Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics 9781845453558

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Race, Ethnicity and Nation

Biosocial Society Series General Editor: Catherine Panter-Brick, Professor of Anthropology, University of Durham Volume 1

Race, Ethnicity and Nation Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics Edited by Peter Wade

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Race, Ethnicity and Nation Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics

Edited by Peter Wade

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

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First published in 2007 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2007 Peter Wade All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-84545-355-8 hardback

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Contents Preface and Acknowledgements

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1. Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics Peter Wade

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2. Race, Genetics and Inheritance: Reflections upon the Birth of ‘Black’ Twins to a ‘White’ IVF Mother Katharine Tyler

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3. Race, Biology and Culture in Contemporary Norway: Identity and Belonging in Adoption, Donor Gametes and Immigration Signe Howell and Marit Melhuus

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4. ‘I want her to learn her language and maintain her culture’: Transnational Adoptive Families’ Views of ‘Cultural Origins’ Diana Marre

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5. Racialization, Genes and the Reinventions of Nation in Europe Ben Campbell

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6. Kinship Language and the Dynamics of Race: The Basque Case Enric Porqueres i Gené

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7. The Transmission of Ethnicity: Family and State – A Lithuanian Perspective Darius Dauks˘as

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8. Media Storylines of Culturally Hybrid Persons and Nation Ben Campbell

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Notes on Contributors

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Glossary

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Index

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his book explores what is happening, in different European contexts, to ideas about race, ethnicity and nation in the light of the way scientific and medical knowledge of – and practices around – genetics and biotechnology have spread into the wider public sphere. Concepts of race, ethnicity and nation all involve in complex ways ideas about human relatedness, with special emphasis on a relatedness through kinship and the connections forged through sexual reproduction. Genetic science and biotechnology now open up avenues that allow people to think in new ways about how people are biologically connected to each other and to ancestors through genetic links (perhaps ones that were unknown or invisible before); biotechnology has created new ways of sexual reproduction (through assisted reproductive technologies, based on sperm and egg donation) which also create complex connections between people (for example, the connection between sperm donor and the child created with his sperm). Taking the term at its broadest, ‘biotechnology’ encompasses the bureaucratic technologies of assisted reproduction that have emerged to allow transnational adoption, a practice that has also created new modes of relatedness and kinship connection. This book looks at the way ideas about race, ethnicity and nation intersect with, shape and are shaped by this genetic science and biotechnology. The focus is on Europe and the approach is mainly anthropological, but the issues and the case studies will be of interest to anyone concerned with the central themes of the book. The research presented in this volume comes out of an EU-funded project ‘Public Understanding of Genetics: a Cross-cultural and Ethnographic Study of the “New Genetics” and Social Identity’ (Contract QLG7-CT-2001-01668), which was directed by my colleague Dr Jeanette Edwards (University of Manchester). The project began in 2004 and seven teams, based in France, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, Spain and the U.K., worked over three years on a set of projects that represented their particular ongoing research interests; at the same time, all addressed questions of the meanings surrounding belonging, personhood and relationality, with particular emphasis on changing understandings of biological and genetic relations (see http://www.socialsciences.man.ac.uk/pug/index.htm).

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One sub-project within ‘PUG’, as it came to be known, was titled ‘Race, Ethnicity, Nation and Genetics in Europe’, directed by myself, which aimed to synthesize material from different research teams that touched on these issues. Another sub-project, under the title ‘Public Understanding of Race and Genetics’, was specifically designed to focus on issues of race. It was undertaken by Katharine Tyler as a full-time postdoctoral research associate and, over two years, involved extensive fieldwork in the city of Leicester followed by a period of analysis and writing. Katharine was then scheduled to work on the synthetic sub-project, but moved to a new job. Her place was taken by Ben Campbell, who was already a researcher within PUG (directing a sub-project on genetically modified foods), and over the final year of the project, he worked on two themes, comparing the governance of gametes and immigrants, and reviewing media productions around genetics and race/ethnicity/nation. The papers in this volume derive from the work of researchers in France, Lithuania, Norway, Spain and the U.K., but also from the bi-annual PUG workshops, in which all seven teams of researchers presented findings and discussed analytic perspectives. PUG was a long and many-stranded journey, undertaken mainly by anthropologists, but also by specialists in communication studies, bioethics, history and law. I would like to express my thanks to all PUG participants, and particularly to all the authors in this volume for their ideas, enthusiasm and hard work. The PUG director, Jeanette Edwards, is due a special vote of thanks for managing to keep the entire network moving and inspiring us all with her passion for the topic. I also want to thank Katharine and Ben, who worked with me most closely on questions of race, ethnicity and nation. One product of this work was a short pamphlet for public dissemination, called PUG, Race and Ethnicity in Europe. This is available in English, French, Spanish, Catalan and Lithuanian versions from the PUG website at http://www.socialsciences.man.ac.uk/pug/pamphlets.htm. Peter Wade October 2006

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Race, Ethnicity and Nation Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics Peter Wade

Introduction n this chapter, I want to approach the well-known imbrications of concepts of race, ethnicity and the nation from the point of view of what might be seen, in a European (and perhaps more widely ‘Western’) context, as the key discourse of human relatedness through corporeal substance and nature – that is, kinship. The researchers in this volume focus primarily on kinship as a privileged, but still rather little-explored, way of grasping dimensions of race, ethnicity and nationality and this chapter sets out the broad theoretical context for that focus. The empirical focus of the research in this volume is European and, while I discuss the European material in depth, my perspective is more general and, referring to other contexts, seeks to tease out general intersections between race, ethnicity, nation, kinship and genetics. Kinship is seen, in a European (and Western) context, as grounded on nature. More accurately, as Strathern argues, it is, or rather was, seen as a hybrid, connecting the two domains of nature and culture, ‘a symbolic construction that took after the natural facts on which society imagined itself to be based’ (Strathern 1992: 198). It has been widely argued that ideas about kinship, human relatedness, nature and indeed life itself, have recently been transformed by the destabilization of concepts of nature which have robbed ‘the natural facts’ of their apparent self-evidence and their taken-for-granted grounding function. New forms of genetic technology and knowledge about genetics have been seen as vital contributors here, but they are not the only factors at work: technological interventions of various kinds into the world of ‘nature’ – such as organ transplants (including the possibility of cross-species transplants) and the advance of cyborg nature–culture hybrids – the increasing evidence of the influence of human activity on global climate, and other practices such as the growth in transnational adoptions have all worked to destabilize ideas of what is ‘natural’ about bodies, families and the environment (Braun and Castree 1998; Brodwin 2000; Castree and Braun 2001; Cronon 1995; Franklin 2000, 2003;

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Franklin and McKinnon 2001b; Haraway 1991, 1997; Rabinow 1992; Strathern 1992). The question then arises of how changing ideas of kinship, human relatedness and the domain of nature, which may or may not explicitly involve genetic idioms, relate to imaginaries and practices around race, ethnicity and nation. This question has, in recent years, typically been tackled with specific reference to genetics, or rather genomics, that is, with reference to the recent advances in knowledge about and manipulation of DNA. Theories about the relation between genomics and race, ethnicity and nationality are linked to more general ideas about the impact of genomics on social life, ideas that often refer to the growing ‘geneticization’ of social life. I believe that a broader canvas may be helpful, encompassing ideas about nature, rather than just genetics, and using kinship as a way into issues of race, ethnicity and nationality, without limiting the analysis to recent mediations of kinship by genomic technologies and knowledge – which is not, of course, to exclude these important mediations. To begin with, however, let us look at some of the current analyses of the influence of genomics on race, ethnicity and nationality. This will give a flavour of the debates and issues at stake. I will then look more broadly at kinship in relation to race, ethnicity and nation, which will also bring gender and sex into the discussion.

Race, Ethnicity, Nationality and Genomics Much of the current material relates to race and to a lesser extent ethnicity (where this is seen to involve some conception of shared descent) and even less to nationality. But we can get a sense of the debates by looking at discussions about race. The impact of genomics on race studies has generated a good deal of controversy, particularly in the U.S.A. The key question has been the old chestnut of whether ‘race’ has any biological reality. Gilroy (2000: 15) holds out hope that ‘the meaning of racial difference is being reconstructed by the impact of the DNA revolution and of the technological developments that have energized it’, although he recognizes that ‘genomics may send out the signal to reify “race” as code and information’ (2000: 37) and that it will take some work to produce a ‘postracial’ version of what it means to be human. Foster and Sharp capture the ambivalent results of genomics in a world before that work has been done: It was hoped by some that the sequencing of the human genome would undermine the view that racial and ethnic classifications have biological significance. This position was based on the prospect that by showing that there are numerous genetic similarities across all social classifications and no genetic features that are entirely unique to any particular racial or ethnic population, genomics would provide definitive evidence that race and ethnicity are social, not biological, classifications. Ironically, the sequencing of the human genome has instead renewed and strengthened interest in biological differences between racial and ethnic populations, as genetic variants associated with disease susceptibility, environmental response, and

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drug metabolism are identified, and frequencies of these variants in different populations reported. (Foster and Sharp 2002: 844–45, references removed) Even though it is said that, genetically, all humans are 99.9 per cent alike, there is ‘a great deal of controversy brewing over that 0.1 percent’ (Financial Times, 2–3 November 2002). Many physical anthropologists and other scholars deny that human genetic variation can usefully be divided up in ways that correlate to something called race or ethnicity. Numerous studies indicate that if genetic variance is studied in relation to racial categories – which are usually defined in terms of geographic origin and/or commonsensically in order to generate samples for genetic analysis – race accounts for 10 per cent or less of such variance and that variation within ‘races’ is often greater than between them (Brown and Armelagos 2001). Despite this, some scholars argue that genomic research into human diversity seems inevitably to lead to the resurrection of ideas of race as a biological reality and to a new form of eugenic thinking (for some examples, see Condit, Parrott and Harris 2002: 373–74). Brodwin argues that ‘rapid advances in sequencing and analysing the human genome have strengthened essentialist thinking about identity in American society and elsewhere’ (2002: 323–24); his examples are all drawn from the domains of racial and ethnic identities. Nelkin and Lindee (1995b: 398) also argue that there is recently greater willingness among ‘race theorists’ to talk in terms of genetic differences. Some scholars have alleged that the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), which was started in 1991 in order to map global genetic diversity, smuggled racial assumptions into the underlying premise of isolated breeding populations, which were tacitly defined by social (ethnic, racial) identities for sampling purposes, thus effectively conflating social with genetic categories (Gannett 2001; Marks 2001; Reardon 2001; Santos 2002).1 These arguments focus to some extent on discourses and practices among scientists, but they go beyond a narrow conception of the scientific community, because they all involve the way scientific knowledge pervades life outside that community. A good example is that of susceptibility to disease and drug metabolism – controversies over which predate the genomic era.2 Some researchers argue that ‘race’ is a good predictor for certain diseases and also for the effectiveness of certain drugs. For example, some studies in the new field of pharmacogenomics have claimed to show that certain heart drugs are more effective for ‘blacks’ (in the U.S.A.) than for whites, while others are better for whites. In dismay, Duster (2003b) says ‘ethnic drugs’ may soon be for sale. Some contest these findings and argue overall that ‘[genetic] variation is continuous [across the globe] and discordant with race, systematic variation according to continent is very limited, and there is no evidence that the units of interest for medical genetics correspond to what we call race’ (Cooper, Kaufman and Ward 2003). Race may continue to be a relevant variable, but for social reasons: racialized patterns of discrimination and inequality may affect health. Others reply that ‘racial and ethnic groups do differ from each other genetically’ due to geographically structured patterns of mating and reproduction, and these differences have ‘biologic implications’, including susceptibility to disease (Burchard et al. 2003).3 Today, the jury is clearly still out on the relationship between

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susceptibility to disease and genetic variation of a ‘racial’ kind, but the point is clear: genomic advances can open the way to reinforcing ideas about race as a biological reality, both among scientists and in other spheres of life. These arguments resonate strongly with the idea that social life as a whole is undergoing a process of geneticization and that there is an increase in popular ideas of genetic determinism. This is despite the fact that geneticists and molecular biologists do not generally see genes as strongly determinist, except in very specific instances (Keller 1995: 26–27). Many commentators on the popular discourses of genetics observe a recent shift towards genetic determinism (Condit 1999a, 1999b: 6, 166). There has, according to Nelkin and Lindee (1995a), been a move towards a popular ‘genetic essentialism’ which ‘reduces the self to a molecular entity, equating human beings, in all their social, historical, and moral complexity, with their genes’ (cited in Condit 1999b: 6). They trace this in relation to gender as well as race (Nelkin and Lindee 1995b). Van Dijck (1998: 126) says that popular images of genes as determinants have a tenacious hold. Haraway (1997: 142–48) talks of recent ‘gene fetishism’, linking it to genetic essentialism, and Rapp (1999: 215) notes the increase of an ideology of ‘geneticization’ in popular consciousness that links ‘individual attributes and social problems as if they could be effectively reshaped or eliminated only in the realm of biomedicine now reduced to genetic diagnosis’. Lippman (1991: 19) also refers to geneticization as ‘an ongoing process by which differences between individuals are reduced to their DNA codes’. Finkler (2001: 235, 47) argues that ‘genetic inheritance increasingly becomes the prevailing causal explanation of affliction and human behaviour in general’ and that there is widespread popular acceptance of this in the U.S.A. because medical models of genetic inheritance and determinism (of disease) fit very neatly with ‘cultural conceptualizations of the biogenetic foundations of kinship’. Against this prevailing view, I think it is important to distinguish between geneticization and genetic essentialism or determinism. The growing public profile of the gene as an icon is not necessarily the same as a growing belief in the determinism of genes: this is an open question which needs to be researched. Condit (1999a, 1999b) argues at some length that the U.S. public (university students, mixed focus groups), while speaking about genes and genetics, do not by any means produce deterministic accounts, but rather see images such as the ‘genetic blueprint’ as an outline or plan that might come to fruition in different ways and that does not determine final outcomes. When talking about race and genetics, ‘the opinions and knowledge of the lay audience parallels much of what the mass media and the scientific establishment say about genetics’ – that is, that genes are not simple determinants (Condit, Parrott and Harris 2002: 385). This debate centres on the question of whether or not the genetic revolution creates more essentialism or not, be it in thinking about disease, bodies, families, gender or race and ethnicity. My view is that the jury is out on this question. Although it is common to speak in terms of growing genetic determinism and essentialism – usually seen as a trait of lay audiences or the popular classes, but not always confined to them – there is also evidence that things are not so simple. Brodwin, for example,

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while arguing for ‘strengthened essentialist thinking about identity in American society’, also notes that the knowledge generated by the use of genetic ancestry tests is subject to complex social and cultural mediations: ‘Setting the record straight about who is related to whom is contested right from the start, and for good reason. Adding genetic evidence does not make things any easy; it might even make things harder’ (2002: 325). His own examples illustrate clearly that a straightforward shift towards greater essentialism is not easy to deduce. He describes how, via a study of Ychromosome markers, some of the Lemba of South Africa were possibly genetically linked to Semitic peoples. This reinforced their own firm belief in their Jewishness, but Brodwin rightly says that this might not confirm their Jewishness for other Jews (e.g., Israelis) who might have other ways of tracing Jewish ancestry. It is a matter of judgement what this genetic evidence adds up to. Also, did the genetic evidence strengthen an essentialist identity, or essentialize a nonessentialist one? There is no obvious means of telling without more extensive research. I think it is possible to open out this debate by expanding the focus away from a tight concentration on genetics and, specifically, the impact of genomic research. My aim here is to explore more broadly the intersections of ideas about kinship, nature, race, ethnicity and nation. I think this will show that there is a good deal of complexity and ambiguity in the way people think about different kinds of connections – natural, genetic, cultural – and that there is no straightforward shift towards either geneticization or genetic determinism in discourses about race, ethnicity and nation.

Kinship, Nature, Race, Ethnicity and Nationality In this section, I will trace how the overlapping and mutually informing domains of race, ethnicity and nation intersect with ideas about kinship; gender also inevitably enters the frame in a kinship model understood as founded on sexual reproduction between two genders. In what follows, I will refer mainly to race and will purposely blur a distinction between race and ethnicity, for reasons which I hope will become clear below. It has long been observed that ideologies of race and nation reinforce each other. Gilroy (1987: 23) noted that the sense of national crisis in postwar Britain was often ‘lived through a sense of “race”’. A sense of nationality, and threats to that nationality, were linked strongly to discourses that saw racialized immigrants (but not white immigrants) as a problem; Britishness, and even more so Englishness, was defined as white by default. Balibar has argued that ‘racism is not an “expression” of nationalism ... but [is] always indispensable to its constitution’ (Balibar 1991b: 54). He traces the intertwining of the two ideologies to the moment when nation-states tried to create their own ‘people’ as not just a political, but also an ethnic and/or racial entity, that is, as a body of people related by a common history, origin and culture. According to Balibar, racism and nationalism both depend on a balance between inclusion (of proper citizens and people who share the proper origins) and exclusion (of people outside those categories). Racism can become a ‘super-nationalism’ that plays on the

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existing themes of roots in ideas about national culture and evokes themes of genealogical roots and purity of blood, often expressed in aesthetic ideals of the body (for example, as nonblack). Race and nation need not invoke ideas of purity. In Latin America, it has been widely recognized that nationalism has often been built on the idea of racial and cultural mixture or mestizaje: nations were often seen as founded, for better or for worse, on the amalgamation of African, indigenous American and European ‘blood’ and cultures. In practice, the apparent democracy of such a vision was belied by ideologies and practices of whitening that belittled the contributions of African and indigenous populations, saw these peoples as backward and destined to disappear in a modernizing nation, discriminated against them, and tried to keep out nonwhite immigrants, while encouraging the immigration of people from Europe (Appelbaum, Macpherson and Rosemblatt 2003; Smith 1997; Wade 1997). Foucault arrived at the intimate relationship between racism and nationalism in his analysis of sexuality in Europe. He traced a gradual shift in emphasis from a premodern ‘symbolics of blood’ to an ‘analytics of sexuality’. In the former, power was of a sovereign kind, in which a king or queen had power of life or death over his or her subjects, a power that was enacted physically upon the subject’s body, for example in the form of public torture and killing. Sovereigns could seize things, time and bodies and dispose of them as they saw fit. In the modern era, power became ‘bio-power’ and the art of government became that of administering the life force of populations, including that of the individuals who composed them, so as to create growth and vigour. This regulation of life included a concern with collective and individual sexual behaviour, as this was seen to play a key role in the life of the population: ‘sex is the means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species’ (Foucault 1998: 146). Ideas about blood did not disappear, however, and continued to ‘haunt the administration of sexuality’ (ibid.: 149). Ideas about vigour, well-being and appropriate sexual morality and behaviour were intertwined with notions of the purity of blood and racial difference. Nation-states were the entities that administered the life force of their populations and ideas about national heritage, culture and history were infused with notions of blood and genealogy. The objects of exclusion could be both those seen as internal enemies – such as Jews and homosexuals (Mosse 1985) – and external colonial subjects (Stoler 1995). The concern with the regulation of life force and bodies within the national population gives a strong clue as to why ideas about blood and its origins and character might have such an intimate relationship with nationalism: the reproduction of the nation’s population involved the endless mixing of the blood of individuals; the character of the individual and his/her body was seen to be affected by whatever was inherited in the blood. This perspective also indicates why ideologies of race, ethnicity and nation have a powerfully gendered dimension, as the life of the race, ethnos or nation was vitally linked to reproductive sexual relations between men and women. As Stoler (1995) and Mosse (1985) show, concepts of appropriate sexual behaviour and morality were an important part of calculations about who was a ‘proper’ member of the nation and the white racial category. What

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was deemed appropriate was usually very different for men and women, with the latter often charged with maintaining the purity of the race, nation or ethnic group and bound by stricter codes of morality than those applied to men (Smith 1997). The interpenetration of ideas of race, ethnicity and nation with those of sex and gender at once raises the issue of the role of kinship more broadly as an idiom of human relatedness. In Western models of kinship, at least, sex and gender are seen as basic to the generation of kinship relatedness. Nationalism has been linked to kinship by various authors (Alonso 1994; Anderson 1991; Schneider 1969). Schneider saw parallels between U.S. kinship and ideas about the U.S. nation. Just as in kinship there were relatives by natural connection (of blood) and relatives by law (marriage) – and this difference reflected a deeper symbolic distinction between nature and law (or culture) – so in ideologies of nationalism, citizenship was assigned by birth or by legal process (often called ‘naturalization’). Schneider saw a structural parallel between nationalism and kinship (and religion) at a symbolic level and both involved the same ‘diffuse enduring solidarity’. Anderson has also argued that nationalism should be understood ‘as if it belonged with “kinship”’ rather than with political ideologies such as liberalism (1991: 5). Alonso observes that in nationalism, ‘place, property and heritage’ are fused into ‘a sovereign patrimony’. The identity between ‘people, heritage, territory and state’ is often expressed in botanical, arborescent images, principally tree-like images of genealogy, which are part of ‘a register of nature tropes’. The idea of the genealogical tree combines botanical metaphors of national space with ‘tropes of shared bodily substance’: ‘the substantialization of nations and states through tropes of blood and kinship, although noted frequently, is rarely analyzed fully’ (Alonso 1994: 383–84). Kinship tropes, she argues, can underwrite ideas of national solidarity and can also substantialize hierarchical social relations, including ones between state and people. Such tropes depend upon and reiterate naturalized constructions of gender and sexuality. Ethnic categories (which, Alonso says, cannot be distinguished sharply from racial ones) can also be substantialized by the same tropes of kinship and descent as nationalism. Ethnic ‘cultural stuff ’ can be ‘semanticized by a tropology of blood, color and descent’ (1994: 396). Links between ethnicity and kinship have been noted by others as well (Keyes 1976; Williams 1989). These authors have detected common ideas of relatedness and genealogy running through kinship, ethnicity and nationalism as ways of categorizing, and including and excluding, people on the basis of ideas about shared substance (e.g., ‘blood’), origins, history and culture (which may also be understood as a quasi-substance). Fewer authors have linked kinship to race. Haraway (1997: 309, n. 1) notes in passing that ‘Race, nature, gender, sex, and kinship must be thought together’. Williams (1995) makes a more detailed argument about the common ground between ideologies of race, nation, kinship and Hindu caste, seeing them all as involving distinctions made in terms of an imagined sameness or unity of human substance (e.g., blood). These distinctions serve to create categories of relatedness which define access to shared material and symbolic resources. Thompson (2005) also discusses race and kinship in the context of assisted conception (see below). In

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my view, kinship is vital to grasping race because a key aspect of the discourse of race is ideas about inheritances, whether ‘natural’ or ‘cultural’, for which a key medium of transmission is the family. Assignations to a given racial category or identity are ultimately grounded on reckonings of kinship, even if these are so obvious as to be tacit – i.e., in the case of a person who seems unproblematically ‘black’ or ‘white’, the unspoken assumption is that his/her parents are likewise black or white. When someone’s racial identity seems more problematic, the first recourse for ‘solving the problem’ is to enquire into family connections, to place the person in a web of racialized kinship. The standard question here is, ‘Where are you from?’, an apparently territorial or national enquiry. But the question probes deeper and conflates nation, race and kinship, because an equally standard answer is, ‘Well, I’m from here, but my parents are from such-and-such a place [which is what explains my appearance].’ A simple illustration of the connection between kinship and race is the common Latin American saying, ‘¿Y tu abuela dónde está?’ (And where is your grandmother?). This is a trope produced to question someone’s racial origins, implying black (or perhaps indigenous) ancestry, especially if s/he is claiming, through word or deed, to be nonblack or nonindigenous. The saying evokes a history, common enough in contexts of Latin American race mixture, of black women having sex with lightercoloured men, perhaps in an informal union, giving rise to children who may follow the same route, resulting in grandchildren light enough to no longer be classified as black, who may ‘forget’ their ancestry, their own grandmothers. The grandchildren are lighter and, symbolically and/or materially, they are wealthier and more ‘modern’ and urban, as blackness in Latin America is generally associated with poor, ‘underdeveloped’ regions and populations, while whitening is connected symbolically and structurally with upward social mobility. The poor, black, rural ancestors have been left in the genealogical and historical past, while the grandchildren move forward to participate in the modernizing nation. But, says the trope, the links of kinship cannot be severed so easily: grandmothers pass on substance and, perhaps particularly in African diaspora contexts, nurturance and love. The grandmother is carried within her descendants’ own bodies, inside and on the visible surface, and she cannot be made to vanish.

The Destabilization of Nature Recently, a number of scholars have created the possibility for a greater dialogue between kinship and race, ethnicity and nation by focusing on the idea of nature and the transformations that it is said to have undergone in recent decades. If ‘nature’ has been destabilized, what is the impact of this on ideas about race, ethnicity and nation? Nature is, in varied ways, used as a ground for ideas about kinship, race, ethnicity, nation, gender, sex and kinship: all these domains tend to use naturalizations in the broadest sense (which may not necessarily be limited to notions of genetics), that is, they make reference to a realm called nature or seen as natural in order to provide a context and basis for their claims and categories (Yanagisako

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and Delaney 1995). Feminist scholarship and work in kinship studies and science studies have led the way in problematizing ‘nature’ and seeing it as changing and unstable (Carsten 2000c; Cronon 1995; Franklin, Lury and Stacey 2000; Franklin and McKinnon 2001b; Haraway 1991; 1997; Jardine, Secord and Spary 1996; Jordanova 1986; Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003b; Rabinow 1992; Strathern 1992; Wade 2002). Franklin and McKinnon (2001a) trace how the ‘facts of nature’ on which kinship appeared to be based, and which have been used to ground categories such as gender, sex, race and the family, have been steadily subjected to critique since the 1950s, revealing nature to be shifting and contestable. This approach is rather different from that of Moore, Kosek and Pandian (2003a: 25), who subscribe to the classic idea that ‘elaborations of a racial nature root identity and difference in the unchanging material of bounded bodies. In the annals of social science, to “naturalize” is to assign such stable and intrinsic essences to people, relations and things’. Recent work on nature and kinship undermines the idea that nature today acts only and necessarily to stabilize essences and evoke bodies as unchanging. A key figure in this process has been Strathern, who argues that during the ‘modern(ist)’ epoch of English, and more broadly Western, society (roughly 1860–1960) ‘nature itself composed an autonomous domain … It created its own context, and did so because it worked as a kind of grounding conceptualization for knowledge, for understanding the intrinsic character (“nature”) of anything. … Although it could be made into a metaphor or seen to be the object of human activity, it also had the status of a prior fact, a condition for existence’ (Strathern 1992: 194). The idea of nature grounded both the notion of the individual, seen as an intrinsically unique product of the endlessly proliferating diversity created by sexual reproduction; and the notion of society, seen as the natural product of individuals entering into relation with each other. The idea of nature was the context for the plurality of the modern world: individuals were plural (there were many unique individuals) and they built on the facts of nature to create plural institutions (different ways of organizing the basics of human life). An appreciation of plurality meant an explicit awareness of context dependence: things had to be seen in context and they could be seen in relation to different contexts; any one figure could be connected to different grounds and located in different sets of relations. The ultimate grounding context of nature eventually succumbed to this self-awareness about the relational character of context. It became clear that nature itself was context dependent. Nature has not disappeared by any means – on the contrary, natural relations ‘acquire a new priority’ (Strathern 1992: 53) – but ‘its grounding function has. It no longer provides a model or analogy for the very idea of context’ (ibid.: 195). This is partly because technological interventions into nature undermine its status as a self-evident context: assisted conception, the genetic modification of organisms, cloning and so on are frequently cited as aspects of the technology that has destabilized the idea of nature. The consequence is that ‘Nature as a ground for the meaning of cultural practices can no longer be taken for granted if Nature itself is regarded as having to be protected and promoted’ (ibid.: 177). In this transformation, Strathern argues, nature becomes part of the world of consumer

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choice, one more product among which consumers can exercise their obligatory right to choose. I would argue that before Strathern’s ‘modernist’ epoch, concepts of human nature in Western thought generally gave it a slightly more plastic, performative character; people’s behaviour could shape their natures and, in very long-standing and pervasive ideas about the inheritance of acquired characteristics, such altered natures could even be passed on to the next generation (Wade 2002: ch. 3). I would also argue that, even during Strathern’s modernist epoch, there is some evidence to indicate that human nature was not always seen as quite as autonomous and fixed as she makes out; that previous, ‘premodernist’ ideas about human nature did not vanish altogether under the weight of an ever more authoritative scientific consensus about the basics of evolution, genetics and human biology (Wade 2002: ch. 4). But the overall point that nature has, in the last few decades, become a less stable construct than it was remains important and valid. The question now arises of the ways in which the destabilization of the concept of nature, especially through the impact of new genetic technologies, has affected the interweaving of race, ethnicity, nationality and kinship. We seem to be presented with two main alternatives, which are prefigured in my earlier discussion of race and genomics. On the one hand, the social world is supposed to be going through a process of biologization – and, as I showed above, of geneticization in particular – in which knowledge about biology and genetics provides ways of regrounding social processes on a particular biological domain, seen as quite deterministic. On the other hand, the whole concept of nature seems to be fragmenting and losing its grounding function. In fact, the two alternatives are not opposed. The ‘exaggerated attention to biological idiom’ in which ‘genetic relations have come to stand for the naturalness of biological kinship’ (Strathern 1992: 52–53) and the fact that ‘nature becomes biology becomes genetics’ (Franklin 2000: 190) are themselves due to the destabilization of the self-evidence of nature. The reaction is to refocus on nature and examine, or reimagine, its workings, using, as a key tool, the very genetic entities and processes that unsettled it in the first place. The question remains, however, of what the consequences of this refocusing are. Are there new and more deterministic ways of thinking about race, ethnicity and nationality, in their intersection with kinship? Or are more flexible ways of imagining and acting on these concepts introduced? Or do both things happen at the same time, amounting to an increase in the options for thinking about race, ethnicity, nationality and kinship, without a clear tendency in any one direction? In this respect, we may well be faced both with ways in which, ‘boundaries – of nations, cultures, species, races, persons, bodies, cells – have been breached’ and ways in which ‘such ruptures become occasions to reestablish and reinforce familiar normative categories’ (Franklin and McKinnon 2001a: 21). My view is that the latter open-ended scenario is the most convincing at present and that a broad view taken from the angle of kinship studies can help us avoid overdetermined answers to these questions. The destabilization of nature highlights the different possible meanings of nature and the variety of modes of naturalization and this, in turn, opens up kinship studies in various ways that connect them usefully to studies of race, ethnicity and nationality. First, it implies that ‘the meaning of

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kinship can be understood only by reading across different cultural domains’: ‘cultural understandings of kinship are shaped by – and, in turn, contribute to the shaping of – the political dynamics of national and transnational identities, the economic movements of labour and capital, the cosmologies of religion, the cultural hierarchies of race, gender and species taxonomies, and the epistemologies of science, medicine and technology’ (Franklin and McKinnon 2001a: 9). Ideas of ‘substance’ that might link and differentiate people, and that might link people to other domains such as land, animals, spirits and the environment, likewise implicate kinship in many other areas of human ideas, including ideas about race, ethnicity and nation. Second, although kinship has always been seen as a link between nature and culture, a cultural elaboration of the ‘facts of nature’, the destabilization of nature draws our attention to the contingency of both nature and culture as categories and the way the traffic between them helps constitute their mutually defining but often ambiguous and shifting boundaries. Carsten (2000a: 3) argues that research on non-Western kinship indicates that ‘the boundaries between the biological and the social which … have been so crucial in the study of kinship are in many cases distinctly blurred, if they are visible at all’. Her own work on adoption in Britain also leads her to conclude that the ‘overwhelming impression is that this distinction [between ‘biological’ and ‘social’] is rather more muddled than any simple model would lead us to expect’. She says that we cannot perceive ‘a very sharp or consistent distinction between what “travels in the blood” and what is absorbed from the environment’ (Carsten 2000b: 693).

The Traffic between Nature and Culture The preceding section indicates that kinship studies promise interesting avenues into areas such as race, ethnicity and nationality and poses the question of what ‘nature’ might mean in those areas. In what follows, rather than assuming that genetics and changing ideas about nature are simply leading to the naturalization of thinking about race, ethnicity and nation into ever more deterministic modes, I explore how ideas about persons, identity and belonging traffic back and forth between the apparently separate domains called nature and culture, unsettling their boundaries, overlapping their radii of action. Blood, Soil and Genealogy In my discussion so far, I have not made a clear distinction between race and ethnicity as analytic terms. It is generally held in social science that there are important differences between tracing relatedness through common history and culture (usually glossed as ‘ethnicity’) and through common genealogical origins and ‘blood’ (usually associated with ‘race’). One important difference is the classic distinction between assigning citizenship by jus soli, by place of birth, or by jus sanguinis, by genealogical connection. This appears to be a well-known distinction between nature (race) and culture (ethnicity), but it has become increasingly clear that these categories are not stable, that they are historically constructed and

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codependent, and that analysis cannot take them for granted. Discourses of race involve all kinds of ‘cultural’ idioms, while those of ethnicity frequently invoke notions of origins and genealogy. In practice, soil and blood are often interlinked through a common notion of origin (Linke 1999), especially when it is by virtue of long rootedness in the soil and the culture of the people of the soil that ‘true’ identity is measured. In practice, too, ‘most states, in order to cope with the practical complexities [of assigning citizenship], operate with a combination of the two modes [of jus soli and jus sanguinis]’ (Heater 1999: 80). Porqueres, in this volume and elsewhere, has argued that discourses of Basque nationalism have moved from open references to blood and biology in the early decades of the twentieth century, in the context of racial science, to references to soil, territory and language. This is the classic shift towards ‘cultural racism’ that many have seen as characteristic of large areas of the post-Second World War world, with the apparent disappearance of openly biological idioms of race (Balibar 1991a; Goldberg 1993: 73; Stolcke 1995). However, Porqueres argues that there is a good deal of continuity in these changing Basque discourses: ‘Despite the formal consolidation of a kind of “right of land and language” [in the definition of who is Basque], the persistence of images of the family in naming the nation and of associated definitions based on the blood of the Basque people, takes us back to apparently bygone conceptions’ (Porqueres i Gené 2001: 534, my translation). This is partly because the soil is seen to be a constitutive and substantializing context for the growth of persons. Porqueres states that ‘the opposition between blood and soil, so dear to anthropologists and politicians, deserves … to be problematized’ (Porqueres i Gené 2002: 60, my translation). ‘Blood and soil, far from being opposed, appear as variants of a single theme, that of the presence of the ancestors in the definition of the nation. Land thus becomes a mediator between those who existed in the past and those who currently live on it’ (ibid.: 58). The work people do on the land is a moment in the constitution of them as subject and of the land as the object of their labour: ‘each mutually modifies the other with a cumulative effect which is inscribed in the succession of the generations’ (ibid.: 61). Porqueres also traces some of the links between blood and land to Christian thought, which associates soil and flesh. In short, as Wieviorka notes, cultural racism still generally depends on a tacit reference to ‘nature, biology, genetic heritage or blood’ (1997: 142): Porqueres’s work gives an important demonstration of how that occurs. There is a traffic between ideas of nature and culture here which, while nature becomes less self-evident – it becomes less and less acceptable to make explicit reference to blood as a defining criterion of ethnonational membership – also seems to naturalize culture via ideas about soil and history. The distinction between nature and culture becomes blurred, but the effects of this are ambivalent. On the one hand, seemingly determinist idioms of Basqueness persist in tacit notions of blood and genealogy and in ideas about soil and the growth of persons. On the other hand, Porqueres also shows that Basqueness has recently opened up to include people of mixed Basque–Spanish descent (Porqueres i Gené, this volume). In Lithuania, soil and blood form competing criteria in questions of citizenship. In his contribution to this volume, Dauks˘as focuses on debates in the press, 1988–91, about identity among Lithuanian Poles and among Lithuanian émigrés.

