Reproductive technologies, social innovation, and the future of kinship studies

If in the early 1980s it seemed that the study of kinship was in decline, in the 1990s it appeared to be reviving. However, this was kinship in a rather different guise. Kinship had been transformed above all by the interest in gender, which had forced a very thorough reexamination of the way in which kinship had been constituted as a subject of academic concern. By the late 20th century the symbolism of procreation, gender roles, emotions, and households and their everyday activities had all become prominent themes of study. The culturalist influence encouraged anthropologists to examine both their own and indigenous assumptions about kinship more closely. However, the meaning of kinship, paradoxically perhaps, is less self-evident than it seemed in the mid-20th century, in part because studies have foregrounded such diverse themes as physical substance, houses, the person, children, motherhood, fatherhood, and feeding. Their starting point has been to examine what “relatedness” comprises in a particular culture, rather than assuming it in advance.

Above all, Schneider’s insight that anthropological definitions of kinship rested on the Western assumption that kinship derived from sexual procreation, and that this was manifestly not the case in every non-Western example, forced a rethinking of what constitutes kinship. The centrality of procreation in Western kinship has also highlighted another analytic assumption. As noted above, anthropologists and sociologists had long emphasized that their interest was purely in the social aspects of kinship rather than the physical or biological ones (which were in many cases quite unknowable in the absence of genetic testing). In so doing they were of course reiterating (rather than analyzing) a division central to modern Western thinking. Adoption, which in Western societies is thought of as a social connection (albeit one that is modeled on biological ties between parents and children), makes this disjunction at the heart of kinship very clear. It is not surprising therefore that adoption, as well as other forms of what had previously been labeled “fictive” kinship (that is, kinship that is not based on biological or marital ties; blood brotherhood and godparenting are other examples), has emerged more prominently as a topic for research.

Many of these studies have focused on new and emerging forms of kinship in the West. In this respect the study of kinship has been stimulated by the perceived changes in the nature of the family in Western societies. Instability and divorce in heterosexual marriage, the advent of same-sex marriage, gender equality, gay rights, falling fertility rates, and increasing numbers of people living on their own all suggest some profoundly new practices and experiences of Western kinship.

Although it might have been assumed that the distinction between the physical and the social was relatively stable and straightforward in the West, studies have revealed complex shifts in the mutual definition of these terms. Analyses of kinship practices among gays and lesbians, for example, have demonstrated that the opposition between biological and social ties may turn conventional understandings on their head. American anthropologist Kath Weston’s informants’ “coming out” stories revealed that they conceptualized biological kinship as temporary and uncertain because biological kin had been known to disrupt or sever kin ties upon learning of a relative’s homosexuality. Meanwhile, her informants’ friendships were invested with certainty, depth, and permanence and were discussed in an idiom of kinship by those whose experience of biological kin had been thoroughly disrupted. Ellen Lewin, another American anthropologist, has found similar complexities in her studies of lesbian and gay parenthood.

Developments in reproductive technologies have highlighted another way that the boundaries between the “natural,” given domain of kinship and the “cultural,” technologically alterable world of science are by no means fixed or impermeable. Anthropologists have once again turned to the opposition between nature and culture—this time to demonstrate that the supposedly “natural” world of kinship can no longer be thought of in these terms. Some technological interventions, most notably various medical forms of birth control (e.g., oral contraceptives, the intrauterine device, the diaphragm, vasectomy), were common by the later 20th century. Others—in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, artificial insemination, and other technologies—had become part of the cultural repertoire, if not the actual practice, of many ordinary people. By the early 21st century the anthropology of kinship had joined with the anthropological and sociological study of science and medicine to provide a rich avenue of exploration that brought together culturally based ideas about bodies and procreation with an examination of how scientists, medical practitioners, patients, policy makers, and the general public experience and articulate understandings of fertility and medicine.

The profound implications of being “socially” (technologically, or scientifically) able to intervene and remake what had previously been seen as the “natural” means of kinship suggest that kinship may take on quite new meanings and that this in turn may have a profound effect on Western knowledge practices more generally. Marilyn Strathern has argued that the significance of kinship for Euro-Americans in the past was that it constituted that part of the social world that was naturally given rather than subject to choice. Once it becomes technologically alterable, as well as increasingly refracted through the language of consumer choice, this “given” quality of kinship is profoundly disrupted. Just what the effects of reproductive technologies will be—both in the West and in non-Western cultures—remains uncertain and is the subject of academic and wider debate.