Expertise in understandings of new reproductive and genetic technologies

Jeanette Edwards, Keele University
September 1998

What kind of understandings do 'lay' people bring to bear on burgeoning and increasingly prominent technologies of assisted conception? There is evidence that people with no vested interest in new reproductive technologies make sense of recent innovations in this field in complex and culturally specific ways which do not require a scientific expertise. From an anthropological perspective, it is clear that people mobilise cultural understandings of kinship when they explore innovation in human reproduction. Kinship is not only about how 'family' life is organised and conducted (in terms of, for example, gender and generation and with reference to, say, obligations and duties), but also about what constitutes persons and connections between them (of what people and links between them are made). Kinship refers, then, to the way in which relatedness is culturally formulated and, in this sense (although the way in which it is conceptualised, as well as its content and conduct, varies cross-culturally) everybody has it.

In the context of new reproductive technologies, understandings are contradictory, shift according to the perspective taken and the reasons for taking it, and are marked by ambivalence, but not uncertainty. To identify 'a public view' or 'a public opinion' would require screening out some of the connections people make and foregrounding others. I want to investigate such processes of purification. For example, an expertise in kinship is not confined to non-scientists (which means a simple dichotomy between 'lay' and 'expert' cannot be sustained), but when, and for what purpose, is kinship screened out as irrelevant to the way in which people understand reproductive and genetic technologies?

The social sciences embrace a range of research methodologies. What is the relationship between the epistemological premises of, and the research methods deployed by, different disciplines and what they construe (or might be construed from their research) as 'the public' and, in turn, as 'public understanding'?

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