AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
Reproductive Tourism:
Through the Anthropological
“Reproscope”
Michal Rachel Nahman
Department of Health and Social Sciences, University of the West of England, Bristol, Frenchay
Campus, Bristol, BS16 1QY, United Kingdom; email: michal.nahman@uwe.ac.uk
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2016. 45:417–32
First published online as a Review in Advance on
August 3, 2016
The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at
anthro.annualreviews.org
This article’s doi:
10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030459
Copyright c 2016 by Annual Reviews.
All rights reserved
Keywords
reproductive tourism, reproscope, egg donation, surrogacy, globalization,
exploitation
Abstract
This review analyzes the emerging literature on reproductive tourism
through a metaphorical “reproscope,” focusing largely on cross-border egg
donation and surrogacy as the prime areas of contemporary anthropological
investigation. While acknowledging that reproductive travel is not new, this
article recognizes that there has been an increased volume of such travel
over the past couple of decades. It provides an overview of the major areas
of anthropological investigation into these transnational phenomena, globalization,
stratification, exploitation, race, nationalism, religion, biopower,
and bioethics. I propose that these areas of investigation may provide key
indications about the preoccupations of anthropology today. Namely, what
kind of discipline does anthropology imagine itself to be?
417
Click here to view this article's
online features:
• Download figures as PPT slides
• Navigate linked references
• Download citations
• Explore related articles
• Search keywords
ANNUAL
REVIEWS Further
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
INTRODUCTION
A look through our anthropological “reproscope” brings into view the following narrative: Global
assisted reproduction has grown, in recent years, to a multibillion-dollar industry, with millions of
cycles of in vitro fertilization (IVF) performed and more than five million babies born (Adamson
et al. 2012, ESHRE 2014). This activity has increasingly included a rise in cross-border assisted reproduction,
which has developed into its own billion-dollar industry. Human egg/oocyte donation/
purchasing and surrogacy in particular, among the top reasons why people traverse national borders
for assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), have more than doubled over the past few years
[exact numbers are unknown and therefore the European Society for Human Reproduction and
Embryology (ESHRE) has convened a global task force to attempt to quantify the current total
(Shenfield et al. 2010)]. At the same time, legal and ethical debates have caused old hubs for certain
techniques and practices to be shut down and new hubs to open up. From the first IVF birth in
1978 to today, ART around the globe has moved from being a slightly hushed, secretive endeavor
(Landau 1998) undertaken out of desperation to a more socially acceptable reproductive method
for many. Hundreds if not thousands of online spaces are dedicated to IVF’s promotion: company
websites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and blogs of commissioning mothers and self-disclosing
oocyte donors, all of which presents a vast “affective assemblage” of transnational reproduction
(Kroløkke 2014b). Hampshire & Simpson (2015) call this time the third phase of IVF, where this
technology is geographically, ethnically, and socioeconomically open to ever-more constituencies.
Meanwhile, governments have begun to enact laws to facilitate and attract “fertility tourism”
as well as to limit its potentially exploitative effects on their own “biological citizens” (Petryna
2013). This socially mediated sojourning brings into view a vast global movement of people, tools,
techniques, gametes, and babies.
And the social scientists have followed on their own quests.
Contemporary anthropology boasts a burgeoning examination of reproductive tourism (a concept
that has been subject to much critique and is viewed critically in this review). This work
examines economies, labor, globalization, affect, morality, exploitation, colonialism, gender, race,
class, subjectivity, altruism, and gift giving. The ethnographic work spans the major sites that
have provided services and body parts, as well as places of origin for commissioning prospective
parents: India, Thailand, Nepal, Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Israel, Latin
America, Africa, the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, and Europe. Several notable fulllength
ethnographies have been published that cover transnational ARTs and adoption over the
past few years (Almeling 2011; Deomampo 2016; Howell 2006; Inhorn 2015; Nahman 2013; Pande
2014a,b; Ragon´e 1994; Rudrappa 2015; Speier 2016; Teman 2010; Thompson 2005; Twine 2011;
Vora 2015a; Whittaker 2015). Edited collections and review articles have also been published on
the subject (Beck 2012, G¨urtin & Inhorn 2011, Inhorn & G¨urtin 2011, Hampshire & Simpson
2015). These reviews and ethnographies indicate that anthropologists are at the forefront of the
social sciences in exploring both “infertility journeys” (Speier 2011) of prospective parents and
the experiences of their egg and sperm donors and surrogates.1
Without doubt, the most prolific anthropologist to have written about cross-border reproduction
is Marcia Inhorn (1994, 2003, 2012, 2015), long-time researcher of reproduction in Egypt
and the Arab Middle East. When it became apparent that her interlocutors were traveling for
reproduction, undertaking quests beyond state borders, not just within them, she began to follow
them. Her most recent and comprehensive ethnography of “reprotravel” (Inhorn 2015) explores
1
I have included qualitative sociologists’ works in this review because the line is blurred historically and in the present between
the works of these two disciplines.
418 Nahman
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
the tensions and hardships of 220 people from around the world who have sought IVF services
in Dubai. There, the tensions between cosmopolitanism and “Emeritization” are experienced.
Through deeply detailed, richly woven accounts of cross-border reproduction, Inhorn’s (2015)
book advocates thinking more carefully about reproductive tourism as a concept and developing
a reprolexicon for exploring the multitude of issues that emerge from these travels and practices.
Aiming not to separate the local and the global, as perhaps was a tendency in her earlier book Local
Babies, Global Science (Inhorn 2003), Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai (Inhorn
2015) shows how Inhorn continually thinks through the links between medicine, reproduction,
and anthropology in a manner that has been greatly influential on the field. Her book ends with a
decidedly activist bent. Inhorn (2015) details several areas that she hopes will change in transnational
reproduction: infertility prevention, support for the infertile (including support for those
deliberately child-free), and finally her own personal commitment to the low-cost IVF movement.
What began in the 1970s with feminists either warning against the evils of ARTs or valorizing
them as women’s salvation from the need to reproduce transformed more recently into an
area of intensive investigation that has brought reproduction to the center of anthropological
theorizing (Ginsburg & Rapp 1995), including an interest in kinship, identities, the gift, and neoliberalist
enterprise (notably, Franklin 1997; Rapp 1999; Strathern 1992a,b; also see Inhorn &
Birenbaum-Carmeli 2008 for a comprehensive review of the anthropology of ARTs; and Constable
2009 for review of work on family and intimacy). Scholars then turned to focus on how this subject
links with, materializes, or reproduces culture, kinship, economies, nation, race, religion, and
globalization (Franklin 1997; Kahn 2000; Nahman 2005, 2006, 2013; Roberts 2012). Thompson’s
(2005) influential Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies describes
the “ontological choreographies” that women undergo, a kind of strategic self-objectification to
subject themselves to IVF. Franklin’s (2013) crucial theoretical intervention in Biological Relatives:
IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship demonstrates that, through the looking glass of IVF,
biology itself becomes contingent (p. 28). There she asks, “[W]hat is IVF reproducing in lieu of
children? What kind of new norm is IVF?” (Franklin 2013, p. 27). Her answers take us on a whirlwind,
like Alice down the rabbit hole, to examine how IVF remakes gender and kinship as ideas
and practices in the world. Following Thompson and Strathern, Franklin shows how yearnings
to be parents and yearnings to be normatively gendered both become naturalized through IVF.