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He shows that discourse in the press about the former centred on origins, territory and cultural authenticity (language, surnames and religious practice). For the emigrés, questions of territory assumed much less significance, as they wished to maintain a Lithuanian identity despite being outside the territory of the nation-state. Instead, the idea of descent – absent from press debates about Lithuanian Poles – assumed greater importance, within a discourse of blood and kinship. The Lithuanian Law of Citizenship (1991), which replaced the 1989 law of the Soviet era, was amended in 2003 to ratify the emigrés’ claim to citizenship by including as citizens people who self-identified as Lithuanian and whose parents or grandparents were Lithuanian. In the official English translation of the law, this was glossed as being of ‘Lithuanian descent’, rather than the previous usage of ‘Lithuanian origin’. In Lithuanian, the text remained the same (lietuviu kilmes asmuo), as the words embraced the meaning of place of origin and genealogical linkage (as indeed the word ‘origin’ is capable of doing in English). In practice, however, ‘descent’ was proven to the Interior Ministry’s Immigration Department in a number of ways: a woman whose parents seemed to be German was allowed Lithuanian citizenship when one grandparent’s Soviet-era passport was found to have ‘Lithuanian’ entered under the Soviet category of ‘nationality’ – itself a status defined by descent in the Soviet system (Dauks˘as 2004). The influence of the Soviet system seems to have been significant. Although in public debates about citizenship in the press, descent seemed unimportant in defining the citizenship of Lithuanian Poles, in everyday life in Lithuanian Polish communities ethnic identity was considered to be something defined by parentage: a key criterion was what was written in the passport and this was defined by what was written in a person’s father’s passport (Dauks˘as, this volume). In Lithuania, then, there seems to have been a constant movement back and forth between ideas of soil and blood, with ideas of family origin mediating between these notions. The Construction of Relatedness: Genealogy, Adoption and ARTs If, in studying kinship and race, ethnicity and nation, we have to be alive to the traffic between nature and culture as categories, this also leads us to be open-minded about how relatedness is constructed in all these domains. Sex between men and women is ‘naturally’ an important part of the reproduction of relatedness – at least in Western kinship models which are centred on this type of reproduction – but kinship, even in Western models, involves more than heterosexual sex and it is important to see that the relatedness that is seen to underlie ethnicity, race and nationality may be formed by other means than sexual reproduction. This may seem too obvious, in the sense that the imagined relatedness of co-ethnics or co-nationals – if not that of co-racials – seems to derive primarily from common histories and cultures and to refer only secondarily to the blood relatedness of sexual reproduction, for example through the kinship idioms of fraternity, paternity and maternity. However, kinship studies indicate that, of course, some types of relatedness do not derive directly from sexual reproduction (e.g., in-law relations), but also that, to take the apparently radically different example of the Trukese of Micronesia, ‘blood can

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be culturally, rather than biologically, made and thickened by shared adversity’ (Williams 1995: 208–09).4 In Western contexts too, there is increasingly a traffic between the idioms of culture and nature, in which one can be transformed into the other, often in unstable ways. Porqueres (this volume) notes the cultural work that needs to be done on genealogical relations to make them figure as genealogical in the first place. This is because, in cognatic kinship systems, blood, far from symbolizing a fixed relationship between generations or a way of reckoning that inherently gives rise to exclusive social boundaries, is involved in a permanent process of mixture and potential destabilization. Every person is made up of the mixed blood of father and mother and that mixture is always a moment of potential redefinition of identity. From this derives the concern with making ‘proper’ unions and avoiding certain types of sexual relations and particularly marriages (which legitimize sexual relations). It would seem, in that case, that whom one is to marry should be defined by one’s genealogical identity. But Porqueres argues that, in fact, the opposite also occurs just as much: that whom one marries defines who one is genealogically. Examining the case of the Xuetes of Majorca, descendants of Jews who began to be persecuted for their Jewish beliefs in the seventeenth century, Porqueres notes that this group was not made up simply of people descended from Jews, but rather those that continued to practise endogamy. It was the marriage to another Xueta person that defined one as Xueta and as someone who would continue to practise the Jewish faith, rather than one’s genealogical descent. Thus brothers and sisters, or even mother and son, might be divided between Catholic and Xueta. This indicates that genealogical modes of reckoning are highly selective and constitutively interwoven with nongenealogical modes of reckoning. Howell’s work on transnational adoption, discussed in her chapter with Melhuus in this volume, shows the work of ‘kinning’ that Norwegian families undertake to turn babies, who come from China and other countries in the transnational adoption circuit, into Norwegian kin (Howell 2001; 2003). That work effects a ‘cultural’ transformation in the sense that it makes the babies into children who talk and act like Norwegians. But the transformation is also ‘natural’ in the sense that the children have bodies that can ski – and talk – like Norwegians. Better than contrasting nature and culture here is to recognize that that difference between the cultural and the natural transformation is not very clear. People might say that the children are not genetically ‘Norwegian’ (whatever that might mean in terms of the molecular biology of population genetics, they do not have the genes of Norwegian parents), but in some sense they are ‘naturally’ Norwegian once they have been made into proper family members, with the requisite bodies that do things like ski, talk and eat in a Norwegian way. The insecurity of the boundary between nature and culture is evident in the way the parents shift between discourses and practices that foreground the children’s birth links to another nation and culture (dressing them in the national costume of their origin countries, or undertaking organized visits to the origin country), and ones that foreground the Norwegian kin links and life. While kinship is a key mode of discourse in adoption, race is never mentioned as a way of linking the adoptees to another set of relations, although culture is.

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In contrast to all this, and as Campbell (this volume) also shows, nonwhite immigrants are not converted into Norwegians in the same way and experience obstacles to their attempts to transform themselves. Legally, they are not Norwegian citizens to begin with, and, even once they are, or their children have been born and raised in Norway, they encounter exclusions. Discourse about ‘race’ is very muted, but racial difference is recognized, as immigrants are talked of as being the victims of racism, and this is allied to the recognition of cultural difference. Nature and culture are again linked and interwoven, but outside the realm of (Norwegian) kinship. In her chapter on transnational adoption in Catalonia, Spain, Marre also traces hints of the naturalization of culture and the uncertainty of the boundary between nature and culture. This was evident in parents’ interest in their child’s culture of origin, something that Volkman (2005: 14) also documents in the U.S.A. where she detects a ‘desire to connect with biological origins’ among transnational adopters. Alluding to a 2003 Spanish television documentary, Marre cites one mother who wanted her Chinese child, adopted soon after birth, ‘to learn her [the child’s] language and maintain her culture’. These desires seem to indicate a view of culture as something one inherits at birth, to be ‘maintained’. Like Howell and Melhuus, Marre found a clear difference between the treatment of nonwhite immigrants and that of nonwhite international adoptees. ‘Both immigrants and adopted children come from the same countries: the poor South, the former Soviet Union and Asia. Both phenomena became socially relevant during the second half of the 1990s, and have had a spectacular growth’ (Marre 2003: 10). While the Spanish state tries to limit the growth of nonEuropean immigration, it has a much more benevolent attitude towards nonwhite babies who are destined to become part of Spanish families and become nationalized through the kinship work done on and with them by their adoptive kin (see also Campbell, this volume). It is tempting to interpret this benevolence as being motivated by the desire to achieve a multicultural nation, with all the apparent difficulties and conflicts that multicultural immigration involves seemingly conveniently defused by the work of benign family relations that retain apparently only superficial racialized difference, while creating culturalized citizens. (Assisted conception technologies have been interpreted in the same light – see below.) This material shows how open to construction apparently natural links can be. Immigrants are seen as culturally different and this is naturalized so that ‘immigrant’ becomes an inherited condition, despite cultural changes – as illustrated in the classic phrase ‘second-generation immigrant’ which is widely used in Norway as in the U.K. Adoptees are seen as naturally different, but this is disguised as a (naturalized) cultural difference, while they are simultaneously naturalized as natives, with the appropriate cultural competences, through the work of kinning. Meanwhile, in Norway and in Spain, great concern is shown for the matching of gametes to mothers in processes of assisted conception. In Norway, as Howell and Melhuus show in their chapter, egg donation is prohibited, so the issue of importing ova never arises formally (although women do go abroad to get ova and return to Norway with ‘foreign’ gametes in them). Sperm, on the other hand, is difficult to get in Norway, due to a lack of donors, and was until recently virtually all imported from Denmark,

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where sperm is classified by the height, hair colour, eye colour and ethnic group of the donor.5 The underlying assumption is that parents want gametes from people who look like them. The ‘foreignness’ of the gametes, in terms of national identity, can be ignored as long as the gametes match ‘racially’. While gametes must match, the evident mismatch between most transnational adoptees and their parents is worked into relative insignificance by kinning, although it never goes away and resurfaces in references to the children’s ‘original’ culture. Under Spanish law, as Campbell shows in one of his chapters in this volume, the phenotypes of egg donors and receivers are classified and matched in terms of skin colour, eye colour, facial features, hair colour and texture, body size and blood group. For at least some time, the Spanish clinic under study by Bestard and his colleagues as part of the PUG project used a commonsense threefold racial classification of black, white and yellow for donors, although this was adapted as demand grew (Bestard 2002). Thompson (2003) notes generally that ‘phenotypic and other descriptors of race and ethnicity are one of the few things that form a common differentiating, kinship-conferring and legitimizing organizational principle for the world’s egg, sperm and embryo markets’ (see also Thompson 2006: 548). It is this principle that effectively controls the movement of gametes across national, racialized borders, in an effort to serve the perceived preferences of parents and thus maintain the ‘purity’ of the nation, despite the fact that transnational adoption seems to undermine all these efforts and works instead to ‘familiarize’ (literally, i.e., to make family) the racial and ethnic differences represented by immigration. In other cases, however, gamete choice seems to express a desire not to maintain but rather to improve the racial status of the family and, by extension, the nation. Nahman reports that Israeli women in one IVF (in vitro fertilization) clinic, which used eggs from a clinic in Bucharest, Romania, were asked to fill in a form titled ‘Preferred External Features’, in which they often expressed preferences for egg donors who were lightskinned – although it seems such preferences did not in practice affect the clinicians’ allocation of eggs to particular women (Nahman 2005). In the U.K., too, Campbell (this volume) comments on clinics reporting that some Asian and Middle Eastern women, whether living in or visiting the U.K., request eggs from ‘white’ women and are able to receive them, despite the fact that the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority guidelines state that a ‘compelling reason’ is needed to depart from the normal practice of ethnic matching. In these cases, couples can have a ‘mixed race’ child without there being a ‘mixed race’ sexual or social relationship. Campbell (this volume) develops the analysis of ethnic matching of gametes to compare how states regulate the movement and attachment of genetic material in the assisted sexual reproduction of citizens with how they regulate the movement and attachment of immigrants in social reproduction of the nation. He argues that biology and culture are separated out and then reassembled in deliberative ways to create appropriate offspring who look (enough) like their parents, and to create citizens who will voluntarily identify as citizens of nations which are being reconstructed as multicultural assemblages (although with different emphases in the cases of Norway, Britain and Spain that Campbell examines). In both domains, the

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state acts as ‘an arbiter of value conflicts deriving from increased social diversity’. The state regulates elements of biology and culture, shuffling between them to produce a ‘morally coherent nation’. In doing so, the meaning of race (or ethnicity) hovers ambiguously between a biological matter of sexual reproduction and inherited physical appearance and a cultural matter of belief and language. The meaning of race harks back to the eugenic era, but is reconstituted as a deliberative process of (consumer) choice; what Taussig, Rapp and Heath (2003) call ‘flexible eugenics’. These examples show a constant movement between nature and culture, blurring their boundaries. On the one hand, race as a biological classification seems to have been resurrected by genetic technologies and to reinforce well-established racial categories and hierarchies: both the ‘need’ to match individuals for appearance and the desire for lighter babies summon up existing collective categories of race. The individualization that genetic technologies seem to depend on and promote – individual choice and preference – slips easily into an idiom of categories. On the other hand, having lighter babies by means of egg donation also destabilizes notions of race as something that ‘runs in the family’ and, as Campbell argues, turns it into a consumer choice that reveals nature as an artifice – which does not mean it can be reconstructed on a whim, as once the die is cast, the family must live with the consequences of that choice. Transnational adoption also undermines established notions of race and nation, even as it acts as a scenario for the reenactment of some of those notions. To summarize at this point: race, ethnicity and nationality can fruitfully be analysed in their interweaving with kinship, bearing in mind that kinship itself is ‘after nature’, that is, a domain that is being reconstituted as a result of the destabilization of the concept of nature. The variety of modes of relatedness and the indeterminacy of the boundary between nature and culture are two insights that recent studies of kinship can bring to an understanding of race, ethnicity and nationality, themselves seen as ways of thinking about relatedness. Ancestry and Ancestry Testing The way people think about their ancestry and how they deal with knowledge about their origins is a fertile ground for examining ideas of race, ethnicity and nation through the lens of kinship relations and in a context in which references to nature become both less self-evident and more self-conscious. Through ancestry, people can connect themselves to anterior individuals, but also to collectivities represented by those individuals. The recent appearance of ancestry testing services based on DNA analysis seems to indicate how genetic idioms might lead to increasingly deterministic ways of imagining ethnic and racial heritage. A report in the Financial Times (2–3 November 2002) describes how the chief executive of the company DNAPrint Genomics discovered he was ‘10 per cent Native American’ through the use of his company’s services, which can be accessed by purchasing a home-use kit with which one collects and stores a cell sample for later DNA sequencing. The DNAPrint website describes their ‘genealogy product, ANCESTRYbyDNA™ 2.5’ as

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a pan-chromosomal assay for genetic ancestry. The test surveys 176 Ancestry Informative Markers (AIMs) to provide an inference of genetic ancestry or heritage. The AIMs were carefully selected from large-scale screens of the human genome; and are characterized by sequences of DNA that are more prevalent in people from one continent than another. Using complex statistical algorithms, the test can determine with confidence to which of the major bio-geographical ancestry groups, Sub-Saharan African, European, East Asian or Native American, a person belongs, as well as the relative percentages in cases of admixed peoples. It’s a great tool for those individuals or groups interested in more deeply understanding their ancestry and lineage, or for certain people (i.e. some adoptee of mixed heritage) learning about their genetic ancestry. (http://www.dnaprint.com/welcome/productsandservices/anestrybydna/) Relative Genetics likewise offers to validate individuals’ Native American ancestry through either the maternal or the paternal line for US$450 (www.relativegenetics.com). This service is also provided by GeneTree, which explains that DNA research on full-blooded indigenous populations, such as Native American Indian populations, from all around the world has led to the discovery of genetic markers that are unique to populations, ethnicity and/or deep ancestral migration patterns. The markers that have very specific modes of inheritance, and which are relatively unique [sic] to specific populations, are used to assess [the] probabilities [of ] ancestral relatedness. (www.genetree.com) Other companies which offer similar DNA sequencing services explicitly discount ethnic and ‘racial’ ancestry tracing. Ancestry.com, for example, insists that one can only trace links to particular individuals. Their website states: ‘These tests do NOT tell you which ethnic tribe you may belong to.’ However, it goes on to say that, ‘They are designed, rather, to allow you to discover these genealogical answers by comparing to others who are proven to fall within certain genealogical characteristics’ (http://www.ancestry.com/genetics/main.htm), a formulation which clearly brings in ideas of ethnicity and race through the back door and, in doing so, presents a tacit scientific case for the genetic basis of ethnic and racial groupings. We are told that answers to the question of ethnic belonging can be provided by comparing oneself to individuals who are ‘proven’ to have certain ‘genealogical’ traits (which one can only assume must mean ‘genetically inherited’). But, as we saw above, there is a very contentious debate still in progress about whether ethnic or racial categories have any ‘proven’ genealogical basis, with the weight of opinion denying this proposition. The website statement purports to focus on the individual and his/her family connections, but collective categories of ethnicity are smuggled back in. The company Oxford Ancestry also denies that DNA analysis can identify racial or ethnic background: ‘There is no genetic basis for ethnicity or race. Our MatriLine

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service identifies your ancient ancestral mother, who lived at a time that pre-dates our notions of ethnicity and race’ (http://www.oxfordancestors.com/faqs.htm#2) – which of course does not stop people who find out the identity of their ancestral mother from assigning her an ethnic or racial identity themselves. In particular cases it seems people read test results in ways that map very straight lines through the genealogical and genetic complexities of generations of sexual unions – a unilinearity that is encouraged by Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA testing which follow either paternal or maternal lineages (see also Campbell’s chapter on media storylines in this volume). Nash (2004) analyses the work of the geneticist Bryan Sykes, who has produced popular literature about genetics, genealogy and human difference. One of her central questions is: ‘How are notions of nation, community, “race” and difference being shaped by and deployed within discourses of genetic relatedness?’ (2004: 6). She focuses on Sykes’s book The Seven Daughters of Eve, in which Sykes argues that 95 per cent of ‘native’ Europeans descend from seven women who lived in Europe (and the Middle East) between 45,000 and 10,000 years ago. Sykes bases his arguments on the analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) – the type of DNA material that is inherited unchanged from mother to offspring. Nash argues that, although Sykes adheres to the idea that genetic analysis shows that ‘races’ do not exist, his version of geneticized genealogy suggests that ‘the historic origins and ultimate “home” of white Europeans are in Europe and for non-white Europeans they are elsewhere’ (ibid.: 26). While he acknowledges that ‘we are all mongrels’ and that the question, ‘where do I come from?’ is ultimately unanswerable, the emphasis on the maternal transmission of mtDNA ‘offers a pure route back to origins’ (ibid.: 24, 23). ‘The problem is the way the popularization of genetic kinship based on … mtDNA can reinforce the notion that biological closeness is the fundamental basis of social and cultural affiliation’ (ibid.: 24). One of the ways it does this is by avoiding direct reference to race and ethnicity and instead focusing on the individual and the family. However, just as we saw in the case of the company Ancestry.com, mentioned above, ‘the language of genetic identity soon slips from individual and family to wider notions of collective identity, origins and communities of descent, meeting racialized versions of difference and belonging as it does so’ (ibid.: 26). Such a slip is even more obvious in the case of the British television documentary series The Difference (Channel 4, November 2000), which examined the nature of human genetic difference and, in one broadcast, linked ‘Asians’ to low alcohol tolerance and a range of different ‘racial’ groups to lactose intolerance (19 November 2000). Throughout the programme individuals were shown reacting in particular ways – getting drunk quickly, accepting or refusing a glass of milk – but in each case they were evidently representatives of a commonsense racial grouping, such as ‘Asians’ or ‘Africans’, even if it was also acknowledged that by no means all Africans or people of African descent were lactose intolerant. Nash clearly fears that popular genetic genealogies can reinforce notions of racial and ethnic purity, notions that may also underlie constructions of national identity. But she recognizes that the genetic answers supplied by such testing may have varied

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effects depending on how they are used by the people involved. Effects may be unpredictable. Brodwin (2002: 328) gives the imaginary example of a person using Y-chromosome DNA analysis that traces father-to-son connections. A man has sixteen male ancestors in the fifth preceding generation. If one of these men was European and all the others African, the person undergoing the test would most likely be socially classed as black in the U.S.A. (and in many other places). But if the European ancestor happened to be his father’s father’s father’s father’s father, then his ‘paternal ancestry’ would appear as entirely European. This ‘pure route back to origins’, to use Nash’s phrase, is highly selective and it is difficult to know what the effects of this selection would be. It might destabilize his racial identity or it might reinforce a racial essentialism, perhaps being interpreted in terms of a common narrative of white male sexual exploitation of African women. Nash’s own work on (nongenetic) genealogical searching also suggests the varied ways in which people use connections. Investigating the use of genealogical reckonings by people in the Irish diaspora, Nash argues that, while such reckonings and searches for ancestry may be easily linked to ideas about cultural and national purity and essentialism and to rooted identities legitimated by blood lines, genealogies also entail a more complex set of imaginings that reveal flows and migrations and that challenge simple biological determinations. Just as Modell (1994: 197–99) found that adoptees reunited at long last with biological mothers might discover the social and emotional thinness of the biological link, so meetings between ‘Irish’ relatives, reunited through ancestry searches, revealed ‘the limits of biological connection as a source of intimacy and affinity’ (Nash 2002: 48). Genealogical reckoning was held in a complex tension between ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, in which roots themselves are not simple belongings, but reimaginations and renarrations of belonging that exist in tension with the migrations and displacements of routes (Nash 2002: 32–33). In line with this, Tyler assesses the television documentary Motherland: A Genetic Journey, aired in the U.K. by the British Broadcasting Corporation (14 February 2003). This was based on an experiment that analysed the Y chromosomes and mtDNA of over 200 men and women of African Caribbean descent who lived in the U.K. and the programme followed three people who, using the results of the tests, travelled to African and Caribbean locations to seek out ancestral origins (see also Campbell, this volume, for a discussion of media coverage of this documentary). In one sense, argues Tyler (2003: 1–2), ‘the viewer is left with the impression that an individual’s DNA can be coded, separated and divided into its racially distinct component parts’. But, she goes on: when the research participants embarked on their journeys to forgotten African and Caribbean ancestral home-places, they unexpectedly discovered the entanglement of white and black people’s colonial histories and origins. In other words, these people’s journeys to ancestral home-places challenged and fractured each traveller’s perception of their ancestry, sense of self and belonging and so ‘widened the possibilities of what counts as kinship out

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from under the long shadow of genealogy and biology’ (Franklin 2001: 317) that set these journeys in motion. (Tyler 2003: 1–2) Mixed-race identities Tyler’s own research in the PUG project was about how mixed-race people in the U.K. use idioms of biology and culture to think about their personal make-up in the context of family and sense of place (Tyler 2005). In the present context, two things stand out from this research. The first is that the people she talked with did not refer much at all to genetics and less still to genomics when speaking about their own experiences and identities. Instead they talked in terms of blood or made very elliptical references to connections that could be glossed as ‘natural’ by referring to racialized phenotypes (colour, hair texture, etc.) and to relationships that did not need to be explained as natural, as they seemed self-evidently based on ‘natural facts’, such as being the (biological) child of a parent. In that sense, recent developments in genetic technology and popular understandings of them, as derived from the mass media, do not seem to have had an explicit impact on how these people think about nature and culture in the constitution of persons. Even when faced with an IVF ‘mixup’, as described by Tyler (this volume), people only referred in passing to genetics and framed the event as much in terms of established notions of inheritance and kinship as geneticized ones. The much-heralded geneticization of social life may be less advanced than supposed when one looks at certain domains of everyday life. It may be that Strathern’s idea that nature has lost its self-evidence and its grounding function is only partially true: for many of these people, nature seems to have been so self-evident that it was barely necessary to mention it. The second finding of interest in this context is that the difference between natural and cultural idioms was insecure and contingent. There was a constant traffic between the two ways of making connections. Tyler found that the testimonies of her ‘co-conversationalists’ illustrate ‘the intersection and blurring of biological and cultural attributes of identity when they think about the inheritance of interracial identities’ (Tyler 2005: 478). For example, ‘Clare’ is the child of an Antiguan father and an Irish mother; she is very light-skinned and ginger-haired, to the extent that many people in the Highfields area of Leicester, where she lives and works in an African Caribbean women’s centre, see her as white. She, however, classes herself as black. She was brought up by her Irish mother and Antiguan grandmother and, talking about her black identity, emphasizes strongly the influence of her grandmother and the surrounding black environment of Highfields on her upbringing. Her ‘black’ biological heritage via her father is not centred in this account. The characteristics she mentions explicitly are ‘cultural’, such as the way she speaks, but there seems to be more involved: some of the women in the African Caribbean centre where she works say that they see her as black, rather than white or mixed-race, and tell her that this is ‘because of your whole make-up, Clare’ (ibid.: 490). Clare insists, and these women agree, that in reality she is black. In short, ‘The food, the way that she speaks, thinks and sees blend together to “make-up” her “black” “heritage”, “roots” and identity. It makes no sense for Clare to make a

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distinction or to perceive a contradiction between her upbringing in a black cultural milieu, her white ancestry marked by her skin colour and her embodiment and internalisation of a “black” identity’ (ibid.). Culture is naturalized here at the same time as a naturalized definition of blackness, based on inherited traits expressed in phenotype, is contested and destabilized. This does not just turn culture into nature and vice versa, but traffics between them, unsettling their boundaries. Strategic Naturalization The term ‘strategic naturalization’ is taken from Charis Thompson and seems to me to capture some aspects of this traffic between nature and culture in reckoning racialized and ethnicized kin relations (Thompson 2001, 2005). In her work on assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in the U.S.A., Thompson found that people using ARTs make important distinctions between natural and social facts but that ‘the connections between the biological facts taken to be relevant to kinship and socially meaningful kinship categories are highly indeterminate’ and that people use ‘a mixed bag of surprisingly everyday strategies for naturalizing and socializing particular traits, substances, precedents and behaviours’ (Thompson 2001: 176, 75). For example, gestational surrogates (those who gestated an embryo made from a couple’s own gametes) tended to play down any links between them and the baby established through gestation. On the other hand, women gestating their own babies created with donated eggs tended to play up the links made between mother and baby through sharing blood and substance during gestation (cf. Ragoné 1994). In short, people privileged particular connections that suited them, rather than simply geneticizing everything. In any case, as we have seen already, genetics has social categories built into it already. For example, Thompson reports the case of an Italian American woman trying to get pregnant using donor eggs from an Italian American friend. The woman described the friend’s ‘shared ethnic classification as being “enough genetic similarity”’, but also said that it was important that her friend had a similar background and upbringing to her: ‘genes were coding for ethnicity’ (Thompson 2005: 156–57). The woman prefers a donor ethnically similar to herself, but glosses that similarity in a way that is indeterminately genetic and cultural, trafficking back and forth between the two. As Thompson (2005: 157) says, this ‘grounds the cultural in the natural’, but at the same time gives the natural its explanatory power by linking it to culturally relevant categories. The result of strategic naturalization is that ‘patients exercise agency and claim or disown bonds of ancestry and descent, blood and genes, nation and ethnicity’ in ways that suit their strategies of personhood (Thompson 2005: 149). Ragoné’s work on transracial surrogacy also indicates the role of strategic naturalization and culturalization (Ragoné 1998; 2000). One African-American gestational surrogate carrying a white baby said her mother thought that a black surrogate would feel too attached to a black baby and might want to keep the child. The mother was therefore happy her daughter was not carrying a black child. ‘Racial resemblance raises certain questions for her [the surrogate] about relatedness even when there is no genetic tie’ (Ragoné 1998: 126). The supposed affective link

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between black surrogate and black baby is very indeterminate in character: is it natural or cultural? It seems to be potentially both at the same time. One can argue that nature has been destabilized here, such that its terms of reference and its mechanisms of operation are not clear, but the result seems not to be to take refuge in increasingly biologized and geneticized idioms, but rather to blur the boundary between culture and nature. As Rabinow (1992: 241–42) predicted, ‘Nature will be known and remade through technique and will finally become artificial, just as culture becomes natural.’ Twine’s work on mixed-race families in Leicester, U.K., also shows this indeterminacy in idioms of nature and culture. Black mothers of black or mixed-race children were said to feel an automatic empathy with their children in the experience of being black in the U.K. White mothers of mixed-race children could only feel sympathy. The affective link between black mother and child was both seen to be due to the shared experience of being black in Britain and suffering racism and seen as so automatic that it derived from a natural affinity. The supposed lack of empathy between white mother and mixed-race child seems to have had a natural basis, because black people recognized that white mothers of such children were themselves victims of quite intense racism (Twine 2000).

Conclusion There seems to be no single way of understanding recent forms of kinship, including ones that involve the intervention of genetic technology, in their intersection with ideas of race, ethnicity and nation. As Weigman says in relation to ARTs, current scholarship has failed to ‘identify with precision a consistent or paradigmatic operation for understanding contemporary racialization in the context of assisted conception’ (2003: 315). She says that this is partly because racialization is itself an incoherent process. Her analysis of real and fictional IVF mix-ups in ART clinics in the U.S.A., which resulted in black children being born to nonblack parents (as in the Fasano–Rogers case in the U.S.A.)6 or black children discovering a previously unknown white parent (as in the film Made in America),7 argues that ARTs permit the imaginary, sentimental fiction of a multicultural, multiracial U.S.A., writ small in the family, where white men can claim affective kinship with nonwhite children, without actually having sexual relations with black women (an act which evokes an ugly U.S. history of violence, rape and hysterical fear of miscegenation). In this argument, ARTs, while geneticizing social relations in one sense, also denaturalize them, removing kinship from the realm of sex and producing an image of the nation, based on family, that is bound together by voluntary affect between racialized kin. (As I noted above, one could make the same argument about a different form of ‘assisted conception’, transnational adoption, which frequently involves integrating nonwhite children into white families.) In stark contrast, the use of ARTs in Israel seems to be shaped by and itself allows expression of anti-Palestinian ethnic and racial prejudice, as Israeli couples reject the possibility of using Palestinian women’s ova and express preferences for ova from

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light-skinned donors, and even voice doubts about dark-skinned surrogates who, it is feared, might somehow darken the baby in the process of gestation (Nahman 2005; Teman 2000; Wade 2002: 106–07). Or, to take another example of contradictory outcomes, in the ‘technology’ of transnational adoption, which also intervenes and assists in processes of human reproduction, racial and ethnic categories seem to be both denied and destabilized (nonwhite children become kin to white families and acquire European bodies in certain important respects), and reproduced (their ‘original’ cultures are maintained and revisited). At the same time, in Norway as in Spain, nonwhite immigrants are excluded in very familiar ways and racial categories reestablished, dividing the ‘family’ of the European nationals from the ‘family’ of the nonwhite immigrants. The resulting boundary can be breached by ‘mixed’ marriages – very rare in Norway, at least – but the resulting offspring are still differentiated from the transnational adoptee. In his chapter in this volume on media storylines about genetics and race, Campbell also concludes that ‘genetic information is used in a creative politics of identity where the contemporary mythologies of self making for “mixed-race” individuals and the multicultural nation, depend on selective regressions and reversals of truths and masks as opposed to genetic reduction pure and simple’. Strategic naturalization captures much of what I see as the reality of the situation, but it is only one side of the coin in that the strategic trafficking between naturalization and culturalization unsettles what is to count as nature and culture in the first place. Looking at the debates about race and genomics, which I reviewed at the beginning of this chapter, and looking also at much of the literature about the geneticization of social life, it is tempting to assume an ever-greater move towards not only the dominance of genetic idioms, but also more genetic determinism and more essentialist ways of thinking about identity and personhood. I hope to have indicated that, although these trends may exist, they do not represent the whole picture and that while there may be increased attention paid to biology and genes in the discourses and practices of everyday life in the Western world, and doubtless other regions where the impact of genetic knowledge has made a mark, it might be better to think in terms of a destabilization of nature in which the difference between nature and culture becomes increasingly blurred, there is a constant traffic between natural and cultural idioms and ideas, and the very constitution or sphere of influence of each realm becomes less clear. I hope also to have shown that kinship and kinship studies provide a revealing perspective for understanding race, ethnicity and nation, as these three domains all involve notions of human relatedness based on intertwining and to some extent exchangeable concepts of nature and culture. Genetics may intersect with race in ways that increase the possibility of racial discrimination in genetic mode. ‘Ethnic drugs’ aimed at racialized minorities may seem a positive form of discrimination, but it can clearly have negative effects, as indicated by the discrimination that U.S. African Americans suffered in the 1970s because of the links made between African origins and sickle-cell anaemia. The sickle cell case reminds us that DNA sequencing is not necessary to create invidious connections between disease, race and entitlement, but clearly if medical genetics

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ends up sustaining connections between race, susceptibility to disease and drug metabolism, this would add legitimacy to ideas about the reality and significance of race and might underwrite processes of social discrimination. It is already widely feared that genetic data may be used to discriminate against people (for example, in the insurance and employment markets) and several bodies have already moved to outlaw discrimination on the basis of genetic characteristics.8 As yet, there is no evidence that geneticized versions of race are being conscripted into the world of medical and life insurance,9 but if medical science ‘proved’ correlations between race and disease, such versions might enter into actuarial calculations. Or, to take another example, the dangers of a forensic anthropology that makes ‘racial’ identifications on the basis of anatomical data from skeletal remains (Smay and Armelagos 2000) may be compounded if DNA analysis is used, apparently lending more scientific weight to the identifications and perhaps legitimating actions that target racialized groups on these grounds (e.g., as potential criminal suspects).10 In short, there are real grounds for concern about possible developments in these directions. On the other hand, these developments are quite speculative at the moment, partly because there are powerful forces ranged against them: many medical geneticists do not think that race has any biological reality and argue against the idea that social categories of identity are linked to genetically based patterns of disease susceptibility; there is also clearly a strong politico-legal tendency to prohibit discrimination on genetic grounds. Finally, as I hope to have shown, increasing genetic determinism is not the evident trend in the postgenomic era: the destabilization of nature opens up new ways of thinking about identity and personhood and, while some of these may react to the artificiality of nature by reasserting natural determinism, others emphasize that artificiality by participating in the increasing volume of traffic between nature and culture that is eroding the boundary between them.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

Note that the scientists involved in the HGDP denied any such intentions (see the HGDP website at www.stanford.edu/group/morrinst/hgdp.html). For discussions of older intersections of race and disease, such as cystic fibrosis and sicklecell anaemia, see Duster (2002: 6; 2003a). See also Wailoo (2003), Tapper (1999) and Bowman (2000). See also (Risch et al. 2002). In May 2003, the historically black Howard University, in the U.S.A., announced plans to create an African American genetic databank, with a view to investigating links between disease and African American origins (Washington Post, 28 May 2003). See the website on the 2003 symposium ‘Race and the New Genomics’ (http://www.uic.edu/orgs/uicsymrg/uicsymrg/) for more information about the race and disease debates. See also Carsten (2001) for ideas about the creation of kinship through non-genealogical means. This changed in November 2003, when a new law included measures prohibiting the former anonymity of the sperm donor, which means, in effect, blocking the importation of anonymously donated sperm from Danish sperm banks.

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6.

In December 1998, Donna Fasano, a white U.S. woman undergoing assisted conception, gave birth to two children, one of whom was genetically the son of Mr and Mrs Rogers, a black couple. This was the result of the mistaken implantation of Deborah Rogers’ fertilized egg into Donna Fasano, along with Fasano’s own fertilized egg. 7. In this 1993 film, the daughter of a U.S. black woman discovers her biological father – the man who donated sperm for her mother’s assisted conception – is a white man. This is also a surprise for the mother. In the end, it turns out that a clinical mix-up of records misled both mother and daughter and the sperm donor was not in fact white, but this is after the development of a relationship between the white man and the two women. 8. Sándor (2002) gives two examples: UNESCO’s 1997 Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, Article 6, states that, ‘No one shall be subjected to discrimination based on genetic characteristics that is intended to infringe or has the effect of infringing human rights, fundamental freedoms and human dignity.’ The European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights (2000), Article 21, states that, ‘Any discrimination based on any ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.’ On 14 October 2003, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (http://www.genome.gov/11508845); it was reissued in 2005 and is still bogged down in the House of Representatives (see http://thomas.loc.gov/). The Act would prevent health insurers and employers from using genetic information to determine eligibility, set premiums or hire and fire people. 9. See, for example, the Policy and Ethics pages of the website of the National Human Genome Research Institute (www.genome.gov) or the website of the U.K. Forum for Genetics and Insurance (http://www.ukfgi.org.uk/). Daykin et al. state: ‘in some circumstances race might provide actuarially relevant information about mortality or sickness, etc. However, strong anti-discrimination norms tend to ensure that, in most countries, this information is not used by insurers when setting premiums. Whereas, in the U.K., disability discrimination legislation permits insurers nonetheless to discriminate, subject to strict controls, the U.K.’s race discrimination legislation allows no such exemption. No exemption was ever sought by insurers, and the Continuous Mortality Investigation of the U.K. actuarial profession (CMI), for example, has never been in a position to investigate insured population mortality rates subdivided by race, since data are not collected in a form that would enable such an investigation to be carried out’ (Daykin et al. 2003). 10. The Louisiana newspaper The Advocate carried a story (6 April 2003) about a genetics laboratory which, on the basis of DNA analysis, redirected a police search for a serial killer from a white man to a black man. Tony Frudakis, chief executive officer of the DNAPrint Genomics company that carried out the analysis, was reported as saying that ‘his company can determine a person’s ancestral past by analyzing 73 DNA markers and narrowing the results to proportions in four categories: East Asian, Indo-European, Native American and Sub-Saharan African. Samples are then compared to a database of 300 to 400 people already typed to produce a comparable skin tone’, he said. The database ‘wasn’t complete enough to be used for this type of investigation until this year’. The newspaper said that, ‘Some geneticists have cautioned against tests for race because they could mislead investigators. Because the technology relies on statistical frequency determining what markers are more likely to appear in black people versus white people it can never provide certainty, just a higher probability.’ See also Duster (2002), who thinks the use of DNA profiling in police databases will simply continue the existing

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tendency to skew such databases towards the racial minorities which tend to be targeted by police, and will lead researchers to make spurious connections between DNA profiles and criminal behaviour.

