Anonymity, gifts and non-returns Anonymity and kinship distance Anonymity and gifts between general others Anonymity, gifts and time Anonymity and circulation (I): Body parts and gender (i): transforming women into potentially matchable parts Substituting body parts: the ideal of equivalence Women's 'recruitment' work Making superlative relations Circulating body parts: the pool and the allocatory flows of persons Units into batches Ranking between recipients Non-divisible batches Conclusions Body parts and gender (ii): feminist perspectives on assisted reproductive technologies Body parts and gender (iii) partible persons and agents 3 Working with the un-named: some notes on methodology 81 Research design and execution (I) Approaching clinics and ethical clearance Gaining access: donors Sample profile: donors Interviewing donors v Research design and execution (II) Gaining access: recipients Sample profile: recipients Interviewing recipients Methodological problems and constraints The problem of representation and 'grass roots' analysis Atomisarion Rhetoric, imagination, and 'unspoken' discourses PART TWO: THE BODIES IN THE GIFT 4 Un-binding blood 107 Separating medical from lay discourse Innate substance and the medical version of 'the donating body' Separating out the different strands of women's discourses Donors' apparent reproductions Substance as action: assisting, facilitating, initiating Remote parenting Distant connections Neither inalienable nor forgettable No ties, no commitment.... The work of donation Women 's time Acquiring 'fame' and making changes The mediumship of 'someone' Conclusions vi 5 Parthenogenesis and intercommunity life 150 Agency, extension and intersubjective spacetime Donors and 'vistas of circulation': Odelle: genes by proxy Penny: relations as ripple effects Rita: donating adoption Meena: pardon and renewal Conclusions Delia and Fay: spacetimes of renewal Conclusions 6 Active recipients 184 Agency, extension and polite fictions Relations of visibility The optics of own Forgetting Conceptive onlookers and spectacles of difference Wendy: the spectacle of race Yvonne: the spectacle of sex The procreative 'body' of the hospital The work of recipiency Blood-food and continuing lines Women's time Pooling relations: gendered substance as action Conclusions vii 7 Circulating no-bodies: a case study of redonation 230 Redonation and 'spare' embryos Recipients and 'vistas of circulation': Yasmin: one person: many women Winifred: passing on second-hand gifts Thea: invisible bonds and unbounded kinship Conclusions PART THREE: NON-IDENTITY 8 What is the substance of anonymity? 252 Paradoxes of value Anonymity and circulation (II): The value of regeneration (i): ovarian tissue and the life-giving death The value of regeneration (ii): the symbolism of Melanesian mortuary exchange The value of regeneration (iii): the symbolism of relations of anonymous exchange Transilience Conclusions viii 9 Conclusions 280 Research methodology and theoretical development Main findings and conceptual insights Appendices 292 Interviewees: Donors Interviewees: Recipients Donor Information Form Egg Donation Questionnaire Treatment Procedure Bibliography 319 ix LIST OF FIGURES 1 Desperately seeking mothers under 35 years. ..48 2a Please let me have a baby...51 2b Please help us to have a baby...Thank you to readers who answered caIl...52 2c So desperate for child of their own...53 3 Alternative ova pathways...60 4 Synchronised treatment cycles of ova donor and recipient undergoing. ..66 embryo transfer with normal (as opposed to absent) ovarian function x Those who know not how to be absent, know not how to love xl CHAPTER ONE Introduction: recombining gifts, bodies and anonymity Contents Research focus Anonymity and the gift Identifying strangers What kind of reproduction? Exteriorisation Anonymity and bodies The discursive limits of biology The western self and property claims Implicit links Anonymity Melanesia Thesis structure Chapter One 2 Research focus This research investigates a series of paradoxes arising from the observation that ova donors and recipients constitute relations of exchange as they give and receive from each other genetic material. Against the view that as mutually non-identifiable persons, these two groups are not sufficiently aware of each other's identities for their actions to be considered as kinds of exchange transactions, the study advances the premise, first, that anonymity is a form of sociality, and second, that the time of exchange is constituted in the way that persons, as anonymous agents, are able to project themselves as social relations. The paradoxes the study highlights are considered initially in terms of the conceptual conjunction of the construct of anonymity in relation to the categories of the 'gift' and the 'body'. This is a somewhat transient project, however, in the sense that what this study seriously aims to explore are the less conspicuous features whereby these categories shed their old associational shackles and transmute into new definitional constructs specifically by virtue of their multiple recombinations. The forum of this exploration is the contemporary practice of 'assisted conception' whereby medical advances in 'new reproductive technology' circumvent temporarily women's and men's infertility. Not by chance, the particular practice of ova donation considered by this research employs a language of gifts as part of its discursive frame of 'assisting' others, and significantly, it is these gifts that are seen to originate from bodies that also denote anonymised persons. The research seeks to answer how gifts Chapter One 3 that embody the power of reproductive substance, namely 'gifts of life', can be made by women as sets of relations from out of their bodies, and just what kinds of persons and relations might be in the process of being exchanged. It asks how such relations might be enacted, through what medium these relations may be recognised as forms of social agency, and from just what kind of substance such relations emanate. Anonymity and the gift Identifying strangers From David Cheal's (1988) speculations that gift exchange is a moral economy of 'redundant' transactions, to Jonathan Parry's observation that a discourse of the 'free' or 'pure' gift is most likely to emerge in societies with an advanced division of labor and strong commercial impetus (Parry 1986:467), the lack of a conceptual framework for theorising the form of contemporary gifts in modem western society has received some critical attention (Carrier 1995). Despite recent critiques in anthropology that the constructs of the commodity and the gift do not constitute oppositionally distinct kinds of power or forms of social organisation (Appadurai 1986; Gel! 1992a; Hart 1982; Parry 1986; Parry and Bloch 1989; Thomas 1991;), anthropological theorisations on the gift are still firmly rooted in the premise that such exchange between strangers bodes a necessary contradiction in terms. Doubtless another factor compounding conceptual advance, this premise is due in part to the Durkheimian legacy of person to person relationships constituted from the 'presence-availability' of persons who, as