Given the wide range of work done on reproductive tourism outside anthropology (Cooper
& Waldby 2014; Dickenson 2007; Ikemoto 2009; Kroløkke et al. 2012; Kroløkke 2014a,b, 2015;
Storrow 2005; Widdows 2009; see Hudson et al. 2011 for a review), the anthropological work
in this arena provides distinctive and valuable depth, detail, and the intimacy afforded by thick
description and having “been there.”
Moving beyond a valorization of this work, I find it fitting in reflexive anthropological fashion
to follow Strathern, Franklin, and Thompson by asking several questions. What becomes
naturalized through the anthropological study of reproductive tourism? What do anxieties and
debates about the naming of reproductive tourism, so central to many theoretical arguments, indicate
about anthropological tensions around anthropology’s role? Is anthropology today simply
about “naming” (Rabinow 1999), or do we have wider social and moral obligations (Fasin 2013,
Scheper-Hughes 2009)? I argue that the study of reproductive tourism offers anthropology the
potential to “reconstruct its theoretical scaffolding still in thrall to a few hegemonic metropolitan
centers of knowledge production about, and dissemination throughout, the world” (Elie 2015,
p. 9). The anthropology of reproductive tourism is, somewhat fittingly, a border object between
what Robbins (2013) calls the anthropology of suffering and the anthropology of the good. The
work in this area manifests the struggles experienced by anthropologists today regarding what kind
of discipline we are. This struggle and the work produced by anthropologists are indelibly shaped
www.annualreviews.org • Reproductive Tourism 419
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
by the context of what is happening globally (a critique made by many, including Trouillot 2003,
cited in Robbins 2013) in terms of economic crises, global wars on terror, and mass migrations of
people from the Middle East to Europe.
This review poses some questions regarding how anthropologists have looked at cross-border
reproduction to query what role this “looking” has had within and for the discipline more widely.
What kind of knowledge object is reproductive tourism? How has the study of transnational reproduction
drawn on the historical traces of anthropology to date? How has the study of reproduction
across borders been a kind of tourism for anthropologists themselves, taking us on journeys in
and out of various arenas and debates? I argue that reproductive tourism, or what I have called
elsewhere “repro-migration” (Nahman 2013), is itself a reflection of aspects of anthropology today
and that it affords moments of cultural critique and more nuanced understandings of what is
common to the human experience of capitalism, racism, and globalization. By being itself a set of
practices negotiated around borders, reproductive tourism puts into question the global utility of
borders and what they mean to people who experience their limits and possibilities. Clearly repromigrations,
whether they are short term or long term, have a larger salience for anthropological
thinking, as several ethnographies on the subject illustrate.
I begin by setting out the historical problem of reproductive tourism in/for anthropology,
then I examine how anthropologists have responded to debates outside the field and how we have
looked at and framed this problem through theories of biosociality and bioeconomy, moralities and
ethics, globalization, stratification and capitalism, and nationalism and race. Under these broad
categories, this review explores how we have mapped notions of kinship across borders, thinking
about the global and the local, the reaffirmation of racial and national thinking, the exploitation
of women, and ethical concerns. The essay then looks at debates about naming these practices in
the study of cross-border fertility practices. The trope of a reproscope is used throughout to help
remind us that we are examining not just the field of reproductive tourism but also rethinking our
own stakes in ‘looking’ at reproductive tourism. I conclude the paper by reflecting that the research
on reproductive tourism itself can be seen as a kind of reproductive telescope or reproscope. In so
doing, the article is tracing the constellations produced through our reproscopes and is bringing
into sharp view elements of contemporary anthropological problem-framing and myth-making.
ANTHROPOLOGY OF REPRODUCTIVE TOURISM
AS TOURISM OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Anthropological work on cross-border kinship, parenthood, and international familial connections
forged in the contexts of war, trade, and slavery is not new (Boswell 1988, Briggs 2003, Dubinsky
2007, Fonseca et al. 2015, Gudeman 1971, Kearney 1995, Mintz 1998, Mintz & Wolf 1950).
US international adoption of Greek, German, and other European children after the Second
World War highlighted these practices (Howell 2006), often involving either child abandonment
or subterfuge (Balcom 2006, 2007; Boswell 1988). Practices of cross-border adoption were also
widespread in Ceausescu’s Romania and elsewhere (Kligman 1992). Yet I would argue that the
scale of the current movement makes it distinctive today. As Inhorn & G¨urtin (2011) show in
discussing cross-border reproductive care, contemporary forms of reproductive tourism involve
the collaboration of two globalized industries, namely tourism and IVF. New technologies of
reproduction mean people are confronted by new kinds of decisions, but the decisions themselves,
as Franklin (2011) has argued, are “familiar and even ‘ordinary’” (p. 815).
Yet the recent, intense anthropological scrutiny of reproduction across borders may in itself be
reproductive, working as it does through social scientific concepts and applying them to the field of
ARTs. This work might be characterized as consolidating the social scientific gaze or interpretive
420 Nahman
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
authority on the subject itself: its authority to look at the world given greater credibility by its ability
to reproduce its own way of looking at things. Much of the work on cross-border reproduction,
while testing our conceptual tools, is revising old ways of looking at things and is concerned with
reinvigorating and critiquing classic concepts and inventing new ones. Indeed, the social sciences
have benefited greatly from this kind of renewal and change, for example in the valuable work of
feminist anthropologists who have deconstructed and renewed the anthropology of kinship, the
family, and gender [Carsten 2000; Edwards 2000; Franklin 1997; Strathern 1992a,b; Weston 2013
(1991); Yanagisako & Delaney 1995].
One significant contribution of this work is the breaking down of traditional analytical domains.
Here, “the very act of description makes what is being described part of something else”
(Strathern 1992a, p. 204, note 21). This dedomaining of knowledge constitutes a significant analytical
contribution of the anthropology of reproductive tourism. Such an interpretive practice
demonstrates how seemingly distinct arenas are, therefore, in unanticipated ways, parts of one
another or “merographic,” as Strathern (1992a) and Franklin (2003) have classically shown.
Building on this classic work, what do the increasingly intensified and standardized practices of
cross-border purchase of gametes tell us about what “IVF reproduces” other than babies (Franklin
2013, Pavone 2015)? For instance, one of the central questions of a project I began in 2000, and
articulated in Extractions: An Ethnography of Reproductive Tourism (Nahman 2013), analyzes how the
everyday practices and procedures of cross-border egg donation create and reinforce nationalized,
racialized bodies, borders, and ideals.
