Elizabeth F. S. Roberts

Reproductive governance in Latin America

This paper develops the concept of reproductive governance as an analytic tool for tracing the shifting political rationalities of population and reproduction. As advanced here, the concept of reproductive governance refers to the mechanisms through which different historical configurations of actors – such as state, religious, and international financial institutions, NGOs, and social movements – use legislative controls, economic inducements, moral injunctions, direct coercion, and ethical incitements to produce, monitor, and control reproductive behaviours and population practices. Examples are drawn from Latin America, where reproductive governance is undergoing a dramatic transformation as public policy conversations are coalescing around new moral regimes and rights-based actors through debates about abortion, emergency contraception, sterilisation, migration, and assisted reproductive technologies. Reproductive discourses are increasingly framed through morality and contestations over ‘rights’, where rights-bearing citizens are pitted against each other in claiming reproductive, sexual, indigenous, and natural rights, as well as the ‘right to life’ of the unborn. The concept of reproductive governance can be applied to other settings in order to understand shifting political rationalities within the domain of reproduction.

Assisted existence: an ethnography of being in Ecuador

In Ecuador, reproductive assistance, whether from God, extended family, or medical technologies, is emphasized and desirable in a precarious and unequal world with a minimal social safety net and chronic economic insecurity. Assistance is the very grounds of being. In better-resourced realities like parts of the United States, assisted reproductive technologies can trouble the biological and social autonomy of individual heterosexual couples. Juxtaposing assisted reproduction in these divergent sites demonstrates that resources can make autonomy easier to establish and assistance between people and things difficult to perceive. Through an insistence on the material specificity of assisted reproduction itself, this ethnographic contrast contributes to anthropological approaches to ontological questions of being. In particular, ethnographic observation of the material realities of reproductive treatments in Ecuador demonstrates that medical care is one means to instantiate race. Private assisted reproduction makes whiter babies and patients in the face of a crumbling public health care infrastructure whose patients are by definition poor and Indian. The framework of assistance might serve then as a means to ethnographically trace the constitution of racial being in better-resourced nations, as well as allow for a more comprehensive recognition of the interdependence of existence.

Nonsecular Medical Anthropology

ABSTRACT A nonsecular medical anthropology insists on the ways medicine and science have constituted ‘the secular’ itself through the ‘secular self’—how medical knowing has been used to craft the secular political subject. As James Boon noted, too often in social theory, “religion gets safely tucked away—restricted theoretically to ‘meaning’ rather than power” (1998:245). The authors of the six articles in this special issue ‘untuck’ religiosity from within the norms and numbers of medicine itself, and examine how ‘secular’ medicine has relied on religious traditions to produce political secularity. These articles demonstrate that ‘secular’ medicine relies on religious others whose exclusion bespeaks latent religious commitments of citizenship in the modern political realm of health.

Bioethnography: A How-To Guide for the Twenty-First Century

This chapter describes our efforts to develop what we call “bioethnography,” a research platform that combines ethnographic and biological data to arrive at better understandings of the histories and life circumstances that shape health and inequality. This platform is made possible through our collaboration with environmental health scientists involved in a longitudinal, pregnancy-birth-cohort and chemical exposure study in Mexico City. Bioethnography is a slow process due to the epistemic, temporal and logistical coordination of disparate and differently positioned intellectual research ecologies. To illuminate these efforts, we reflect on key issues and challenges that have arisen so far within three specific investigations within the larger collaboration (neighborhood dynamics, sleeping and eating), to provide a preliminary guide for social scientists contemplating similar bioethnographic projects.

Gods, Germs, and Petri Dishes: Toward a Nonsecular Medical Anthropology

Abstract This commentary calls on medical anthropology to become programmatically non-secular. Despite recent anthropological critiques of secularity, within and outside of anthropology, most contemporary medical anthropologists continue to leave deities and religiosity out of their examinations of healing practices, especially in their accounts of biomedicine. Through a critical, relational constructionist lens, which traces how all entities are both constructed and real, a non-secular medical anthropology would insist that when deities are part of medical practice, they are integral to analysis. Importantly then, within the symmetrical nature of this same constructionist lens, biomedical entities like germs and petri dishes need to be accounted for just as much as deities.

Reproduction and Cultural Anthropology

Reproduction is central to contemporary anthropological theory, intersecting with studies of kinship, biomedicine, exchange, sex, gender, politics, nature, and capitalism. The production of reproduction as a category and its domaining as feminine, private, and biological was central to the modern Euro-American separation of industrial wage labor from domestic labor and care, that is, between reproduction and production and between nature and culture. Feminist anthropology of the 1970s called for a focus on womens lives, laying the foundation for an explosion of interest in reproductive experience, as well as critique of the category itself, as both natural and naturally private and female.

Practicing Population in Latin America

Population involves the counting of a group in a place. To count is to know. To know is to intervene. Knowing and intervening are complicated practices. Assigning groups to places is complicated as well. This set of essays, that examine how scientists make Latin American groups into “objects of inquiry and intervention” (Suárez-Díaz 2017a [this volume]) allows for a fundamental examination of how practicing population can involve seemingly disparate accounts of the relationship of groups to places. North American scientists tend to constitute the populations described in these papers as biologically essential groups located in timeless landscapes or as malleably cultural groups within national territories, while Latin American scientists tend to constitute populations through the examination of groups formed in relation to land. Debating the nature or culture of groups of people is a relatively recent activity. While nature became identifiable as “a thing” in early Enlightenment thought, until the mid-nineteenth century humans were understood as shaped in continuous relation to the material world around them, not through x percentages of nature or culture (Keller 2010). The German philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is often credited with providing us with culture, coming from volkgeist, the genius of a people. But it was only later that culture came to emphasize ephemerality and non-materiality as opposed to the hard reality of nature. Herder, instead, linked culture to cultivation (as in agriculture), signifying specific groups of people embedded within a particular climate, geography and language over time. Culture was made through the constant back and forth of land and bodies, both subject to continuous change. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century in the industrialized northern world that nature “hardened,” becoming less relational and more internal

Resources and race: assisted reproduction in Ecuador

This article considers the early period of development of IVF in Ecuador, focusing on factors that shaped the decade after the nations first successful IVF birth (1992–2002). It describes how a poorly resourced public healthcare sector compelled Ecuadorians towards private-sector medicine, which included assisted reproduction treatment, and how IVF clinics drew patients through the pervasive racial inequalities that characterise post-colonial Ecuadorian society. More generally, the development of assisted reproduction treatment in Ecuador exemplifies themes in 20th century healthcare provisioning and inequality in Latin America, making it essential to understand this larger picture when considering Ecuador’s IVF industry both within the region and also internationally.