Socio-Cultural Approaches to the Anthropology of Reproduction

Abstract

Attention to reproduction within anthropology emerged in early cross-cultural studies, largely descriptive and ethnomedical in nature, that examined reproduction in the context of cultural and religious beliefs around conception, childbirth and postpartum taboos, and knowledge about fertility regulation. However, the topic was given a new theoretical framing and disciplinary significance beginning in the 1980s when feminist scholars built on prior work on gender and kinship to articulate a new field of analysis that firmly situated reproduction at the nexus of power and politics. As Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp argued in their article, “The Politics of Reproduction” (Ginsburg and Rapp 1991, cited under Early Conceptual Frameworks and Edited Volumes) that demarcated this new field that they called the “politics of reproduction,” biological and social reproduction are inextricably intertwined. Social struggles over biological reproduction were also struggles over the reproduction of communities, states, and the shape of cultural futures. This insight provided a new theoretical language and analytic optic for future anthropological research. The field has flourished in the past three decades, with anthropologists drawing on cross-cultural data to demonstrate how reproduction is interwoven with culturally and historically specific ideals of gender and personhood, as well as beliefs about the morality and modernity of people and societies. From this breadth of research have emerged two primary, but not mutually exclusive, foci. The first builds from the early feminist critiques of the medicalization of pregnancy to examine experiences of pregnancy and birth, as well as the uptake and social effects of reproductive technologies, around the globe. The second analytical trajectory focuses on the politics of reproduction in the context of social inequality. Drawing on the concept of stratified reproduction, research in this arena examines policies, ideologies, and practices that work to devalue and discourage the reproductive capacities of groups of people deemed less desirable by virtue of race/ethnicity, class, nationality, religious or cultural practices, and so forth, while valorizing and enabling the reproduction of other groups. Newer work also employs the concept of reproductive governance to describe the centrality of reproduction to diverse moral, political, economic, and national agendas. Given the wealth of research in this field, including important work in qualitative sociology and biological anthropology, citations here refer to full-length ethnographic monographs or edited volumes by socio-cultural anthropologists (a few of which contain chapters written by anthropologists from other subdisciplines). Articles or edited book chapters have been included only if the work has been extremely influential, if there are few full-length monographs in the topical area, or if the author is influential but has not published a monograph. The field is also distinguished by a number of excellent edited book collections, which represent research from an array of authors and ethnographic locations. The anthropology of reproduction has significant overlap with the anthropology of motherhood/parenthood and the anthropology of childhood, which are not treated in depth here.