This kind of critique also works at the level of metaphor, figuration, and “diffraction” (Haraway
1997). When I began to examine this topic, I asked whether eggs could be seen as synecdochal to
the nation, i.e., do the identities imagined to be enclosed in these cells-becoming-babies mirror
how the nation and its borders are imagined? I had been thinking at the time of racist reproductive
practices in Israel and the policing of national borders more generally. And indeed I found that
borders are policed at the level of the body and the nation in similar ways (Nahman 2005, 2006,
2008, 2013). Everyday Israeli responses to the second Palestinian Intifada seemed, for example,
resonant with what was transpiring with cross-border reproduction. There was both a descriptive
and an analytic element involved in viewing together the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and crossborder
egg donation. Observing jointly these two disparate arenas of practices and narratives
offered an ethnographic benefit to understanding both subjects more deeply than could have been
done if each was considered separately. I called these relationships “synecdochic ricochet effects,”
gleaned in ethnographic moments (Nahman 2006). In a similar vein, Vora’s account of surrogacy
in India critiques the imagined body of the surrogate as an “empty space.” She shows how that
figuration illuminates colonial imaginaries of “newly encountered land as empty and unpopulated”
(Vora 2015a;b, p. 144). In a collection of essays entitled Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from
Kinship and Genetics (Wade 2007), several authors present similar findings: Campbell explores how
“cultural projects are being realized by clinical means” (p. 95) in gamete-matching practices; Marre
shows how Spanish families attempt to preserve something of the country and culture of their
child’s origin in transnational adoption; and Howell & Melhuus found that in contrast to Norway’s
public aversion to being a “sorting society,” transnational adoption and ARTs instantiate biological
and cultural fundamentalism among commissioning and adoptive parents. All are instances of
de- and cross-domaining in cultural practices. They exemplify ethnographic work that thinks
beyond domains that may not form new wholes but whose analytic mergers enable new insights
into each part, by viewing or scoping cross-border reproduction from a position that reframes
or recasts analytical domains. This work, in a sense, mirrors what happens more widely under
global capitalism, where some boundaries become eroded and new possibilities emerge. These
occasionally allow glimpses of a potentially positive future.
www.annualreviews.org • Reproductive Tourism 421
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
BIOPOWER, BIOECONOMIES, AND BIOSOCIALITIES
From a perspective less concerned with core anthropological tropes and their undoing, and more
closely affiliated to Foucauldian questions of power, concepts such as “biological citizenship”
(Petryna 2013) and “biosociality” (Rabinow 1995) put the notion of power, political and economic
inequality, war, histories of colonialism, and global stratification at the forefront of analysis
(Bharadwaj 2008; Gupta 2006, 2012; Nahman 2008, 2011, 2013; Pande 2009, 2010, 2011, 2014a,b;
Pfeffer 2011; Rudrappa 2012, 2015; Vora 2013, 2014, 2015a,b; Whittaker 2009, 2010, 2011, 2015;
Vertommen 2016). This literature perhaps comments critically without being prescriptive. But in
another vein, it also intervenes as Scheper-Hughes (2009) has suggested.
Much of the movement across borders today is a consequence of regulations that limit the
numbers of donors in a specified country, prohibitive costs to many potential users, legislation
barring certain categories of people from procreating through ARTs in their home countries,
and adoptive protocols that make home-country adoption a challenge or close to impossible.
Women in economically poorer countries have been seen as “bioavailable” or “biodesirable”
(Cohen 2005, Gunnarsson Payne 2015). The rise of Internet-based communication has driven
and enabled prospective parents to search online for other routes to reproduction, and clinics
or reproductive service providers in some countries have taken up the new and highly profitable
business opportunities that have emerged in this arena. Concepts such as “bioeconomy” and
“biosociality” have been used to understand this emergence.
Deomampo (2013), in a rare ethnographic investigation of the intermediaries in Indian surrogacy,
examines how women both gain power and are subject to power in the practices of the
caretaker–agent role. Pande’s (2011, 2010, 2014a,b) analysis of surrogate mothers living in a surrogate
hostel examines how the mother–worker role is both taken on and resisted. Pande’s work
on the complexities of the negotiation of the surrogate’s role by the women themselves demonstrates
again the value of seeing reproductive travel from the perspective of those who must stay
put. Pande’s firsthand account of living among surrogates positions her well to narrate these
complexities.
My study of Romanian oocyte sellers (Nahman’s 2006, 2013), also gleaned from living briefly
in an oocyte extraction clinic in Bucharest, explores the tensions between being subjected and
empowered. Such tensions mean that egg donors cannot be thought of solely as exploited victims;
conventional categories of “eggsploitation” (a widely used antisurrogacy term) versus free-market
liberation are, in a sense, devoid of meaning in this context. Taking the women’s own words,
Nahman sees the oocyte donors as “egg sellers” and “theorists of reproduction” at the same time,
following anthropological traditions of emic analysis (Abu-Lughod 1993).
Vora’s (2013) account of how Indian surrogates’ bodies become “potentialized” shows how
longer-term benefits can be accrued by surrogates, including those of emotions and care. Thus
transnational transactions in bodily substance can be promissory in terms of capital accumulation
not only for clinics and doctors (Thompson 2005) but also for egg donors, surrogates, and the like.
These interpretations of what surrogates and egg donors acquire from engaging in such practices
should provoke ongoing debate about whether eggs and embodied potentialities of surrogates are
commodities or assets (see Birch & Tyfield 2013 for a critique of the overuse of the prefix “bio-”).
From such analyses as above there emerges a sense for the nuanced biosocialities lived by the least
empowered actors in the arena of reproductive tourism.
Indeed Foucauldian ideas of biopower figure strongly in the new anthropological literature
on reproductive tourism. Inhorn (2011), following Bharadwaj (2008), has proposed a notion
of a “bioscape” as exemplified in the intensified flows of biological substances and parts across
borders—what Bharadwaj called “biocrossing” to connote “a crossing between biology, biology
422 Nahman
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
and machine and across geo-political, commercial, ethical and moral borders” (Bharadwaj 2008,
p. 102). These symbolic-material crossings, Bharadwaj warns, provide sites, too, where, in addition
to critiquing the enactments of biopower by science, medicine, and technology, anthropologists’
own assertions about the new nature/culture splits and imploding boundaries should also be something
we analyze.
In examining the complex and multiple workings of power in transnational reproduction, anthropologists
have moved beyond dualistic power/resistance and global/local dyads toward theorizing
“global assemblages” (Ong & Collier 2005). This perspective enables us not only to examine
the moral and ethical repercussions of technologies and practices of cross-border reproduction,
but also to query anthropologically the discipline’s role in the wider society. Reproductive tourism
then becomes an epistemological site for queer/querying anthropology.
MORALITIES AND ETHICS
Scholarly and activist discussions have centered on the ethics of these processes, whether payment
for eggs and sperm and babies should or should not be practiced (cf. Thompson 2007 for a
strong argument in support of paying egg donors who donate for stem cell research). Some
anthropologists have called for a universal feminist bioethics, based on global solidarity (Gupta
2006), and a ban on paid surrogacy and egg donation (Gupta 2012). Discussions in feminist
bioethics and philosophy have often aimed at banning such cross-border practices, having been
deemed exploitative (Dickenson 2007, Widdows 2009). Analyzing the global market for surrogacy
through the frame of reproductive justice and its race and class dimensions, Twine (2011) provides
a deeper examination of the effects of racism on the global scene of surrogacy. As seen with the
organ-trafficking debates, perspectives have diverged significantly (Scheper-Hughes 2002). With
respect to cross-border reproduction, anthropologists have tended to see their role as responsible
for depiction, description, and critical analysis (though see Franklin 2013 and Bharadwaj 2008 for
more epistemological questions). Yet, there has been a more recent move toward thinking through
intervention (Gupta 2012, Rudrappa 2015) or through “interferences” (Nahman 2012).
Debates in the feminist bioethics literature (Dickenson 2007, Pfeffer 2011, Widdows 2009)
have been a centrally defining aspect of anthropological concern as well (Tanderup et al. 2015).