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Ragoné, H. 1994. Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart. Boulder: Westview Press. ———. 1998. ‘Incontestable Motivations’, in S. Franklin and H. Ragoné (eds), Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 118–31. ———. 2000. ‘Of Likeness and Difference: How Race Is Being Transfigured by Gestational Surrogacy’, in H. Ragoné and F.W. Twine (eds), Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism. London: Routledge, pp. 56–75. Rapp, R. 1999. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. London: Routledge. Reardon, J. 2001. ‘The Human Genome Diversity Project: A Case Study in Coproduction’, Social Studies of Science 31(3): 357–88. Risch, N., E. Burchard, E. Ziv and H. Tang. 2002. ‘Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research: Genes, Race and Disease’, Genome Biology 3(7): 1–2007.12. Sándor, J. 2002. ‘Racism and Eugenism: Realistic Fears in the Post-Genomic Era?’ Race, Ethnicity, Nation and Genetics in Europe. PUG Workshop 3, 12–14 December 2002. University of Oslo, Norway. Santos, R.V. 2002. ‘Indigenous Peoples, Postcolonial Contexts and Genomic Research in the Late 20th Century: A View from Amazonia (1960–2000)’, Critique of Anthropology 22(1): 81–104. Schneider, D. 1969. ‘Kinship, Nationality and Religion in American Culture: Toward a Definition of Kinship’, in V. Turner (ed.), Forms of Symbolic Action. New Orleans: American Ethnological Society, Tulane University, pp. 116–25. Smay, D.B. and G.J. Armelagos. 2000. ‘Galileo Wept: A Critical Assessment of the Use of Race in Forensic Anthropology’, Transforming Anthropology 9(2): 19–40. Smith, C.A. 1997. ‘The Symbolics of Blood: Mestizaje in the Americas’, Identities 3(4): 495–521. Stolcke, V. 1995. ‘Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe’, Current Anthropology 36(1): 1–23. Stoler, A.L. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Strathern, M. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tapper, M. 1999. In the Blood: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Taussig, K.-S., R. Rapp and D. Heath. 2003. ‘Flexible Eugenics: Technologies of the Self in the Age of Genetics’, in A.H. Goodman, D. Heath and S.M. Lindee (eds), Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science beyond the Two Culture Divide. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 58–76. Teman, E. 2000. ‘Surrogate Motherhood in Israel’. M.Sc., Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Thompson, C. 2001. ‘Strategic Naturalizing: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic’, in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 175–201. ———. 2003. ‘Biological Race and Ethnicity: Dead and Alive. The Case of Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the U.S.’ Anthropology and Science: The 5th Decennial Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the U.K. and Commonwealth, 14–18 July 2003. University of Manchester, U.K. ———. 2005. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

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———. 2006. ‘Race Science’, Theory, Culture and Society 23(2–3): 547–49. Twine, F.W. 2000. ‘Bearing Blackness in Britain: The Meaning of Racial Difference for White Birth Mothers of African-Descent Children’, in H. Ragoné and F.W. Twine (eds), Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism. London: Routledge, pp. 76–108. Tyler, K. 2003. ‘The Genealogical Imagination: The Inheritance of Inter-Racial Identities’, Anthropology and Science: The 5th Decennial Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the U.K. and Commonwealth, 14–18 July. University of Manchester, U.K. ———. 2005. ‘The Genealogical Imagination: The Inheritance of Interracial Identities’, Sociological Review 53(3): 476–94. Van Dijck, J. 1998. Imagenation: Popular Images of Genes. London: Macmillan. Volkman, T.A. 2005. ‘Introduction: New Geographies of Kinship’, in T.A. Volkman (ed.), Cultures of Transnational Adoption. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–24. Wade, P. 1997. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto Press. ———. 2002. Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. London: Pluto Press. Wailoo, K. 2003. ‘Inventing the Heterozygote: Molecular Biology, Racial Identity and the Narratives of Sickle-Cell Disease, Tay–Sachs and Cystic Fibrosis’, in D.S. Moore, J. Kosek and A. Pandian (eds), Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 235–53. Weigman, R. 2003. ‘Intimate Publics: Race, Property and Personhood’, in D.S. Moore, J. Kosek and A. Pandian (eds), Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 296–319. Wieviorka, M. 1997. ‘Is It So Difficult to Be Anti-Racist?’ in P. Werbner and T. Modood (eds), Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. London: Zed Books, pp. 139–53. Williams, B. 1989. ‘A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain’, Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 401–44. ———. 1995. ‘Classification Systems Revisited: Kinship, Caste, Race and Nationality as the Flow of Blood and the Spread of Rights’, in S. Yanagisako and C. Delaney (eds), Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis. New York: Routledge, pp. 201–36. Yanagisako, S. and C. Delaney (eds). 1995. Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis. London: Routledge.

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2 Race, Genetics and Inheritance Reflections upon the Birth of ‘Black’ Twins to a ‘White’ IVF Mother Katharine Tyler

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n 8 July 2002, the Sun newspaper (the most widely read tabloid newspaper in the U.K.) reported their exclusive scoop: ‘White couple have black IVF twins’. The paper described how this ‘devastating’ and ‘tragic mix-up’ involved a ‘black couple who has also been desperately trying for a test-tube baby’ (Kay 2002a, 2002b). With the aid of computerized images of the black and white couples, arrows point the reader to the possible combination through which the ova and sperm were ‘mixed up’. Either the black couple’s fertilized egg was wrongly implanted into the white woman or the black man’s sperm was used to fertilize the white woman’s egg. The question became ‘Who are the real parents of the twins?’ (Kay 2002a).1 This question generated much speculation and debate on the black and white couples’ competing claims to motherhood and fatherhood. Pages of copy set the couples’ claims to the twins against each other (see also the television docudrama inspired by this incident, Born with Two Mothers [Channel 4, 21 April 2005]).2 It appeared that while the twins potentially linked the two couples, they also divided them. A month after the media uproar, DNA tests established that the black father and white mother were the biological parents. With these scientific facts in mind, a High Court judge decreed that the white woman and her husband were the children’s legal parents. This case is unique in the history of assisted conception in the U.K. because it features the first known accidental mixing of the gametes of couples undergoing IVF treatment in the same clinic. An examination of the public’s reactions to this event provides a rare opportunity to explore how ideas of biological and genetic relatedness

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mediate ideas about the inheritance of racial identity. In this essay I seek to begin such a project by drawing upon the newspaper reports on this event as well as the thoughts and reactions of ‘lay’ people to this incident. The latter are drawn from conversations that I had with people from Leicester during twelve months of residential ethnographic research in the city.3 My study explores how idioms of genealogy and relatedness are put to work in the popular imagination to construct, maintain and undermine racial binaries and hierarchies that support cultures of racism. My account illuminates the contradictory ways in which the press and people from Leicester traffic between an essentialist racialized discourse, which reaffirms the naturalization of racial difference, and a more progressive discourse, which undermines the black/white binary. It is precisely this ambiguous and ‘mercurial’ aspect of racialized discourses that racism exploits (Wade 2002). Anthropological studies that examine how ideas of racial and ethnic identification mediate people’s experiences of assisted conception have provided me with a useful framework to trace the reactions of the press and of my coconversationalists to the birth of the ‘black’ twins (Hartouni 1997; Ragoné 1998, 2000; Thompson 2001; Weigman 2003). Proponents of this approach examine the complex meanings that people attach to ideas of gestational bonding and genetic relatedness within interracial surrogacy arrangements and mistaken racialized IVF mix-ups. In contrast to my account, however, the majority of these studies are drawn from America. For example, Weigman (2003) explores the legal battle that ensued after a white woman, who had IVF treatment in a Manhattan clinic, gave birth to twins, one black and one white. Furthermore, Ragoné (1998, 2000) illuminates how American gestational surrogate mothers (women who do not donate genetic material to the developing child) prefer to gestate embryos that belong to couples who are from a different racial and ethnic background to themselves. The women perceived their different racial location to the child to provide a ‘separation’ between themselves and the baby (Ragoné 2000: 66). In stark contrast to the women with whom Ragoné worked, Hartouni (1997: 85–98) examines the details of an African American gestational surrogate’s custody battle for a baby that she was contracted to carry for a white couple. The black woman claimed that the process of gestation had led her to develop ‘more feelings’ for the baby than the child’s ‘natural parents’ (1997: 85). However, the judge appointed to the case did not grant custody to the black mother. He believed the ‘true maternal bonds’ that she claimed to feel were only likely to occur within a ‘proper family unit’ (1997: 92). In the judge’s mind, such a family was stereotypically constituted by ‘married mothers with husbands whose babies that they carry’. Hartouni (1997: 98) concludes that this case demonstrates how the new reproductive practices have the potential to reinforce the power relations that support and maintain the normative ideal of the ‘biologically rooted, racially closed, heterosexual middle-class unit’. Questions concerning the role of gestation and genetics in conferring racial affiliation and distance between mother and child, as well as debates about who and what constitutes the ‘proper’ family, are also played out in the British newspaper

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accounts and my co-conversationalists’ reflections on the birth of the ‘black’ twins. Yet in spite of these resonances across the Atlantic, the contrasts and complexities between British and American cultures of racism, and imaginings of nation, makes it imperative to examine how these aspects of genealogical relatedness are configured in the British context. It is with this in mind that I now turn to an examination of the ways in which my study is situated within and contributes to the body of sociological literature concerned with understanding the articulation of ideas of race, ethnicity and nation within the British genealogical imagination.

Configurations of Race, Genealogy and Inheritance in Britain The dominant folk conception of race pervasive within British society associates physical appearance such as skin colour, hair type, facial features and body shape with a particular, discrete and bounded biological parentage and cultural ancestry (Ifekwunigwe 2001: 48). Another way of putting this is to suggest that it is possible to determine an individual’s racial ancestry and cultural location from their physical appearance. The postwar period in Britain has been coined as the era of the ‘new racism’ (Barker 1981) whereby cultural differences, such as language, religion and so forth, become markers of absolute racial differences, thus giving weight to the idea that one ‘race’ is culturally superior to another (see for example Gilroy 1987). Many writers insist that racial differentiation, even if expressed in cultural terms, implies a commitment to the idea of biological distinction rooted and fixed in nature (for reviews of anthropological and sociological approaches to the study of race, biology and culture, see Goldberg 1999; Wade 2002). It is against this background that social scientists of critical race studies have debated how British racial and ethnic minorities might mobilize the genealogical idioms of ‘inheritance’, ‘belonging’, ‘ancestry’ and ‘culture’ to construct identities of resistance to racism (see for example Gilroy 1997; Hall 1992; Nash 2002). The aim of this project is to reject essentialist notions of racial difference formed through the ‘warring domains of Nature and Culture’ (Gilroy 1997: 331) without disposing of ideas of shared histories, origins and ancestries (Nash 2002: 32). The rejection of politically regressive notions of fixed biological and cultural ‘origins’ is necessary to construct a counter-politics to the ‘continual oscillation’ between essentialist notions of biology and culture that constitute the so-called ‘new racism’ (Gilroy 2000: 57). This approach is exemplified in Hall’s (1992) much acclaimed essay on the ‘new politics of representation’, which called for ‘the end of the essential black subject’ imagined in dominant British discourse to be stabilized by ‘nature or some other essential guarantee’ (1992: 257). In his essay, Hall advocates the political necessity of focusing on the formation of ‘new ethnicities’ that ‘decouples’ the term ethnicity from closed and exclusive forms of British national identity synonymous with ideas of white ethnic and racial purity (ibid.). For Hall, the process of ‘rediscovery’ of where black Britons came from does not involve a ‘simple return’ to ‘ancestral pasts’ and ‘cultural roots’ (ibid.: 258), but neither does it entail disposing of ‘shared points of departure’ and ‘forms of experience’ (Nash 2002: 33). Rather, Hall (1990: 224)

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calls for an ‘imaginative rediscovery of hidden histories’. He insists that such mutual feelings of ‘deep inheritance’ must be ‘re-experienced and re-interpreted’ through the ‘categories of the present’ (1992: 258). Thus Hall argues that black British ethnicities need to be ‘constructed historically, culturally, politically’ (ibid.: 257). Clearly, Hall demonstrates how the components of genealogy – affiliation to ancestral histories and pasts, cultural ‘roots’, descent and inheritance – open the way for thinking about ethnic and racial identities as ‘neither eternally fixed and essential, nor endlessly fluid and freely self-fashioned’ (Nash 2002: 49). In so doing, he illustrates how genealogy provides a useful concept for moving on from essentialist theories of race and ethnicity. An examination of the public’s reactions to the birth of the ‘black’ IVF twins pushes people to include within this frame the more immediate aspects of relatedness, such as gestation, maternal affiliation, upbringing and marital fidelity. Thus, it seems to me that such an examination provides a valuable avenue for research that holds the potential to sharpen up the sociological analysis of race and genealogy.

What the Papers Say... Both traditionally left- and right-wing, broadsheet (quality) and tabloid newspapers portrayed the incident with melodrama and hysteria. The defining tropes employed to describe the ‘mix-up’ traffic between the realms of the ‘spiritual’, ‘the natural’ and ‘the cultural’. The left-leaning broadsheet the Observer described IVF in supernatural terms as ‘the miracle that can become a nightmare’ (Kellaway 2002). The mistake, according to the Guardian, the Observer’s sister paper, was caused by ‘disastrous human error’ that left the medical profession ‘in shock’ (Morris 2002). The white couple, who remained anonymous, were also depicted as ‘shocked’ when they discovered that the children were ‘dark-skinned’ (Morris 2002). In a similar vein, the Sun reported that the white couple’s ‘joy turned to dismay when the babies were born and clearly dark skinned’ (Kay 2002b). This melodramatic reaction did provoke some critical comment and analysis in the broadsheet newspapers. For example, in the Guardian, Robert Winston, a professor of fertility studies, questioned the British Medical Association’s suggestion that this was an ‘appalling tragedy for all concerned’ (Winston 2002). He asked, ‘Would this spokesperson have thought it such an “appalling tragedy”… had these parents given birth to unrelated white children?’ In other words, the supposedly miraculous conception of the ‘children’ demonstrates how ‘white people are [imagined to be] something else that is realized in and yet is not reducible to the corporeal, or racial’ (Dyer 1997: 14–15). The birth of black twins transforms the babies’ joyous conception into a nightmarish experience, associated with ‘disastrous human error’. At birth the babies become racially marked and so they are reduced to their bodies and thus to ‘race’ (Dyer 1997: 14). The Daily Mail, a tabloid regularly condemned by some for its racist and nationalist sentiments, provides an extreme image of the white couple’s ‘shock’ by running a racist cartoon that dramatized the racialized aspect of the blunder with the

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caption, ‘I’m sure there’s nothing wrong about Eileen. But why not ring the hospital to put your mind at rest?’ The cartoon was of a mother taking her child to nursery – except that child was a chimp (see also Birkett 2002 for critical comment on this cartoon). Drawing upon utterly racist imagery and symbolism, this cartoon evokes bestial images associated with science fiction scenarios concerning the potentially monstrous hybrids that might be produced by the reproductive technologies. The racist cartoon also echoes past colonial sexual and social taboos about the imagined defilement of white women who gave birth to interracial children.4 In short, the figure of the chimp can be interpreted as a ‘surrogate for all who have been colonized in the name of nature’ (Haraway 1989: 152). While the chimp’s relationship with the white woman positions the animal ‘just over the line’ into the field of culture, the white woman’s maternal love and care for the chimp places her ‘just at or over the line into “nature”’ (Haraway 1989: 148). The white woman’s maternal instincts appear to almost – but yet not quite – blind her to the species of her child. To ease her concerns, the woman is advised by the disembodied and authoritative voice of the caption to seek the objective and rational guidance of the hospital. It could be argued that the caption symbolizes the authoritative voice of Western science. The racial incongruity between the white birth mother and the twins is further reinforced by the journalists’ references to the babies’ ‘dark skin’, which when the story broke was emphasized by the newspapers’ reference to the twins as ‘black’, rather than ‘mixed race’. However, once the genetic identity of the twins was established, they were referred to as both ‘black’ and ‘mixed race’. For example, the judge reporting on the case commented that ‘the twins had been born “children of mixed race by a mistake which cannot be rectified”’ (Verkaik 2003). The term ‘mixed race’ is commonly used in English vernacular to refer to people whose parents are recognized as belonging to distinct racial groups. From this point of view, the Sun’s initial failure to concede that the babies’ gestation in the white woman’s womb and their contested genetic racialized parentage might render them ‘mixed race’ reproduces the hegemonic ‘bi-racialized’ folk models of difference pervasive in British society (Ifekwunigwe 2001). The supposed racial difference separating the white mother from the ‘black’ twins is a recurring theme throughout the initial newspaper reports. Unambiguous Motherhood Collectively the newspapers argue that the white mother’s claim to the twins is dependent not on her potential genetic relationship to the babies but on the idea that she would have created a ‘bond’ with them during the period of their gestation in her body. The quality press draw upon the mother’s legal claim to the children by citing the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. This act, we are told by the Independent, states that, ‘the woman who carried the child was the mother, regardless of its genetic inheritance’ (Duckworth 2002a). The Sun echoes similar sentiments by drawing not upon the law but the more intimate aspects of kinship in the following emotional plea: ‘But even though the twins are black, the mother wants to keep them. She feels that she has bonded with them because of the time they were inside her body during the pregnancy’ (Kay 2002b). As Thompson (2001: 178) argues,

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gestational surrogate mothers, women who do not donate genetic material to the gestating child, are often accorded a ‘rich biological’ claim to motherhood. This claim is not rooted in the idea that genetics is the ‘essential natural component that confers kinship’ but in the sharing of substance, for example blood and oxygen, between the mother and developing child in the womb. What is particularly significant is the Sun’s emphasis upon the formation of this bond ‘even though the twins are black’. The mother’s bond with the ‘black’ children is thought to facilitate a ‘cross-racial feeling’, an aspect of ‘white liberal society’ associated with ideals of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘racial progressiveness’ (Weigman 2003: 308). The Independent (Duckworth 2002a) supports this image of multiracial kinship by reporting that the white couple was ‘determined’ to keep the twins and that they were more than a year old. These sentiments highlight the ways in which the white mother’s biological relationship with the children formed through gestation becomes ‘assimilated to the care one provides a child once it is born’ (Thompson 2001: 180). However, the formation of this social and biological bond between the mother and the twins does not disrupt the racial location and identities of the ‘white’ mother and the ‘black’ twins. The white mother is thought to love and want the twins ‘even though’ they are ‘black’. It would appear that, while gestation facilitates love across the racial divide, such interracial love does not necessarily become a conduit for the inheritance of racial identity. It is the maintenance of incongruity between the white mother and the twins that means the mother’s legal rights can be utilized, according to a fertility expert quoted in the Independent, to sue the NHS clinic for ‘negligence and battery’ (9 July 2002, p. 5). The expert argued: ‘They placed a different embryo in the woman to the one she was expecting [note the pun here on ‘expecting’]. She would have a case for shock and violation of her bodily integrity, which is what battery comes down to.’ While the spokesperson does not qualify what renders the embryo ‘different’ to the one that the white woman was ‘expecting’, she draws upon the framework of the law to turn the white liberal image of multiracial kinship reproduced by this mistake upside down. In this way, the mother’s legal and physical ownership of her body enables her to make claims in what appear to be competing directions. The particular claims of the black woman to the children are screened out in the media debates and commentary on motherhood. According to the Guardian this is because, ‘The law is clear: the mother who gives birth to a child after IVF treatment is the legal mother’ (10 July 2002, p. 17). Yet, the law is not so clear on who has the right to claim to be the twins’ father. This is exemplified in an examination of the heated speculation concerning the legal, social and biogenetic status of the black and white men’s claims to fatherhood. Ambiguous Fatherhood In parallel with the discussions on the white woman’s affiliation to the twins, the debates surrounding the issue of fatherhood are gendered. However, in contrast to the mother’s claim to the twins, they are not explicitly racialized. The Guardian contends that under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act:

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If he is married to the mother [i.e. gestational mother] he is considered is considered the father – unless he did not consent to the placing in her of the embryo. If it is proved that Mr B [the black man] is the biological father, lawyers may attempt to argue that he has rights to the child, as Mr A [the white man] did not give informed consent to the placing of these embryos. (Morris 2002) Clearly, the emphasis here is upon the white man’s ‘informed consent’ to his wife’s gestation of another man’s genetic children in determining his claims to fatherhood and so truncating the black man’s right to claim his genetic material as his own. This presupposes that the ‘old fashioned’ contractual relationship of marriage and the maintenance of fidelity between a husband and his wife are crucial in determining who can claim the status of legitimate fatherhood (see also Weigman 2003: 308). The black woman’s marital contract with her husband, and status as his wife, does not sanction her to make a similar claim to motherhood. This reveals the gendered hierarchy between husbands’ and wives’ access to the fruits of each others’ reproductive labour and property, which in this case produces racial inequalities. Thus, a legal duty that protects the rights of one set of married women (gestational surrogates) negates the rights of another set of married woman (wives of sperm donors). What’s Best for the Children? The Guardian (Morris 2002) speculates that ‘the best interests of the child’ will be paramount in the judge’s decision. The children have a lawyer to represent their ‘interests’ and so they become independent persons. Yet their ‘best interests’ are reported to be potentially synonymous with those of either of the couples. The Guardian (Morris 2002) explains, ‘Lawyers for Mr and Mrs A might argue that the children have bonded with the couple. But lawyers for Mr and Mrs B could claim it would be in the best interests for two black children to be brought up by a black couple.’ Once more, the white parents’ racial location is unmarked, rendering their ‘bond’ with the children racially neutral, whereas the ‘black’ couple’s relationship is racially marked and so made particular and distinct. Moreover, implicit in this statement is the assumption that lawyers might claim that the ‘black’ parents by virtue of being ‘black’ will have an awareness of what Twine (2000) identifies as ‘racial empathy’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘racial literary skills’ for the twins’ cultural needs. Miles insists that such assertions ‘condemn “white” people to a universal condition which implies possession of a permanent essence which inevitably sets them apart’ (Miles, cited in Twine 2000: 76). This sentiment is echoed in the Independent’s reporting of an interview with a white Dutch woman who experienced a similar mix-up (9 July 2002, p. 5). Wilma Stuart gave birth to twins, one black and one white, after the hospital mistakenly mixed her white husband’s sperm with the sperm of a black man. Reflecting upon her future relationship with her black son, Mrs Stuart commented: ‘What is going to happen when he comes home from school and says kids have been calling him “the black one”? I’m white. I’ve never suffered racial discrimination and I won’t know

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how to react properly.’ Mrs Stuart thinks that her racial location means that she will be unable to empathize with her ‘black’ child’s future experiences of racism. This assumption rests upon the belief that her white ethnicity prohibits her from acquiring racial literacy. The Verdict A month later the press reported in a much more discrete and less enthusiastic style the genetic identity of the twins. DNA tests established that the white woman was their ‘biological mother’ and the black man was proved to be the ‘biological father’. Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, the judge appointed to the case, was quoted in the Daily Telegraph as saying, ‘It is now up to the court to “seek to disentangle a matter of difficult issues”’ (Hall 2002). In this way, objective and universal scientific knowledge that tells us about what exists ‘out there’ has ‘intimate and personal effects’ (Franklin 2001: 306, 307). In February 2003 Dame Elizabeth made her final ruling. It was reported that the black man was named as the legal father of the twins and ‘has the right to help to bring up the children’ (Verkaik 2003). However, the judge commented, ‘Their biological mother and their biological father are not married and cannot marry. They may not be able during their childhood to form any relationship with their biological father’ (Verkaik 2003). Advancing within this moral framework, Dame Elizabeth said that, ‘Everyone concerned with the problems which have arisen in this case agrees that the twins should remain with the family into which they were born, with Mr and Mrs A’ (Verkaik 2003). It is on these grounds that the white couple applied for adoption of the children to enforce their parental status. While the law acknowledges the black father’s genetic part in the reproduction of the twins, it simultaneously suggests that biological relatedness alone can not sustain his and his wife’s claims to parenthood. In the absence of the black father’s marital relationship with the white mother, the white couple’s claims to the twins remain paramount. The effect of Dame Elizabeth’s judgment is to reaffirm the normality of the ‘proper’ heterosexual marital nuclear family that is central to white, straight, middle-class British culture. Perhaps surprisingly, given the heated debates centred upon the racial identity of the twins, Dame Elizabeth’s ruling focused exclusively upon the couples’ gendered and matrimonial rights to the babies. Having sought to critically present the newspapers’ reactions, I shall now turn to ethnographic mode and explore my co-conversationalists’ reflections on this event.

What the People Say... At the time this story broke, I was beginning twelve months of anthropological research in an ethnically diverse and inner-city area of Leicester (May 2002 to May 2003). One aim of the fieldwork was to examine the residents’ understandings of the ways in which ideas of ancestry, biological and cultural relatedness mediate ideas about the constitution of racialized identities (see Tyler 2005a). As a way into these discussions I asked past and present residents of this locality, across racial, ethnic,

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class and gendered locations, what they thought about the birth of the ‘black’ twins to the white IVF mother. While my discussions with my co-conversationalists were stimulated by the newspaper commentary, this is not the frame of reference that they mobilized to collect their thoughts. Rather, one context that these people summoned up to organize their ideas was their experience of similar racialized ‘mix-ups’ occurring without the intervention of assisted reproduction. Thus a recurring theme in my co conversationalists’ accounts was that the white couple could be the biological parents of the twins. In parallel with my analysis of the newspapers’ reporting of this incident, I shall attempt to draw out the contradictions inherent within my coconversationalists’ reflections. From an anti-essentialist standpoint, I shall argue that my co-conversationalists’ emphasis upon the recurrence of racialized traits across generations and colour-lines holds the potential to undermine the naturalization of racial difference. However, I shall also suggest that it could be argued that their views reaffirm the fixity of racial binaries and hierarchies. Mr Shah I spoke with Mr Shah a week after the media commotion.5 We first met in 1997 when I conducted fieldwork for my doctoral thesis (see Tyler 2000: ch. 5). Then he told me that he was born in the Gujarat region of India during the time of British colonial rule. Mr Shah migrated in his late teens to the British colony of Uganda. After Uganda’s independence from colonial rule, South Asians were identified with the old colonial regime and were expelled by Idi Amin’s government. At this time, Mr Shah was forced to settle in Leicester. He explained how he understood his migration to Leicester to be a continuation of his ongoing relationship with Britain and its Empire. Growing up in colonial India made Mr Shah feel ‘more English than the English’. Thus, when he settled in Leicester, it was a shock to him to find that white English people saw him as an immigrant and an outsider. When we met again to discuss the birth of the IVF twins, Mr Shah drew upon his childhood experiences in India to think about the social and ethical implications of this mistake as follows: From my experience, when I was young, when a fair-skinned couple gave birth to a dark coloured child, then it would be well discussed, same as the experts are discussing it now. The elderly people would say that even if dark skin was in the family five to six generations back then people [i.e. fairskinned couples] could have a different colour child, even if they [the couple] are from the same community... So if the couple is fair then the child will not necessarily be fair, who knows this might not be the case now, but I am talking from my own experience. It is for the scientists to prove what has happened here.6 Thinking through the details of this mistake, Mr Shah deploys the terms ‘fair’ and ‘dark’ to refer to distinctions in skin colour. Within colonial and postcolonial South Asian societies, ‘fair’ skin tone and colour is sometimes perceived to be a marker of

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higher social rank and status than ‘dark’ skin tone and colour (for a discussion of the similarities between South Asian ideas of status and British folk models of racial differentiation, see Sharma 1999). Mr Shah believes that there is nothing new in ‘fair skinned’ parents producing children that are ‘darker’ than them in skin colour. In fact, he would not be surprised if the ‘fair-skinned’ parents are the genetic parents of the twins – a possible connection and explanation that was absent in the newspapers. He demonstrates his belief that ‘fair’ or ‘dark’ skin colour does not simply signify ‘just’ fair or ‘just’ dark biological parentage and descent. From an anti-essentialist perspective, Mr Shah’s interpretation of events appears to undermine ideas concerning the differentiation of status groups marked by skin colour. In other words, he seems to suggest that there are no discrete genetically homogeneous ethnic, racial groups and communities. However, it might also be the case that Mr Shah’s ideas draw upon a discourse that supports the naturalized differentiation of people by skin tone and colour. From this angle, his belief in the unpredictable recurrence of ‘dark’ or ‘fair’ skin colour points to the idea that a genealogical essence lies dormant in the body and can reappear across generations. Dr Said Dr Said also thinks that the white parents could be the genetic parents of the twins. He is in his fifties and is the manager of an educational and cultural community centre for Bangladeshi people. During my stay in Leicester, I was often invited to celebrations and events organized by the community centre: for example, prize giving and poetry readings. I came to know Dr Said through my participation in such events. I learnt that he had moved to England from Bangladesh (or Pakistan as Bangladesh was then) in his early twenties to study for a masters degree at Salford University, which led him on to complete a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Dhaka University. One afternoon, I sat talking to Dr Said for several hours in his office at the back of the community centre. He told me about his childhood in Bangladesh. Dr Said described with sadness how his mother had died when he was ten years of age and that his father remarried. He laughed when he remembered how he used to tease his step-siblings when they were young children by asking them, ‘Who is my mother?’ They assumed that Dr Said’s stepmother was also his birth mother. It is in the face of this discussion that Dr Said reflected upon the baby ‘mix-up’ like this: There was a white lady and a white man and they had a child with African hair. The dad never accepted the child, saying that his wife had had an affair with a mixed-race African… So they had a DNA test and that claimed that the parents were the real parents. So what conclusions can we draw from this? Conclusion is that features can reappear. You don’t know if there is any black blood or African blood in you [addressed at me, his white British coconversationalist] – it can happen, and it can reappear after years. So I would not be surprised if they found that those twins were the white couple’s.

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In parallel with my analysis of Mr Shah’s narrative, Dr Said’s retelling of the story of the white couple who gave birth to a child with African hair is open to several interpretations. First, Dr Said’s explanation demonstrates, yet simultaneously undermines, the linear logic of racial fractions underpinning folk conceptions of the mechanisms involved in the inheritance of racial identity. On the one hand, the white father thinks that his white wife has had sexual intercourse with a ‘mixed-race African’ to give birth to a newborn that has African-style hair and white skin. From this standpoint, the inherited racialized body correlates categorically, in fact almost mathematically, with one’s biological parentage. On the other hand, Dr Said’s resolution to this story exemplifies his belief that inherited phenotypical traits do not necessarily join up with and connect to one’s racialized parentage. In fact, he goes further to suggest that to be of black descent is constitutive of the genealogies of most ‘just’ white British individuals. He looks at my white skin and insists that there might also be black and African ‘blood’ in me. In this regard, Dr Said seems to be claiming that we are all ‘black’ and ‘white’ under the skin, so to speak. Yet, to the contrary, it might be the case that he suggests ancestral ‘black blood’ remains or clots in the white body. From this point of view, black racialized physical characteristics always already have the potential to become unexpectedly visible in the offspring of white parents. Margaret Consider also the thoughts of Margaret. The IVF incident pushes her to reflect upon the racial genealogy of her future children. Margaret describes herself as of ‘African Caribbean and Asian Antiguan’ parentage. She has been married for a year to a man whose parents also migrated to Leicester from Antigua. By chance, I happened to talk with her in the local African Caribbean Centre on the day that the Sun broke the story. Margaret told me that she had heard some details of the story on the radio that morning and went on to reflect: If I ended up with a white child a lot of people would think that I was playing around [i.e. having a sexual affair with a white man]. If you go to the doctors [for IVF treatment] and people don’t know what you’re doing, the first thing that they will assume is ‘Oh my God!’ But my husband’s granddad is white. He was Irish with blue eyes. So I might have a white kid as a throwback. Thinking about the birth of the black twins, Margaret imagines that if she gave birth to a white child then others would question her marital fidelity. This scenario illuminates her belief that a child’s skin colour can indicate the biological mother’s sexual loyalty to her husband. Such a gendered and morally coded view of the world coexists with a particular understanding about the mechanisms involved in the inheritance of the racialized body. Nonetheless, this event also reminds Margaret of her husband’s white Irish ancestry and so she thinks of the possibility that she might give birth to a ‘white kid’ as a ‘throwback’. It seems to me that the idiom and imagery of ‘throwback’ has both

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positive and negative connotations. On the one hand, this genealogical idiom potentially fragments racially homogeneous models of descent by signalling the idea that an individual’s racial location is not fixed. From this point of view, offspring need not necessarily resemble their genetic parents in terms of racialized characteristics, such as skin colour. But the potentially progressive meanings attached to this genealogical idiom might also be interpreted to mean that racialized characteristics inherited generations back have the potential to reemerge in unpredictable and shocking ways. Like Margaret, Sharon also employs the expression ‘throwback’ to explain the baby mix-up. She is a white woman in her fifties. Sharon is divorced and has a daughter who is nine years of age. I came to know Sharon and her daughter through their participation in our local residents’ association. One afternoon I arranged to meet Sharon at her home to discuss the birth of the ‘black’ twins. She echoed Margaret’s initial reaction that the birth of a child that was of a different skin tone to its biological parents would lead others to assume that the mother is an adulteress. I couldn’t imagine what she went through in the delivery room and her husband is there and she produces two black children. His mind is going to be – you’ve been somewhere else – and believe me, if he didn’t think that he’s a saint!... But also remember when you go back to the roots of a lot of Africans, when they were brought as slaves, the plantation managers were white. They used to take the girls for their sexual pleasure and the children were born mixed-race. And then as it has gone along, the children could have become very white and then all of a sudden you get a young white couple marrying and producing a black child... Only recently, over the last forty years, you get throwbacks and that’s the same situation that this young couple [i.e. the white IVF couple] will go through with their children. It would seem that for Sharon, racialized ‘black’ substances remain hidden, inert and inactive within apparently white genealogical trees to unexpectedly resurface. As she suggests, ‘all of a sudden you get a young white couple marrying and producing a black child’. However, it could also be argued that Sharon’s return to and remembrance of the past refutes the ‘simple return’ to ideas of ‘origins’ associated with the fixity of ancestral racial purity. In this regard, she illuminates how white British people might identify with black slave ancestors without negating or celebrating their white ancestries. The preceding considerations strongly suggest that my co-conversationalists’ emphasis upon the recurrence of racialized traits across generations has the potential to both undermine and/or reaffirm essentialist models of racial inheritance. From a progressive point of view, their ideas resonate with population geneticists’ understanding that people from different racial and ethnic groups are to some extent interrelated with each other. From the perspective of scientific research on race and genetics, the established orthodoxy advocates that there is as much genetic variation within as there is between groups and populations of people defined as ‘races’.7 But

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it might also be the case that my co-conversationalists’ thoughts and reflections share some resonances with, but also important differences to, nineteenth-century theories of inheritance, in particular a theory called ‘telegony’. Peter Wade (2002: 94–96) reports that the theory of telegony proposes that a man who impregnates a woman can influence the children that the woman has with future men. Interestingly for my understanding of my co-conversationalists’ ideas, Wade (2002: 94) illuminates the persistence of racialized versions of this theory in the twentieth century. He draws upon an empirical study conducted in the 1970s with older white women from Bristol. Some of the women in the study suggested that if a white woman had sex with a black man, she might thereafter give birth to children ‘tinged’ with blackness, even if the father is white. Wade (2002: 95) writes that typical comments made by the women included: ‘blackness goes into the system and clots in the blood’; ‘the womb is polluted in some way’. In contrast to these older white women, Mr Shah, Dr Said, Margaret and Sharon do not perceive the birth of black (or ‘dark-skinned’) children to a white (or ‘fair-skinned’) couple to be a necessarily negative occurrence. Nor do they place the same emphasis upon the immediate intergenerational and gendered aspects of inheritance. In other words, telegony concerns one white woman whose womb has become ‘tinged’ by sexual intercourse with a black man, and the possible reoccurrence of racialized traits within one generation. This is at odds with the throwback idea that presupposes that racial traits can lie dormant ‘in the blood’ of a man and/or a woman and thus reappear in later generations. Nevertheless, from a regressive standpoint it could be argued that my co-conversationalists’ emphasis upon the persistence of racialized essences and traits indicates the resonance between the theory of telegony and the ways in which they think about the inheritance of the body. Racial Empathy and Interracial Parenthood John’s narrative provides a different angle on the ways in which some of my coconversationalists mobilize their ideas on genealogy and relatedness to collect their thoughts on the birth of the ‘black’ twins to the white IVF mother. He draws upon his experience of being the father of interracial children. Like Mr Shah, I knew John from ethnographic research that I had conducted in 1997. John describes himself as a ‘black’ man of African Caribbean parentage, ‘born and bred’ in Leicester. John has been married for nearly twenty years to a white woman who is also from Leicester. They have five children spanning ages from nine to seventeen. I spoke to John about the baby mix-up a month after the break of the newspaper story. In thinking about the white couple’s claims to parenthood, he elaborates upon his wife’s relationship to their children. He thought from his reading of the newspaper reports that the black parents were the genetic parents of the twins and from this assumption commented: This is about the whole issue of what I call the mother and baby bond, because I mean to the parent’s credit she could have said, ‘Bloody hell, I had a black baby, get rid of those’. But the maternal instinct kicked in. And so

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in one sense she is a surrogate mother [i.e. gestational surrogate] because she gave birth to and carried those children, and no matter what colour, that’s what is sticking in her head... It has transcended racial barriers…because the reality is that it has become like a maternity issue… I mean move away from race and that is the bottom line… It was a mix-up that has put two families in an awkward position... KT: But some people say that the children should not grow up with a white mum and dad. John: So now they are going to have to have some understanding, some empathy and some knowledge of those communities because they [the white parents] can not do it otherwise. So it was like I was saying there is still nothing wrong with the white mother getting them kids if they have got some understanding... With my wife there has been a lot of learning for her... And the whole thing about her understanding the effects of racism and what she would say to the kids if they come home [with issues and problems regarding racism] … And all those things about slavery … liberation and black history… So the thing about politicizing is very important. Because again the mother instinct takes over as well – it is one thing when you have to go up and fight on behalf of the child but it is quite another thing when it is a white mother challenging racism. Like the emphasis in British law upon the rights of surrogates to claim motherhood, John thinks that the actual process of carrying and giving birth to the twins creates a maternal bond between the white IVF mother and the children that transcends ideas of genetic inheritance. However in contrast to the Sun newspaper’s stress upon the white mother’s ‘bond’ with the IVF twins ‘even though they are black’, John believes that the maternal bond has the potential to become intertwined with racial ‘empathy’, ‘understanding’ and ‘knowledge’ for the twins’ cultural needs. For John, it is exactly the intersection of the ‘mother instinct’ with racial empathy that makes a white mother’s challenge to racism a powerful political expression of anti-racist sentiment. John also thinks that the white woman’s partner, who has no biological affiliation to the twins, has the potential to develop racial literacy and so become a competent parent of the twins – as he says, ‘they can not do it otherwise’. While John’s experience and ideas disrupt the hierarchical bi-racialized tensions within British society that classifies and defines individuals as either ‘black’ or ‘white’, he does not diminish the significance of the ways in which racism maintains privilege and power for some and disadvantage and discrimination for others. Some of the people that I spoke with about this incident felt that the white couple would not make suitable parents of the twins. In a similar vein to Margaret and Sharon’s initial reaction to this incident, they think that the phenotypical differences that distinguish the white parents from the ‘black’ twins would lead to malicious gossip and spiteful rumours pertaining to the twins’ paternity and the

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white mother’s fidelity. It is this idea that led Mr Ibrahim to conclude that the children should be adopted for others to claim as their own. Paternity and Gossip Mr Ibrahim is seventy-three years of age and is the father of five adult children. Like Sharon, I came to know Mr. Ibrahim through my participation in our local residents’ association. I talked to him after Dame Elizabeth’s ruling that the twins were to be adopted by the white father and spontaneously he replied like this: How would that work because only the husband knows that they are not his kids? But when they grow up it is a case of – ‘Oh she has got black kids’. Few people knew about this. And then the children [should] look like the father and the grandfather and if those kids are not white then people start to have doubts – are they his kids? Is it his sperm?… The children would have to go to the social services and someone would have to adopt them… I would not be brave enough for those children to carry my name. Although the legal ruling decreed that the mother’s marital status provided her husband with rights to her reproductive labour, Mr Ibrahim believes that this mixup truncates both the white mother’s claims to motherhood and her husband’s claims to fatherhood. He thinks that the phenotypical differences separating the white parents from the ‘black’ twins will lead to speculation and rumour about the circumstances of the twins’ conception, generating spiteful gossip regarding their paternity. Thus, like Margaret and Sharon, he knows how racialized ideologies that associate skin colour with genetic parentage can become intertwined with gendered ideologies of paternity and descent to structure and shape people’s lives. This insight leads Mr Ibrahim to conclude that it is in the best interests of all concerned that the children are adopted. His conclusions resonate with the emphasis in the law that children are seen as autonomous individuals with interests independent of their parents. Yet, unlike Dame Elizabeth’s conclusions, Mr Ibrahim believes that the children’s ‘best interests’ are not synonymous with those of either of their genetic parents. Rather, his belief that the children should be placed in the care of the state for others to adopt privileges upbringing over biogenetic relatedness in determining parenthood.

