claims (puzzle solving). In the course of normal science (that is, where a paradigm is stable and dominant) science proceeds ‘as usual’ according to these rules. However, when competing paradigms make incommensurable claims, they cannot be adjudicated on the basis of either correspondence with nature or conformity with pre-determined scientific norms (since different paradigms mobilise nature differently, and appeal to different criteria as definitive of legitimate scientific practice). Kuhn’s argument is that at these moments of paradigmatic conflict ‘social’ factors are crucial in determining which paradigm manages to recruit enough scientists to ‘win out’ over competitors (Kuhn focuses on individual psychological factors, temperament or sensibility, in scientists’ decisions about allegiance to a paradigm).

Latour’s argument about the ‘agonistic field’ (p237-238) suggests that a similar process of ‘wrangling’ takes place continuously in the course of normal science. Where for Kuhn extra-scientific factors enter into questions of validity only at times of paradigm crisis, for Latour all scientific statements require stabilisation through the mobilisation of material elements and the on-going negotiation of scientific norms. Scientists are always in the process of deciding “what they choose to accept as negative evidence” (p156 emphasis original). And, “a complex web of evaluations simultaneously enter into any one deduction or decision... evaluations of the exigencies of professional practice, the constraints of time, the possibility of future controversy, and the urgency of concomitant research interests” (p159). Similarly, “negotiations as to what counts as a proof [contention over incommensurable scientific norms] or what constitutes a good assay [arguments about how to ‘use’ natural elements in scientific practice] are no more or less disorderly than any argument between lawyers or politicians” (p237).

However, Latour departs decisively from Kuhn in his claims about the co-production of the (natural) ‘things’ to which facts correspond. His focus on the minutiae of material scientific practice (in contrast to Kuhn’s focus on the history of scientific claims) leads to a very different account of the relationship between science and nature than Kuhn’s. Kuhn implicitly posits a radical disjuncture between an ultimately unknowable nature and processes of scientific knowledge production. From this position, epistemology appears as essentially a problem of representation (and contestation over how representation of nature can be rationally achieved), and reality is split: into ‘things-in-themselves’, which recede into a fundamentally inaccessible ontological level, and into a concept of reality that is deployed to stabilise representational statements.

At times Laboratory Life appears to end up with a relativised neo-Kantianism similar to Kuhn’s, with the difference that Latour focuses on the micro-processes whereby certain ‘chunks’ of reality are incorporated or recruited into the material world of scientific practice, i.e. the laboratory. From this perspective, what Latour adds to Kuhn is an account of how science perforates the membrane separating the domain of epistemology from the ontological substrate that underlies it, which necessarily resists any kind of wholesale incorporation. But in doing so he appears to be relying on an obfuscation of whether he is ‘crafting’ his account of science at the epistemic or ontic level, by tacking back and forth between claims about statements and things ‘in-themselves-(in-the-laboratory)’, and ‘things-in-themselves(-out-there)’ (this is particularly apparent in his explicit discussion of realism, p177-179).

So, in response to the questions: how is the ‘effect’ of Laboratory Life produced? How does Latour ‘make’ his own account of science? we might say: by working up and sustaining a fundamental ambiguity between the epistemological and ontological aspects of what he means by ‘facts’ (the objects and outputs of scientific knowledge production). If these two dimensions (first, epistemological: the construction of facts through the stabilisation of statements as true; and second, ontological: the actual correspondence between natural entities ‘out there’ and the facts which represent them truthfully) are held separate and we demand from Latour a stable account of their relationship, we can always push him into incoherence. But this is to miss the point that I think he is getting at: the absolute and necessary entanglement of knowledge and material reality, the mutual co-constitution of epistemology and otology. We can thus reject Latour by subjecting him to a version of what Foucault called ‘the blackmail of the Enlightenment’. But Latour’s argument is precisely that such stable and unquestionable demarcations (between nature and society; between social and technical practices; between ideas and objects) are not a priori, but are produced and then naturalised (that is, purified of all traces of their production) in the course of scientific craftwork.

Some critical questions about Laboratory Life

Laboratory Life raises a number of fascinating questions about the viability of a sociology of scientific knowledge and the value of its contribution. For instance, does Latour’s claim that facts (and the objects they describe) exist only where the networks that produce and sustain them are extended, amount to anything more than a contemporary restatement (and, perhaps, an empirical demonstration) of Hume’s extreme scepticism? Hume pointed out that we can never ‘prove’ the validity of inducted laws or generalisations that are applied to events that have not yet happened (or that are assumed to have happened without direct observation)?

Similarly, Latour’s claim that scientists are involved in the production of order from chaos sometimes seems to amount to nothing more extraordinary than the observation that scientific practice depends upon technical competence and settled protocols: “Between scientists and chaos, there is nothing but a wall of archives, labels, protocol books, figures and papers. But this mass of documents provides the only means of creating more order” (245). While Laboratory Life is fascinating to read, and does make me think about science is a very concrete way, I am not convinced that a sociology of scientific knowledge contributes anything particularly novel or contentious to our understanding of science.

And, rather than clarifying the always ‘political’ and necessarily ‘social’ nature of scientific practice, does Lator actually render the problem of science’s relation to politics and society entirely opaque? For instance, he states quite clearly that he is not interested in issues of political interference or social ‘intrigue’ (cannot find quote). But how is Latour able to differentiate between the (sinister) political interference that he is not interested in, and the ‘agonistic’ wrangling amongst scientists that he sees as constitutive of ‘normal’ scientific practice (“the same “political” qualities are necessary both to make a point and to out-manoeuvre a competitor”, p237)? Without reference to the norms circumscribing science as a privileged site at least ideally insulated from political, economic or social influence, how do we critique, for example, the pernicious influence of drug-companies on research and development? (I know this is a hackneyed point).

Another problem, is that Latour wants to make general claims about science but his account of science is completely tied to modern, laboratory science. Contemporary scientific practice surely does involve a level of specialisation and complexity that ‘separates’ it from direct engagement with nature. But it seems paradoxical that Latour wants to restore history to science, to demonstrate the historicity of things, yet is completely focused on scientific practice at a particular historical moment (namely, the present). Science has its origin in practices that were much ‘closer’ to nature, like people plotting the movement of the stars. And similarly ‘close’ scientific practices exist today, for instance in acts of ‘public science’, where bird watchers throughout North America report their sightings and contribute to understandings of migratory patterns.