Yet, some of the anthropologists approach it differently, attempting critique of the universal
subject and questioning Western liberal human rights discourses. The critique of “exploitation”
(Mitra 2015; Nahman 2008; Pande 2014a,b; Rudrappa 2015; Vora 2015a; Whittaker 2009, 2010,
2011, 2015; Whittaker & Speier 2010), when considered in light of postcolonial thinking, ethnographic
depth, and deep identification with the Other by anthropologists, produces a sensitized,
nuanced understanding of the complexity underpinning reproductive tourism. Although very well
intentioned, calls for “a more equitable” system of globalized reproduction, as Cooper & Waldby
(2014) enjoin in their book Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy,
often fail to highlight how this kind of labor is situated in a self-reproducing, chaotic
system of capitalism (cf. Bear 2015a, Bear et al. 2015). There is nothing sensational about how
egg donors or surrogates are treated; it is emblematic of “banal capitalism” (Nahman 2013). Or
as Rudrappa (2015) opines in her ethnography of surrogacy in India, Discounted Life: The Price of
Global Surrogacy in India,
If reproductive justice is to prevail, women must have access to comprehensive health care, where their
nuclear and extended family members’ health and medical needs are met, in order for them to live full
and satisfying lives. And crucially, reproductive justice cannot prevail without an acute consciousness
www.annualreviews.org • Reproductive Tourism 423
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
of social hierarchies that can only be confronted with the force of a critical mass of actors working
in tandem with each other, across various social strata. If and when these conditions are met, then
transnational surrogacy has the potential to be a part of reproductive justice. (p. 173)
Rudrappa is suggesting that policy interventions are insufficient for ameliorating the experiences
of surrogates. Such a suggestion involves a vastly different reproscope with magnification of
the problem and solution. The various ways that anthropologists have contributed to the morality
and ethics debate, detailed above, as well as to interdisciplinary collaborations (such as that
evidenced in G¨urtin & Inhorn 2011 and Inhorn & G¨urtin 2011 and the collaborative work with
scientists and doctors in Inhorn & Patrizio 2009 and Inhorn et al. 2012) could be examined in
greater depth. One future line of inquiry into cross-border reproduction could be an analytical
mapping of the kinds of interventions that social scientists have undertaken in this field and the
epistemological and sociocultural implications of those efforts.
GLOBALIZATION AND STRATIFICATION
Globalization is one of the central unifying themes of research on social stratification. As travel
becomes ever cheaper and makes sense as a way to expand and deepen reproductive practices
of clinics, hopeful parents-to-be come to accept it as an ideal option (Bergmann 2011, G¨urtin
& Inhorn 2011, G¨urtin 2011, Inhorn 2011, Nahman 2011, Pande 2011, Whittaker 2011). This
action often shifts people’s understandings of themselves as national subjects and of their intended
children as racialized or unracialized subjects as well as shifts their understandings of culture in
general (Wade 2007). On other occasions, it merely hardens or reifies national, racial, and cultural
understandings, for instance, when prospective parents desire racially similar children or want
to preserve a child’s so-called cultural heritage (Bharadwaj 2008; Campbell 2007; Marre 2007;
Nahman 2011, 2013; Twine 2011).
Reproductive traveling can be seen as one aspect of “medical migration,” producing new subjectivities
and mobilities under globalization (Roberts & Scheper-Hughes 2011, Sobo 2009). Within
anthropological investigations of reproductive tourism, there is scholarly interest in ethics, an
impetus toward critique, and a highlighting of traditional themes of gender, religion, home and
belonging, and transnational kinships (Bharadwaj 2008, G¨urtin 2011, Inhorn 2012, Kahn 2000,
Teman 2010, Whittaker 2011, Zanini 2011). It is these aspects that unite the globalized practices
of cross-border reproduction (Franklin 2011, Pande 2011). That is, cultures of trans-border
reproduction may be more similar than different when viewed through the lens of narratives of
hope, family, religion, and relatedness (see also Wade 2007).
It is not that globalization is homogenizing; rather, global capitalism may create similar interests
and dispositions for people around the world through its constant restratification of market
possibilities. Anthropology has been interested in the particular, and feminist anthropologists
have offered groundbreaking critiques of universalizing tendencies of classical theory, especially
in ideas such as “local biology” (Lock 1995). The recent range of diverse studies of reproductive
travel around the world reveals that despite unique instances of “push and pull,” there is more
that unites globally than that which separates in reproductive tourism. Without making an economic
reductionist argument, global histories of colonialism, imperialism, and contemporary late
capitalist ethos saturate this commonality. Nahman (2013) argues, for example, that Israeli crossborder
egg donation can be viewed as emblematic of reproductive tourism under global capitalism.
Hence, we may need a reversible reproscope that allows us to see national detail while also viewing
common aspects of globalization in order to provide rich analyses, description, and commentary.
Observing what may be similar or common amid difference may be one area of critical descriptive
424 Nahman
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
and theoretical intervention to be made by this field of study to move us beyond reproducing and
consolidating accepted interpreting practices.
Mohanty (1988) long ago referred to shared legacies of colonialism, racism, and gender oppression
as a “common context of struggle.” A legacy of that concept resides in the work proposing
that we examine global stratification and inequalities (Franklin 2011; Inhorn 2015; Lewis 2016;
Nahman 2011, 2013; Pande 2011; Pfeffer 2011; Pollock 2003; Ragon´e 2005; Spar 2006; Tober
2001). Reproductive travel sheds light on global divisions in terms of class, race, and gender and
provides further justification for the argument that to separate the so-called global from the local
is to miss the intersectional, interwoven nature of these issues and forms of identification. Inequalities
are mutually produced within a wider system of historical, social, and economic processes,
making work in this area an apt lens. Reproductive travel affords moments of radical social critique,
as this literature shows.
CAPITALISM, NATIONALISM, AND RACE
Legal asymmetries have facilitated the evasion of the laws in certain countries in order to
help intended parents realize their fertility goals (Bergmann 2011, 2014; Nahman 2011). Some
Israeli physicians, for example, saw themselves as pioneers, helping women to become mothers at
whatever cost: taking eggs from working-class Israeli women (in this case, Jewish Israelis almost
certainly from North African and Asian backgrounds) by subjecting them to ovarian hyperstimulation
and the overproduction of oocytes for the purpose of implanting those eggs in women
who were paying out of pocket for IVF and egg donation in private Israeli clinics (for intra-Jewish
racial politics within Israel, see Lavie 2011a,b, 2012, 2014). As this practice became a sensitive
issue within Israel, raising a specter of moral and bioethical backlash, a transnational opening was
realized.
Whereas Israelis did not feel comfortable exploiting women in their own country, when women
from another country (in this instance, Romania) were the donors, out of sight was often out
of mind. Dickenson has called this widespread experience “the Lady Vanishes.” I called this
“reverse traffic” (Inhorn 2015, Nahman 2011), that is, not trafficking eggs per se, but circumventing
laws to keep differently situated groups of women geopolitically hidden from one another to
facilitate the emotional transformation necessary for undergoing fertility treatments, often at the
expense of other women’s subjection to exploitation. Central in the analysis of these processes
was how racially desirable these Romanian women were to the Israeli commissioning couples by
producing what I called a “different mixture” (Nahman 2006), a merging of the racialized and
eugenic notions of increased vitality with whiteness, Europeanness, internalized anti-Semitism,
and therefore imagined “racial improvement.” This process is part of the ontological choreography
that oocyte recipients undergo (Thompson 2005) in service to personal, national, and neoliberal
goals. What I observed in Israeli cross-border reproduction has also been seen by anthropologists
worldwide: a contradictory and ambivalent process within cross-border reproduction that both
highlights global racial and economic inequalities as well as hides them. These were processes
of whitening or imagining such whitening as a way of Europeanizing the Jewish state. Crossborder
reproductive travel remakes and re-entrenches national imaginaries, colonialism, and race
(Campbell 2007; Nahman 2006, 2013; Schurr 2016; Speier 2016; Vora 2014).