Parting Thoughts Gilroy (1998, 2000) argues that ‘the impact of the DNA revolution’ and its associated technologies demands a rethinking of our understanding of ‘race’, ‘species’, ‘embodiment’ and ‘human specificity’ (2000: 20). For Gilroy, the ‘nanoscale’ of genomic technologies that ‘operate beneath the surface of the skin’ signals the end of racial classification grounded upon the visual homogenization of racialized physical differences and the cultural essentialisms associated with ‘the new racism’ (2000: 32–36).

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My findings more modestly suggest that the reproductive technologies can become the prism through which to begin the critical work of examining how ideas of race, biological and genetic relatedness are mobilized in the popular genealogical imagination. In this regard, the discursive twists and turns that constitute this fragment of the British public’s ideas do not straightforwardly concur with Gilroy’s conviction that the genetic technologies signal the ‘overcoming’ of the ‘idea of race’. On the one hand, the media reports suggest that the white woman’s ‘bond’ with the ‘black’ twins formed through gestation facilitates the production of multicultural kinship across the colour-lines. In this way, the maternal bond holds the potential to undermine the folk racial binary of ‘black’ and ‘white’. On the other hand, a legal expert suggests that the white woman’s gestation of embryos that she was not ‘expecting’ makes it possible for her to sue the clinic for ‘negligence and battery’. Moreover, my co-conversationalists’ belief that the white couple might be the genetic parents of the ‘black’ twins has both racially progressive and regressive meanings and effects. Thus, it seems to me that a potential of the genetic technologies is to open up a creative research avenue that illuminates how everyday understandings of biology, genetics and inheritance are mobilized in contradictory ways to both undermine but yet also support the idea of race and thus the reproduction of cultures of racism. Postscript On 30 May 2006, the Sun led with a ‘world exclusive’ interview with the parents of the IVF twins, under the headline: ‘Our life with IVF twins born wrong colour’ (Kay 2006a). While the identities of the twins and the white couple remained anonymous, it was revealed that the ‘black father’ is ‘Asian’ in terms of ethnic location. The Sun describes how the couple told the newspaper that ‘they were SHATTERED when they discovered the test tube tots were fathered by an Asian man’ (Kay 2006a, original emphasis). By contrast with the newspaper’s original focus upon the mother’s relationship to the twins, the interview stressed the white father’s relationship to the ‘Asian twins’ as follows: ‘The white dad whose wife had Asian twins in an IVF blunder told yesterday how his son declared: “I want to be pink like you daddy”’(Kay 2006b). The father is also reported to have explained, ‘They are MY children. I love them to death and they love me’ (2006a, original emphasis). In short, love is thought to be central to becoming and being a father, and not biological relatedness. The Sun also provides an update on the legal status of the case as follows: ‘The current situation is not completely clear-cut. The Asian man has applied to be legally declared the twins’ father, which would give him some parental rights’ (Kay 2006b). Acknowledgements I thank Peter Wade for his excellent comments on a draft of this chapter. I am also extremely grateful to the members of the PUG project for their valuable suggestions on versions of this paper presented at project meetings. I have also presented this chapter at the departmental seminars in anthropology at Goldsmiths College and the University of Aberdeen, and to a postgraduate research seminar at the University of East Anglia. I thank colleagues for their kind invitations and for contributing valuable insights to the arguments offered here.

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Notes 1.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

The mistaken ‘mix-up’ of the IVF couples’ gametes occurred in a National Health Service (NHS) fertility clinic funded by the state and so neither of the couples involved paid for their fertility treatment. Thus the couples did not make claims to the twins on financial grounds, as is sometimes the case in American accounts of contested surrogacy arrangements (see for example Thompson 2001: 189). Moreover, the question of class differences and inequalities between the parents did not come into play. The docudrama featured a white IVF mother who was mistakenly impregnated with a black IVF couple’s embryo. Except for the couples and their families, the cast was played by real-life professionals, including fertility doctors, lawyers and social workers. When the baby was ten months old, the black couple was granted custody of the child on the grounds that the needs of a black child were thought to be better met by black parents. The white couple who had ‘bonded’ with the child through the process of gestation and upbringing received visiting rights to the baby. The docudrama focused upon the emotional trauma of the two mothers and so highlighted the personal suffering caused by such mistakes. A couple of months after the IVF mix-up became public, a similar drama was aired on British television about a childless white woman’s discovery that she might be the genetic mother of a five year-old white girl, who was brought up by another woman who also thought that she was the child’s genetic mother (Ella and the Mothers, BBC 1, August 2002). Both women underwent IVF treatment at the same time in the same clinic. In contrast to Born with Two Mothers, the people who featured in this drama were white and so the issue of racial identification and bonding was screened out. However, both dramas placed emphasis upon the mothers’ emotional identification with and affiliation to the child, rather than the fathers’ feelings of attachment. Leicester is situated in the East Midlands region of England, approximately one hundred miles north of London. Leicester has one of the largest settler communities in the U.K. and it has one of the largest Asian populations with origins in East Africa. According to the official 2001 Census, 25.73 per cent of the total population of Leicester define themselves as ‘Asian or Asian British Indian’; 1.53 per cent ‘Asian or Asian British Pakistani’; 0.69 per cent ‘Asian or Asian British Bangladeshi’; and 1.97 per cent ‘Other Asian’. By contrast, according to Census classification, the local black population, which is defined as ‘Black or Black British Caribbean’, ‘Black or Black British African’, ‘Black or Black British other’, constitutes only 3.08 per cent of the total population. The local white population, which includes ‘White British’, ‘White: Irish’ and ‘White: Other White’, constitutes 63.86 per cent of the total population. The local mixed-race population, which is defined by the Census categories of ‘Mixed: White and Black Caribbean’, ‘Mixed: White and Black African’, ‘Mixed: White and Asian’ and ‘Mixed: Other Mixed’, constitutes 3.04 per cent of the total population. See Stoler (1995) for a discussion of colonial perceptions of pollution and contamination surrounding interracial sex in the Dutch East Indies. For reasons of confidentially I use pseudonyms to name my co-conversationalists from Leicester. Mr Shah’s suggestion that ‘it is for the scientists to prove what has happened here’ points to the way in which my co-conversationalists’ reflections reveal their understandings of science (see Tyler 2005b). See Condit, Parrott and Harris (2002) for a detailed account of this scientific claim that critically assesses both the anti-racist and potentially politically regressive implications of these ideas. See also Brown and Armelagos (2001) for an examination of the experiments carried out by biological anthropologists that demonstrate that variation in human traits is nonconcordant along racial lines.

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References Barker, M. 1981. The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe. London: Junction Books. Birkett, D. 2002. ‘Why Has the Response to the Black IVF Twins Born to White Parents Been so Hysterical?’, Guardian, 10 July, p. 9. Brown, R.A. and G.J. Armelagos. 2001. ‘Apportionment of Racial Diversity: A Review’, Evolutionary Anthropology 10: 34–40. Condit, C.M., R. Parrott and T.M. Harris. 2002. ‘Lay Understanding of the Relationship between Race and Genetics: Development of a Collectivized Knowledge through Shared Discourse’, Public Understanding of Science 11: 373–87. Duckworth, L. 2002a. ‘Court Fight Over Black Twins Born to White Couple’, Independent, 9 July, p.1. ———. 2002b, ‘White Woman Is Legally the Mother of the Black Babies; IVF Scandal Solicitors Wade through the Implications after an Egg and Sperm Blunder at a Fertilisation Clinic’, Independent, 9 July, p. 5. Dyer, R. 1997. White. London: Routledge. Franklin, S. 2001. ‘Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of the New Biologies’, in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 302–28. Gilroy, P. 1987. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson. ———. 1997. ‘Diaspora and the Detours of Identity’, in K. Woodward (ed.), Identity and Difference. London: Sage, pp. 299–346. ———. 1998. ‘Race Ends Here’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 21(5): 838–47. ———. 2000. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures, and the Allure of Race. London: Penguin Books. Goldberg, D. 1999. ‘The Semantics of Race’, in M. Bulmer and J. Solomos (eds), Racism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 362–77. Hall, C. 2002. ‘Tests Prove IVF Mix-up Over Twins’, Daily Telegraph, 1 August, p. 6. Hall, S. 1990. ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 222–37. ———. 1992. ‘New Ethnicities’, in J. Donald and A. Rattansi (eds), Race, Culture and Difference. London: Routledge, pp. 252–59. Haraway, D. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. London: Routledge. Hartouni, V. 1997. Cultural Conceptions: On Reproductive Technologies and the Remaking of Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ifekwunigwe, J. 2001. ‘Re-membering “Race”: On Gender, “Mixed Race” and Family in the English-African Diaspora’, in D. Parker and M. Song (eds), Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’. London: Pluto Press, pp. 42–63. Kay, J. 2002a. ‘White Couple Have Black IVF Twins: Shocking NHS Test Tube Bungle’, Sun, 8 July, p.1. ———. 2002b. ‘NHS Always Dreaded This IVF Nightmare Would Happen … Now it Has Torment on Twins’, Sun, 8 July, p. 4. ———. 2006a. ‘Our Life with IVF Twins Born Wrong Colour’, Sun, 30 May, p. 1. ———. 2006b. ‘I Want to be Pink Like You Daddy …’, Sun, 30 May, pp. 4–5. Kellaway, K. 2002. ‘Review: IVF Is Big Business. Parents Are Desperate for Children, Clinics Are Desperate for Money’, Observer, 14 July, p. 1.

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Nash, C. 2002. ‘Genealogical Identities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20: 27–52. Morris, S. 2002. ‘Mix-up over Twins Sparks Embryo Clinic Alert: Custody Battle over White Couple’s Black Babies’, Guardian, 9 July, p. 3. Ragoné, H. 1998. ‘Incontestable Motivations’, in S. Franklin and H. Ragoné (eds), Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 118–31. ———. 2000. ‘Of Likeness and Difference: How Race Is Being Transfigured by Gestational Surrogacy’, in H. Ragoné and F.W. Twine (eds), Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism. London: Routledge, pp. 56–75. Sharma, U. 1999. Caste: Concepts in the Social Sciences. Buckingham: Open University Press. Stoler, A.L. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thompson, C. 2001. ‘Strategic Naturalizing: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic’, in S. Franklin and S. Mckinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 175–202. Twine, F.W. 2000. ‘Bearing Blackness in Britain: The Meaning of Racial Difference for White Birth Mothers of African Descent Children’, in H. Ragoné and F.W. Twine (eds), Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism. London: Routledge, pp. 76–108. Tyler, K. 2000. ‘White Hegemony in Leicestershire: Race, Nation, Place and Class’. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Manchester. ———. 2005a. ‘The Genealogical Imagination: the Inheritance of Interracial Identities’, The Sociological Review 53(3): 476–94. ———. 2005b. ‘Comprehénsion Publique des Notions de Race et de Génétique: au Apercu des Résultats d’une Récente Recherché au Royaume-Uni’, Bulletin of L’observatoire de la génétique. Montreal: Centre de bioethique. [see also English trans. ‘A Summary of Findings of a Project that Examined Public Understandings of Race and Genetics in the U.K.’]. Verkaik, R. 2003. ‘IVF Mix-up Donor Named as Legal Father’, Independent, 27 February, p. 8. Wade, P. 2002. Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. London: Pluto Press. Weigman, R. 2003. ‘Intimate Publics: Race, Property, and Personhood’, in D.S. Moore, J. Kosek and A. Pandian (eds), Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 296–320. Winston, R. 2002. ‘Comment and Analysis: Blaming IVF Doctors Alone Is Wrong’, Guardian, 10 July, p. 16. Television Born with Two Mothers, Channel 4, 21 April 2005. Ella and the Mothers, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC1), 10–11 August 2002.

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3 Race, Biology and Culture in Contemporary Norway Identity and Belonging in Adoption, Donor Gametes and Immigration Signe Howell and Marit Melhuus

Introduction There is no predominant discourse on race as such in contemporary Norway, though there are racist articulations and concomitant accusations of racism. Thus to write about race in Norway may seem contrived. Yet there are good reasons for doing so. Historically, notions about race played a significant role in connection with the ideology of racial hygiene which was prominent in Norway from the turn of the last century until well after the end of the Second World War. The repercussions are still felt today (Roll-Hansen and Broberg 1996; and see below). An explicit awareness of the implications of eugenics informed the new biotechnology law passed in 2003. At the same time, with an increasing influx of immigration from outside Western Europe and North America, a tendency towards stressing differences between peoples in cultural rather than racial terms is observable. In light of these developments, it is important to consider the terms employed within these discursive fields and ask whether, and to what extent, they rest on underlying racialized categories (Gullestad 2001, 2004). Drawing on the particular topics of our research – transnational adoption and assisted reproductive technology – we shall explore two pervasive tendencies in Norway that pertain to identity and belonging: those of biological fundamentalism and cultural fundamentalism. We will argue that these two tendencies are mutually implicated in processes that involve inclusion and exclusion, but that, as models for explanation, each becomes operative according to the particularity of the context. However, in Norway both tendencies run counter to an overarching ideology of

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equality and to a political aversion against producing a ‘sorting society’ (Solberg 2003), i.e. a society that negatively marks differences from what is perceived as the norm.1 Thus, rather than focusing explicitly on race, our approach will be to examine what constitutes the criteria for producing Norwegians in terms of identity and belonging and to ask how these may be satisfied by those who, initially, do not obviously satisfy them. We shall draw on three sources of empirical material. The first two concern two categories of immigrant populations (innvandrere): namely the steady increase since the early 1970s of immigration from outside Europe and North America, and the adoption of infants from the same geographical regions.2 In terms of phenotype, these newcomers look more similar to each other than they do to socalled ethnic Norwegians. Their incorporation into Norwegian society raises issues of both race and Norwegianness. Our third empirical example, the conception of children through the use of donor gametes, is less relevant for an understanding of questions of race, but it will be used to highlight attitudes to questions of identity and belonging. The aim is to investigate, firstly, to what extent a biologically grounded notion of relatedness is being challenged by transnational adoption and by conception through donor gametes and, secondly, in what ways cultural differences are used as criteria for belonging in the case of immigrants and adoptees whose immediate identifying marker is their physiognomy. As a result of these three new sources of population growth, questions about the meaning of kinship (who is a relative?) and the meaning of nationality (who is a Norwegian?) have to be confronted by the Norwegian population which, until the 1970s, was relatively stable and homogenous. We wish to examine ideas about Norwegian personhood as these are articulated through kinship, procreation and cultural practices. Kinship and procreation are only two of several possible domains where ideas and values of identity and personhood surface, but in the present context we argue that they are the most significant ones. Different attitudes to, and practices of, procreation highlight different links between biological origins and identity, whether personal, ethnic or national. Kinship is central to Norwegian understandings of relatedness, not least with respect to notions of inclusion and exclusion, ideas of same and other as well as notions of equality. These in turn give rise to a preoccupation with what Gullestad has termed imagined sameness. By this she means, ‘an interaction style in which commonalities are emphasized, while differences are played down…the sameness cannot always be observed, but it is, rather a style that focuses on sameness’ (Gullestad 2001: 47). Such notions, we suggest, are in turn grounded in ideas of place, origin, belonging, language and identity and are articulated through rituals, everyday practices and the work that goes into making a family and the creation of an imagined moral community.3 How does this affect attitudes to immigrants? A Norwegian passport is obviously not enough for inclusion to take place; many immigrants obtain this. It is the degree and kind of significant relatedness that seems to be at stake, and it is this that we suggest distinguishes the transnationally adopted children from other immigrants. While the adoptees are included into Norwegian kinned sociality at the expense of that of their place of birth and are not referred to

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as immigrants (Howell 2003, 2006), the ‘real’ immigrants continue to look to their own kin, culture, and non-Norwegian place of origin in order to establish and confirm their identity. By the same token, children who result from donor gametes are kinned and made part of the Norwegian sociocultural world. Ultimately, belonging becomes a matter of an imagined moral community – the criteria for which, as we shall show, are not straightforward. Our focus is on observable trends in thinking and values amongst the ethnic Norwegian population: how they perceive the possibilities for, and constraints on, achieving an imagined moral community of the Norwegian nation state. We illustrate these points through a double comparative exercise. Transnational adoption becomes a kind of hinge, as it were, between assisted conception and immigration. The practices and values of transnational adoption are contrasted with, firstly, immigration and immigrants and, secondly, with the practices and values attached to assisted conception using donor gametes; more precisely, donor sperm, as the donation of eggs is prohibited in Norway (see below). First, the notion of foreigner and the foreign will be evoked, placing our argument within the ongoing discourse of us and them, same and other. We will explore to what extent race surfaces in these discourses. Second, our focus is on the legislation concerning assisted conception, adoption, immigration and racism in Norway and the way these laws are perceived and practised. By examining these together, we argue that they highlight some common assumptions about sameness and otherness, but that they do so by alternately stressing biology and culture as defining criteria. Conception through use of foreign (i.e. nonrelated) substances questions biological identity and belonging. Immigration questions cultural identity and belonging, and transnational adoption questions both biological and cultural belonging. As our examples will show, there is not one dominant indigenous argument, or discourse, that consistently informs the understanding of the relationship between nature and nurture, or environment and biology/heredity. Prevailing arguments will shift according to context, and points of reference employed in discussions are not constant: which explanatory model is foregrounded at the expense of others changes situationally (Howell 1999, 2003; Melhuus 2005), producing a continuous tension between fixity and flexibility (Wade 2002). This is apparent, albeit in different manifestations, in the three arenas we focus upon. Moreover, not everyone involved in each arena shares the same opinion about what is right and proper. Ambiguities and ambivalences are clearly apparent within all three discursive practices and, partly because of this, we question whether culture simply may be understood as a euphemism for race (e.g. Wade 2002), or if culture(s) as a reified social category might not be a more relevant marker for difference than physiognomy. Whereas the practice of assisted conception by donor sperm has given rise to the most explicit expression of biological fundamentalism – exemplified by the increasing biologizing of identity discourses – immigration has given rise to the most explicit expression of cultural fundamentalism. Discourses concerning transnationally adopted children manifest a middle position. Here, traces of both biological and cultural fundamentalism – or reductionism – are situationally determined, but are

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expressed with much less certainty and with less force than may be observed in connection with the other two practices. This, we suggest, is due to the kinning of the adoptees into Norwegian families, which enables them to easily cross the boundary from outsider to insider and, as a result, blurs the overall issue of the relationship between biology and culture.

Discourses of Race While the term ‘race’ is hardly ever used with reference to either adoptees or immigrants, other terms to distinguish nonethnic from ethnic Norwegians are. This was made very explicit during parliamentary debates leading up to the 2005 Protection against Ethnic Discrimination Law. The Ministerial Committee charged with writing the proposal argued that the basis for discrimination should be specified as ethnicity, national origin, descent, skin colour, language, religion and world view, and that the concept race should not be employed. Their reasons were that there is no generally accepted scientific basis for establishing race and, further, that the concept is too loaded to be of meaningful use.4 These caveats notwithstanding, in society at large, racialized physiognomy act as a signal of cultural difference, and culture is to some extent seen as inherited in a quasi-natural way (we return to this point). However, although people from different ethnic groups, some of whom have dark skin, do intermarry, their union and any resulting children are not referred to as ‘mixed race’. In ordinary parlance such people are talked of as being of different origin, or the foreign party’s exact country of origin will be specified, e.g. ‘she is married to a Pakistani’; ‘their children are half-Pakistani’. According to historians, during the 1920s and 1930s Nazi German ideological notions concerning race, the purity of race, and the hierarchy of the races met with approval amongst many Norwegians. Eugenics, originally termed ‘racial hygiene’ (Hviid Nielsen, Monsen and Tennøe 2000: 66), as a practice to weed out undesirable genetic features was respectable during the first third of the twentieth century. In the 1930s Norwegian health authorities institutionalized programmes of racial hygiene (the sterilization laws were passed in 1934), the extent of which is still being documented. In particular, Gypsies became the focus for the debates, but extreme poverty, alcoholism, prostitution and criminality were also regarded as somehow biologically determined (ibid.: 67; Roll-Hansen and Broberg 1996). Whether as a result of this or not, today, Norwegians are very reluctant to enter into discussions of race and racial characteristics, although worries about racism often are expressed with regard to questions concerning discrimination vis-à-vis ethnic minority groups. The existence of a meaningful category of ‘outsider’ or ‘alien’ presupposes a meaningful category of ‘native’ or ‘local’, and the meaning and value attributed to each is generated in the interface between the two. The degree to which foreigners are treated as outsiders must be dependent upon the strength of the values attached to being native. The arrival of adoptees and immigrants whose physiognomy is very different from that of the native Norwegian population has meant that issues of race have been placed on the agenda in Norwegian public debate, however implicitly. The

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term ‘immigrant’ is today racially coded and, in common parlance, refers to those who have arrived from countries outside Western Europe and North America. It is not normally applied to transnationally adopted persons, and they resist being characterized as such (see below). Although racism to some extent has become a national concern here, as elsewhere in Europe, this discourse is not prominent. In this context, our point is to show that the two groups of immigrants are viewed very differently; while the adopted children are incorporated into the native group the other immigrants remain outside. The reasons for this will be examined below.

Racism By and large, until the arrival of immigrants and adoptees, the Norwegian population had been relatively homogenous, at least from the point of view of physiognomy. Non European travellers rarely visited the country and the majority of Norwegians rarely visited beyond the European borders. This does not mean that discriminatory practices have been absent. These were operative in relationship to the Sami indigenous people of northern Norway and the incorporation of this group into the Norwegian state (Thuen 1995), as well as to the Romani (Gypsies) people and other travellers. The Constitution of 1814, generally judged a most liberal and modern piece of legislation, contained a paragraph that refused entry to Jews and Jesuits. It was revoked in 1851, largely due to the concerted efforts of the famous poet Wergeland, who argued for a universal humanity. This fact notwithstanding, the Jewish population remained small, and although immigration from various parts of Europe had taken place since time immemorial (Kjeldstadli 2003), few people from outside Europe settled here. However one chooses to define them, there undoubtedly exist ethnic boundaries in Norway today which raise issues of the criteria for crossing and for trespassing. How easy it is for foreigners in Norway to cross the boundary that initially excludes them and be integrated, or even assimilated, must remain an empirical question. The kind of answer that can be produced in all cases tells us quite a lot about attitudes to identity, be this personal, cultural, social, ethnic, racial or national. In Norway, as elsewhere, ‘foreigners’ do not make up a homogenous category. Some are thought of as less foreign than others, more like ‘us’. A silent sliding scale can be seen to operate. People from the neighbouring Scandinavian countries are clearly perceived as more ‘like us’ (viz. the demand for Danish sperm and eggs, see below), as are Northern Europeans and white North Americans, than are those from Asia and Africa. This is most clearly manifested in cases of marriage. At the same time, when adoption from the former Soviet empire became possible, many expected a demand for children from Eastern Europe and Russia due to the fact that their physiognomy is closer to that of ethnic Norwegians than are African or Asian ones. However, this did not happen, partly because many adoptive parents insisted that they did not want to hide the nature of the relationship and partly because of the poor state of health of many children from these countries. All in all, it is difficult to ascertain with any degree of certainty to what extent questions of sameness and otherness may be brought back to questions of racial or sociocultural differences.

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Although numerically few, the growth of neo-Nazi organizations over the past few years has rekindled a racist discourse and led to both racist and anti-racist sentiments. Despite the fact that there is a lot of talk of racism, the term race is conspicuous by its absence. Rather, ‘race is coded as culture’ (Wade 2002) and racist discourses surface in the guise of culture, religion and notions of essentialized (embodied) cultural differences. The murder of a young dark-skinned boy, whose mother was Norwegian and father African, by a neo-Nazi activist in 2000 caused a public outrage. Judgment was passed in the appeals court in 2003 when the sentence was not just upheld, but increased. The judge was very clear in his final statement that the killing was racially motivated. Although this event is an important point of reference in subsequent antiracist discourses, it has not become a springboard for facing the increasing extent of discriminatory racial practices. Neither has the equally tragic murder one year earlier of a seventeen-year-old boy adopted from India. His parents attempted, unsuccessfully, to have the culprits tried under the Racism clause of the Criminal Act. This paragraph has been invoked very rarely. In fact, when the leader of an extreme right-wing neo-Nazi group (Vigrid) was sentenced in 2002 to thirty days’ imprisonment for inciting racist expressions, this was the first time that a Norwegian court had imposed a prison sentence under this clause. The leader of the political party White Alliance, which, in its programme, promised to ‘send back all immigrants and sterilize the transnationally adopted’ was, in 1997, only given a suspended sentence when tried according to the Racism clause. The reason for this extreme reluctance to invoke the clause can be traced to the fact that it is part of the Criminal Act. The burden of evidence is therefore extremely heavy. Having said that, the retrial of the murderer of the half-African, halfNorwegian boy may be an indication of a new willingness to recognize racism. With the new Ethnic Discrimination Act – which comes under civil, not criminal, law – it is expected that more prosecutions will be brought to court (Ronald Craig of the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, personal communication). It is the waves of immigration from poorer countries in the South that have contributed to new discriminatory practices, and that place questions of racism – if not race – on the agenda. The integration of these groups of people into Norwegian society has long been politically sensitive, and the tendency has been to discuss differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in terms of religion and culture – with references to the culturally foreign (fremmed kulturell) and to multicultural society (flerkulturelt samfunn). Only indirectly have notions of colour been confronted – as in the slogan ‘yes to a colourful community’ (ja til et fargerikt fellesskap). At the same time, an assumed racial superiority has not been totally eradicated. A recent incident reported in the university student newspaper at the University of Oslo is indicative of this. In an article discussing the increase in venereal disease amongst Norwegian youth, a student who had contracted one such infection while on holiday in Thailand excused his failure to wear a condom with the statement that the girl in question had been Norwegian and therefore he assumed that he was safe (Universitas, November 2004). The journalist writing the report did not question his excuse. What we draw from this small example is that it demonstrates an implicit racist attitude: Norwegian girls are somehow ‘clean’, whereas Thai (or presumably any other Asian) girls are not.

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Adoptees and Other Immigrants We turn next to a consideration of a rather special case of the foreigner – namely the transnationally adopted child – and shall contrast this group to another group of foreigners, namely non-Western immigrants. Both categories of foreigners arrive from the poor regions of the world: mainly from countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa and, more recently, from Russia and Eastern Europe. Both are recent arrivals, and they began to arrive in Norway round about the same time: the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since then, both have increased in numbers.5 Children (mainly infants and young children) are adopted by involuntarily childless Norwegian couples. Today, more than seven hundred children arrive each year and, in per capita terms, more children arrive here than in any other country. Due to a number of socioeconomic factors, there are today virtually no Norwegian-born children available for adoption.6 For those who wish to adopt, going overseas is not a choice, but a necessity. In order to understand differences in attitude to adoptees and other immigrants, it is important to understand the background to their arrival. Unlike immigrants, adoptees have not chosen to come. They are in Norway as a result of the need and desire of involuntarily childless Norwegian couples who wish to adopt a child in order to become a family. Immigrants have chosen to come, either in order to seek their fortune or to escape from local persecution. The arrival of non-Western immigrants began when individuals, mainly from Pakistan and Turkey, came for economic reasons. They found work, settled down and brought their families. Even though many Asian immigrants are well educated, there is a noticeable prejudice against employing them. As a result, most of them work as unskilled labour and are overqualified for the job they are doing (Rogstad 2001). While economic opportunities continue to be a major incentive to migrate, in more recent years there has been an influx of asylum seekers mainly from Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. With an increase in illegal immigration from the same regions, the image of the immigrant has become ever more complicated. Because of the different motivations that lead foreign people to Norway, it is, perhaps, not surprising that economic immigrants, asylum seekers and adoptees are viewed very differently. Whereas the adoptees, who also look very different from their new countrymen and who come from unfamiliar countries, will be transubstantiated and kinned (Howell 2003) in order to be subsumed within Norwegian kinship and culture, no concerted efforts are made in order to similarly transform the other immigrants. On the contrary, the immigration policy of the Norwegian state is that of integration, not assimilation. Immigrants are expected to participate fully in society, while retaining their cultural distinctiveness. Efforts are made to integrate immigrants through obligatory language learning, through courses in Norwegian history, social and cultural values and practices, and the raison d’être for Norwegian institutions. The aim is for them to enter the labour market and become responsible Norwegian citizens. These efforts have been far from satisfactory. Even if they obtain work, most immigrants remain outside mainstream Norwegian social and cultural life. Most adoptees, on the other hand, are incorporated

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(assimilated) into it. This situation gives rise to different cultural scenarios. Discussions about, and accusations of, racism are primarily, but not exclusively, directed at the immigrant communities. The adoptees were regarded, at least until recently, as tabula rasa upon their arrival; and, at the same time, as vehicles for, and receptors of, the work of incorporation and kinning, of instilling a form of essential sameness. Through a number of acts, adoptive parents work quite consciously at achieving sameness for their children. They kin them deliberately and create life trajectories that overlap their own (Howell 2006). The child’s origins are ignored for the first few years while the kinning process is being accomplished. Adoptees are photographed dressed in the regional national costume of one of the parents; they are brought up to play Norwegian games in Norwegian settings; they eat Norwegian food and celebrate Norwegian rituals. By and large, adopted children are accepted as the child of their adoptive parents and legally they have the same rights as biological children (Melhuus and Howell, in press). In all these regards, the adoptees’ status is dramatically different from that of other immigrants who arrive – many from the same countries as the adoptees – as traders, as economic entrepreneurs in search of a better life, or as asylum seekers. Far from being tabula rasa, these categories of newcomers are, as it were, filled to bursting point with their past lives and their past and present relatives. And it is this very past – their different histories linked to unknown regions outside Norway – that largely create the barriers between them and ethnic Norwegians and make the extension of imagined sameness very difficult. Not only do they adhere to different religions, they eat different food and, most important of all, they practise different kinship. These factors make it hard for many Norwegians to include them in their imagined moral community. While adopted children receive Norwegian nationality upon completion of the legal adoption, the other immigrants may obtain citizenship only after seven years’ residence and if they fulfil a series of requirements. However, even as citizens, in social terms they retain their status as foreigner – certainly during their own lifetime. Arguably, this is a status that is passed on to their children, who are described by commentators and politicians as ‘second-generation immigrants’.7 One might even ask with Longva (2003) if they think of immigration as being not so much an action that an individual performs once in his or her life, but rather a collective condition which is inherited from generation to generation.

Adoptees and ‘Donor’ Children Couples who choose to adopt a child from overseas know that the child will not in any sense be theirs biologically. They also know that the child will look quite different from themselves and that the nature of the relationship will be obvious to the outsider. When they opt for assisted conception with donated sperm or ova, or even embryos, the couples concerned similarly have to confront the fact that their child will, in part, be the product of some other person’s genetic material. Unlike

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some other countries, the available options in Norway are very restrictive. Egg donation and surrogacy are not allowed according to Norwegian law, but sperm donation is. However, by going outside Norway – to Denmark, Finland and, more recently, to Spain (Marre, personal communication) – women may obtain eggs which may, or may not, be fertilized by their husband. For many women (but also men), the significance of bearing the child – being pregnant and giving birth – outweighs any worries they might have about the child’s biological origin (Melhuus, in press). Pregnancy is a very visible state at the same time as it conceals the child’s genetic make-up. In contrast to ‘birth’ by adoption (Howell 2002), children born by the donation of gametes will appear to outsiders as belonging to – and being of – the expecting couple; their biogenetic difference is not apparent. Unlike transnational adoption, where the matter of the child’s appearance is a nonsubject amongst personnel who handle the transaction,8 the medical personnel allocating donor sperm seek deliberately to match certain aspects of the appearance of the father with those of the donor, such as colour of eyes and hair, and height. Although there has been a dearth of Norwegian male donors, obtaining sperm from the same countries that Norwegian couples adopt from has not, to our knowledge, been seriously proposed. Rather, since 1995, Norway has imported Danish sperm.9 Hence, the contrast with adoption from overseas is marked. Transnational adoption implies a visible incorporation of a foreign element into the family; birth through donor sperm does not and, although it necessitates the incorporation of foreign substance into the female body, every measure is taken to hide the fact. Adopting parents know that the child adopted from abroad will necessarily look different from themselves and that the nature of the relationship can never be hidden. In fact, at first glance, most adopted children look like immigrant children (innvandrebarn). Although many prospective adopting parents are concerned about potential discrimination due to their children’s different appearance, these concerns are not sufficient to deter them from adopting. On the contrary, parents assume that the adopted child will become theirs in the sense that it will be like them in every way except bodily appearance. Indeed, adoptive parents emphasize that there is a fundamental difference between their adopted child and the children of immigrant families – who increasingly are the target for discrimination in society at large. Parents are anxious that others will not recognize the difference. During the early years of transnational adoption, people assumed that children who looked ‘foreign’ were in fact adopted and treated them with benevolence. As more and more immigrants from the South entered Norway, such an assumption could no longer be taken for granted and adoptees risk being the target for racist remarks, especially when they move away from their home locality in order to study or work. These frequently cease, however, once their identity is clarified. From an essentialist point of view, the identity of children born from donor sperm is uncertain, but this uncertainty is not visible. Until 2003 when the Biotechnology Law revoked the anonymity clause of sperm donors, parents might, if they so chose, keep this information from their child. Following the new law, a child born from the use of donor sperm has, at the age of eighteen, the right to information

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about the donor (but the parents are not obliged to inform the child about the nature of its conception). This parallels the provisions of the 1986 Adoption Law. So far, we know very little about the status of these children within their families as they grow up, or about the attitudes of their genitors. From interviews with couples considering donor sperm, the fact that the prospective child will not be the father’s biological child is not perceived as a problem as regards the child’s identity. Like the parents of the adopted child, the donor child parents assume that it will be successfully kinned. To them, nurture rather than nature defines the relationship. However, this confidence in the power of kinning is not shared by the majority of lawmakers or the expert professions. Their thinking displays an attitude in which biocentrism can be seen to define practices that are constitutive of identity and hence belonging. Moreover, recent changes in paternity laws with respect to DNA testing move in the same direction. Paternity is understood as predicated upon genitor, privileging biological over social fatherhood, thus undermining the practice of pater est, whereby the husband of a woman giving birth is the legal father of the child (Melhuus, unpublished manuscript). Further evidence of a reliance upon biogenetic evidence for establishing identity can be seen in the increasing employment of DNA testing of asylum seekers (see below). In such a context, adopted children represent a paradox: legally there is no doubt where they belong, and socially and emotionally they are accepted as members of their parents’ family. Yet they come from somewhere else – both geographically and biologically – and the 1986 Adoption Act grants them the right to learn their biological origin.