Banerjee (2014) refers to a “transnational reproductive caste system” in which social stratification
along the lines of race is heightened rather than reduced. This notion contradicts the
somewhat-more-hopeful, cosmopolitan images of the fertility tourism industry that sees crossing
borders as opening up peoples’ ideas of acceptability and desirability in terms of racial imaginings
(Inhorn 2015). Anthropologies of reproduction, medical anthropology, and the social study of
www.annualreviews.org • Reproductive Tourism 425
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
science and technology (STS) began to look beyond the bounds of the nation-state by using a
more global and transnational lens (Ong and Collier 2005) as events on the ground gained velocity,
and this drive is seen in the repro-migration literature as well (Bergmann 2011; G¨urtin 2011;
Inhorn 2011; Inhorn & Patrizio 2009; Pande 2010, 2011; Wade 2007; Whittaker 2009, 2010,
2011; Whittaker & Speier 2010).
Some analysts purport that reproductive technologies define the present era of capitalism and
globalization (Franklin 2005; Nahman 2013; Strathern 1992b, 1995). This kind of anthropological
parable-making is a way to tackle the topic of reproductive tourism as yet another aspect of
contemporary culture. The debates within this arena of research span topics such as kinship,
love, religion, travel, intimacy, commercialization, ethics, and globalization. Anthropologists bring
their expertise in creating detailed narratives and a curiosity to explore the different vantage
points where reproduction and tourism are brought together. Examining reproduction and global
movement together has become a task at which anthropologists are now skilled, a shape-shifting
research subject that moves around and is now our specialty in many senses. How and why have
anthropologists become specialists at this work? Despite the importance and service of multisited
research to anthropology more widely, might we at times be unwittingly providing service to the
global repro-tourism industry itself through this approach?
Some have commented that reproduction with IVF itself is already a “global form” (Beck
et al. 2012), highlighting a more symbolic understanding of how IVF practices and artifacts (eggs,
sperm, embryos) index the globe (Franklin 2005). The past decade has provided a literalizing
or enactment (Mol 2002) of this globalization of reproduction through the diverse practices of
people and clinics. Reproduction has become extended to a form of traveling one does or a form
of traveling one’s future babies or gametes do, not unlike older practices of international adoption
(Cannell 1990) and surrogacy. Yet the scale and scope of eggs and sperm traveling or leading
people to travel for their procurement raise new questions.
Naming
Anthropologists and others have grappled with the problematics of naming reproductive tourism.
We became wary of this nomenclature (Bergmann 2011, Inhorn & Patrizio 2009, Matorras 2005,
Nahman 2013, Whittaker 2009) because of its implications of free and easy travel, for the way it
upholds neoliberal values of individual choice-as-pleasure (Franklin 1997). Attention to the critique
of Appadurai (1996) warns that if analysis of reproductive travel merely privileges cultural
flows of people across borders without attention to power relations, we risk a very nonspecific,
nonparticular view of these practices. Inhorn & Patrizio (2009) have been central to developing
concepts such as “reproductive exile,” borrowing this term from Matorras (2005), and “reproductive
return,” which detail aspects of homecoming and diaspora. Others have suggested “the new
opportunism” (Whittaker 2011), “infertility journeys” (Speier 2011), “eggs-ploitation” (Pfeffer
2011), and “reprotravel” (Inhorn 2015). Cross-border reproductive care has been an influential
concept and the accepted term within the clinical literature (G¨urtin & Inhorn 2011, Inhorn &
G¨urtin 2011), although care was often lacking in instances of transnational reproduction. The concept
of “repro-migration” (Nahman 2013) denotes a specific kind of “medical migration,” which
helps view kinship, love, and global biopolitics in contemporary global travel practices (Roberts
& Scheper-Hughes 2011). The reproductive tourism concept is useful only if it implies a critical
stance toward the industry’s attempts to profit from human need (as in fertility or medical tourism).
The term minimizes the pain and dilemmas experienced by those who seek to have children abroad
and serves as a weak shorthand for the internal debates that prospective parents face. It also elides
426 Nahman
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
reference to those who cannot travel but whose services are purchased (donors and surrogates).
We anthropologists have tried to be faithful to our interlocutors by finding innovative ways of
naming this phenomenon. We have also aimed to expand and deepen anthropological knowledge,
showing the various strands of theorizing into which our work has fed.
CONCLUSION: REPROSCAPES AND REPROSCOPES
In this spirit, I suggest we think more deeply about Inhorn’s concept of the “reproscape.” In
expanding Appadurai’s description and analysis of globalization, Inhorn argues, “reproductive
tourism might be thought of productively as a more complex ‘reproscape’—a kind of ‘meta-scape’
combining numerous dimensions of globalization and global flows” (Inhorn 2011, pp. 89–90).
Reproductive travel involves multiple dimensions, as the literature discussed above demonstrates.
This body of work has opened up a space for ethnographically describing and interpreting global
complexities in a non-unidirectional way. At the same time, this new body of literature has included
analysis of rising cosmopolitanism and also of the ways that stratification and inequalities are reproduced.
However, it may be at the metaphorical level that Appadurai’s and Inhorn’s use of “scape”
is most useful for thinking about the role of reproductive tourism in and for anthropology itself.
If “scape” means “view,” “picture,” or “representation,” then reproscape represents the perspective
of the researcher who is examining transnational reproduction. A scape is an excellent
metaphor for analyzing global flows, but it is also useful for thinking about anthropologists’ own
representations of those flows. I suggest that it is not simply the scape or scene that we need to
discuss; our frame should also reveal who is doing the viewing or “scoping.” The interpreter of
the scape also needs to be included in the setting. What are our particular professional scopic
preoccupations? I offer the concept of an anthropological reproscope, underlining the particular
ways in which we anthropologists view and frame transnational reproduction.
New work on reproductive tourism has explored many avenues for seeing how people create
and live in their moral and social worlds and how they reproduce them. The tendency to reify
the global and the local, a tendency shared with much of the social sciences, has shifted toward
greater complexity and depth. Moving away from “methodological nationalism” to think about
reproduction crossing borders, we have a conceptual opportunity to employ the “transnational
migration” concept (Wimmer & Glick-Schiller 2002). Work on transnational reproduction has
self-consciously engaged with issues of power, relative disempowerment, and complex positionings
under global capitalism, in large measure by examining seemingly separate arenas of practice
together. As we move beyond boxing diverse aspects of assisted cross-border reproduction into the
prepackaged, readily available concepts that we anthropologists have made up, are we discussing
anything beyond naming? Although naming and renaming empirical practices are time-honored
parts of anthropology’s culture of critique, which other kinds of critiques can we offer and which
sorts of interventions might be made here beyond the field of anthropology? Contemporary
cross-border reproduction has literalized the feminist idea that modern technologically facilitated
birth and reproduction is a transformative, ritualized journey for women (Davis-Floyd 1991). Our
task now may be to think through the ways that this field literalizes, ritualizes, and is potentially
transformative of our own theoretical perspectives.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might
be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
www.annualreviews.org • Reproductive Tourism 427
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
LITERATURE CITED
Abu-Lughod L. 1993. Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Adamson GD, Zegers-Hochschild F, Ishihara O, Sullivan E, Mansour R, et al. 2012. ICMART world report:
preliminary 2008 data. Hum. Reprod. 27(Suppl. 2):ii38–39
Almeling R. 2011. Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Appadurai A. 1996. Global ethnoscapes: notes and queries for a transnational anthropology. In Modernity at
Large, pp. 48–65. Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press
Balcom K. 2006. Constructing families, creating mothers: gender, family, state and nation in the history of
child adoption. J. Women’s Hist. 18(1):219–32
Balcom K. 2007. “Phony mothers" and border-crossing adoptions: the Montreal-to-New York black market
in babies in the 1950s. J. Women’s Hist. 19(1):107–16
Banerjee A. 2014. Race and a transnational reproductive caste system: Indian transnational surrogacy. Hypatia
29(1):113–28
Bear L. 2015. Beyond economization: state debt and labor. In Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary.