Cultural Fundamentalism The presence of groups of population who not only look different from the majority, but who also adhere to different social and cultural practices and values, often promotes mutual antagonism, distrust, even racism. Stolcke (1995) has argued that there is evidence of emergent cultural fundamentalism in many European countries faced with an increasing influx of immigrants, which in turn leads to a hardening of attitudes of the native population. This analysis seems to fit the situation in Norway. As is the case in many Western European countries today, it is the Muslims who have become the radical other. In contemporary Norway the debate about integration and participation in Norwegian society turns on questions of religion, language and gender as they are manifested in Islamic beliefs and practices. When one witnesses how the media highlight differences between Muslims in Norway and ethnic Norwegians, is seems increasingly unlikely that, from the point of view of both communities, a semblance of imagined sameness – of becoming one moral community – will be achieved. In November 2004 there was a heated debate on television about the values and practices of the Muslim population in Norway. Participants were senior representatives from the Muslim community in Oslo together with ethnic Norwegian politicians, academics and journalists. The reason for the debate was the murder in Holland of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim. Van Gogh had made a film that was critical of the treatment of women

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in Muslim societies, and the killer objected to it on the grounds that it was blasphemy. Many viewers (us included) were left with an impression that the Muslims present were unwilling to accept the relevance for them of the Norwegian way of life. The programme ended with an invitation to the viewers to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question ‘Are Muslims a threat to Western values?’. 46,000 people sent an answer, of which 97 per cent replied in the affirmative – making this the highest imbalance between the answers ever recorded by the programme.10 At no point during the broadcast did the issue of race come up. The conflict throughout was phrased in terms of cultural (and religious) differences between Muslims and ethnic Norwegians – ‘those whose sociocultural heritage is based on a Christian world view’, as one debater put it. Both sides appeared to agree that there is a cultural gulf between them; they only varied in the way they viewed the significance of this gulf and about what, if anything, ought to be done to diminish it. As witnessed by the television debate, a hardening of the discourse is observable with an ever clearer demarcation drawn between ‘them’ and ‘us’. This is further evidenced by the government deciding not to pursue the introduction of dual citizenship of adults, despite the fact that a White Paper (NOU 2000: 32) recommended it in 2000. The principle of single citizenship is to prevail in Norway. This has to do with notions of loyalty – to family, nation and state – confirmed by the following statement by the Minister of Local Government: ‘ [c]itizenship should make visible where loyalties lie’ (Statsborgerskap skal synligjøre hvor lojaliteten ligger). One might suggest that Norwegians have difficulty recognizing bifurcated belonging and that the politicians, perhaps reflecting a common view, are unable to accept that a person can be loyal to two separate cultures and nations. If this is indeed the reason, then a question of the perceived quality of loyalty and belonging immediately arises. The reluctance to accept dual citizenship, we suggest, may also be interpreted as a cultural suspicion of uncertainty. As in the biotechnology law, one may discern a tendency to identify people according to clear-cut, one-dimensional criteria in order to know who they are and where they ‘belong’. This is most explicitly demonstrated in the paragraph related to egg donation. The law insists that ‘eggs be returned to the woman from whom they were taken. That is where they belong’. There is no room for fuzzy identity; uncertainty is by itself suspicious. If this is so, then non-Western immigrants have a major obstacle to overcome: they are in a catch–22 situation. Either they remain outside and ‘different’ and risk being the object of racism, or they modify their practices and try to assimilate and give rise to suspicion. The belonging of the transnationally adopted child, on the other hand, is not uncertain. It is fully accepted that from the moment a child is allocated to a couple, the adoptee belongs to his or her Norwegian family and kin – and by extension to the Norwegian nation, society and culture. The fact of the child’s alien origin is ignored, the adoptee is given a new identity as a Norwegian in everything but looks. The child receives a new birth certificate – naming his or her adoptive parents as parents – new name, new family and kin, new language, culture and nationality.11 However, as we shall show, a degree of ambivalence remains. The language of roots and the growing popularity of ‘motherland tours’ bear witness to this.

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Race into Culture?/Culture into Race? While skin colour and country of origin certainly are important elements in classifying people (although not openly admitted as such), we argue that it is the ‘cultural stuff ’ (Barth 1969) that primarily determines a foreigner’s standing in Norwegian society. This is manifested in the unproblematic inclusion of the adoptees into the most intimate circles of family and kin – and the corresponding exclusion of immigrants. As they become adults, most adoptees marry ethnic Norwegians and are welcomed by their in-laws as Norwegians. For a Norwegian to marry a nonWestern immigrant, however, raises many problems for the families of both parties. Although the adoptees also have personal histories separate from those of their new kin, this past cannot be evoked in the same way as it can for members of immigrant communities. To all intents and purposes the adoptee’s family is his or her family. The relationship between the two sets of affines upon a marriage is, in principle, not problematic. To have a non-Western immigrant son- or daughter-in-law move into the family, on the other hand, is much more difficult, not least because the Norwegian side of the family will be brought face-to-face with the kin of the son/daughter-in-law.12 The stated problem is not that they look different, which would evoke ideologically unacceptable issues of race, but that they carry with them different cultural traditions, which implicitly evokes racism. Immigrants in Norway tend to lead their social lives amongst themselves, they marry amongst themselves, and they keep in close touch with their kin in their countries of origin. Given the often radical different cultural values and practices between ethnic Norwegians and non-Western immigrants, an affinal relationship between them represents a potential for tension, if not conflict (see below). With the adoptees, one may detect a negation of race by (Norwegian) culture. The fact that transnational adoption results in mixed-race families is not on the agenda in Norwegian public debate on adoption. This is in sharp contrast to the situation in the U.S.A. and U.K. where many of those involved professionally in the activity express hostility to white parents adopting nonwhite children. Their argument is that mixedrace families provoke the development of confused identity in the adoptees, which, in turn, leads to confused identification with either group. A resolution passed by the American National Association of Black Social Workers in 1992 states: ‘It is the right of a child to be raised in a permanent, loving home which reflects the same ethnic or racial group’ (Russell 1995: 188). To contravene this and allow a black child to grow up in a white family will, according to Russell, a black social worker, mean that ‘at best, he can only become a well-fed, well-dressed, well-trained person, but a psychological mongrel – a new spelling of neo-colonialism’ (ibid.: 193). This kind of biological (or racial) fundamentalism finds no resonance amongst Norwegian psycho-technocrats (Howell 2004) nor within adoptive families. Studies confirm our findings that parental fear of racism is not built on a fear of a perceived threat against their adopted children as such, but on a perceived threat that they be confused with immigrant children (Brottveit 1996: 133). Adoptive parents further thought that racism in Norway is less directed at differences in appearances and more at the fact of being immigrant and, as such, the bearers of

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alien customs, religions and practices (ibid.: 134). There is some basis for arguing that this may be a defining feature of contemporary Norwegian racism. Politicians of the major right-wing party Fremskrittspartiet voice their concern about immigration precisely in terms of cultural differences. This is not to deny that cultural differences manifest themselves first and foremost through physiological differences, but it may be that culture is less a euphemism for race than an actual meaningful category. This certainly was the impression one was left with after the television show mentioned above. At the same time, physiological differences may become metonymic for cultural differences and this is what adoptive parents fear. Thus, it may not be analytically pertinent to abandon a characterization of discriminatory comments on cultural differences as the effects of racism, because the attacks and discriminations are directed at the same groups of people who traditionally are the butt of racist sentiments (see also Brottveit 1996). In ideological terms, most Norwegians would assert the equality of all humanity. In practice, however, it appears that only those representatives of humanity whose beliefs and practices may be imagined as sufficiently similar to their own are included in the ‘Norwegian family’ participating in an (however diffusely defined) imagined moral community. Only then may their socialities become intertwined. In the case of those whose physical characteristics are markedly different from the typical Norwegian, cultural overlaps are important, but resistance to acknowledging difference is most marked in the case of adoption. Conversely, those foreigners who continue to live in accordance with their own ‘cultural stuff ’ remain excluded from Norwegian sociality – or perhaps, they exclude themselves? Many do not want to become culturally ‘Norwegian’ as this is presently being understood by them. Minimally, the ethnic Norwegians and different immigrant populations lead parallel lives that rarely touch. This is brought out in a recent study of young people from various non-Western immigrant groups in Oslo. They find that, despite their attempts to assimilate, their different cultural background prevents this from taking place and, as a result, they develop an ever stronger attachment to the ethnic groups of their families (Prieur 2004: 10). Although skin colour is mentioned by some of those interviewed as the cause of their being kept outside Norwegian social life, many put their exclusion down to cultural differences which first became apparent during adolescence. For example, many non-Western families keep their daughters (and to a lesser extent sons) on a much tighter rein than do their Norwegian counterparts. This means that teenage immigrant girls may not participate in many activities that their Norwegian-born – and transnationally adopted – contemporaries do as a matter of course and, as a result, they become distant from their former friends. Despite earlier regular interaction with ethnic Norwegians, by the time most of those interviewed had reached their twenties their social life was centred almost exclusively on their own ethnic group (ibid.). Norwegian young people fail to appreciate why their friends from immigrant backgrounds accept their parents’ strict rules. A young woman of Chinese extraction said, ‘I had sort of believed that Norwegians and Chinese are the same, but recently I have realized that I need the Chinese environment more. We understand each other better’ (ibid.). So, as long as parental

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control remains firm, the indications are that the ‘ethnic gap’ will remain in Norwegian social life, giving rise to, and maintaining, mutual suspicion. An incident in which the different ethnic and cultural worlds confronted each other took place in connection with the celebration of the national day in 1999. It demonstrated both official Norwegian acceptance of non-Western immigrants as actors in the Norwegian nation-state, and the different criteria for Norwegianness that are applied to adoptees and immigrants. The national day celebrates shared history, culture and kinship predicated upon Norwegianness. It is a day when many children – including transnationally adopted children – and adults alike don a regional national costume (bunad). Strictly speaking, one should only wear the costume of the region to which one can trace hereditary belonging. In 1999 one of the very few members of Oslo City Council who has an immigrant background was chosen to lead the main procession of schoolchildren, which winds its way throughout the streets of Oslo, ending at the Royal Palace where the royal family greets its Norwegian ‘family’. The councillor had arrived with her family from Pakistan when she was a child and grew up in a predominantly Pakistani environment in Oslo. Following her appointment, she received some hate mail, including threats to her life, from people who felt that she was trespassing. In planning the event, a question that arose was what she should wear on the occasion. An ethnic Norwegian would, as a matter of course, wear a bunad. As the Pakistani councillor could lay no claim to a regional origin, nor to being a transformed and kinned Norwegian adopted from overseas, for her to wear a bunad was out of the question. To wear a typical Pakistani outfit would similarly be regarded by many as provocative. Luckily, the occasion coincided with the invention of a bunad linked to the city of Oslo. She was invited to inaugurate it, thus marking the fact not only that Norway was becoming a multicultural nation, but also that urban life had made inroads into a predominantly rural cultural identity.13

Children of Our Own… In the case of adoption, identity is a question of instilling values which create and underpin belonging. The child is to become not just a son or daughter, but our/my son or daughter. In this process the fact of the child’s different physiognomy is, by and large, ignored; the act of reproduction is centred on sociocultural intangibles and practices which project the parents’ notions of continuity and belonging. At the moment of allocation of a foreign child to a waiting couple an almost instant bonding occurs (Howell and Marre 2006). The following quote from an adoptive mother is typical: ‘From the moment we received the telephone call [informing us of the allocation of an Indian baby boy], it was precisely that boy, Shavran, who was our son. We had not seen him, not even in a photo, not held him, but I felt so strongly that he was precisely mine’ (Beheim Karlsen 2002: 15). Despite the immediacy of the identification, it is the routines and rituals of everyday life that kin the child and make it theirs. This is a process which privileges culture (or environment, or nurture) over nature (or biology, heredity or genes); and,

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at the same time, mind over body (Howell 2003). It is the essential aspects of the child’s identity that are transubstantiated; little can be done directly to change bodily features such as skin colour or size. However, to clothe an adopted child from overseas in Norwegian children’s clothing, as well as in national costumes (bunad), to introduce him or her to Norwegian children’s games, sports and other activities, means that their bodies develop a bearing more akin to that of their Norwegian contemporaries than to that of those in their country of origin. This is apparent when adoptees go on a so-called ‘motherland tour’, or return visit, to their country of birth. Contrary to popular opinion, as well as to their own expectations, they do not blend so easily into the local population as they had expected.14 Not only do they dress differently, they have different hairstyles and differing bodily comportment. This is particularly noticeable in the girls and shows that the body may not be such a neutral and unchangeable entity as might be thought. Interestingly, Howell’s findings show that such return visits, more often than not, serve to confirm the adoptees in their kinned Norwegianness rather than open up a Korean, Indian, Colombian – or whatever – identity (Howell 2006). Adoptive parents’ understanding is that their adopted children’s identity is predicated upon their being transubstantiated and kinned. A similar understanding is shared by the parents who opt for the use of donor gametes. As stated above, this understanding is not fully shared by the lawmakers. Recent debates surrounding the legislation that regulates assisted conception, children, adoption and immigration in Norway make evident the increasing importance attributed to biological bonds and genetic knowledge. The focus is on particular biogenetic substances: where they belong and who they belong to (or who have claims in them). This state of affairs only serves to confirm the notion that blood is thicker than water, that Norwegians are rooted in ideas of nature. To quote from a hearings document to the 2003 Children Act, ‘There is a general agreement [in Norwegian society] that knowledge of biological origin has enormous emotional significance for individual persons.’ In the law, maternity and paternity are perceived as biologically grounded. The body is framed in relation to the biogenetic substances of ova and sperm and to know their origins becomes a prerequisite for identity. This is evident in the 2003 Children Act, paragraph 9, which regulates paternity claims with respect to DNA testing. This test has made it easier to have claims (or refutation) of paternity verified. In terms of the discourse, the test makes paternity ‘certain’. Similar reductionist thinking, albeit for a different purpose, may be discerned in the recent practice of DNA testing of claimants for family reunion of immigrants (particularly Somalis) already resident in Norway. Only those who can demonstrate that they are genetically related to the Norwegian legal immigrant residents will be considered legitimate applicants.15 In stark contrast to transnational adoptive families, social kinship – which to the immigrants concerned may be ‘real’ kinship – is in these cases completely disregarded. To put it starkly: ethnic Norwegians come from inside the nation and have done so for generations. The transnationally adopted children come from outside, but cross the national and cultural border to Norway legitimately and become kinned as insiders. Children born by donor

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gametes similarly cross the relational borders legitimately, and become kinned as a member of the family. The legal immigrants cross legitimately but, in their refusal to become as-if Norwegians, are perceived as ambiguous and potentially threatening. Illegal immigrants and asylum seekers are regarded by most as trying to trespass. In other words, just as a cultural fundamentalism is observable with regard to immigrants, a biological fundamentalism is observable in the construction of personhood within the procreative universe of donor children and family reunion seekers alike, with the adoptees occupying a shifting middle ground.

Conclusion We have seen a tendency in Norwegian officialdom to avoid ambiguities. Biogenetics assists such a purpose well. The restrictions in the biotechnology law are not only grounded in perceptions of specific essences, but are themselves conducive to producing a specific essentialism. Biogenetic substances are seen as crucial identity markers in all three arenas, albeit differently weighted. Yet, as we have seen, these notions of biogenetic belonging are fundamentally challenged by the practices of transnational adoption. Our point of departure for discussing race has been to look at what it takes to produce relatives and Norwegians, and what it means to belong. Nationalism and racism are both constituted through ideologies of sameness and difference. In contemporary Norway these are applied differentially to children born from donor gametes, transnationally adopted children, and immigrants. We have examined notions of Norwegianness and the significance of kinship in Norway as these are articulated in contemporary discourses of origins, identity, belonging, inclusion and exclusion. What we find is that, despite a strong tendency towards both cultural and biological fundamentalism, transnationally adopted children are enabled to transcend ethnic, racial and national boundaries and that this is due to the kinning process that they undergo. This enables them to be incorporated into Norwegian kinship, culture and society. The other immigrants, on the other hand, lead a precarious existence. As long as they continue to focus their attention upon their own places of origin and their own cultural practices, and as long as their sociality is directed at their own kin and ethnic network both in Norway and in their country of origin, the odds are that they will continue to be regarded with suspicion by ethnic Norwegians. They must continually demonstrate that they are not trespassing; at the same time they must demonstrate where they belong (namely, the question of dual citizenship). When all is said and done, however, it is important to recognize a prevalent inconsistency and flux in all these domains. The meanings of identity and belonging are contextually determined. Our way into this field has been somewhat unorthodox in that we have chosen to juxtapose domains that are conceptually quite distinct and whose internal similarities and differences are not of the same order: adoption and immigration, on the one hand, and adoption and birth through donor gametes, on the other. Our intention has been to demonstrate that these unusual juxtapositions, and the tracing

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of connections between these different phenomena, provide rich empirical material for highlighting complex relations. Taken both separately and together, examples from these domains shed light on central sociocultural values that help us understand contemporary Norwegian principles and values concerning identity (personal, ethnic, national) and belonging (family, group and nation) .

Acknowledgements We wish to thank our colleague Thomas Hylland Eriksen for pertinent comments on an earlier draft, and Ronald Craig of the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights for help with the new law of Protection against Ethnic Discrimination. All our friends and colleagues in PUG deserve an extra thanks.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

The sorting society is an indigenous concept that the previous Christian Democrat dominated government was particularly at pains to combat. This means, inter alia, a reluctance to identify malformed foetuses with a view to abortion. The idea is that all humans are of equal value regardless, have equal rights, and are to be treated equally. We shall not be exploring the implications of the sorting society here, but wish to draw attention to its constituting role in contemporary Norwegian social policy. While Howell has studied the world of adoption and Melhuus that of assisted conception, we have no direct ethnographic experience of the worlds of immigration, and have relied primarily upon written sources for insight. Incidents reported in the media have been a rich source for our understanding, and adoptive families have also provided some insight into racism in present-day Norway. Norwegian understandings in this regard are not very different from those of the various ethnic immigrant groups. The erection of boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ on grounds of kinship and ethnicity is very common. However, the focus for our examination here is the effects of mainstream Norwegian values and practices. It is stated in the 2005 Protection against Ethnic Discrimination Law that ‘the concept of race was compromised by Hitler–Germany’s actions during the Second World War’ . Transnationally adopted children make up 1.4 per cent of the annual birth rate. Spain is an active newcomer to the world of transnational adoption and is challenging the Norwegian lead. In 1975, immigration to Norway was stopped. People who have since moved to the country have been experts, students, family members, asylum seekers and refugees. In 2003, there were 333,000 immigrants in Norway, or 7.3 per cent of the total population. Of these, 277,300 were first-generation immigrants, 70 per cent from non Western countries (www.ssb.no). One-third of the non-Western immigrants live in Oslo. Free contraception, abortion on demand, the disappearance of a social stigma attached to single motherhood, coupled with sufficient economic support provided by the state to single mothers, have resulted in a situation in which virtually no unwanted babies are born in Norway. In addition, the authorities prefer fostering to adoption in cases where a child must be removed from his or her family. According to Gullestad, quoting Bjernæs, the Norwegian Bureau of Statistics defined immigrants as follows: ‘The immigrant population encompasses people where both parents are born abroad. The immigrant population includes first generation migrants …

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8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

Signe Howell and Marit Melhuus and second generation migrants born in Norway of two parents who are born abroad’ (Gullestad 2001: 40, footnote 22; our translation). Prospective parents are not allowed to state any preferences for colour of skin, hair or eyes, height, sex or other physical attributes of their child-to-be. Until 1995, sperm was obtained from Norwegian donors. However, when screening sperm for infectious diseases became imperative and a quarantine of six months imposed on the sperm before release, implying that the sperm must be frozen, Norwegian clinics decided to import sperm from the Danish firm Cryos International Sperm Bank (http://www.cryos.dk/) The reasons for not creating a Norwegian sperm bank were mainly pragmatic, but it was also difficult to recruit reliable sperm donors in Norway (Melhuus 2003). The programme, entitled Holmgang, is a weekly event and follows the same pattern. It always includes a yes/no question to the viewers, who either ring in or send a message by mobile telephone. In most cases the children obtain a Norwegian passport at the local embassy before they leave their country of birth. They are thus incorporated into Norway from the moment they are joined to their new parents. Of course, this goes both ways. Few immigrant parents would welcome an ethnic Norwegian son/daughter-in-law. She was received with loud expressions of support when she led the procession through the streets of Oslo. These visits are becoming increasingly popular and many are organized by the adoption agencies. Howell’s research finds that expecting adoptive parents are admonished during the preparatory courses organized by the adoption agencies to undertake such a visit once their child reaches adolescence. This is meant to accommodate the adoptee’s ‘belonging to two cultures’ (2003, 2004). For the time being the test is not obligatory, but those concerned are encouraged to undertake it.

References Barth, F. 1969. ‘Introduction’, in F. Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Culture Difference. London: George Allen and Unwin, pp. 1–38. Beheim Karlsen, K. 2002. Arve – Sonen Min. Oslo: Gyldendal. Brottveit, Å.1996. ‘Rasisme og de Utenlandsadopterte’, Norsk Antropologisk Tidsskrift 7(2): 132–48. Gullestad, M. 2001. ‘Invisible Fences: Egalitarianism, Nationalism and Racism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(1): 45–64. ———. 2004. ‘Normalising Racial Boundaries: The Norwegian Dispute about the Term Neger’, Social Anthropology 13(1): 27–46. Howell, S. 1999. ‘Self-conscious Kinship: Some Contested Values in Norwegian Transnational Adoption’, in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 203–23. ———. 2002. ‘Community beyond Place: Adoptive Families in Norway’, in V. Amit (ed.), Realizing Community: Concepts, Social Relationships and Sentiments. London: Routledge, pp. 84–104. ———. 2003. ‘Kinning: the Creation of Life Trajectories in Transnational Adoptive Families’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9(3): 465–84.

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———. 2004. ‘The Backpackers That Come to Stay: New Challenges to Norwegian Transnational Adoptive Families’, in F. Bowie (ed.), Cross-Cultural Approaches to Adoption. London: Routledge. ———. 2006. The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Howell, S. and D. Marre. 2006. ‘To Kin a Transnationally Adopted Child in Norway and Spain: The Achievement of Resemblances and Belonging’, Ethnos 71(3): 293–316. Hviid Nilsen, T., A. Monsen and T. Tennøe. 2000. Livets Tre og Kodenes Kode: fra Genetikk til Bioteknologi, Norge, 1900–2000. Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk. Kjeldstadli, K. 2003. Norsk Innvandringshistorie (3 vols). Oslo: Pax. Longva, A.N. 2003. ‘Hvor Inkompatible er Multikulturalisme, Demokrati og Feminisme?’ Paper presented to NOVA, Oslo, 22–23 March 2003. Melhuus, M. 2003. ‘Exchange Matters: Issues of Law and the Flow of Human Substances’, in T.H. Eriksen (ed.), Globalisation: Studies in Anthropology. London: Pluto Press, pp. 170–97. ———. 2005. ‘“Better Safe than Sorry”. Legislating Assisted Conception in Norway’, in C. Krohn-Hansen and K. Nustad (eds), State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto, pp. 212–33. ———. In press. ‘Procreative Imaginations. When Experts Disagree on the Meanings of Kinship’, in M. Lien and M. Melhuus (eds), Holding Worlds Together. Ethnographies of Knowing and Belonging. Oxford: Berghahn Press. ———. Unpublished manuscript. ‘The Inviolability of Motherhood or Why Egg Donation is Not Allowed in Norway’. Melhuus, M. and S. Howell. In press. ‘Adoption and Assisted Conception: One Universe of Unnatural Procreation. An Examination of Norwegian Legislation’, in J. Edwards and C. Salazar (eds), Kinship and Genetics in Europe. Oxford: Berghahn Books. NOU (Norges Offentlige Utredninger). 2000. ‘Law of Citizenship’, Norwegian Public Policy Paper. Oslo: Home Office. Prieur, A. 2004. ‘Kan Man Bli Norsk?’, Aftenposten 7 June 2004, p. 10. Rogstad, J. 2001. Sist Blant Likemenn? Synlige Minoriteter på Arbeidsmarkedet. Oslo: Institutt for Samfunnsforskning. Roll-Hansen, N. and G. Broberg (eds). 1996. Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. East Lancing: Michigan University Press. Russell, A.T. 1995. ‘Transracial Adoption Should be Forbidden’, in A. Harnack (ed.), Adoption: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, pp. 188–98. Solberg, B. 2003. ‘Den nye Bioteknologiloven – ikke til Barnets Beste Allikevel?’ Nytt Norsk Tidsskrift 20(3): 316–24. Stolcke, V. 1995. ‘Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe’, Current Anthropology 36(1): 1–23. Thuen, T. 1995. Quest for Equity: Norway and the Saami Challenge. St. John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Wade, P. 2002. Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. London: Pluto Press.

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4 ‘I want her to learn her language and maintain her culture’ Transnational Adoptive Families’ Views of ‘Cultural Origins’ Diana Marre

Going to my country of origin and getting to know my origins meant understanding certain attitudes coming from my genetic background that I have. It was very revealing. Asha Miró, a Catalan young woman adopted in India at age seven

When they see her in the park and they ask me if my husband is black, I say, ‘No, but my daughter was born in Haiti’. An adoptive mother

Introduction The theme of the ‘cultural origins’ of adopted children is a recurrent one among adoptive families. The adoptive mother of an eleven-month-old baby, who was adopted in China and arrived in Barcelona when she was three months old, emphatically said in a prime-time television show that she did not want her baby to lose her cultural origins: ‘I want her to learn her language and maintain her culture’ (TV1, 8 October 2003). In this chapter, I explore the many different and ambiguous meanings attached to the notion of ‘cultural origins’ by adoptive parents and the uncertain boundary between nature and culture that exists in their narratives about the ‘cultural origins’ of children born in Asia, Africa and Latin America who do not

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look like them.1 I examine attitudes towards ‘difference’, using Spanish ethnographic data on how international adoptive families understand ‘culture’, ‘cultural origins’ and ‘race’. I discuss the role of adoptive parent associations which are formed to share and discuss common experiences of difference; face questions of race and racism; and build ‘new ways of imagining race, kinship and culture’ (Volkman 2003: 29). Field research for this article was primarily carried out in Barcelona (2002–5) and I interviewed seventy adoptive families – married and nonmarried couples, single mothers and fathers, and gay and lesbian couples – living in Catalonia. These interviews were complemented by participant observation in ADDIF, the first association of adoptive families of Catalonia, and by participant observation in the internet list-servers of AFAC (Association of Families Adopting in China) and ANSANM (one of the two associations of families adopting in Haiti); and two listservers on postadoption issues, which represent a more broadly Spanish population.

International Adoption in Spain Today, in terms of international adoptions per capita, the Autonomous Community of Catalonia has the world’s highest rate with 0.23 children adopted per one thousand inhabitants (Spain as a whole has 0.12) and 51 per cent more international adoptions in 2004 than in 2003. While Catalonia has 16 per cent of Spain’s population and 16 per cent of the Spanish children born every year, it has 28–30 per cent of Spanish international adoptions, according to official records of the Departament de Benestar i Família, Generalitat de Catalunya (Oficina de Prensa, Barcelona 2005). In relative terms, the number of adoptees per inhabitant in Catalonia is double that of Norway and Spain as a whole, the countries which rank next highest in the international tables. In Spain, except for isolated cases, international adoption began in the middle of the 1990s. Before this, people from other countries came to Spain to adopt. In Spain, as in other Western European and North American countries, international adoption has become a major means for involuntarily childless people to obtain a child and thereby become a family, or for people who want another child but are not willing to go through biological procedures. In 2004, according to Selman, people in Western Europe and North America adopted more than 40,000 children and the demand is steadily rising (Selman 2002). As in other countries, in Spain people adopt from abroad for several reasons. First, there is a lack of local children available for adoption. The paucity of nativeborn children in Spain is a result of a relatively recent process: the end of Franco’s dictatorship in 1975, the subsequent transition to democracy and the ensuing changes in Spanish family and women’s lives. Contraception was forbidden in Spain until 1978, when it was legalized by a Royal Decree (2275/78). In 1981, the Divorce Act (Law 30/1981) was approved and later amended in July 2005 (Law 15/2005). Voluntary sterilization surgery was legalized in 1983. In 1985 Organic Law 9/1985 legalized abortion but not on demand and this remains the case.2 In short, what took decades to develop in other countries, happened in under ten years in Spain. In the

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second place, a restructuring of the social welfare system took place, while feminism in Spain promoted the right of Spanish women to choose to delay childbirth and/or to remain childless.3 Spain had the EU’s highest birth rate in 1975 (2.8 children per woman) but the lowest in 1995 (1.17 children per woman). Finally, family law in Spain tends to preserve genitors’ biological rights, almost until they themselves renounce them. Law 21 of 1987, considered as the starting point for the modern regulation of adoption, suggested that one cause of the scarcity of national adoption in Spain was, and still is, a legislation that is ‘excessively’ protective of biological parents’ rights. This has led some adoptive parents not to adopt children in Spain even when there were children available to be adopted.4 A Catalan politician and journalist, and a former member of the National Parliament and the Barcelona City Council, is the mother of a biological daughter, an adopted son from national adoption, and a daughter from international adoption. She complained bitterly about the special attention given by the public administration to biological parents who keep their rights for longer than they should be allowed to. In a letter to her son, published in book form, she remarks: So what was there in your suitcase? A marginal neighbourhood of Barcelona, a lot of siblings spread between adoption and foster centres, a father who did not know how to treat you all, only to mistreat you, yet did not want to give you up – the medieval blood right! – and who prolonged the status quo more and more, making things more complicated. And, if the father did not know what to do in this world, the mother, literally, did not know that she was in it, with a brain unaware of life, almost empty of impulses. Children, only children expelled from the womb like an automaton. There were more things in the suitcase: a foster centre since you were born, correct but distant treatment from the people who took care of you, the coldness of the established order, the absence of a father figure, the multiplicity of mother figures, none of them, though, well enough defined to seem close, one’s own, real. So many busy mothers that none of them behaved like a real mother, with all those children to be taken care of. And no father. (Rahola 2001: 42–43) A journalist from Madrid who formed a single-parent family with an adopted daughter expressed herself in similar terms. She was called in by the Senate Special Commission on International Adoption (SCIAS) to publicly defend adoption. She explained that, having completed all the procedures for a national adoption, she discontinued it when a social worker, who was visiting her, suddenly started crying. When she asked what was the matter the social worker replied that, obeying a judge’s decision, every month she had to accompany an eight-year-old girl to visit her biological father who was in jail. The girl would remain speechless in front of him because he had raped her repeatedly since she was three.5 The same criticism of the treatment of biological parents by the law and government administration was made by the coordinator of one of the associations of adoptive parents in Catalonia. He

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knew of parents who, even three years after having children by national adoption, still had to witness their children being addressed by their biological parents’ surnames when they took them to see a doctor at the National Health Service. For these reasons, CORA, the adoptive parents’ associations coordinating body, asked the Senate Special Commission on International Adoption (SCIAS) for the modification of state legislation, the Civil Code in particular, in order to clarify the reasons for which parents could lose the custody of their children. Then, institutionalized minors could be adopted by Spanish families.6 The years 1995 and 1996, which showed the lowest birth rate in Spain and in which the Autonomous Communities of Catalonia and Madrid did not receive applications for domestic adoption because there were no children to be allocated, are recognized as the years in which international adoption started to gain a public profile.7 Single parents, women and men have been able to adopt from the very beginning in Spain. In July 2005, the Parliament approved a modification of the Civil Code to allow homosexual marriages and, as a direct consequence, child adoption by these couples. In the Catalan case, the family and civil codes were modified in April 2005 to include child adoption by homosexual couples. Before that, when homosexuals were allowed to adopt, they did so as single parents.

Choosing a Country of Origin, Choosing a Way to Be Parents The first thing to do in order to adopt a child in Spain is to fill out an application form in the offices of the appropriate regional Autonomous Community. Who is eligible to adopt depends on each Community.8 When filling out the application form, adoptive parents must indicate the country from which they wish to adopt because the Suitability Certificate (IC) must to be issued for a specific country.9 The reason is that not all countries admit unmarried couples or single people as adoptive parents, and only very few admit homosexual couples. As an adoptive parent said, it is not easy to decide on the country of adoption, because when parents do so, they start to build some bond with that country, which is emotionally difficult to break or change. The mother-to-be of a Chinese girl said that for her it would be a great shock to have to change country because, when she decided where to adopt, she started imagining her daughter. Another mother, who was filling out her application for Brazil and, due to problems with her ECAI (authorized Spanish international adoption agency), finally had to adopt in Ukraine, recalled the change as the worst moment of the process, something that discouraged her from considering another adoption.10 A biological mother who had decided to have another child, this time adopted, justified her choice of adopting in Morocco in terms of ‘geographical and cultural proximity’: We were looking through the files and, well, one has one’s preferences, likes and dislikes, and we decided we were not interested in anything to do with Russia, Ukraine, Romania or China. I do not know. We do not know those cultures, and then what? Latin America was another possibility, the other

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big area, but there were several drawbacks, such as the fact that in some countries you had to stay for two months, which we could not do, and also it was a very long trip, and with our child we were a little afraid of it ... I guess people make those long trips without any problem, but we were uncomfortable, anyway. The advantage was the language, of course … Well, we decided to pass on that. There was India, also, but there were other problems. In India there are many orphanages and you have to have been married in the Church to adopt from them because they are run by religious staff, and we thought our file would be held up there. Then, our first idea was Africa, not Morocco, but Africa, but there was Madagascar, which was also an ordeal, because when you were there filling out forms – I think it has now changed – you had to travel to South Africa on several occasions because it somehow belongs to South Africa for some matters; you had to travel from there. And we said then, well, Morocco. Parents attribute a great deal of importance to the selection of the country where they will adopt. In general, they feel that, after the decision of having a child, this is probably the most important decision they make. It is a decision that will determine the most important characteristics of the adoption process, which depend upon the country of origin of the child to be adopted. As I have already mentioned, all the adoption paperwork is done for one country only, or exceptionally for two. Since the whole process takes too long from the adoptive parents’ point of view, a ‘mistake’ in the selection of the country would make the process even longer – and more problematic, distressing and expensive. China is the principal country of origin chosen by Spanish adoptive parents. After the U.S.A., Spain is the second most common destination for Chinese adopted children. Many families adopting in China explain their decision by arguing that the process there is made ‘transparent and crystal clear’ by the country’s authorities and this makes the waiting period easier. A single mother, who worked for a while as a volunteer at an association of adoptive families while waiting for the assignment of her girl adopted in China, pointed out: Many people, once they solve the race problem, choose to adopt in China because the process is legal, transparent and ‘clean’, and because everything is very clear. If there is one thing a person who is adopting wants to have it is information and, in this sense, adoption in China is very good, because people are constantly informed about how the process is going and how things are going. Everything is done on a rigorous first come, first served basis. A person is given a number when they submit the application and that number is always respected. No one is afraid of someone skipping that number. Soon after that, the parents go on a trip to China, organized by Chinese institutions such as the Women’s Institute, if they choose not to use any Spanish mediation, or through AFAC (Association of Families Adopting in China) or some of the Spanish

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ECAIs (international adoption agencies). They know in advance where their hotel will be, regardless of the Chinese province where they will go to find the child, because this decision depends on the Chinese authorities. The hotels are always the same and they are usually four or five star so as to avoid unpleasant surprises. They know that they will not be allowed to go to the orphanage where their daughter (Chinese adoptees are almost always females) has lived so far. They wait for her at the hotel, where she will arrive together with the girls assigned to the other families of the group they are part of, which is organized by the Chinese authorities according to the time of arrival and province of origin of the minors. The reference to clarity and transparency in the processes in China includes, although it is not explicitly mentioned, its regularity in the assignment and allocation of children. Those who adopt in China believe they have the certainty that, nine or ten months after applying, which is more or less the period of time of a pregnancy, the CCAA (Chinese Centre of Adoption Affairs) will assign them, along with a photo, the girl they have asked for, i.e., healthy, under twelve months or two years old, as they have imagined, and ‘compatible’ with them. This compatibility is decided, according to their narratives, in the Centre’s Matching Room, the final stage of the allocation of children (Howell and Marre 2006; Marre and Bestard forthcoming). In due course, they will meet the girl they were waiting for: a toddler (almost a baby), with almond eyes and dark straight hair and, above all, healthy. If something happens between the moment of allocation and the meeting, the CCAA would allocate them another girl. Recently, when a family was in China looking for a girl through an ECAI, the CCAA told them that the girl had spilled a flask of boiling water on herself, causing major burns on her face and neck. Consequently, another girl was allocated to them before they returned to Spain. As for the first girl, she was probably destined for what is called ‘green ticket’ adoption, a system for those who wish to adopt minors with a health problem. These are problems (a full list of which is given to the prospective parents) that, from the parents’ point of view, can be solved with the right economic resources; the initial cost of the adoption is lower in such cases. Therefore, adoption in China gives to adoptive families the feeling that there will be no uncertainties and unforeseen events and, if there were, that the CCAA would solve them. Decisions made by the CCAA take no account of families’ opinions and it decides what information it will provide about the minors. But the CCAA is the only body that takes the decisions and it apparently makes the same decisions about similar situations. It therefore seems predictable and, above all, not open to appeal: it does not allow the families any role in decision making and this can be reassuring because it frees families from this difficult responsibility. The CCAA decisions help to guarantee the continuity of the adoptions and, above all, the image of transparency and clarity. It is ironic to note that the Chinese government that offers adoptive families guarantees related to adoption processes is the very one which adoptive parents think of as responsible for the abandonment of girls in China. From the adoptive parents’ narratives the ‘only child policy’ of the Mao era is the reason why there are so many girls to adopt in China. They like to

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think that their daughters were wanted and loved by their biological mothers who were compelled to abandon them by the government, not because of their decision and/or desire. A common feeling towards biological Chinese mothers is that of comprehension, solidarity and compassion. The act of abandonment by the biological mother is an important proof of her love for her daughter, in the parents’ narratives, taking into account that child abandonment in China is punishable by law. This is also a condition that, for many parents, guaranteed the impossibility of finding their girl’s biological mother in the future. The second most common region of origin for adoption among Spanish families, and the most common in some of Spain’s Autonomous Communities, is Russia and Eastern Europe. There, according to adoption services and adoptive parents (whether they adopt there or not), adoption processes are rather random. The waiting periods and the final costs tend to be vaguely defined. Parents visit the country to accept the child and it is only after this acceptance that the final adoption process begins and often the parents need to return to the country to collect the child some months later. During the first visit, adoptive parents sometimes reject the child allocated and need to return once, twice or even more. Adoptions are carried out through Spanish ECAIs or with the support of an association such as ASFARU (Association of Families Adopting in Russia) or through ‘facilitators’ who are local agents with contacts with local authorities and orphanages. These agents are hired by Spanish families using a ‘word of mouth’ system of recommendations. The corruption that the minors’ countries of origin are seen to ‘suffer from’ is a frequent subject among families adopting in the former Soviet Union, Latin American or African countries; it is occasionally raised in relation to Asian countries, but, I would say, never in relation to China. As the adoptive father of a girl of Ukrainian origin pointed out, he had to bribe the authorities to ‘exaggerate’ the girl's health problems so that the adoption process would be expedited.11 He also had to bribe the judge so that he would ‘believe’ what the authorities had told him/her, quickly confirm the adoption and allow them to return home as soon as possible. This confirmation of the adoption and the return home is something that families experience as a real relief and is part of all their narratives. The bribes considerably increase the anticipated initial cost, but, from the parents’ perspective, they also reduce the length of stay in the country of origin and lessen the risk of more unexpected problems. Interestingly, corruption is always and without exception attributed to the persons or institutions that receive or ask for the bribe and never to those who offer or give it.12 The health condition of the minors worries the families adopting in Russia and the former Soviet Union. As Khabibullina (2006) says, information about adoptions from Russia and other Eastern European countries is rather limited, with a striking emphasis on the medical condition of the adopted children and its effects on the adoptive families. Families are very worried about the possibility of RAD (Reactive Attachment Disorder)13 or FAS (Foetal Alcohol Syndrome) in children of alcoholic mothers, which, it is thought, can be detected in a photograph or a domestic video of the child. As Cartwright (2003) has pointed out, interpreting casual portraits for

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medical information has become a common practice in transnational adoption and especially in the specific case of FAS,14 which in Spain is only talked about among families adopting in the former Soviet Union.15 Cartwright shows that certain regions become associated with certain pathologies and the racialized appearance of children, seen as ‘Asian’ for example, may be interpreted as indications of medical problems such as FAS, which are thought to be visually detectable (Cartwright 2003). In choosing a country of origin, parents already engage with, and build up an image of, the culture of origin of the child they hope to get. Ideas of fairness, transparency, authoritarianism, corruption, health conditions, alcoholism and poverty all shape the relationship and emotional bond parents build with the country of origin, even before they have seen or met a prospective adoptee. The country and culture of origin are engaged with energetically and interrogated in detail for information about adoption and adoptive children, yet they are also perceived as environments which it is a relief to leave behind, once the child has been secured.