Cult. Anthropol. Online. March 30. http://culanth.org/fieldsights/659-beyond-economization-state-
debt-and-labor
Bear L, Ho K, Tsing A, Yanagisako S. 2015. Gens: a feminist manifesto for the study of capitalism. In Fieldsights:
Theorizing the Contemporary. Cult. Anthropol. Online. March 30: http://culanth.org/fieldsights/
652-gens-a-feminist-manifesto-for-the-study-of-capitalism
Beck S, Knecht M, Klotz M. 2012. Reproductive Technologies as Global Form: Ethnographies of Knowledge, Practices,
and Transnational Encounters. Vol. 19. Frankfurt, Ger.: Campus Verlag
Bergmann S. 2011. Reproductive agency and projects: Germans searching for egg donation in Spain and the
Czech Republic. Reprod. BioMed. Online 23(5):600–8
Bergmann S. 2014. Fertility tourism: circumventive routes that enable access to reproductive technologies
and substances. Signs 40(1):280–88
Bharadwaj A. 2008. Biosociality to bio-crossings: encounters with assisted conception and embryonic stem
cells in India. In Genetics, Biosociality and the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities, ed. S Gibbon,
C Novas, pp. 98–116. London: Routledge
Birch K, Tyfield D. 2013. Theorizing the bioeconomy, biovalue, biocapital, bioeconomics or . . . what? Sci.
Technol. Hum. Values 38(3):299–327
Boswell J. 1988. The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity
to the Renaissance. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press
Briggs L. 2003. Mother, child, race and nation: the visual iconography of rescue and the politics of transnational
and transracial adoption. Gender Hist. 15:179–200
Campbell B. 2007. Racialization, genes and the reinventions of nation in Europe. See Wade 2007, pp. 95–124
Cannell F. 1990. Concepts of parenthood: the Warnock report, the Gillick debate and modern myths.
Am. Ethnol. 17:667–86
Carsten J. 2000. Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Univ. Press
Cohen L. 2005. Operability, bioavailability and exception. See Ong & Collier 2005, pp. 79–90
Cooper M, Waldby C. 2014. Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. Durham,
NC: Duke Univ. Press
Davis-Floyd R. 1991. Ritual in the hospital: giving birth the American Way. In Anthropology: Contemporary
Perspectives, ed. P Whitten, DE Hunter, pp. 275–85. Boston: Little, Brown. 6th ed.
Deomampo D. 2013. Transnational surrogacy in India: interrogating power and women’s agency. Front. J.
Women Stud. 34(3):167–88
Deomampo D. 2016. Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India. New York:
N. Y. Univ. Press
Dickenson D. 2007. Property in the Body: Feminist Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press
Dubinsky K. 2007. Babies without borders: rescue, kidnap and the symbolic child. J. Women’s Hist. 19(1):142–
50
428 Nahman
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
Edwards J. 2000. Born and Bred: Idioms of Kinship and New Reproductive Technologies in England. Oxford, UK:
Oxford Univ. Press
Elie SD. 2015. Anthropology as an emerging global discipline: a new research ethic. Glob. J. Anthropol. Res.
2:7–29
ESHRE (Eur. Soc. Hum. Reprod. Embryol.). 2014. ART factsheet. July, ESHRE, Grimbergen, Belg.
Fasin D. 2013. Why ethnography matters: on anthropology and its publics. Cult. Anthropol. 28(4):621–46
Fonseca C, Marre D, San Rom´an B. 2015. Child circulation in a globalized era: anthropological reflections.
In The Intercountry Adoption Debate: Dialogues Across Disciplines. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge
Sch. Press
Franklin S. 1997. Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception. London: Routledge
Franklin S. 2003. Rethinking nature-culture: anthropology and the new genetics. Anthropol. Theory 3(1):65–85
Franklin S. 2005. Stem cells R us: emergent life forms and the global biological. See Ong & Collier 2005,
pp. 59–78
Franklin S. 2011. Not a flat world: the future of cross-border reproductive care. Reprod. BioMed. Online
23(7):814–16
Franklin S. 2013. Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press
Ginsburg F, Rapp R, ed. 1995. Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction. Berkeley/Los
Angeles: Univ. Calif. Press
Gudeman S. 1971. The compadrazgo as a reflection of the natural and spiritual person. Proc. R. Anthropol. Inst.
G. B. Irel. 1971:45–48+4+49–71
Gunnarsson Payne J. 2015. Reproduction in transition: cross-border egg donation, biodesirability and new
reproductive subjectivities on the European fertility market. Gender Place Cult.: J. Fem. Geogr. 2(1):107–22
Gupta JA. 2006. Towards transnational feminisms: some reflections and concerns in relation to the globalization
of reproductive technologies. Eur. J. Women’s Stud. 13:23–38
Gupta JA. 2012. Reproductive biocrossings: Indian egg donors and surrogates in the globalized fertility market.
IJFAB: Int. J. Fem. Approaches Bioethics 5(1):25–51
G¨urtin Z. 2011. Banning reproductive travel? Turkey’s ART legislation and third-party assisted reproduction.
Reprod. BioMed. Online 23:555–64
G¨urtin Z, Inhorn M. 2011. Introduction: travelling for conception and the global assisted reproduction market.
Reprod. BioMed. Online 23(5):535–37
Hampshire K, Simpson B, eds. 2015. Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the Third Phase: Global Encounters and
Emerging Moral Worlds. London: Berghahn Books
Haraway DJ. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience.
New York: Routledge
Howell S. 2006. The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective. London: Berghahn
Books
Hudson N, Culley L, Blyth E, Norton W, Rapport F, Pacey A. 2011. Cross-border reproductive care: a review
of the literature. Reprod. BioMed. Online 22:673–85
Ikemoto LC. 2009. Reproductive tourism: equality concerns in the global market for fertility services. Law
Inequal.: J. Theory Pract. 27:277–309
Inhorn MC. 1994. Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility and Egyptian Medical Traditions. Philadelphia: Univ.
Pa. Press
Inhorn MC. 2003. Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, Religion, and In Vitro Fertilization in Egypt. New York:
Routledge
Inhorn MC. 2011. Diasporic dreaming: return reproductive tourism to the Middle East. Reprod. BioMed. Online
23:582–92
Inhorn MC. 2012. The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press
Inhorn MC. 2015. Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press
Inhorn MC, Birenbaum-Carmeli D. 2008. Assisted reproductive technologies and culture change. Annu. Rev.
Anthropol. 37:177–96
Inhorn MC, G¨urtin ZB. 2011. Cross-border reproductive care: a future research agenda. Reprod. BioMed.
Online 23(5):665–76
www.annualreviews.org • Reproductive Tourism 429
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
Inhorn MC, Patrizio P. 2009. Rethinking reproductive ‘tourism’ as reproductive ‘exile.’ Fertil. Steril. 92:904–6
Inhorn MC, Shrivastav P, Patrizio P. 2012. Assisted reproductive technologies and fertility “tourism”: examples
from global Dubai and the Ivy League. Med. Anthropol. 31(3):249–65
Kahn SM. 2000. Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel. Durham, NC: Duke Univ.
Press
Kearney M. 1995. The local and the global: the anthropology of globalization and transnationalism. Annu.
Rev. Anthropol. 24:547–65
Kligman G. 1992. Abortion and international adoption in Ceausescu’s Romania. Fem. Stud. 18(2):405–19
Kroløkke C. 2014a. Eggs and euros: a feminist perspective on reproductive travel from Denmark to Spain.
Int. J. Fem. Approaches Bioethics 7(2):144–63
Kroløkke C. 2015. Have eggs, will travel: the experiences and ethics of global egg donation. Somatechnics
5(1):12–31
Kroløkke C, Foss KA, Pant S. 2012. Fertility travel: the commodification of human reproduction: Charlotte
Kroløkke, Karen A. Foss, and Saumya Pant, Guest Editors. Cult. Polit. 8(2):273–82
Kroløkke CH. 2014b. West is best: affective assemblages and Spanish o¨ocytes. Eur. J. Women’s Stud. 21(1):57–
71
Landau R. 1998. The management of genetic origins: secrecy and openness in donor assisted conception in
Israel and elsewhere. Hum. Reprod. 13(11):3268–73
Lavie S. 2011a. Mizrahi feminism and the question of Palestine. J. Middle East Women’s Stud. 7(2):56–88
Lavie S. 2011b. Staying put: crossing the Israel-Palestine border with Gloria Anzaldua. Anthropol. Humanism
36(1):101–21
Lavie S. 2012. Writing against identity politics: an essay on gender, race, and bureaucratic pain. Am. Ethnol.
39(4):779–803
Lavie S. 2014. Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture. Oxford, UK:
Berghahn Books
Lewis S. 2016. Gestational labours: care politics and surrogates’ struggle. In Intimate Economies: Bodies, Emotions,
and Sexualities on the Global Market, ed. S Hoffman, A Moreno. London: Palgrave Macmillan. In press
Lock M. 1995. Encounters with Aging Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America. Berkeley: Univ.
Calif. Press
Marre D. 2007. “I want her to learn her language and maintain her culture”: transnational adoptive families’
views of “cultural origins.” See Wade 2007, pp. 73–93
Matorras R. 2005. Reproductive exile versus reproductive tourism. Hum. Reprod. 20:3571
Mintz S. 1998. The localization of anthropological practice. From area studies to transnationalism. Crit.
Anthropol. 18(2):117–33
Mintz S, Wolf E. 1950. An analysis of ritual co-parenthood (compadrazgo). Southwest. J. Anthropol. 6(4):341–68
Mitra S. 2015. Forces and flows of the market of commercial surrogacy: Expansion of market in and around India.
Presented at Indiscip. Workshop: The ART of Reproducing Difference: Discussing (In)Equality in the
Context of Reproductive Travel, Oct. 29–30, Inst. Soc. Anthropol., Univ. Bern, Switz.
Mohanty CT. 1988. Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Fem. Rev. 30:61–88
Mol A. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. London: Duke Univ. Press
Nahman M. 2006. Materialising Israeliness: difference and mixture in transnational ova donation. Sci. Cult.
15(3):199–213
Nahman M. 2007. Synecdochic ricochets: biosocialities in a Jerusalem IVF clinic. In Biosocialities, Genetics and
the Social Sciences: Making Biologies and Identities, ed. S Gibbon, C Novas, pp. 117–35. London: Routledge
Nahman M. 2008. Nodes of desire: transnational egg sellers as theorists of reproduction in a neo-liberal age.
Eur. J. Women’s Stud. 15:65–82
Nahman M. 2011. Reverse traffic: intersecting inequalities in human egg donation. Reprod. Biomed. Online
23:626–33
Nahman M. 2012. Making interferences: the cultural politics of egg ‘donation.’ In Reproductive Technologies as
Global Form. Ethnographies of Knowledge, Practices, and Transnational Encounters, ed. M Knecht, M Klotz,
S Beck, pp. 305–30. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press
Nahman M. 2013. Extractions: An Ethnography of Reproductive Tourism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan
430 Nahman
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
Nahman MR. 2005. Israeli extraction: an ethnographic study of egg donation and national imaginaries. PhD Diss.,
Univ. Lancaster
Ong A, Collier SJ. 2005. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. London:
Blackwell
Pande A. 2009. ‘It may be her eggs but it’s my blood’: surrogates and everyday forms of kinship in India. Qual.
Sociol. 32:379–97
Pande A. 2010. Commercial surrogacy in India: manufacturing a perfect ‘mother-worker’. Signs: J. Women
Cult. Soc. 35:969–94
Pande A. 2011. Transnational commercial surrogacy in India: gifts for global sisters? Reprod. Biomed. Online
23:618–25
Pande A. 2014a. This birth and that: surrogacy and stratified motherhood in India. PhiloSOPHIA: J. Cont.
Fem. 4.1:50–64
Pande A. 2014b. Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India. New York: Columbia Univ.
Press
Pavone V. 2015. IVF as a looking glass: kinship, biology, technology and society through the lens of assisted
reproductive technologies. BioSocieties 10(1):111–15
Petryna A. 2013. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press
Pfeffer N. 2011. Eggs-ploiting women: a critical feminist analysis of the different principles in transplant and
fertility tourism. Reprod. Biomed. Online 23:634–41
Pollock A. 2003. Complicating power in high-tech reproduction: narratives of anonymous paid egg donors.
J. Med. Humanit. 24(3–4):241–63
Rabinow P. 1995. Artificiality and enlightenment: from sociobiology to biosociality. In Essays in the Anthropology
of Reason, pp. 91–111. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press
Rabinow P. 1999. French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press
Ragon´e H. 1994. Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart. Boulder, CO: Westview Press
Ragon´e H. 2005. Surrogate motherhood: rethinking biological models, kinship, and family. In Cross-Cultural
Perspective, ed. CB Brettell, CF Sargent, pp. 471–80. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall
Rapp R. 1999. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. New York:
Routledge
Robbins J. 2013. Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good. J. R. Anthropol. Inst.
19(3):447–62
Roberts EFS. 2012. God’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes. Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. Calif.
Press. 1st ed.