Choosing a Country of Origin, Choosing a Child? Choosing a country of origin is a decision that also determines some characteristics of the adopted child. In Spain, it is not possible to ‘choose’ the sex of the child, although people are allowed to state a ‘preference’, which most families do and, in general, they prefer girls.16 The selection of the country of origin also has, from the perspective of the families, an influence on the possible sex of their future child. Many families admit to choosing China because of the high probability of getting a girl due to the fact that most, if not all, of the numerous minors given up for adoption in China are girls.17 Some families wish to have a son and therefore they choose Morocco because most minors given up for adoption there are boys. Parents can specify an age range that they prefer. However, the professionals in charge of evaluating them as prospective future parents recommend the age range that they consider to be most appropriate for that family. In general, families say that this is something they manage to agree with the professionals.18 Nevertheless, it is well known that approximately 70 per cent of minors adopted in China are under twelve months.19 The legal impediment against choosing skin colour or other physical features in the children is solved, or at least avoided (only partially from the parents’ perspective), through the selection of the country of adoption. Most families anticipate what their adopted girls will look like by choosing to adopt in China, Ethiopia, Haiti, Congo, Russia or Eastern Europe. Latin America, where initially some Spanish families adopted but which is less and less common as a region for adoption, is probably the ‘origin’ that poses most questions for future parents in this regard, as children from this region can be very varied in appearance. In general most parents said that their child would probably be ‘very ethnic’. The former director of the Catalan Institute of Fosterage and Adoption (ICAA) has explained that adoptive parents prefer to adopt in China because, as I have shown, the process is ‘quick’, ‘easy’ and ‘continuous information’ is provided. Russia,

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the second most common country of origin, is the opposite, according to ICAA’s director. There the ‘process is not easy’ but people choose to adopt there for ‘ethnic reasons’: ‘children are more white [blanquitos] and more similar to us’.20 Many parents adopting in Russia justify their decision in term of ‘cultural or ethnic similarities’ which often, according to the ICAA’s director are, in fact, ‘physical resemblances’. There was a case of a family adopting in Russia who, when they made the first trip to meet and accept the girl they had been assigned and saw she was not as they expected her to be, rejected the assignment for what seem to have been clearly racialized motives. They said that they really needed a physical resemblance to the baby so as to identify themselves as parents. Different approaches to choosing a country of origin appear in the narratives of adoptive parents. Families that have adopted in Haiti, Ethiopia and China often say that, when they walk around with their girl, it is as if she is wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘I’m adopted’. In contrast, many of the families that adopt in Russia and Eastern Europe want to keep the adoption a secret or at least have the possibility of talking about it when they wish and of deciding if and when to talk about it with their children. For many families, the origins issue is especially related to having to talk about it with their children and about when, how and in which circumstances to do it. But the issue is also related to the fact that they have to explain it to strangers and people they do not want to discuss it with. An adoptive mother of two older siblings of Russian origin defended herself against the presumption of ‘racism’ associated with families that choose to adopt in Russia or Eastern Europe, pointing out that, ‘they [her children] realize that every time we go somewhere together, they do not carry the “I am adopted” sign with them for strangers that bothers them’. Families with children adopted in Russia say that many families who adopted in Asia or Africa do it to try to seem ‘cool’ or ‘open-minded’ people. When in July 2004 a law was passed according to which families could have their adoptive children ‘reborn’ in Spain, giving them a Spanish birth certificate, many families thought it was something that could only be ‘beneficial’ or ‘useful’ for families adopting in Russia and Eastern Europe. The law aroused interesting discussions in several listservs of adoptive families. Those who wanted to use this facility, most of whom were certainly families adopting in Russia and Eastern Europe, would justify the decision by saying they did it for their children’s sake so that, when they were older, they would not be forced to give explanations to others when they did not want to. For those objecting to it, the law meant a step backwards in terms of making adoptive parenthood ‘visible’ and simply encouraged the secrecy that had surrounded adoption in Spain for so many years. All of them rejected, or simply could not think in terms of, the possibility of children (re)born in Spain with African/Asian/Native Latin American traits. This perceived incompatibility between being Spanish and looking ‘non European’ is part of the common idea that adoptive parents are ‘ethnically’ homogeneous, all being ‘white’ or ‘Caucasian’, despite centuries of sexual and colonial exchange between Spain, North Africa and Latin America. Of the seventy families I interviewed, only two adoptive mothers, who had adopted children from

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Latin America and Morocco respectively, justified their choice in terms of ‘physical resemblances’ between themselves and the children. ‘Pregnancy’ – the period of waiting before the child arrives in the family – is a time during which the bond with the country of origin of the child or with the ‘culture of origin’ is reinforced. Families adopting in Russia and Eastern Europe are probably the exception. While there is almost no reference whatsoever to potential health problems among families adopting in China, and it is a recurrent topic for families adopting in Russia and the former Soviet Union, once the placement takes place and the child is incorporated into the family, the latter category are the least ‘active’ families in relation to adoptive family circles and activities in Spain. They seem to be less interested in a ‘culture’ that they feel is very similar to their own. As Khabibullina (2006) says, ‘it seems that children adopted in Russia are “invisible” because of their “European looks”. Besides, the popularity of “Russian” children might sometimes be explained by the “racial” choice of adoptive parents’. Waiting time is also an experience that many families share with an association of adoptive families, and these associations are usually organized by country of origin.21 ‘It’s for your child, so that he doesn’t feel like he’s the only one and for him to know that there are others like him’, said one father who was a founder of one of Barcelona’s oldest associations. It is also a time during which the associations encourage families to buy books and other ‘cultural’ material about the countries of origin of the children and even encourage them to learn ‘their’ language. The associations and their events, activities, services and meetings – especially the annual or biannual full-day major parties – tend to create a community whose children are (and look) similar. With the exception of most families adopting in Russia and Eastern Europe, the decision to keep a postadoption bond with their child’s country of origin is something that adoptive parents never question. This may be as a result of changing trends within the adoption world generally that emphasize questions of roots, and more explicitly the need to encourage a child to accept his or her ‘two cultures’. Today, most expecting or new adoptive parents will say that they plan to undertake a journey to the child’s country of origin once their child reaches adolescence. Their arguments for doing so are rather similar and appear not to be thought through. Having been told by the ‘experts’ that it is an important aspect of the children’s sense of identity to be familiar with their ‘original culture’, they, being good parents, make this part of their future planning. In Spain, parents are adamant about their adopted child not losing touch with their ‘culture of origin’. There is literally no home I have visited for an interview with an adoptive family without some sign of the child’s country of origin: pictures, images and objects – with the exception of parents who adopt from Eastern Europe, which is, from their point of view, adopting ‘into the same culture’. The distant relationship that parents adopting in Eastern Europe and Russia have with the countries and cultures of origin is striking in its difference from the more engaged relationship formed by parents adopting from other regions. It seems clear that it is the impact of racialized phenotype that makes ‘culture’ more

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important. Engaging with cultural difference is a way of dealing with racialized difference: it recognizes the ineradicable physical difference of race but simultaneously denies it by focusing on culture. As I show below, however, ‘culture’ is conceived in naturalized forms that connect it intimately to racialized difference.

A Trip to ‘Difference’, the ‘Country of Origin’ and ‘Cultural Origins’ In their narratives, with what do families link the idea of origins? Some link origins or culture of origin with a language, even if the girl has been adopted as a baby, as is the case with the Chinese girls. The Association of Families Adopting in China (AFAC) offers language classes to parents and girls. An adoptive mother said that she would like it if ‘some ill-humoured classmate called her [her daughter] Chinese, or told her “go back to your country”, [the girl] would answer with a string of insults in Chinese, even if it was made up’. In contrast, an adoptive mother with children adopted in Russia pointed put that, even though her children had a map of Russia in their room with thumbtacks on the cities where they had been born, she was not teaching her children about Russian culture. She also mentioned that she could not help laughing in the face of her local Russian consul when, at the time of registering her children, he recommended that she renew their passport every five years so that the children could have Russian nationality when they grew up, if they wanted to. Similarly, the mother of a Ukrainian-born girl said, ‘I do not educate her in the Ukrainian culture, or its food, beverages, clothing, language, music or anything; but I know this is not the norm, that I am an isolated case.’ Families also talk about food and regional products, and thus they incorporate new products into their diets and pass around recipes from the country or region of origin. They buy music, objects, children's books and they go see movies coming from the country of origin. From the moment the decision about country of origin is made, they start to take an interest in its literature, music, language, food and other products. As a mother-to-be who was waiting for a girl from China while doing voluntary work pointed out, the future adopting parents know that the ‘country of origin’, or simply ‘the origin’, influences what they normally call the ‘culture of origin’ of their child, even when they are referring to a new-born or a child only a few months old. In many of these and other cases, the terms ‘origin’ or ‘culture of origin’ are used to refer to phenotypical features, that is, to ‘race’. An adoptive mother of a girl from China, who lived in the Autonomous Community of Galicia, pointed out: ‘Of course I want to be able to talk to my child about her cultural origins, she’ll be aware of the difference whenever she looks at herself in the mirror.’ One mother, who did not know if she could have her own children but had decided that, in any case, she preferred to adopt, said more or less the same thing: ‘Many people, once they solve the race problem, choose to adopt in China.’ Thus, even though from the very beginning she had thought about adopting in subSaharan Africa, she carried out her first adoption in China, followed two years later by another one in Africa. She considered her daughters to be ‘different’ but said she

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felt prepared for the experience. However, she recognized that when she decided to adopt for the second time, and to do it in Africa, some families with whom she had shared her first adopting experience in China told her that they did not feel prepared to adopt in Africa and the furthest they could go, in terms of ‘differences’, was China. Her husband did not have a problem adopting in Africa, as long as the child was a girl. He explained this by saying that he did not see himself being able to say no to (i.e., controlling) an adolescent boy from Africa when, he felt sure, the child would be taller and bigger than him. The issue of ‘origins’ or ‘cultural origins’ of the child, or the fact that the children themselves will probably raise the issue of origins, is something that all adoptive parents mention. This is not something new and Howell (2003, 2004) and Yngvesson (2003; Yngvesson and Mahoney 2000) have described this for Norway and Sweden respectively. They both agree that the operación retorno (operation return, the Spanish version of other countries’ ‘motherland tours’) is more related to the parents’ than to the children’s needs and desires. Paco Rúa, adoptive father and coordinator of one of the most active associations in Madrid, prepares these tours and says: ‘sooner or later, your children will ask you to take them to their country of origin so they get to know their own origins. Adolescence implies a construction of the identity and Judith, who is ten years old, is at its doors. I prefer to anticipate it instead of coming too late. Therefore, we’ve already decided where to go for our 2005 vacations: Zipaquirá [Colombia]’ (El Pais Semanal, 12 December 2004). Howell (2004) has even suggested that the relative lack of interest on the part of most young adoptees in their origins may be, for their adoptive parents, a confirmation and reaffirmation of the kinning bond they have been able to build. This was true for a Spanish single-sex female couple. For them it was very important that it had been so difficult to return to Nicaragua to adopt their second daughter, accompanied by their eldest one who had also been adopted in Nicaragua: the adolescent did not want to go back to the country and did not enjoy the trip at all. In some sense, adopters are often concerned with origins in an attempt to get a grip on a child’s particular, individual character. It also seems as if origins refer to the place, town or city where the child is thought to have been born, or the place where he or she was institutionalized. To establish a contact with that place has the aim of reducing as much as possible the sense of the unknown and ‘ghostly’, of that ‘backpack’ that all parents perceive that their children bring with them, no matter how old they were at adoption. The adoptive families are convinced that there is a past; they are certain that they do not start from zero. So they want to know as much as possible about that past. ‘It is not only important where your child comes from, but also to know his or her reality,’ an adoptive parent said to justify the requirement imposed by some countries that adoptive families stay in the country of origin of their children for several weeks. In general, families try to ‘know’ or have the largest possible amount of data about their children. Thus, if they are able to visit the institution the child has lived in, they can get to know who took care of him/her, what the child ate, how he/she was dressed and therefore collect stories that they can tell their child later. If

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they can, they visit the site where they are told the child was found abandoned, they take pictures or film the site, the street, the atmosphere, the people. They try to talk to people from there. That is, they try to collect the elements needed to build a story about the child’s origin that they can tell him/her later.22 Adoptions with contact between biological and adoptive parents also indicate this need to construct a story. Many of the families adopting in Haiti do this so they can choose one orphanage in particular that allows the possibility of having an interview with the child’s biological parents. The objective is, in many cases, to obtain the maximum possible information about their children, to clear as many doubts as possible and to find explanations about their child, for the present and the future. A mother said that it had been a good experience to know the biological parents of her two daughters, because she rapidly found an explanation as to why they were so tiny in spite of their age. They were like that because their biological parents were also very small and not because of malnutrition or any disease (Marre 2003). In the parents’ retelling of the time when they went for their children, they never talk about ‘that place’ as an interesting, nice and pleasant place; they rather mention its lack of resources, its problems, its poverty, its corruption and its stifling hot or freezing cold weather. Moreover, they systematically retell the moment of taking the plane back home as a relief.23 The need for a break, what Yngvesson (2003) refers to as a ‘clean break’, necessary to create a new kinning link, also explains the fact that what people look for in order to fill the emptiness is objects, images and various elements with which to create a story, which the adoptive families need in order to create a sense of uniqueness. It is interesting to note that the huge interest in gathering ‘pieces of the puzzle’, as they are usually referred to, does not generally include any type of contact with the families that fostered the children or that took care of them and might have more information about the children. These puzzle pieces are never words or stories coming from others or that children can hear from others’ mouths. The words used to make a story about origins, seen as the best way of integrating the child into the family, are words of the adoptive family, the kinship language of their adoptive family. Although they always perceive ‘origin’ as linked to many problems, as a place children were rescued from so that they would have a better future, parents also show ‘respect’, ‘gratitude’ and understanding because that place ‘gave’ them a girl and the possibility of being parents. More often than not, in stories about ‘origins’, ‘cultural origins’ and ‘birth origins’, the biological mother figures importantly. As one mother said: ‘I love the Chinese culture in many respects and I deeply respect this country. I owe them my girl’s life and I feel very sorry for the woman that carried her for nine months and I don’t even want to think what she was going through.’ The biological mother is, however, an ambivalent figure. With some distress, another mother asked: ‘Is it good to idealize an unknown mother they cannot get to know? Is it advisable that in the mental universe of our girls there be a mother who is good and ideal while we turn into the witches because we don’t let them go out at night?’ This overlapping of ‘origins’ and biological family is evident in a different way in the words of a young Catalonian woman born in India. She declared that, ‘going

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to my country in search of my origins had meant for me being able to understand certain attitudes that had come up and were related to my genetic inheritance’. This explicit reference to the genetic past as an explanation for present attitudes is one way of thinking about the importance of origins. Another way of linking past origins to the present is evident in the words, cited at the start of this chapter, of the mother of a Chinese girl adopted when she was three months old, who emphatically maintained that she did not want her child to lose her culture of origin. ‘Culture of origin’ here is something seen as already imbued into a three-month-old baby: it is naturalized into something quasi-biological, something that is as much part of her as the way she looks. Origins and culture of origin thus mean many different things to parents. They invoke language, foods, music and other regional products; they explain physical appearance; they provide elements that are needed for a story to tell the children and others, including the parents themselves, about why the children are the way they are; they figure as oppressive places, the reality of which is to be held at a distance; they are places which command respect and gratitude, but which may be idealized by rebellious teenagers; they are the source of genetic traits and quasi-biological cultural heritage. This last aspect is particularly noticeable when it comes to parents’ ideas about the bodies of the children they adopt transracially.

Knowing or Building ‘Difference’: Managing ‘Difference’ in the Body Most adopters say they are aware that their children are ‘different’. Origins, cultural origins or country of origin refer to the difference. Nevertheless, they know that when they talk about difference, they are also referring to certain types of problems perceived as linked to difference, problems that they want to ‘anticipate’. The word ‘anticipate’ is often mentioned by adopting parents. But, what does ‘anticipate’ really mean? It means to state explicitly and to emphasize something that is seen as selfevidently problematic and that may create stigma (Goffman 1963). Likewise, as some families would comment in their meetings, they feel they have to prepare themselves on a daily basis to explain ‘where’ their child is from. ‘When someone asks me if my husband’s black, I answer that he is not, but I say that Clarisa was born in Haiti’, said one mother who had found an ironic way of answering the recurrent question about her daughter’s skin colour. The emphasis on difference is not something exclusive to girls of African or Haitian origin. Some mothers of girls born in China recommended doing a tight ponytail in their daughters’ hair to stress their almond-shaped eyes. These mothers treat their children’s eyes with special eye drops because, they claim, those types of eyes produce low quantities of natural tears. Nevertheless, it is evident that the emphasis on the difference is greater among parents with children adopted in Africa, Haiti and Latin America. As Wade (2002: 4) has said, ‘only some aspects of phenotype are worked into racial signifiers and they are the aspects that were originally seen to be ways of distinguishing between Europeans and those they encountered in their colonial explorations. “Phenotype” is thus linked to a particular history.’

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From the parents’ point of view, it seems to be better to place extra emphasis on those traits that appear to be evident and/or may be stigmatized. Adoptive parents spend a lot of effort in emphasizing the differences between themselves and their adopted children. But, at the same time, they can make statements such as the following, affirmed by a high school teacher, mother of an adopted child of Ethiopian origin and two biological sons: ‘Imagine how much “ours” we feel her to be that we don’t even see her as black anymore. I’m not kidding. You don't see the colour, it's just love.’ The journalist who interviewed this mother understood her comment as a positive attitude towards ‘cultural’ (actually racial) ‘differences’ (El Pais Semanal, 12 December 2004). Evidently, this is a possibility and, in fact, it is supposed that this adoptive mother, ‘once [she] solves the race problem’, can adopt in Ethiopia. Nevertheless, she needs to emphasize her love for her child saying that they ‘don’t see the colour’. But what would happen if they saw her black colour? Could they not love her in the same way? Why does she need to emphasize so explicitly her love for her daughter? For adoptive families, the adoption of phenotypically different children means a deeper process of reflection during the preadoptive as well as the postadoptive stage. From their perspective, it requires the acquisition of the ‘skills’, ‘tools’ and ‘knowhow’ typical of the ‘cultures of origin’ of their children, in order to adequately treat their bodies and ‘customs’. These explanations are found even among families adopting in China who, because of their attitudes, are perceived by other families as the ‘elite’. The parents of girls from China often spoke of the ‘thousand-year-old culture of their baby daughters’, which was linked to their perception that their girls had a ‘natural’ meekness and intelligence. These ‘natural’ qualities, however, may be improved by parents from the start, for example through naming. An adoptive mother of two girls, one Chinese and the other Congolese, told me she had called the former one Honey and the latter Forest in reference to their ‘natures’. Reference to how fast children’s general health improves, and especially how their bodies do, is recurrent among adoptive families. This is not only a question related to health but also to appearance. The first thing parents mention in their accounts is the state in which they found the children, what the clothes looked like in which the child was handed over and the condition of his or her hair and skin, which is something they hasten to examine in detail, in search of signs. Skin and hair care is a recurrent subject among parents in general and especially of girls of African or Haitian origin. For most of them, their daughters’ skin is very delicate and needs special care with creams, oils and soaps to moisturize it. The skin is said to require constant moisturizing with extra products, otherwise it becomes ‘white’, the most usual word to refer to the appearance of their very dry skin. Also the hair receives a lot of attention and energy from white mothers of black girls. Not only is it present in their accounts, but it is also a recurrent topic in the listservs in which one can find products, recommendations on how often Afro hair should be washed (compared to non-Afro hair), what types of shampoos, conditioners, combs, brushes and rubber bands should be used, and so on. The considerations about hair and white mothers’ difficulties in dealing with it are identical to those described by Tyler in her work on

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mixed families in Leicester (Tyler 2003, 2005). Most mothers point out that the best thing to do is to take the girls to a hair salon ‘for black people’, as one woman said, because they ‘naturally’ know how to deal with it: You have to go to one of these hair salons that there are now, run by immigrants, because not only do they know how to deal with the hair, but they also have the appropriate products. One can look at how they do it, but we will never be able to do it as they do it, because for them it’s natural. An adoptive mother advised others to contact black women when they took their children to the park because it was the only way of learning how to handle kinky hair. Another mother regretted not being able to get the appropriate products because she lived in a small town without black immigrants. All the mothers were very pleased when people from Africa, Haiti or South America commented on how good her girl’s hairstyle looked. ‘Natural’ is also the adjective used to describe the inner rhythm that parents perceive in their daughters (cf. Tyler 2003). A father of a two-year-old girl, adopted in Central Africa, mentioned that some colleagues with whom he had been on a trip were very surprised, as was he, by the way his daughter received him at the airport. She did, according to him, an African dance full of ‘natural’ rhythm. Parents also describe the ‘natural’ ability of their daughters from Africa to eat delicately with their hands, forming a sort of bowl with them instead of a plate. The references to the tastes, ‘natural’ rhythmic musical skills and ‘natural’ energy said to be characteristic of children adopted in Africa and Haiti are as frequent as the references to the ‘natural’ meekness, intelligence and serenity of girls adopted in China.

Final Remarks Adoptive families, individually or as part of an association, build and maintain bonds with the country and culture of origin of their children. They often go to the countries and they typically become consumers of some of their cultural products. It is evident that they are building bridges with those countries and cultures. This goes hand in hand with the perception that the children, when adopted transracially, are very different from themselves. Adoptive parents create an ‘ethnic’ construction of their adopted children and also an ‘ethnic’ self-construction, which places them as white. With the exception of parents who have adopted ‘Caucasian’ children in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, most adoptive parents, when they talk about an interracial adoption, refer to the child as having different ‘origins’ or as being ‘very ethnic’ or ‘ethnically’ different. The notion of race is replaced by the notion of ethnicity (Stolcke 1993, 1995; Wade 2002), even when referring to people’s ideas about phenotypical difference. Children’s differences are linked, in general terms, to their ‘cultural origins’ or ‘country of origin’ with no explicit mention of ‘racial difference’ but with reference instead to ‘different traits’. Evidently, this does not happen exclusively in Spain. Volkman (2003) describes American

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parents’ fascination with the imagined ‘birth culture’ of their adopted children. Interestingly, and in order to point out the ambiguity found between ‘cultural origins’ and physical traits, Volkman began her article quoting Isabelle, a six-year-old adopted girl in first grade in a New York city school. The little girl explained to her mother that she had made a list of children she knew that were like her, adopted. The mother asked her what those children looked like, and she replied: ‘Chinese’. International adoptions always cross lines of nation and ethnicity, but when adoption involves visible, racialized differences between children and parents, the communities created around them and the associations of international adoptive families try to become more and more ‘visible and vocal’ (Volkman 2003: 30). Clear examples of this are Spanish and U.S. families adopting in China and Spanish families adopting in Ethiopia and Haiti. The opposite is true for the Spanish association of families adopting in Eastern Europe and Russia, the most recent one to be created and the least active one, despite the fact these regions were the second most common place of origin for children in 2004 (after Asia), and the most common in 2000, 2001 and 2003. It seems clear that this contrast derives from the way ‘culture’ is mobilized to cope with a silenced form of ‘race’. The striking concern of parents with the ‘culture of origin’ of children whose physical difference from themselves takes a racialized form – even if, as in Spain, ‘race’ is not an overt part of public discourse about difference – is surely a reaction to the perceived ineradicability of that difference. Whatever the importance attached to a culture or country or origin, however, from the parents’ point of view, these are always seen as worse than the adoptive country and culture. The underestimation of a place or culture, which on the other hand they insist that they want to keep alive for their children, is a paradoxical aspect of the kinning process that, in interracial adoption, is probably the most difficult part of adoption (Howell 2004). It indicates that the ‘culture of origin’ responds to parents’ needs rather than to the realities of life in the country of origin, which are seen as something to be escaped from. It seems that Weil was right when he said that ‘children rarely maintain elements of their native cultures … even when adopters make strong efforts to preserve their children’s original heritages’ (Weil 1984: 277). Interestingly, however, culture appears in these accounts as something heritable, often in a powerfully naturalized and quasi-biological way, and I would argue that this is related to the fact that culture is clearly standing in for the phenotypical traits and racialized differences that parents’ discourses are so concerned with. There is no clear distinction in these discourses between elements that are seen as heritable which manifest themselves phenotypically, such as hair, eye and skin type; elements seen as heritable which are thought to be internal but manifest in external behaviour, such as ‘natural’ rhythm, meekness, energy, intelligence or other ‘intrinsic’ skills; and elements which are cultural but still inherited, such as an automatic link with a culture or language of origin. All these elements seem to form part of the baggage that adopted children are thought to bring with them, even when adopted as babies. With reference to the classic Western nature/culture dualism, things ‘biological’ and things ‘cultural’ become very hard to separate from each other in practice.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank to Peter Wade for his comments on this chapter and for his help in preparing the manuscript. Notes 1.

Elsewhere I have developed the analysis of kinning and belonging among adoptive parents and their children (Howell and Marre 2006; Marre and Bestard forthcoming; Marre and Bestard 2004). 2. Abortion may only be legally performed if the health of the woman or the foetus is in danger or if the pregnancy is the result of rape. Proposals to legalize abortion on demand have been rejected several times. 3. Also, the marriage rate decreased from 7.60 per cent in 1975 to 5.04 per cent in 2004, currently at the average EU rate. Maternal age at the birth of the first child, on the other hand, has increased from 28 in 1976 to 31 in 1997, the highest in the EU. Now the birth rate is increasing mainly because of the high birth rate of immigrant women (15 per cent of the total births in 2004). Nevertheless, today the Spanish birth rate is 1.32 children per woman compared to the EU average of 1.5 (La Vanguardia, 25 October 2005). 4. This situation ‘produces a certain feeling of failure that makes national children remain institutionalized until they reach adulthood’, according to the former President of the Catalonia Autonomous Community (keynote address to the conference on ‘Adoption in Catalonia and International Adoption: Complexities and New Horizons’, 29–31 May 2003). By June 2006, in Catalonia, there were 6,649 children in government care (see the website of Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Benestar i Família, Atenció a la Infancia i l’Adolescència: Dades estadístiques de l'atenció a la infància i l'adolescència, which is at http://www.gencat.net/benestar/dgaia/estai.htm. 5. Actas del Senado sobre la Comisión Especial sobre la Adopción Internacional, 7 October 2002; http://www.asfaru.org/pagines/comisionsenado.htm. 6. Actas del Senado sobre la Comisión Especial sobre la Adopción Internacional, 23 September 2002; http://www.asfaru.org/pagines/comisionsenado.htm. 7. Interestingly, during 2003, the Autonomous Communities of Madrid and Catalonia reopened domestic adoption – closed since 1996 – because there began to be some children available for adoption, coming from the immigrant population. 8. Adoption is ruled by general regulations constituted by Spanish general law (Ley Orgánica) and the international regulations to which Spain subscribes, but each Autonomous Community has its own regulations and direct responsibilities are decentralized. There are twenty-four government authorities related to adoption in Spain. The Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of Spain acts as a communication authority. 9. The modification of this requirement is one of the associations’ main priorities. The administrations argue that, since their main priority is the minor’s well-being, it is necessary to look for the best parents, taking into account the minor and his/her country of origin. The associations claim that, since they are already sufficiently discriminated against by having to obtain a certificate that is not required of biological parents, suitability should be considered in general, not for a specific country. At present, Catalonia is one of the few Communities which allow people to start simultaneous procedures for more than one country. 10. ECAI stands for Entidad Colaboradora de Adopción Internacional.

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11. I found a widespread belief among adoptive parents that the authorities in countries of the former Soviet Union tended to expedite the adoption of children with health problems. 12. The issue of corruption appears in three recent movies, famous among adoptive families, about international adoption, shot in the U.S.A., La Casa de los Babys (John Sayles, 2003), in France, Holy Lola (Bernard Tavernier, 2005), and in Argentina, Hordeste (Juan Solanas, 2006). 13. ‘There is no single opinion about RAD: some doctors claim that it exists and “RADafflicted” children are violent and dangerous, and especially that “violent” children come from “Soviet bloc”, other specialists think that it is exaggeration and “unfair stereotype”’ (Khabibullina 2006). 14. Cartwright (2003) and Khabibullina (2006) agree that FAS is ‘a designation whose diagnosis, especially in the absence of a child body, is both common and notoriously tricky because it is a syndrome – a set of possible conditions, not a fixed identity ... This is because FAS features powerfully in both adoption discourse and discussions of cultural patterns of alcoholic consumption as pathological behaviour. Alcohol consumption is higher in populations undergoing economic crisis, and maternal alcoholism is one reason for child abandonment or removal from the home’ (Cartwright 2003: 97). 15. A medical member of Tarragona Hospital’s Paediatric Service referred to the case of prospective parents adopting in Russia who asked about the health condition of a girl who had been allocated to them. They gave the physician a domestic video, the information given to them by the institution when the girl was allocated and their own reactions when seeing her for the first time in a Russian orphanage. The baby, a sixteen month-old girl born to a drug-addicted biological mother, had suffered during birth, for which reason, according to the institutional information, the baby had a physical and mental age five or six months below her chronological age. Although the physician decided not to confirm this information to the prospective parents ‘for ethical reasons’, they later decided not continue with the adoption process (Allué 2004). 16. The preference for girls does not seem to be exclusive to adoptive families. An article entitled ‘Pocos hijos y, si es posible, chicas’ (Few children and, if possible, girls) reported work carried out by Margarita Delgado and Laura Barrios on population and fecundity in Spain. This showed that there was a clear preference for girls, which was more significant in the case of mothers with university training (El País, Sociedad, 6 December 2004, p. 29). 17. Ten years after the first international adoption and the ratification of The Hague Convention in 1995, the proportions of adopted boys and girls are not known in Spain nor in any of its Autonomous Communities. In the Spanish Autonomous Community of Extremadura, 151 minors were adopted from China between 1997 and 2004. Just one of them was a boy (Morell Bernabé 2004). It is informally said that in one 2006 allocation of Chinese adoptees in Spain, there were many boys, nearly eighteen, four or five of whom were rejected because they were boys. This news was circulated and discussed in two or three adoptive parents’ listservs and chat-rooms, but it never reached the mass media nor was it confirmed by the adoption services. 18. In 2006 the law on assisted reproduction was modified. The new law did not include a maximum age limit for women to begin assisted reproductive treatment. Adoptive families are asking for the same treatment. 19. The Chinese Centre of Adoption Affairs has notified agencies and adoptive families that they are unable to accept applications for children between two and four years old because they do not have any children in this age range.

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20. Agencia EFE press agency, 22 March 2006; http://www.20minutos.es/noticia/ 102186/0/cataluna/adopciones/internacionales/. 21. I am referring to Autonomous Communities like Catalan or Madrid which have high levels of international adoption. There are some Autonomous Communities with just one international adoptive families’ association. 22. In the case of China, where information about female children is more difficult to obtain, many adoptive families resort to the services of the U.S.-based adoptive parent of a Chinese girl, who carries out a search of ‘finding ads’. These are reproductions of the notices that, since 1996, the Chinese authorities have been obliged to publish in a local journal when a little girl has been found abandoned. ‘Those ads have often more information than the one we have,’ a mother said. They are ads with a picture of the baby girl and, thus, parents consider it to be the first picture they could have of her. As a mother who was about to receive her baby girl told me: ‘When I get the finding ad from C., I will let you know. It will be in Chinese, of course, but I will have it translated when I pluck up the courage to do so. Sometimes one does not know whether one wants to know more or not.’ The same father from the United States also offers the service of filming the place where the baby girl was abandoned and obtaining any information the orphanage has about the child. 23. This is a general feeling that has been very well transmitted by the two films mentioned above: La Casa de los Babys and Holy Lola.

References Allué, X. 2004. ‘Adopciones transnacionales, cuestiones médicas y éticas’, Foro Pediátrico. Publicación informativa de la Sociedad de Pediatría de Atención Primaria de Extremadura. I Jornada sobre Pediatría e Inmigración 14: 10–13. Cartwright, L. 2003. ‘Photographs of “Waiting Children”: The Transnational Adoption Market’, Social Text 21(1): 83–109. Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Howell, S. 2003. ‘Kinning: The Creation of Life Trajectories in Transnational Adoptive Families’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9(3): 465–84. ———. 2004. ‘Unrelated Kin and the Creation of Imagined Place and Community: Some Paradoxes in the Transnational Movement of Children in Adoption’. Workshop on Mobilising Structures, Structures of Mobility: Globalisation and the Power of Place and Kin, 25–28 April 2004. Dubrovnik: University of Oslo. Howell, S. and D. Marre. 2006. ‘To Kin a Transnationally Adopted Child in Norway and Spain: The Achievement of Resemblances and Belonging’, Ethnos 71(3): 293–316. Khabibullina, L. 2006. ‘International Adoptions from Russia: Criminal Versus Medical’. Barcelona: Mimeo. Marre, D. 2003. ‘Governance, Globalisation and Associations: Collaboration/Conflict between Public Administrations and Associations with Regard to International Adoption’, PUG Workshop 4: Governance and Legal Understanding of Genetics, Budapest, 26–28 June 2003. Marre, D. and J. Bestard. Forthcoming. ‘The Family Body: Persons, Bodies and Resemblances’, in J. Edwards and C. Salazar (eds), Kinship Matters: European Cultures of Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

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———. (eds). 2004. La adopción y el acogimiento: presente y perspectivas. Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona. Morell Bernabé, J.J. 2004. ‘Atención a la salud de niños adoptados procedentes de China’, Foro Pediátrico. Publicación informativa de la Sociedad de Pediatría de Atención Primaria de Extremadura. I Jornada sobre Pediatría e Inmigración: 13–19. Rahola, P. 2001. Carta a mi hijo adoptado. Barcelona: Planeta. Selman, P. 2002. ‘Intercountry Adoption in the New Millennium: The “Quiet Migration” Revisited’, Population Research and Policy Review 21: 205–25. Stolcke, V. 1993. ‘Is Sex to Gender as Race Is to Ethnicity?’ in T. Del Valle (ed.), Gendered Anthropology. London: Routledge, pp. 17–37. ———. 1995. ‘Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe’, Current Anthropology 36(1): 1–23. Tyler, K. 2003. ‘Research Report D4.2. The Genealogical Imagination: The Inheritance of Inter-Racial Identities’, PUG Workshop 4: Governance and Legal Understanding of Genetics, Budapest, 26–28 June 2003. ———. 2005. ‘The Genealogical Imagination: The Inheritance of Interracial Identities’, Sociological Review 53(3): 476–94. Volkman, T.A. 2003. ‘Embodying Chinese Culture: Transnational Adoption in North America’, Social Text 21(1): 29–55. Wade, P. 2002. Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. London: Pluto Press. Weil, R. H. 1984. ‘International Adoption: The Quiet Migration’, International Migration Review 18(2): 276–93. Yngvesson, B. 2003. ‘Going “Home”: Adoption, Loss of Bearings, and the Mythology of Roots’, Social Text 21(1): 8–27. Yngvesson, B. and M.A. Mahoney. 2000. ‘“As One Should, Ought and Wants to Be”. Belonging and Authenticity in Identity Narratives’, Theory, Culture & Society 17(6): 77–110.

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5 Racialization, Genes and the Reinventions of Nation in Europe Ben Campbell

Introduction In an apparently straightforward and noncontroversial way, when Europeans seek IVF treatment using donor sperm or eggs, a requirement is made that donated gametes should match the physical characteristics of the recipients. There are immunological factors that present a partial rationale for this matching, but the issue invites pause for thought about the extent to which DNA has been freed from eugenic typologies. Physical characteristics are specified to be transferable within, but not across, boundaries of ethnic difference. This imperative for physical resemblance in the offspring of technologically assisted reproduction requires anthropological reflection on shifting states of racial practice. The general question that I pose of the gamete-matching regulation is, what does it tell us of the way that cultural projects are being realized by clinical means? As a contribution to debates about geneticization of social life, I discuss new reproductive technologies (NRTs) as an explicit configuration of kinship that makes a deliberative assemblage of bodily matter, identity and intent, and compare this to changing conceptions of the nation as a similar kind of assemblage. At one level this consists of asking whether a shared culture of kinship informs assisted reproduction, in which the social objective of having a child is privileged over the genetic provenance of donated gametes (within limits of racialized (in)visibility). At another level, there is a question to ask of the relationship between new ways of reproducing human bodies, and ideas of reproducing national societies by incorporating new kinds of members, who voluntaristically, rather than by ancestral connection, have joined European nations. Are there similar logics operating that make gametes the plastic objects of social

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projects (enabling infertile partners to have a child), and that match immigrant communities to the goals of reproducing national economies? Contemporary intersections of kinship and ethnicity can then be examined in self-proclaimed, ‘multicultural’ nations, to ask how different kinds of ‘raciological’ (Gilroy 2000) underpinnings characterize the ideas and practices that formulate persons as citizens, rather than as members of self-conceived genetic nations. The chapter assumes a degree of methodological holism in comparing associations between human fertility regulation and policies for immigrant community integration in the different contexts of the U.K., Spain and Norway. Rather than seeing kinship and nationhood as separate domains, it asks how relationships are made or assumed to be ‘given’ (Viveiros de Castro, forthcoming) across these contexts. It draws on post-Schneiderian approaches, which have dragged kinship studies away from genealogical fixations, to view practices of relatedness as ‘eminently historical’, and located in ‘socio-political tensions’ of particular times and places (Weston 2001: 151). Sarah Franklin has argued, in this vein, that new reproductive technologies are not just about ‘new ways of making babies’ (2001: 319), but impact on how knowledge is produced, capital accumulated, and identity categories become transformed. The extra reproductive contexts to how parental projects are made socially amenable to intervention are not, though, always immediately apparent. As Strathern has put it, ‘anthropologists don’t really find contexts, they create them’ (n.d.: 2). A pertinent example of this context making comes in an analysis of policy debates in Germany over the selection of appropriate candidates for immigration, and of stem cells for biotechnology research. Sperling (2004) demonstrates the value of bringing into conjunction parallel public debates, which were not explicitly linked by those involved, but which were effectively driven by a common narrative of national invigoration and selective potentiality. My goal here is to experiment in looking for comparative connections in the ways that culture and ethnicity are inscribed on bodies and nations: in their deliberate reconstitution through NRT using donor gametes, and through immigrant citizen integration. To place the argument of this chapter in recent theoretical concerns over the analytical status of race, the stipulation to match physical characteristics of gamete donors and receivers can be seen to provide a distinctly hard biological edge to idioms of difference in contemporary European societies. Arguably, this runs against the line taken by theorists such as Stolcke (1995), who argue that from the 1980s a transformation has occurred insofar as, in right-wing political rhetoric and in immigration policy, it is culture rather than biological race which has been reified as providing the rationale for fault lines of present social inequalities. The ‘race’ dimension of human fertility regulation is, though, concealed behind medical concerns for compatibility and social welfare discourses about the interests of the child. Race is not then put to the fore, but lurks in coded forms (Gingrich 2004). My intention is, however, not to expose the presence of a skeleton in the cupboard, and pit biological against cultural bases for differentiating people (as if these are somehow stable and exclusive structures of knowing), but rather to understand how a new technology becomes socially legitimated in the context of interrelated

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historical processes of change that affect how sexual reproduction, identity categories, citizenship, and conceptions of nationhood are reconstituted and transformed. Questions need to be asked about what racialized expectations have historically been placed on citizenship and sexuality, and how does the perceived need for cultural management of genetic exchange in human reproduction link into border controls of other kinds? If, as the academic consensus has it, ‘racism assumes more subtle and elusive forms in the contemporary world, it is being reconfigured without “race” as a classificatory device for demarcating difference’ (Harrison 1998: 610), how can persistent racializing practices (Wade 2002: 121) be evaluated? The comparative framing, across three different European countries, emphasizes how important it is to pay attention to the national contexts in which arguments over reproductive choice are configured, and to consider the race effects of the different ways that the ‘givens’ (Viveiros de Castro, forthcoming) of kinship, the body, choice and mixture are imagined and deliberated. Framework of Enquiry In sketching a background to the shifting intersections of race, ethnicity and nation, the chapter moves from current efforts to create reserves of sperm and eggs for different ethnic communities, back into nineteenth century classificatory approaches to racial difference. These can be seen as modelled on natural science taxonomies, which served as naturalizing devices for colonial and slave economies (Bayly 1999; Smaje 2000; Smedley 1993; Stoler 2002; Young 1995), and contrast with more subtle codings of otherness in contemporary narratives of identity (Gilroy 2000; Gingrich 2004; Stolcke 1995). If ‘embodiment’ can broadly be seen to have replaced classification in how race and ethnicity are currently understood by academics (Wade 2002, 2004), it is the clinical conjunction of embodiment and classification in managing gamete donation that this chapter interrogates. ‘Matching’ donors’ and recipients’ physical characteristics pushes anthropological explanation to evaluate the differences between classificatory practices of the past, and current debates about recognition and incorporation of different communities in ‘postcolonial’ societies. At issue is the unitary status of two entities undergoing historically exceptional processes of change in the genetic era. These are: the body as an assemblage of parts, inheritances, identities and rights; and the nation as a coherent idea of belonging and source of welfare. Ideas about kinship are central to both, and interweave the discourses of sovereignty between them, and it could be argued that ethnicity (with considerable variation across Europe) is replacing the nation as a more self-evidently ‘natural’ set of allegiances, modelled on presumed proximities of kinship, that is to some extent promoted by state policies of multiculturalism. The comparative frame opens perspectives on how different nations make their pitch for what kinship should do, and how technology can appropriately serve these ends. We see great variations across Europe in the extent to which the body is made accessible to being rendered partible and, correspondingly, the extent to which ethnic difference is recognized and ‘new’ parts of population are taken in among territorial residents of the nation. One problem is that this reifies national kinship ideologies as

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entities for comparison, and here the value of ethnography and cultural analysis is to present views of how the governance of reproductive intimacy contrasts markedly with its vernacular negotiation. Secondly, the analytical status of the nation is questioned as the primary reference for what is taken to be multicultural society. This study is not a comprehensive comparison of like data sets, and draws mostly on secondary sources and analyses, but it aims to offer a platform for reflection and further research. The approach has been to ask whether clusters of associations are visible in how the reproductive body and the nation are ethnicized. In an initial hypothesis of the PUG project’s comparative work on bioethical regulation, it was suggested that the religious traditions and the histories of legislation on divorce and abortion issues of each country would be reflected in genetic normative regulation. This was soon found not to hold. As will be seen, Norway pays most attention to maintaining the coherence of the female body, as if a national responsibility, while immigrants are expected to conform to standards of national culture in return for the benefits of residence. Spain has least overt concern for maintaining equality in rights and welfare among its immigrant population, and permits most liberality in NRT. Britain sits in between, but is most explicit about making reproductive health available to diverse ethnic communities.

Clinical Assessments of Ethnicity In November 2003 a newspaper article in the Sunday Times reported that some British fertility clinics were providing eggs from white donors to Asian couples. It suggested that although there is a lack of Asian donors, an additional motivation to produce lighter skinned babies was involved. A number of cases of cross-‘racial’ gamete donation were discussed in the article, some that were for couples who were themselves in a ‘mixed’ partnership. Almost inevitably the term ‘designer baby’ was used to describe the preference of some Asian couples for a baby with lighter skin. Commentary from clinicians indicated that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s (HFEA) guidelines were considered too vague to apply in many instances. The guidelines of the HFEA had been altered in October 2002 to specify that ‘those seeking treatment should not be treated with gametes provided by a donor of different racial origin unless there are compelling reasons to do so’ (although this was qualified with a reminder that no guarantees could be offered in attempting ‘to match physical characteristics’). One Asian woman, who had experienced such a long wait for an available egg that she no longer cared where it came from, said other people’s concerns for the interests of the child were ‘none of their business’. On the other hand, a clinician advised, ‘In my experience of living overseas, mixed race babies are always at a disadvantage and looked down upon by both ethnic groups. Every effort should be made to match ethnic origins.’1 In insisting on ethnic endogamy and the avoidance of genetic mixture being used for racial ‘advantage’, a category-enforcing, precautionary conservatism appears to govern how infertility can be treated, reminiscent of lines of etiquette regulating the intimate under colonial racial containment (on which more below).

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Other PUG research teams in Spain and France had looked ethnographically into new kinds of family relatedness as a result of IVF and their incorporative domestications of donor sperm and eggs. My role was not to undertake new ethnography in the U.K.; however, I wanted to get a feel of the places and institutions where assisted reproduction occurs and to talk with some of the clinicians and people working in this area. The National Gamete Donation Trust (NGDT) is centred in Manchester, and promotes awareness of the need for gamete donors. Responding to my questions about how ‘multicultural’ the gamete donor pool was, the administrator showed me surveys of donors to IVF clinics, and stressed there was a definite shortage of Asian and Afro Caribbean donors (Golombok and Murray 1999; Murray 1999). She used the word ‘taboo’, in the sense of a barrier of unexplained rationale for nondonation by these communities. She pointed out that people often develop motivations to donate when they are personally affected by an infertility problem in their family circle, and that egg donors in particular are frequently known to the recipients. A positive aspect of the noncommercialization of donation is the perceived honesty that donors exhibit in disclosing inherited diseases. At Saint Mary’s Hospital Andrology2 Unit in Manchester, a clinician admitted that the infertility patients were mostly white, and themselves wanted to match their ethnicity, so the need was not great for Asian, African or Turkish sperm. Over more than two decades at the unit, she could not remember a single Afro-Caribbean donor. She commented that she has heard men from this community say about masturbating, ‘I’ve never done it in my life, and I won’t.’3 At the high point of the unit’s donor population there were fifty donors per year. This number fell after the requirements of the HFEA were put in place in 1991, and by 2004 there were only six. In both these interviews I was struck by the difficulties in creating an ethnically unbiased resource of infertility services. Gametes are inscribed with ethnicity and segregated, creating restricted circuits of exchange under noncommercial regulatory conditions. Arguments were made within the HFEA in 2004 for moving to a more market-oriented principle of exchange in reproductive health, to offer more for egg donors (in the region of £1,000), though a view often expressed within the HFEA is that women should not be donating eggs ‘in order to put food on the table’. Men are given £15 for their donor role, and the Manchester Andrology department found this insufficient to motivate any unemployed men to attend the unit. The removal of donor anonymity in Britain, following the Netherlands, in the interests of the child’s right to know his or her genetic parentage, has only further reduced the flow of male donation. From the NGDT’s point of view this is regrettable insofar as the number of donors is expected to fall further. The contrast with U.S. fertility commerce is enormous, where clinics’ websites proclaim their sourcing from ‘Ivy League donors’, showing images of smiling faces riding bikes along leafy avenues. The main study on ethnicity and assisted reproduction in Britain is Culley et al. (2004), which found an antipathy to using donated gametes among families of South Asian origin. The survey revealed that infertility was understood as amenable to medical intervention, and that attempts to deal medically with infertility were not

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opposed on religious grounds. Indeed there could be said to be a duty to follow this route, as in Islam and Hinduism marriage is strongly linked to procreation. The converse is that the intensity of ‘pro-natalism’ brings a heavy stigma to childlessness (Culley et al. 2004: 9). Several Islamic fatwas in the 1980s declared assisted reproduction was permissible, but not with donated gametes (a position very close to that of Norway). Using donated gametes was ubiquitously regarded as socially unacceptable, though opinions were recorded that this might be resorted to if alternative means of having a child proved impossible (ibid.: 16). Given that South Asian culture is unquestionably ‘pro-natalist’, and that infertility presents severe domestic problems to those affected, in objective terms South Asians’ lack of interest in gamete donation facilities highlights the problem of thinking through the issue as an economy of matching ethnic supply and demand. What is not recognized here is the work done by ‘optative’ kinship thinking that separates out biological input from social end-product, and yet cannot see this as an assemblage of culture – it is represented in the technologized idiom of ‘assistance’. However, as the health service aims to support fertility provision for all, but prevents ethnic mixture, South Asians are left appearing culturally constrained, unable to negotiate religious positions, concerns for the direct continuity of ancestral patrilines, or risks of public stigma. This is a recognizably orientalist strait-jacket, evoking colonial denigrations of an ancient and priest-ridden society (Robb 1995). Technological refusal, or excessive demand, presents a modern context for collective cultural differentiation. Either overly fecund,4 or reluctant to donate gametes, South Asians just can’t seem to ‘get it right’ in the eyes of health policy officials, and when they do present for treatment, some even ask for ‘white’ eggs!5 The treatment of South Asians above indeed appears ‘orientalist’, but this is different from the question of whether fertility technology is in a forced marriage with nineteenth-century anxieties about racial purity. The increasing tendency for infertility to be seen as a treatable illness, and the involuntary childless as having rights to assistance from medical science, appears to extend an equality of reproductive potential to a wider number of people, overcoming the ‘genetic lottery’ of individual biology. This is, however, directed by ethical mediation because of perceptions that the technology’s creative possibilities must be harnessed to public cultural values. Controversy is thereby anticipated in areas such as ‘optative’ physical characteristics, genetically compulsive incest,6 and nonheterosexual kinship,7 but these are not so much old ‘taboos’ in the sense of transgressed natural limits, as deliberative assessments of relational consequences in technologically assisted outcomes. The contexts for thinking about category ‘givens’, even anachronistic ones, in the assemblage of bodily matter, identity and intent characteristic of consumer kinship, are not the same as for nineteenth-century purity of lineages. While the language of the HFEA attempts to be scientific, ethically reflexive, and oriented to the greater public good, its mapping of categories from the political domain of identity recognition onto ‘biological’ parameters of individual men and women is an authority stamp that restricts agency in relational construction, rather than an actor deployed ‘strategic naturalization’ (Thompson 2001). Britain’s similar

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predilection to ethnicize its citizens in census categories has drawn comment from others in Europe (see Favell 2003: 32). Rather than assuming any intrinsic coherence to racializing discourses (race is a ‘scavenger’ discourse: Stoler 1995: 90, borrowing from Mosse 1985), specific racializations need to be explained from the motives of those for whom they matter, and in terms of the situated practices in which they have effect. Discourse and embodiment are merged in the racialized management of reproductive fertility, but how do they differ from the kinds of racialized hierarchy at work in the racism of slavery and colonial rule? These had their specific political economies of difference rooted in divisions of labour and relations of domination, which were voiced in ideologies of racial destiny (Robb 1995; Young 1995). Contemporary DNA knowledge works ideologically with consumption-oriented economies of difference, choice and malleable body image (Gilroy 2000; Smaje 2000), in which ‘multiculturalism’ implies a pluralistic tolerance and mutuality. However, in practice, these economies depend on large-scale human inequalities that are not dependent on race per se, but on control over possibilities of movement across boundaries of inclusion and exclusion established through territorially segmented nationhood and citizenship (Hart 2004: 212–13; Stolcke 1995).

Historical Background to Race as an Instrument of Colonial Management Does the seemingly innocent intention of matching ‘physical characteristics’ between gamete donors and recipients reproduce more than the parental project of the individuals concerned? It is hard not to see elements of colonial concerns about miscegenation at work in this management of sexuality, which Stoler discusses in terms of ‘a racially coded notion of who could be intimate with whom’ (2002: 2). Is there a continuity in the kinds of questions being asked about in-group membership, and criteria of admission in establishing contemporary citizenship rights, as those that accompanied the scientific racism of the colonial era? Speaking as a relative newcomer to debates about contemporary sociocultural change in Europe, it is striking how little relevance to current issues is accorded to the history and social practice (beyond stereotypes) of people who have immigrated to Europe, or to the fact that intercultural encounter has been negotiated for centuries (Subrahmanyam 2005). It is as if history is a baggage that might be conveniently lost in transit. Current discussions about citizenship in European states and the means of access to economic and political rights are far from being as new as some would believe. It is the scale and locations of these processes that have changed. Stoler (2002) draws attention to changes in the way classifications of people as native or European in southeast Asia coincided with distinct phases of colonial presence and socioeconomic relations of power. What emerges is a highly instrumental shift in the kinds of living arrangements, codes of conduct, and gendered moral associations that accompanied designations of race and citizenship. Her argument is that while categories of racial difference remained relatively fixed, the people who were thereby inscribed, and the criteria for defining who belonged to them, showed great flexibility.8

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Late eighteenth-century to mid-nineteenth-century phases of colonialism in Java were characterized by domestic arrangements of European men living with local women.9 This made sense in terms of assisting European staff to learn local practices of food and language, and did not place a great financial burden on the maintenance of a domestic life (Stoler 2002: 29). In the early twentieth-century Netherlands Indies there was only a loose matching between the legal category of ‘European’ and the idea of ‘ethnic European origin’ (ibid.: 39). Stoler points out that in 1884, European ‘legal equivalence’ (gelijkgestelde) required being Christian, speaking and writing Dutch, having a European upbringing and education, and demonstrating ‘a suitability for European society’ (ibid.: 3). The influx of European middle-class women changed the moral coordinates of colonial social interaction, introducing ‘new etiquettes of racial difference’ (Stoler 2002: 55): ‘control over sexuality and reproduction was at the core of defining colonial privilege and its boundaries… [C]olonial control and profits depended on a continual readjustment of the parameters of European membership, limiting who had access to property and privilege and who did not’ (ibid.: 39, my emphasis). Especially after the 1920s, eugenic thinking spread its ‘biological idiom’ for articulating anxieties over European dominance and white status in medical and moral terms (ibid.: 63). Among both racist and liberal versions of the colonial enterprise, ‘regulating the intimate and policing the family’ (ibid.: 18) became central to reformist strategies of governance. In later colonial history, movements to secure European rule involved getting rid of ambiguous racial genres and open domestic arrangements, turning ‘away from miscegenation toward white endogamy; away from concubinage toward family formation and legal marriage; away from [local] customs and toward metropolitan norms’ (ibid.: 64). In the later phase, technocrats arrived from Europe advocating modernization and ‘scientific management’ methods for the colonies, with little embedded knowledge of local conditions. They asserted ‘a distinct colonial morality, explicit in its reorientation to the class markers of being European. It emphasized transnational racial commonalities despite national differences. Not least it distilled a notion of Homo Europaeus for whom superior health, wealth, and education were tied to racial endowments and a White Man’s norm’ (ibid.: 64). There are important lessons here for comparing colonial regulations of racial intimacy, and how etiquettes of pluralism are managed in contemporary European deliberative positions on assigning genetic parameters to cultural difference. Stoler demonstrates how Europeans’ interests in managing their presence and profitability in the colonies generated distinct racialized responses at different times, and the offspring of interracial unions in particular put to the test ideas of what made someone ‘European’: be this as lineages of blood, or as shared histories of residence, and language. To think there is an increasingly ‘cultural’ idiom of difference in European polities, reflected in the notion of ethnicity being folded into modernizing trajectories of national integration, is for Stoler to ignore how colonial race was constituted through practices of domestic life, comportment, language and claims to citizenship, rather than being simply ascribable to later eugenic principles. Therefore,

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an opposition between cultural and biological rationales for difference will not serve as a straightforward means of distinguishing colonial from postcolonial racialization. It is necessary, instead, to look at how nation-states have reformulated the bases for their citizenship over the post-Second World War period. New logics of belonging have been adapted to changing territorial coordinates of social difference, which play into the etiquettes of difference in expanding genetic technologies, and affect new possibilities for making persons and relationships legitimate.

European Citizenship and the New Immigrants The post-Second World War retreat of European colonial powers, and subsequent influx of migrants from the colonies, has led to a series of changes in European national laws on citizenship to cope with the sociological and political conditions generated by the migration process. Spain, Norway and the U.K. all allocated extraterritorial entitlements to citizenship based on distinct histories: Spain permitted dual citizenship to most Latin American countries, Norway gave preferential citizenship access to other Scandinavian countries, and the U.K. extended citizenship to people from the Commonwealth until 1962. While citizenship laws are formulated with reference to principles of descent and place of birth (jus sanguinis, jus soli), the principles have been deployed, as Stoler argued for the colonial period, overwhelmingly according to national demands of economic functionality, but now purged of explicit eugenic content. In the overview given by Hansen and Weil (2001), ‘primary’ immigration was controlled by the 1970s, and after this period a liberalization of nationality laws followed that permitted the integration of permanently resident migrants and their children, with possibilities for further limited family immigration (2001: 13). The subsequent reforms represented ‘a process of elite learning in which politicians have recognized that exclusionary nationality law provisions are untenable in the context of large-scale immigration’ (ibid.: 10). Broadly, a north/south split in immigration laws can be seen in Europe. The northern countries have dropped the required periods of residence before citizenship to around five years, whereas countries of southern Europe, which experienced widespread immigration only from the 1980s, have increased the residence requirement to around ten years, with the exception of Spain. Hansen and Weil emphasize that nationality ‘gives institutional expression to the state’s prerogative of inclusion and exclusion’ (2001: 10), and claim, in opposition to post-nation-state theorists (e.g., Soysal 1994), that nationality remains ‘one of the foundations of individual identity. It defines the boundary between us and the others’ (2001: 2). Their statement that nationality is viewed ideologically ‘as unique, an area that somehow exists autonomously of the social and economic factors that shape politics’ (2001: 2–3), is somewhat difficult to square with the sense of national identity crisis in many European countries (very much articulated in political arenas), precipitated by events such as France’s banlieux revolts of 2005. Yet in the realm of genetic regulation and bioethics, it is the nation that claims the moral authority to speak for

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the common good. Nationality is not a genetic institution, and geneticists such as Steve Jones argue: ‘The world is divided by politics, but it is united by genes; and our variation under nature is more confined than that of any comparable creature’ (2000: 414). From this perspective there can be no doubt that the way persons are differentiated according national rights and identities is genetically arbitrary. Old eugenics imagined a consubstantial tie between race and the bodily-programmed potential for the development of genetic expression in the political form of nations (Robb 1995). New genetics is ‘explicitly distanced from old associations of racial hygiene’ (Leroi 2003: 355),10 and the new national identities of Europe have rhetorically delinked themselves from racial alignments of biology and culture. This places the territorialized entities of states, and the grounding of persons’ citizenship rights, on a far more ‘accidental’ association of shared economic welfare, institutional participation and cultural–linguistic affinities. How then do national institutions divide the world of genetics, when possibilities for human reproduction are viewed in different regulatory protocols of gamete selection and matching? Comparing the protocols and ethical debates around donor selection, it can be seen that European states adopt markedly different ethical responses to the possibilities of technology and to the concerns and desires of their publics in ways that cannot avoid being controversial.

The Mothers of Contention: U.K., Norway and Spain in Focus These three countries were chosen for comparison to provide a range of regulatory positions on gamete donation in human fertility. It will be seen that the primary expressions of bioethical concern are voiced in terms of the interests of those being treated, and the resulting children, and that the commodification of the body is the issue that explicitly hits ethical nerve-endings in different ways across these countries. U.K. The British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s sixth version of its guidelines (para 3.18–3.19) ‘has been amended to clarify that in the selection of donated gametes [fertility] centres are expected, as far as possible, to match the physical characteristics and ethnic background of the donor to those of the infertile partner, or in the case of embryo donation, to both partners, unless there are good reasons for departing from this procedure’. The HFEA ‘donor information form’ solicits, in descending order, data on name, date of birth, place of birth, prior donation history, the existence of ‘own children’, and height and weight, before the data rows for ‘ethnic group’, eye colour, hair colour, skin colour, which are then followed by religion, occupation and interests. The high place in the order of characteristics occupied by ‘ethnic group’ on the HFEA form continues the prominence given to this feature by the pre-HFEA documentation of the regional sperm bank donor record. The HFEA form’s ethnic group section is further subdivided into tick-boxes consisting of ‘White’, ‘Black Caribbean’, ‘Black African’, ‘Black Other’, ‘Indian’, ‘Pakistani’, ‘Bangladeshi’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Any Other’.11

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Spain The Spanish law on assisted reproduction, dating from 1988, contains a section on ‘the users of the techniques’. This states that ‘[t]he medical team that carries out the technique of assisted reproduction is responsible for donor selection. Donors must have the maximum phenotypic and immunological similarities and the maximum possibilities of compatibility with the recipient and her family environment’ (Ley 35/1988, article 6.5). The Spanish regulation attempts to reproduce a natural model, so that sons and daughters look like their parents, as if to minimize any noticeable difference from an unassisted conception (Orobitg and Salazar n.d.). Donors are selected from personal data records for the purpose of matching with recipients. The Royal Decree 412/1996 establishes protocols to collect information on donors and users, and regulates the National Registry of Gametes and Pre-embryos Donors for reproductive aims. The protocol is described in an annex. It begins with ‘personal data’ such as address, date and place of birth, national identity card, and nationality of the donor, and continues with ‘physical data’: height, weight, skin colour (light or dark – pálido/moreno), eye colour (brown, blue, green, amber, black, other), hair colour (blond, light hazel, dark hazel, black, red, other), hair texture (straight, wavy, curled, other), blood group, other distinctive features, and race. Note that this ordering puts physical data in prior position to the ‘race’ classification, in contrast to the British prior ordering of ‘ethnic group’. Norway The 1994 Act relating to the application of biotechnology in medicine opens with a statement of purpose that the act was designed for biotechnology to ‘take place in accordance with the principles of respect for human dignity, human rights and personal integrity and without discrimination on the basis of genetic background, on the basis of norms relating to our Western cultural heritage’ (section 1: 1). The distinctive feature of the Norwegian law is that it only permits sperm donation, not eggs, and prohibits the use of donated sperm in IVF. The revised law on the use of biotechnology in medicine (2003, section 2: 10) repeats the earlier act’s stipulation that ‘the physician providing the treatment shall select a suitable sperm donor’. A representative of the Laboratory of Andrology, Rikshospitalet University, commented that choices can be made about colour of hair, height, weight and colour of eyes, in order to match as much as possible the husband/partner of the woman to be treated. Norwegians follow Danish rules on donor information, as sperm is imported from the CRYOS sperm bank, based in Denmark, and semen is classified both in terms of the donor nationality and as ‘Asian’, ‘Caucasian’ and ‘African’. According to an official of the Norwegian Health Directorate,12 donor selection should only be a matter of matching ‘physical characteristics’ with those of the legal father. She emphasized that ‘nowadays we speak of ethnic origin’, and was more concerned to stress that selection could not be made for criteria such as occupation, intelligence and other such characteristics.13 The new Norwegian law follows Dutch and British changes in the anonymity of semen donors, to bring children of donor IVF the same rights as those accorded to

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adopted children. The entitlement to this biological knowledge of the self avoids a stratification of rights towards genetic information. A consequence is that semen will no longer be imported from Denmark, and moves are underway to set up a semen bank in Norway. Due to the law’s provision of the right for children to know the identity of their genetic father, donors will have to be registered as residents in Norway, and this is anticipated to restrict further the recruitment of donors. If the terminology of matching ‘physical characteristics’ in these regulations serves as a neutralized proxy for race (an ‘evasive’ form of racial coding; see Gingrich 2004; Hervik 2004), the presumption of spontaneously visible markers (Gilroy 2000) corresponding to donor and recipient ethnic groups casts a racializing gaze of biological essentialism. The supplementary ‘ethnic’ identifications that are given, in terms of the donors’ country or community of origin, can be assumed in the structure of donor information to correspond to the specified variations of hair, skin and eye colour, while the ethical conditions that make one matching appropriate, and another not, evade specification. Discussing gamete matching with one infertility service worker in the U.K., I was told that the decisions were ‘very subjective’, and often donors’ physical characteristics are supplemented by the self-composed ‘pen portraits’ of donors, that refer to personal dispositions, such as for musicality or sporting aptitude.14 Breached birth legalities Melhuus (2003) argues that Norway can be seen as putting in place barriers to the commercialization of human material, and as resisting an equivalence in the value of male and female gametes in reproduction. The law protects the unity and wholeness of the Norwegian mother, and the stages of reproduction, in as closed a circuit as possible. This propels people who feel such codes not to be morally constraining into external circuits of infertility treatment outside the country. With the globally expanding commerce of assisted reproduction, an image is created of the human body in fragments, and, she points out, the state is also under fragmentary pressures. ‘Norway exports its ethical dilemmas’, as Melhuus quotes one doctor, but in the eyes of legislators, scientists show insufficient ethical judgement in drawing lines of acceptability. Melhuus discusses the power of the state to define the parameters of exchange, equivalence and permissible procedure in human reproduction, which establishes a framing to the question of what is infertility (an illness or a fate), and what can be done about it. This contrasts markedly with the U.K.’s and Spain’s attempts to increase the availability of donor gametes to meet the demand for addressing infertility with technological solutions. The Norwegian case exposes national regulatory variations in the legality of IVF, and the impossibility of preventing people from accessing reproductive facilities within other legal frameworks. The laws being implemented in Britain and Norway removing donor anonymity have increased ‘donor attrition’, and those countries where it has not been implemented, like Spain (and Belgium), have received an influx of gamete seekers.15 Differences in the regulation of genetic knowledge and technology thus create their own exits and entrances. The international cross-cutting of assisted reproduction technologies with citizenship laws came together in a case picked up by the BBC in 2004.16 The

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programme concerned a British Indian couple who had been unable to have their own child, even with IVF. They visited a clinic in Gujerat, India, and were advised to think about surrogacy using a woman relative. The woman’s mother was selected by the clinician, and at the second attempt at implanting her own daughter’s eggs, the pregnancy successfully resulted in twins. The couple were, however, to find that their parentage was not recognized, because even though their own sperm and eggs had been used, U.K. citizenship and HFEA law recognizes the ‘mother’ as the woman who actually gives birth, and the legal father as her husband. The couple had mistakenly thought that because the ‘birth father’ was of British nationality the twins would be genetically entitled to acquire British passports. The categorical insistence on legal motherhood as defined by the act of birth meant that the twins’ first visit to Britain had to be under temporary visas, prior to being legally adopted. This movement of fertility consumers in pursuit of conception, blocked by regulation and citizenship laws, contrasts with the image of the public being dragged along by the state riding a biotechnological juggernaut, as is sometimes portrayed in the framings of the public as ‘knowledge-deficient’ in relation to genetics (Kerr, Cunningham-Burley and Amos 1998). In a case of ‘fresh versus frozen’, a loophole was discovered by a British businessman looking for a commercial opportunity, to avoid the requirement for a ‘father figure’ set by the HFEA in the case of frozen sperm. The enterprise ‘Man Not Included’ eventually faced obstruction from the HFEA because the sperm it supplied had not been clinically tested for HIV, or the range of congenital diseases that sperm donors to clinics are obliged to disclose, at the risk of legal proceedings from the offspring.17 In 2004 the company moved to Spain to try and operate under the less restrictive fertility regulations there, while the HFEA announced a less categorical position on whether a child born from donated sperm should necessarily have a man included in its upbringing. Spain has thus drawn patients and businesses to take advantage of its comparative reproductive liberality. A 2004 policy document from the Spanish ministry of health addresses the impact of new techniques of biomedicine, and includes the promotion of a draft decree to permit embryonic stem cell research, with declarations of solidarity for women, and citizen consumers’ rights. It is noticeable that in pitching the social relevance of the policy, it is not only ‘us, our elders, and our children’ as a national community who are identified as beneficiaries, but also ‘those who come to live here or those who visit us’ (Selgado 2004: 9).18 In this section, we have seen how national regulations specify ‘givens’ of what can and cannot be done with IVF; how states legitimize their positions by reference to citizens’ interests (for instance, harmonizing rights to knowledge of genetic parentage between donor IVF and adopted children);19 and how the differences across countries in their relative liberality produce transnational flows of fertility ‘consumers’. It is notable how legal authority is acknowledged within Europe for country-specific managements of nonnegotiable givens over biophysical matter, identity and intent in the assisted reproduction of persons.20 The question I now want to ask is whether there are analogies with how nations are reconceived in the context of immigration flows?