Roberts EFS, Scheper-Hughes N. 2011. Introduction: medical migrations. Body Soc. 17:1–30
Rudrappa S. 2012. India’s reproductive assembly line. Contexts 11(2):22–27
Rudrappa S. 2015. Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India. New York: N. Y. Univ. Press
Scheper-Hughes N. 2002. The ends of the body: commodity fetishism and the global traffic in organs. SAIS
Rev.: J. Int. Aff. 22(1):61–80
Scheper-Hughes N. 2009. Making anthropology public. Anthropol. Today 25(4):1–3
Schurr C. 2016. From biopolitics to bioeconomies: the ART of (re-)producing white futures in Mexico’s
surrogacy market. Environ. Plann. D: Soc. Space doi: 10.1177/0263775816638851
Shenfield F, de Mouzon J, Pennings G, Ferraretti AP, Nyboe Andersen A, et al. 2010. Cross border reproductive
care in six European countries. Hum. Reprod. 25(6):1361–68
Sobo EJ. 2009. Medical travel, what it means, why it matters. Med. Anthropol. 28(4):326–35
Spar DL. 2006. The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce for Conception. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Bus. Sch. Press
Speier A. 2011. Brokers, consumers and the internet: how North American consumers navigate their infertility
journeys. Reprod. BioMed. Online 23(5):592–99
Speier A. 2016. Fertility Holidays: IVF Tourism and the Reproduction of Whiteness. New York: N. Y. Univ. Press
Storrow RF. 2005. Quests for conception: fertility tourists, globalization and feminist legal theory. Hastings
Law J. 57:295
Strathern M. 1992a. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Univ. Press
www.annualreviews.org • Reproductive Tourism 431
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45CH25-Nahman ARI 13 September 2016 16:32
Strathern M. 1992b. Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies.
New York: Routledge
Strathern M. 1995. Displacing knowledge: technology and the consequences for kinship. See Ginsburg &
Rapp 1995, pp. 346–68
Tanderup M, Reddy S, Patel T, Nielsen BB. 2015. Informed consent in medical decision-making in commercial
gestational surrogacy: a mixed methods study in New Delhi, India. Acta Obstet. Gynecol. Scand. 94:465–72
Teman E. 2010. Birthing a Mother: The Surrogate Body and the Pregnant Self. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Thompson C. 2005. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press
Thompson C. 2007. Why we should, in fact, pay for egg donation. Regen. Med. 2(2):203–9
Tober DM. 2001. Semen as gift, semen as goods: reproductive workers and the market in altruism. Body Soc.
7(2–3):137–60
Trouillot MR. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan
Twine FW. 2011. Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class, and Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market. New York:
Routledge
Vertommen S. 2016. Towards a political economy of egg donations: doing it the Israel way. In Critical Kinship
Studies: Kinship (Trans)formed, ed. C Kroløkke, L Myong, SW Adrian, T Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, pp. 169–84.
London: Rowman and Littlefield Int.
Vora K. 2013. Potential, risk and return in transnational Indian gestational surrogacy. Curr. Anthropol.
54(Suppl. 7):S97–106
Vora K. 2014. Experimental sociality and gestational surrogacy in the Indian ART clinic. Ethnos: J. Anthropol.
79(1):63–83
Vora K. 2015a. Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Press
Vora K. 2015b. Re-imagining reproduction: unsettling metaphors in the history of imperial science and
commercial surrogacy in India. Somatechnics 5(1):88–103
Wade P, ed. 2007. Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics. New York/Oxford, UK:
Berghahn Books
Weston K. 2013 (1991). Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia Univ. Press
Whittaker A. 2009. Global technologies and transnational reproduction in Thailand. Asian Stud. Rev. 33:319–
32
Whittaker A. 2010. Medical travel and global health governance: challenges posed by medical travel in AsiaPacific.
Glob. Soc. Policy 10:396–415
Whittaker A. 2011. Reproduction opportunists in the new global sex trade: PGD and non-medical sex selection.
Reprod. BioMed. Online 23(5):609–17
Whittaker A. 2015. Thai in Vitro: Gender, Culture and Assisted Reproduction. Vol. 30. Berghahn Books
Whittaker A, Speier A. 2010. ‘Cycling overseas’: critical perspectives on cross-border travel for medically
assisted reproductive technologies. Med. Anthropol. 9:363–83
Widdows H. 2009. Border disputes across bodies: exploitation in trafficking for prostitution and egg sale for
stem cell research. J. Fem. Approaches Bioethics 2(1):5–24
Wimmer A, Glick-Schiller N. 2002. Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration
and the social sciences. Glob. Netw. 2(4):301–34
Yanagisako SJ, Delaney C. 1995. Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis. New York: Routledge
Zanini G. 2011. Abandoned by the state, betrayed by the church: Italian experiences of cross-border reproductive
care. Reprod. BioMed. Online 23(5):565–72
432 Nahman
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45-FrontMatter ARI 28 September 2016 9:1
Annual Review of
Anthropology
Volume 45, 2016 Contents
Perspective
A Life in Evolutionary Anthropology
Clifford J. Jolly p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 1
Archaeology
Archaeological Evidence of Epidemics Can Inform Future Epidemics
Sharon N. DeWitte p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p63
Collaborative Archaeologies and Descendant Communities
Chip Colwell p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 113
Reaching the Point of No Return: The Computational Revolution
in Archaeology
Leore Grosman p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 129
Archaeologies of Ontology
Benjamin Alberti p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 163
Archaeology and Contemporary Warfare
Susan Pollock p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 215
The Archaeology of Pastoral Nomadism
William Honeychurch and Cheryl A. Makarewicz p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 341
Urbanism and Anthropogenic Landscapes
Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 361
Decolonizing Archaeological Thought in South America
Alejandro Haber p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 469
Biological Anthropology
Out of Asia: Anthropoid Origins and the Colonization of Africa
K. Christopher Beard p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 199
Early Environments, Stress, and the Epigenetics of Human Health
Connie J. Mulligan p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 233
vi
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45-FrontMatter ARI 28 September 2016 9:1
Native American Genomics and Population Histories
Deborah A. Bolnick, Jennifer A. Raff, Lauren C. Springs, Austin W. Reynolds,
and Aida T. Mir´o-Herrans p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 319
Disease and Human/Animal Interactions
Michael P. Muehlenbein p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 395
Anthropology of Language and Communicative Practices
Intellectual Property, Piracy, and Counterfeiting
Alexander S. Dent p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p17
Science Talk and Scientific Reference
Matthew Wolfgram p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p33
Language, Translation, Trauma
Alex Pillen p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p95
(Dis)fluency
J¨urgen Jaspers p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 147
Some Recent Trends in the Linguistic Anthropology of Native
North America
Paul V. Kroskrity p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 267
Sociocultural Anthropology
Urban Space and Exclusion in Asia
Erik Harms p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p45
Historicity and Anthropology
Charles Stewart p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p79
Anthropological STS in Asia
Michael M. J. Fischer p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 181
Cancer
Juliet McMullin p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 251
Affect Theory and the Empirical
Danilyn Rutherford p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 285
Where Have All the Peasants Gone?
Susana Narotzky p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 301
Scripting the Folk: History, Folklore, and the Imagination of Place
in Bengal
Roma Chatterji p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 377
Reproductive Tourism: Through the Anthropological “Reproscope”
Michal Rachel Nahman p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 417
Contents vii
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.
AN45-FrontMatter ARI 28 September 2016 9:1
Design and Anthropology
Keith M. Murphy p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 433
Unfree Labor
Filipe Calv˜ao p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 451
Time as Technique
Laura Bear p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 487
Indexes
Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 36–45 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 503
Cumulative Index of Article Titles, Volumes 36–45 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 507
Errata
An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Anthropology articles may be found at
http://www.annualreviews.org/errata/anthro
viii Contents
Annu.Rev.Anthropol.2016.45:417-432.Downloadedfromwww.annualreviews.org
AccessprovidedbyMasarykUniversityon02/14/22.Forpersonaluseonly.