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Multiculturalism without Race? Multiculturalism has been an aspiration in Western European countries that has meant many things to different people. Its evocation of a desire for pragmatic coexistence disguises very disparate experiences and ideological intentions in regard to new configurations of citizenries. In their discussion of comparative European citizenship laws, Hansen and Weil (2001) argue that there has been little convergence on how nationality is defined and allocated. Histories of extranational solidarities and interests have moulded very distinct logics of citizenship entitlement in Norway, Spain and the U.K. If it is rather, as these authors suggest, in immigration and integration policies that convergence has occurred, there are nevertheless differences in the terms of debate over cultural change in these nations, and the expectations placed on immigrants and their children to conform to national frameworks. My purpose here is to review how the ‘givens’ for integration are discussed across the three countries, and to compare perceptions of ethnic diversity in national cultures to the assemblages of bodies, identity and intent discussed for NRT. Norway has been the site of intense debate about immigration and national culture in recent years. Without a history of colonial possessions, or direct associations with the slave trade, Norway’s terms of cultural engagement with people of non-European origin can be seen to be on a different grounding than those of other West European states. Gullestad (2005) describes how many Norwegians cannot perceive the possibility that what they see as a descriptive label, neger (roughly ‘Negro’), could carry any connotation of racism. Moreover, they refuse to accept that whatever their intentions in using such a term, its effect on those so labelled should be a matter of concern. Norway’s ‘innocent national self-image’ (Gullestad 2004: 182) is at stake with complaints about racism, and ‘[i]ntegration is increasingly seen as something minority people have to achieve and not as a process of mutual reflection and adaptation’ (ibid.: 192). Gullestad argues that significant shifts are apparent in how Norwegianness is now represented. This is less, as in the past, in relation to other Scandinavian countries, and increasingly in terms of a white Europeanness in contrast to people of nonEuropean origin. By looking at parliamentary statements that invoke ‘our’ culture and heritage, and value ancestrally transmitted traditions, she observes that this ‘implicitly marks a boundary between “us” and contemporary inhabitants whose family background lies outside Norway. Cultural differences are thus bound to lines of descent. Embedded in this seemingly egalitarian rhetoric is thus an ethnically defined nationalism’ (2004: 192). Just such an affirmative language of national cultural values was noticed in the opening statement of Norway’s biotechnology law (above), which framed the restrictions placed on gamete donation and assisted reproduction. It contrasts with the more individualized and scientized orientation for user benefit in the U.K. HFEA’s language, and Spain’s positioning to an extranational market of fertility consumers. Borchgrevink and Brochmann (2003) make the point that North American or other Western European models work with a presumption of a relatively ‘thin’ majority culture, whereas Norway’s is by most accounts perceived as a ‘thick’ example

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of ‘societal culture’ (2003: 92). They even ask how feasible multicultural integration is when this is viewed by the majority population as ‘mission impossible’ (ibid.: 92). Apart from the constitution, and a commitment to welfare, the prime values supported by the state are given by Brochmann as the school curriculum subject ‘Christianity, Religion and Life-view’, marriage based on love, and the Norwegian language (2003: 9). All these dimensions became embroiled in the case of a Moroccan immigrant family’s dispute over their daughter’s lifestyle, controversially taken up by Wikan (2002); her participation in court proceedings led her to argue against cultural relativism in Norway’s defence of women’s rights. It was presumed that the ‘choice’ of living in Norway was made with an (absolutist) acceptance of ‘how Norwegian society functions, for good or bad’ (Wikan 2000: 69). Favell discusses Spain’s national integration of immigrants in terms of a ‘weaker state penetration of society and the market’ (2003: 33), and this process is happening at a different historical moment than the countries offering models of integration. In contrast to the Norwegian case of a state demanding adherence to national norms in return for the privileges of livelihood, Spanish immigration law, established and revised in 2000, allows ‘illegal’ immigrants to stay as members of the society but without the ‘panoply of rights undergirding a liberal democratic society’ (Calavita 2003: 400). The Organic Law 8/2000 confers rights to social integration to those immigrant ‘aliens’ recognized to be in regularized situations, and confers only the most reduced human rights to the rest (Gortázar 2002: 13–14).21 Spanish rigidities in the labour market are the explicit justification for admitting larger numbers of immigrant workers, and their illegality, according to Calavita, permits a post-Fordist economic system in which workers’ rights are denied to those in the underground and informal sectors. The ensuing lack of clarity in the distinctions ‘immigrant/citizen’ or ‘stranger/member’, and the legal contradictions required in this ‘colonization in reverse’, highlight pressures on the idea of citizenship as a stable identity granted to all members of a national community. For Calavita, race plays a part in the unstable ideological and material constructions of citizenship. She argues that just as during the 1950s and 1960s, when southern European workers in Germany, France and Switzerland ‘were considered racially and culturally inferior, only to become “Caucasians” and members of the European Community 30 years later, so it is with the marginalized workers of the Maghreb and certain South American countries in Spain, that race, exclusion and economic function are of a piece’ (2003: 409). Solé and Parella (2003) similarly argue that while immigrants’ rights to education, housing and family reunion appear to be conceded by the majority society, considerable reluctance exists in relation to more extensive social and political rights, such as voting, political membership or access to qualified jobs (2003: 135). Solé and Parella comment on the cultural dimension for the possibilities of integration in Spain and note that, from the native’s point of view, the immigrant will be accepted ‘as long as he or she renounces his or her culture (language, customs, religion) and adopts the official culture of the host society’ (ibid.: 136). The very generalized framing of this immigrant/host culture perspective makes no

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acknowledgement of Spain’s internal ‘national’ differences, and the tensions and tolerances that are already in play when Spain and its ‘autonomous’ regional identities are considered. Bestard (n.d.) observes that a conceptual linkage is made between the house and the Catalan nation. This works not in terms of a community of descent (by which Gullestad characterizes Norwegian identity, above), but as a community of residence and work. One of the most widespread political rhetorics about Catalan membership is the definition of a Catalan person as someone ‘who lives and works in Catalonia and expresses the wish to be Catalan’ (ibid.: 21). What is significant here is the voluntaristic, nongenetic basis for thinking about both nation and kinship. It is residence-based language acquisition that by the late twentieth century has risen as the prominent criterion of national belonging, in deliberate opposition to state cultural hegemony from Madrid. Citizenship claims derived from both jus soli and jus sanguinis ‘are rooted in the same kinship principle of the house system’ (ibid.: 23). The relation of kinship and nation here is then explicitly analogical, rather than consubstantial. If Spain’s tolerance of irregularized immigrants contrasts to Norway’s more (in relative terms) assimilationist stance, Britain sits in between with its self-image of having promoted multiculturalism through explicit recognition of ethnic difference. Britain’s policy to encourage ethnic gamete donation clearly fits into this overall disposition. For Favell, ‘[m]ulticulturalism is… claimed as an achievement of the British state, rather than as a consequence of the weak penetration of the state in everyday life in Britain’ (2003: 24). Its laissez-faire and ‘minimalist style of intervention’ in forms of multiculturalism creates an appearance of London as cosmopolitan, while outside are found ‘white and intolerant provincial homelands’. Ruling elites appropriate a multicultural character ‘in the name of their own tradition of nationhood’ (ibid.: 24), while their own orientations and networks are increasingly transnational. While multiculturalism operates with a theory of equal recognition, respect and welfare, the inequalities operating to differentiate categories of persons’ rights in Britain are not ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ as such, but emerge, according to Lydia Morris (2002), from a pragmatic negotiation of contradictions in the structure of legal statuses. She argues that there has been a greater stratification of rights since the 1970s, in which there is free movement for EU nationals, certain residual rights for Commonwealth citizens, and ‘the growing phenomenon of non-citizens, non-EU migrants and asylum seekers’ (2002: 411). Multicultural tolerance was put in question in 2004 in Britain, with its Race Relations ‘Tsar’ Trevor Philips declaring the desirability of a new citizens’ initiation, involving required knowledge of Shakespeare, Dickens and other supposed icons of Britishness, and blaming ethnic tensions on a resistance to cultural incorporation. While ‘integration good, assimilation bad’ remains the motto, the desirability for stronger integration is increasingly expressed at the policy level.22 The idea of controlled migration being beneficial to the economy and thereby to society (now expressed in terms of entrepreneurialized ‘people flow’, Flynn 2005),

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has certain consequences for how ‘culture’, ‘values’ and ‘the nation’ can be understood. Immigration policy uses adoption as an implicit model of multicultural socialization: one which assumes that through socialization, new groups of people can be integrated in a process of cultural ‘enrichment’ that will be politically neutral, and which conveniently serves the interests of keeping labour costs down. In an adoption model of immigration, the idea is that bodies can be moulded to identities of national belonging, in which the reality of de facto membership (often invoked by the ‘daily plebiscite’ of Rénan)23 gives substance to everyday social interaction, rather than ancestral connection and shared DNA. But this reifies culture into something that can be separated out from economic motivations to maintain low wages, and the selective granting of rights for asylum and family reunion. It presents culture as a national resource that can be drawn on to infuse future generations of immigrants with subjectivities of European citizenship. This work of national culture supplies information code to neutral biogenetic substance, in a similar way to how kin socialization is imagined to work in donor IVF and adoption. It connects to a strong European idea of culture as containing transcendent values, such as tolerance and pluralism, that are impregnable to hybridization. On the contrary, it is seen to be enhanced by added levels of diversity, and resists the possibility of cultural relativization, the spectre of which surfaces as a kind of retrogressive, diminishing, cultural miscegenation, in the prospect that ‘national values’ and culture could be relativized as local, not universal, and their reigning cultural supremacy be challenged. The converse of this is that incomers do become stratified to mark their status as nationals-in-process. ‘What should European nations have to know or learn about incomers’ cultures?’ is not a question that appears necessary in the asymmetry of immigration flows, and the presumption is that the act of immigration involves an intentional signing up to a whole package of livelihood, language and law. In relation to the ‘integration’ of ethnicity within British fertility services, the study by Culley et al. has argued that clinics had minimal appreciation of patients’ cultural sensibilities (2004: 28), and discovered that none of the consultants interviewed had received any ethnicity or diversity training (ibid.: 29). No Asian counsellors were available at any of the infertility centres, and the counsellors available expressed the opinion that South Asians were prone to ‘keep problems to themselves’ (ibid.: 34). It is striking how much policy-driven, academic debate about multiculturalism talks of principles, institutions and societal models without resorting to any discussion of the substance of cultural change, or the transnational flows of the music, arts, writing, and screen-based or congregational events that actual people are engaged with. It is as if transcendent national cultures imagine themselves as impervious to exogenous influence,24 and that market conditions of globalization and technological change can be held apart from cultural reproduction. Brochmann questions the centrality of the nation state as the appropriate unit of analysis and framing of multicultural social phenomena (2003: 10), but from the perspectives explored in this chapter, it is rather that the postcolonial nation-state has engineered a self-affirming idea of socioterritorial coherence that no longer rests on

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commonalities of blood and struggle for its conceptions of sovereignty, but on negotiating public front lines for individuals’ consumption. Discussions over integration or assimilation as alternative conceptions of multicultural nationhood have replaced colonial practices of governmentality that structured interpersonal conduct by racial containment. However, the border zones of intimacy in actually existing multicultural communities present people with real-life situations to make sense of. These vernacular negotiations of intimacy contrast markedly with the administration of difference in fertility regulation, and the use of multiculturalism as a policy tool of governance in fields other than those more disposed to hybridity, such as arts and culture. In Britain, the management of multicultural relations at ‘community’ level becomes an issue of engineering neighbourly affect, which aims at reducing working-class excess and acts of incivility attributed to individual bad faith, but this presents a gulf between embodied and disembodied conceptions of multicultural citizens (Fortier 2007). Ethnographic research at interactive levels of multicultural encounter offer an important ‘demotic’ (Gilroy 2000) and embodied counterpart to the transcendent ethical discourses of citizenship and genetic regulation. In contexts such as Leicester, where PUG researcher Katharine Tyler worked, historical fears from colonial times of miscegenation25 have been turned around by a generation of women and men who have crossed old race divisions. In one of Tyler’s interviews (no. 25), a neighbour contributes the statements below in a conversation about mixed race. They demonstrate how the experiences of black or white identity are inseparable from their locatedness in a shared history of social change, in which the terms of racialized sociality have fundamentally shifted ground. This recognizes that ‘race’ has been lost as an association with purity, and that everyday choreographies of gendered sexual propriety, spoken in terms of culturally differentiated sets of practices, have drawn people into new pragmatic equalizations through acknowledgement of the single field of connection generated by asymmetrical powers of desire. Neighbour: You see English girls are willing and that’s the cultural part. It is changing now. If you can’t beat them you may as well join them. In different cultures things adapt and change, while in others you are just left on the shelf. The old categories of pure black and pure white just aren’t there anymore. We are now all becoming multicultural. I think part of it is to do with the sexual revolution and that we are now all changing. We are not prepared to sit back and be trampled on. We have given up being the girl at home. In this vernacular social theorizing, a gulf clearly appears between its grasp of dynamic value relations between bodies, identities and intentions, and the more static, controlled assemblage of these factors in fertility regulation, that require constant ‘catch-up’ modification. While multiculturalism, gender and sexuality are relationally of a piece in the quotation above, the issue to follow through in the conclusion is the relation between human fertility and multicultural change as separate or overlapping domains of governance and models of relationship.

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Issues of Comparison The order of active differentiation that gets called ‘race’ may be modernity’s most pernicious signature… Its specious ontologies are anything but spontaneous and natural. (Gilroy 2000: 53)

Race and kinship are both concepts that in anthropology have passed through crises in their epistemological status and object reference. In the liberation from thinking of these terms as self-evident domains of social life, productive channels of enquiry into the relational matrices they summon up have been pursued in more open-ended treatments of ‘the betwixt and between and beforehand of received social categories’ (Weston 2001: 150). In this chapter my aim has been to explore what kinds of reworkings and intersections of kinship and race inhabit patterns of thinking and tensions in the administration of bounds of permissibility, in the two areas of making legitimate offspring through donor IVF, and the refashioning of European nations as multicultural. Through comparison of three countries’ fertility regulation and immigrant integration policies, significant contrasts emerged in the extent to which logics of choice characterize relational possibilities in these areas. Questions thus arise about the idea that kinship and race are now configured by consumerist economies of difference, rather than old productionist lineages of blood. Following Taussig, Rapp and Heath (2003), the idea of the body being subject to posteugenic, individualized choice is too much the polar opposite of racial destiny. The role of choice is crucially delimited in assisted reproduction by the ethnic matching of gametes, in order to manage the representation of the expanding industry of fertility services as ‘assistance’ to recognizable procreative goals (Thompson 2001; Orobitg and Salazar n.d.), rather than as postnatural reproduction. In the framing of multicultural citizenship, immigrant communities are imagined as malleable to national cultures’ values and economic welfare, rather than as signalling postnational citizenship. Gametes, Race and Kinship Laws and ethical guidelines for assisted reproduction are selective about revealed motivations for regulation, and their intended interpretations by the range of publics they are designed to influence. They do, however, create boundaries of practice. Of the countries investigated, Norway has taken the strongest line in establishing a defence of ‘cultural’ values in this field that focuses in particular on the integrity of the mother’s body. Britain has adopted a position against the commercialization of the body, and Spain has actively positioned its regulations to promote donor IVF, and enable other nationals to benefit from its relative liberality. All explicitly, or by implication, prevent clinically assisted cross-‘racial’ mixing, through the criteria of matching the ‘physical characteristics’ of gamete donors and recipients. What relational effects does the design for ethnic matching of gametes produce? What effects are obstructed? The matching provision privileges a simulation of monogamous parenthood by insisting on donor–recipient ethnic endogamy, and institutes matched gamete donation as a kind of extended ‘levirate’, to borrow a term

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from ‘old kinship’ studies, which seems appropriate in that matching reinforces ethnicity in the mould of a bounded community of blood. Gamete donation is prevented from being an act of universal generalized altruism, and assigned a genetic–moral relativity. What the regulations do by implication is affirm the unique and ‘dangerous’ agency of persons sexually crossing ethnic lines, for which only the people taking such a step must bear the consequences (see my other chapter in this volume). The British HFEA cannot concede that this could be ‘in the interest of the child’. The match-making clinician is in a discretionary position which is recognized as inevitably ‘subjective’, but nonetheless perpetuates in medicalized mode a naturalized, self-evidential, and visually marked quality to the categories of family, nation and ethnic group. In the process of modelling donor-assisted reproduction on the physical characteristics of the persons in a given partner relationship, gamete and embryo donation produces fragmented quasi-persons. Biology and relational identity are separated out, and their recomposition is an intentional act of design, a deliberate assemblage, that imitates ‘natural’ reproduction, by producing a child that could ‘pass’ as a genetic offspring. The ways that regulatory frameworks address fragmentary threats to the unity of the biologically autonomous individual, and selectively distribute integrity to reproductive rights-bearing persons, have unmistakable parallels in the idea of reproducing a morally coherent nation, where the state acts as an arbiter of value conflicts deriving from increased social diversity. The citizen is ideologically redesigned not as an umbilically linked son or daughter of the nation-as-family, but as a voluntaristically accountable consumer of civil rights and duties. Holding the consequences of technological possibility within legal and ethical containment requires maintaining ‘strategically naturalized’ singularity in the key domains of the person, and the nation, but ethnicity or race are problematically placed in terms of whether they are of the same order. For Norway, protecting the unity of the female birthing body achieves singularity within reproduction, which is mirrored in a homogeneous, national self-image. In Britain, legal adjustments are required to maintain a parity of rights for persons who are born by donated gametes as compared to adopted children.26 In the U.K., ethnic communities’ reluctance to donate gametes is portrayed as a failure to recognize the technologically mediated split of body substance and relational identity as a means to achieve the cultural goal of procreation. Spain, on the other hand, is more comfortable with anonymous gamete donation, and, as with the nation, appears to have less of a biologically determined view of kinship, and more of an understanding that residence, work and language, rather than blood, make kinship and nation. Within Britain, ethnic containment of gametes has the corollary of needing to generate donation from within these administered categories of difference so that equality of fertility provision can be offered to all members of society, and the singularity of rights within the welfare nation can be sustained. The HFEA attempts to fend off critical talk of eugenics with the counter-argument that as long as notions of differential phenotypic value are de facto present in some potential fertility users’

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motivations, it can be seen as an anti-racist move to prevent selections of gametes in order to produce ‘whiter’ babies. Thus gametes are racially inscribed so as not to allow ‘optative’ racialization, yet in the process an innovative technology is aligned to what Thompson describes as the ‘same old stultifying ways of classifying and valuing human beings’ (2001: 199). This reifies human bodies into physiologically ringfenced and ‘spontaneously’ visible categories,27 on the pretext that these can then be biologically protected from cultural misuse. The fact that donor gametes from nonwhite communities are so scarce means that no equality exists in practice, but this is put down to a ‘cultural’ resistance to recognizing that NRT can overcome ‘biological’ defects. The appearance of equality of provision is only achieved by means of imposing biologized frontiers on ethnicity, creating separate regimes of genetic exchange value, and blaming cultural conservatism for people’s unwillingness to donate gametes within these spheres of legitimate bodily circulation. This resonates with Franklin’s comment about the ethnocentricity of the kinship concept in anthropology and her argument that ‘anthropologists have conflated their own conceptual apparatus with the underlying “realities” of social life elsewhere – as if everyone “has” kinship in the same sense that everyone “is” biological’ (2001: 305). For ‘anthropologists’ read human fertility practitioners. Rather than a single culture of kinship, each country offers different ideological versions of what kinship choices can be legitimately enabled by genetic technologies: Norway claims to defend European cultural values; the U.K. promotes equality in diversity; Spain extends techno-facilitation for intending parents. All within a replication of parental physical characteristics, there is little reflexive questioning of the role that technology plays as part of the construction of kinship, other than simply bringing new kin materially into the world, and realizing the value of having a family. Outside of Norway’s culturalized techno-refusal, certain publics’ ‘mis’-understanding of reproductive technology is not seen as reflecting alternative relationships between bodies, reproduction and kin relatedness, that may be less ‘constructivist’ about material input to social relations. Gamete matching shows that kin constructivism actually operates within givens of physicalized (apparently not constructed) ethnic boundaries, while by marked contrast the posteugenic nation assumes constructive reinvention of persons according to the givens of territorialized citizenship.

Conclusion: Multiculturalism, or the Fragmentation of States and Bodies? A review of histories of nationality laws and citizenship showed how fluid the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion have been after the heights of nineteenthcentury European nation building. Nations are remarkably different in their applications of the idea of national singularity and what constitutes a citizen. Nevertheless, a common conundrum faces all European welfare states in that ‘the norms and values that define the democratic welfare state may become violated by excluding immigrants either at the border or internally, by not giving access to social, economic, and political benefits’ (Borchgrevink and Brochmann 2003: 94). Significant numbers of people who lie territorially within, but are legally and

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economically marginal, challenge the idea of the nation as a set of primordial ties of collectivity prior to, or beyond, social contract.28 In this context, multicultural ‘integration’ can be seen as ‘a choice of rhetoric designed explicitly to rescue the nation-state’ (Favell 2003: 37). The new multicultural cloth on European nations disguises a whole set of contradictions and opportunities. The different countries are finding their localizing strategies for negotiating pluralism in varying ways. Norway assertively adopts immigrants into required native models of unitary shared values (comparable to France’s insistence against ethnicity that its citizens are ‘indivisibly’ French). Britain marks and celebrates cultural diversity that combines with hierarchies of civic stratification to show continuities with its heritage of colonial ‘indirect rule’. Spain has a more easy-going acceptance of inequalities, which could reflect a more voluntaristic rather than normative integration paradigm. Looking at nation and citizenship in the long view, a picture of very rapid change appears in which ‘race’ is a notion that responds to conditions of uncertain priorities of solidarity and territorialization. For Foucault, race was a ‘discursive bricolage’ that retrieves, reworks and reconfigures older discourses. It was less the successive meanings of race that interested Foucault than ‘race as part of the discourse of power, within which it is endlessly reconceived, redefined, and reconstrued’ (Shanklin 1998: 675). If race is seen as a ‘scavenger’ discourse (Mosse 1985), the nation has catered to its appetite, and extends its typologies of the human into the organization of fertility consumption. The ethical boundary making in which gametes are segregated and matched by ethnicity belongs in the general strategic positioning of the state as mediator of incommensurate cultural values and communities. The reinvented state now takes form as multicultural and technologically legitimated, by providing institutions for defending equity and human dignity in the social use of genetics. In the history of European culture, biogenetic inheritance was thought to be a key to the potential for realizing liberty through the development of national identities and institutions. ‘Parthenogenetic’ narratives of national history belong in this mould (Drayton 2000: xiii–xiv). Now, genes and the knowledge of ourselves as individualized rather than aggregated are setting new kinds of collective imperatives for regulation and the protection of people’s rights, and therefore contexts for state legitimacy.29 The contexts in which genetic knowledge is becoming meaningful in Europe are located at a time when ideas of national identity, consumption practices and bodily values are undergoing rapid transformation, and the state is in retreat from the market.30 This calls for a recognition that the dynamics and contexts of contemporary racializations are fundamentally different from early twentiethcentury eugenics. At the same time, the governance of racialized clinical parameters demonstrates a tenacity of sensibilities over race and reproduction, and the power that ‘racial’ mobility is deemed to hold, such that the ethical terrain of choice in the area of ‘physical characteristics’ cannot as yet be conceded. Postcolonial public ideology, by contrast, denies such difference as constitutive of anything that should really ‘matter’,

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given the opportunities of democratic society and equality under the law. This deep ambivalence, or contradiction, is located between clinical practices of precautionary apartheid and a popular culture, where instead of racially distinct, docile bodies, the creative fashioning of the body has become a task of self-applied coercion (Baumann 1995), and the obligatory choice making of ‘flexible eugenics’ (Taussig, Rapp and Heath 2003). Therefore, rather than fertility and multiculturalism being seen as discrete domains, which the opening of this chapter sought to bring into relation through a focus on models of relation making in both these areas, the body and the nation can both be seen to be struggling against old connections to nineteenth-century biological fixations. Body and nation are now ontologically postnatural phenomena, and require an immense labour of cultural misrecognition to be held in representational aspic as if natural entities. The body fragments, longevity extends, biological autonomy is remoulded, and simultaneously the nation-state society has to organize its presence as a framing of social relevance for multicultural change. The ‘givens’ for human fertility and national citizenship are explicitly the outcome of deliberation, and this relativizes their status as no more than one choice among others (tipped one way or the other by parliamentary pressure groups), rather than as located in the order of the universe. The bases for establishing protocol in the new assisted assemblages of bodily matter, identity and intent for IVF and national allegiance are barely disguised as arbitrary acts of power, when viewed against the transnational flows of fertility consumers and economic migration. In this light, the old anthropological cousin-ancestors ‘kinship’ and ‘race’ appear now as faded figures in a sepia photograph with a relation to ourselves we prefer to cast doubt on. With our analytic concerns shifting from logics of production, genealogies and racial destiny towards consumption, DNA information and bioethics, the PUG project’s European horizons have confronted the facile image of a unitary ‘Western’ kinship with radically different positions on techno-assisted relationality (although with ubiquitous acceptance of the matching of gamete donors’ physical characteristics to recipients). The tendency for adopting differencemaking positions on this bioethical plateau (Fischer 2005) reflects more than an economically competitive narcissism of small differences (de Lauretis 2003) among nations that in history have been ‘troublesomely similar neighbours’ (Favell 2003: 18). The diverse ethical ‘givens’ they establish occupy the space vacated by the denaturing of old kinship, old sex and old race. While voices of DNA science continue to promise erasure of race (Templeton 2003), others warn from a variety of perspectives that Enlightenment principles of universal humanity are at risk from submolecular intervention (Fukuyama 2002)31 in ways that scientific racism could never manage. The variations on a theme spread across Europe in regulatory responses to borderlines of bodily matter, identity and intent mark out territories of differences that are irreversibly denaturalized (even in the case of Norway, it is no longer ‘old’ nature when it takes culture to defend its integrity). Here Stolcke’s (1995) arguments for culturalized insider/outsider alterities are in accord with the avowedly ‘cultural’

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specifications for frontiers of bodily commodification, and the national instantiations of cultural supremacy that are imagined to enfold global migrants with a sense of multicultural citizenship. Cultural positions occupy the space of national visibility to compel with authority, without as yet seeing through multiculturalism towards postcultural identities. Culture offers flexible management tactics of difference and respect in contemporary fields of negotiated social change, and, in the fragmenting of European welfare societies, culturalized difference sits alongside a new comfort with stratifications of rights and opportunities in the same de facto society, simulating something of the colonial discourse of race that worked as an instrument of division to assert ‘the rights of certain Europeans to rule’ (Stoler 2002: 63).

Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Peter Wade, Jeanette Edwards, Katharine Tyler, Kari-Anne Ulfsnes, Marit Melhuus, Gemma Orobitg, Julia Ribot, Kirsti Larsen, Grete Brochmann, Lindsey Marshall, Fiona Sterling, Bob Simpson, Mwenza Blell, Devon Brown, Dominique Tessier and AnneMarie Fortier.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

Sunday Times, 16 November 2003, p. 7. Male fertility. Murray (1999: 124) lists similar comments made by clinic staff about attitudes of Asian men to masturbation. The study came across South Asian women who were told they were a type that ‘just wants loads of kids’ (Culley et al. 2004: 24), and found institutional resistance to giving women information on the sex of the foetus. The report found ‘little evidence that clinics had a clear understanding of the ethnic, religious or language profile of patients’ (ibid.: 28). It is interesting to consider how, in the history of human fertility and population control policies since the 1950s, South Asians feature repeatedly as a demographically problematic category (Jeffery, Jeffery and Lyon 1989). This is discursively produced through a medicalized political gaze, in which explicit concerns with ‘race’ have transformed into concerns for suboptimal physical conditions and disease propensity among Asia’s poor (Escobar 1995: 35). Säävälä (2001: 77) comments that the overwhelming concern to limit population growth in the subcontinent has resulted in no public consideration towards, or studies about, the 7 per cent of childless couples. Incest, or ‘genetic sexual attraction’, is seen as a compulsive intimacy that is reported among the children of the same donor, or between donors and ‘their’ children. See ‘Information Handout H: Information for Adopted People and Birth Relatives about Genetic Sexual Attraction Following a Reunion’, published by The Post-Adoption Centre, London (http://www.postadoptioncentre.org.uk). Gays and lesbians mostly have to resort to unregulated surrogacy and IVF in private clinics. Stoler focuses on the racialized interface of the European and native, rather than on how race framed the Dutch or French perception of how southeast Asian societies operated. Bayly’s (1995, 1999) discussions of the entrenchment of caste in colonial India show how European race theory circulated between studies of British hospital populations, and even

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11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

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county-specific ‘types’ (see also Young 1995: 77), and the capacity of ‘races’ in India to free themselves from the tyrannical divisiveness of caste, to realize inner potentials to create vigorous, freedom-loving nations and citizenries (Bayly 1995: 215). These theories were furthermore appropriated by Indians in speculating on the capacities of various categories of people (such as the Khattri and Jat Sikhs) to achieve fully formed nationhood. See Dalrymple’s White Mughals (2004) for an illuminating account of this phase in colonial India, and Young (1995) on the desires of European men in the West Indies. Leroi is a geneticist who argues for a posteugenic revision of race, reworked in terms of visual selection factors: ‘the true meaning of beauty is the relative absence of genetic error’ (2003: 355). This is a view that is anticipated in Gilroy’s (2000) theory of raciological thinking in the consumerist culture of body spectacle, that he argues indeed links to eugenic logics of visualization. Whether these categories correspond in any way to emic lines of in-group norms of marital affinity (such as the south Asian terms biradari, jati, kurumba) is another issue. See www.shdir.no. Information provided by Kari-Anne Ulfsnes, University of Oslo. In the absence of genetic links, Diane Marre even found transnational adoption managers creatively matching parents and children by means such as astrology (paper presented to the PUG workshop, Paris, 17–19 June 2004). Spain furthermore permits a greater number of fertilized eggs (three) to be implanted at one time than the U.K. (two). The programme was broadcast on 6 September 2004 in the BBC’s London ‘Insideout’ topical series. HFEA pamphlet, ‘Sperm and Egg Donors and the Law’ (www.hfea.gov.uk). See also HFEA press release, ‘HFEA expresses concern over unregulated sperm donation services’, 9 May 2003. This restraint on unfrozen sperm use parallels how IVF is actively promoted in U.S. clinics as representing a ‘value added’, rationally superior form of reproduction, and an improvement on ‘old sex’ (Bob Simpson, personal communication). Discurso de la Ministra de Sanidad y Consumo, Elena Salgado, en el Foro de la Nueva Economía. Madrid, 7 July 2004. Adoption services have generally moved ahead of fertility regulation on ‘race’ issues. The current U.K. position on cross-racial adoption is to consider the ‘whole context’ of adopters’ background and residence to evaluate suitability for cross-racial adoption. See Wade (2002: 86–90) for a discussion of race and adoption; to see the emerging networks of adoptive and donor identities under virtual construction, go to www.ukdonorlink.org.uk/AAY/help.htm. A ruling of the European Court of Human Rights on 7 March 2006 confirmed this in relation to a case of a man whose (withdrawn) consent was required under British regulations for his estranged wife to be implanted with their frozen embryos. National regulations on human fertility were not considered contestable. Gortázar (2002: 4, fn. 11) refers to the way the Spanish authorities hope to turn a ‘vicious circle’ of mafia human trafficking and contraband into a ‘virtuous circle’ of regularization under the GRECO programme (Global Programme for the Regulation and Coordination of Aliens and Immigration in Spain). After the New York, Madrid and London bombings, the ‘nonintegration’ of Muslims has become a concern of European governments. Prime Minister Blair announced after July

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2005 that, if Muslims do not like the British way of life, they should leave. 23. Hansen and Weil (2001: 15) quote from E. Rénan’s Qu’est-ce que une nation?: ‘A nation … is the consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue communal life…. The existence of a nation is a daily plebiscite.’ See Young (1995: 68–71) for the racial background to Rénan’s thinking on the nation, which makes the adoption of this phrase in discussions of multiculturalism singularly ironic. 24. Indeed, tolerance and pluralism has been built into European notions of transcendent culture since the late seventeenth century (Robb 1995). 25. Such fears are quite evident in documentary film of immigrant arrival to the U.K. in the 1950s. In a BBC documentary, ‘Race…’, one white mother tells a group of Caribbean men, ‘Don’t you go thinking you’ll have our daughters’ babies.’ 26. Melanie Johnson, public health minister, said at an HFEA conference, ‘donor conceived people have a right to information about their genetic origins that is currently denied them’, and ‘donor-conceived people should not be treated so differently from adopted people’ (‘Sperm donors to lose anonymity’, Guardian, 21 January 2004). 27. Gilroy’s ‘postracial’ stance ‘does not concede the possibility that “race” could be seen spontaneously, unmediated by technical and social processes’ (2000: 42). 28. See Young’s (1995) discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of de- and reterritorialization. 29. Nobel prize-winning geneticist John Sulston argues that we need to have ‘solid laws in place’ to protect people’s rights (Guardian, 15 May 2004, p. 11). 30. See Sperling (2004) and Árnason and Simpson (2003) for excellent analyses of the penetration of narratives of the nation in contemporary European biotechnology deliberations; and Morgan (2003) for a historical perspective on how the embryo has been discursively inscribed with nationhood. 31. In his newspaper interview, John Sulston warned of how testing for disease genes threatens to deprive humanity of the equality we are all born with: ‘The main worry with genetic tests is abuse of information. So are we not going to use them and lose the medical benefits, or are we going to alter society by drafting good laws so that people are protected?’ (Guardian, 15 May 2004, p. 11).

References Árnason, A. and B. Simpson. 2003. ‘Refractions through Culture: The New Genomics in Iceland’, Ethnos 68(4): 533–53. Baumann, Z. 1995. Life in Fragments. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bayly, S. 1995. ‘Caste and “Race” in the Colonial Ethnography of India’, in P. Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 165–218. ———. 1999. Caste, Society and Politics in India From the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bestard-Camps, J. n.d. ‘Paradoxes of Nation and Kinship: Concrete Relations and Abstract Ideas’. Unpublished manuscript. Borchgrevink, T. and G. Brochmann. 2003. ‘Comparing Minority and Majority Rights: Multicultural Integration in a Power Perspective’, in G. Brochmann (ed.), The Multicultural Challenge. Amsterdam: JAI, pp. 69–99. Brochmann, G. 2003. ‘Citizens of Multicultural States: Power and Legitimacy’, in G. Brochmann (ed.), The Multicultural Challenge. Amsterdam: JAI, pp. 1–11.

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Calavita, K. 2003. ‘A “Reserve Army of Delinquents”: The Criminalization and Economic Punishment of Immigrants in Spain’, Punishment and Society 5(4): 399–413. Culley, L., F. Rapport, S. Katbamna, M. Johnson and N. Hudson. 2004. ‘A Study of the Provision of Infertility Services to South Asian Communities’. Leicester: De Montfort University. Dalrymple, W. 2004. White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India. London: Penguin. De Lauretis, T. 2003. ‘Becoming Inorganic’, Critical Inquiry 29: 547–70. Drayton, R. 2000. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press. Escobar, A. 1995. Encountering Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Favell, A. 2003. ‘Integration Nations: The Nation State and Research on Immigrants in Western Europe’, in G. Brochmann (ed.), The Multicultural Challenge. Amsterdam: JAI, pp. 13–42. Fischer, M. 2005. ‘Technoscientific Infrastructures and Emergent Forms of Life: A Commentary’, American Anthropologist 107(1): 55–61. Flynn, D. 2005. ‘New Borders, New Management: The Dilemmas of Modern Immigration Policies’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(3): 463–90. Fortier, A.-M. 2007. ‘Too Close for Comfort: Loving Thy Neighbour and the Management of Multicultural Intimacies’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25(1): 104–19. Franklin, S. 2001. ‘Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of the New Biologies’, in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 302–25. Fukuyama, F. 2002. Our Posthuman Future. London: Profile Books. Gilroy, P. 2000. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London: Routledge. Gingrich, A. 2004. ‘Concepts of Race Vanishing, Movements of Racism Rising? Global Issues and Austrian Ethnography’, Ethnos 69(2): 156–76. Golombok, S. and C. Murray. 1999. ‘Egg and Semen Donation: a Survey of U.K. Licensed Centres’. Bury, Lancashire: National Gamete Donation Trust. Gortázar, C. 2002. ‘Spain: Two Immigration Acts at the End of the Millennium’, European Journal of Migration and Law 4: 1–21. Gullestad, M. 2004. ‘Blind Slaves of our Prejudices: Debating “Culture” and “Race” in Norway’, Ethnos 69(2): 177–203. ———. 2005. ‘Normalising Racial Boundaries. The Norwegian Dispute about the Term Neger’, Social Anthropology 13(1): 27–46. Hansen, R. and P. Weil (eds). 2001. Towards a European Nationality: Citizenship, Immigration, and Nationality Law in the EU. London: Palgrave. Harrison, F. 1998. ‘Introduction: Expanding the Discourse on “Race”’, American Anthropologist 100(3): 609–31. Hart, K. 2004. ‘The Political Economy of Food in an Unequal World’, in M. Lien (ed.), The Politics of Food. Oxford: Berg, pp. 199–220. Harvey, D. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hervik, P. 2004. ‘The Danish Cultural World of Unbridgeable Differences’, Ethnos 69(2): 247–267. Jeffery, P., R. Jeffery and A. Lyon. 1989. Labour Pains, Labour Power: Women and Childbearing in India. London: Zed Books. Jones, S. 2000. Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated. London: Anchor.

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———. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Strathern, M. n.d. ‘Europe, the Scientific Citizen and the Anthropologist’, EASA Conference, panel on ‘Re-defining Europe: Perspectives from Socio-Cultural Anthropology’, 8–12 September 2004. Vienna: EASA. Subrahmanyam, S. 2005. Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taussig, K.-S., R. Rapp and D. Heath. 2003. ‘Flexible Eugenics: Technologies of the Self in the Age of Genetics’, in A. Goodman, D. Heath and M.S. Lindee (eds), Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Two-Culture Divide. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 58–76. Templeton, A. 2003. ‘Human Races in the Context of Recent Human Evolution: A Molecular Genetic Perspective’, in A. Goodman, D. Heath and M.S. Lindee (eds), Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Two-Culture Divide. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 234–57. Thompson, C. 2001. ‘Strategic Naturalization: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic’, in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 175–202. Viveiros de Castro, E. Forthcoming. ‘The Gift and the Given: Three Nano-Essays on Kinship and Magic’, in S. Bamford and James Leach (eds), Genealogy beyond Kinship: Sequence, Transmission and Essence in Social Theory and Beyond. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Wade, P. 2002. Race, Nature and Culture. London: Pluto Press. ———. 2004. ‘Race and Human Nature’, Anthropological Theory 4(2): 157–72. Weston, K. 2001. ‘Kinship, Controversy, and the Sharing of Substance: The Race/Class Politics of Blood Transfusion’, in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 147–74. Wikan, U. 2000. ‘Citizenship on Trial: Nadia’s Case’, Daedalus 129(4): 55–76. ———. 2002. Generous Betrayal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Young, R. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge.

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6 Kinship Language and the Dynamics of Race The Basque Case Enric Porqueres i Gené

Introduction: The Role of Blood in European Cognatic Kinship Systems A key element in the phenomenology of anti-Semitism is the reference made to the crime of Golgotha as presented in the Gospels. In particular, it is the narration given by Matthew that furnishes an argument that is repeated time and again. When Jesus was brought before him, Pontius Pilate offered to set him free: Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified. And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified. When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children. (Matthew 27: 22–25) Mainly from this reference, Jews are depicted in traditional anti-Semitic discourse as those who killed Christ. While this illustrates, somewhat paradoxically, the importance of the image of deicide used repeatedly in Europe, it is useful to consider that we also find in the history of Jewish communities that certain groups escaped violence and pogroms because their ancestors were considered not to be among those who were in Palestine at the wrong time. This was the case for the Karats and Bejundene, who received special treatment by the Russians (Nikepowetzky 1979).

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The descendants of the Jews of Majorca, still recognized as such today even though they converted to Christianity in 1435, use the same argument. The Xuetes of Majorca, who became marginalized during the eighteenth century, stake a claim to the nobility of their origins when confronted by those who demand their segregation because of their ‘infected blood’. They argue that the very best of all Christians, Jesus and the Virgin Mary as well as the Apostles, were themselves Jews. Besides, so the argument goes, the Jews of Majorca were already there when Christ was crucified, and so they do not bear the burden of guilt of those Jews whose ancestors were actually in Palestine at the time of the crucifixion and who transmitted their fault to subsequent generations. The same combination of genealogical and religious references, central to anti Semitism, can also be found in other contexts of racial discrimination in early modern and modern Europe. This is the case in the exclusion of the so-called races maudites, to use the expression of Francisque Michel:1 the Gypsies, the Cagots from Béarn and the Basque country, the Caqueux from Britanny, the Vaqueiros de Alzada from Asturias in Spain, the Moriscos in the Spanish kingdoms during the sixteenth century, and the Jews generally throughout Europe. Since the end of the Middle Ages and in different parts of Europe, groups of ethnically defined peoples such as these have been marginalized in sundry ways, mainly spatially and in the labour market. Contact with them has been seen as dangerous: it would be bad to eat with them, and, in some cases, even to speak to them, if the wind carried their breath towards the speaker. The recurring explanation given to justify these practices has been that, through blood, these people have inherited bad qualities from ancestors whose religious behaviour was inadmissible: they are represented as the descendants of Jews, of heretics, of Muslims… And, if it is through blood that the marginalized have received their bad character, logically they also become themselves potential transmitters of these traits to others. This is the source of the insistence, found in all these cases, on the necessity of not having sex with, and a fortiori not marrying a member of, any of the different types of pariah groups (Porqueres 1995). Here we see clearly at work the logic of the purity of blood. As in many other contexts that are better known to anthropologists, the language of kinship serves here to construct the social order, to include certain people in, and exclude others from spheres of sociability such as the guilds, or from religious institutions such as fraternities and monasteries. If we look beyond early modern Europe and beyond the races maudites, we find in more recent contexts the same impact of kinship language on the social order, effectively classifying people in supposedly distinct groups. This is particularly evident in certain specific nationalist contexts, such as the Nazi regime, studied by Edouard Conte and Cornelia Essner (1995), or in the initial period of Basque nationalism. In both contexts, purity of blood defines the true members of the nation and, consequently, sex and marriage are to be restricted to the category of persons sharing the same blood characteristics. Certainly we also find references to religion in these contexts, but, in general, the institutionalization of exclusion is justified by emphasizing almost exclusively the different biological natures of people. In many racist contexts, such strong institutionalization is absent and, if we exclude scientific

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treatises, the ‘racial others’ are depicted less systematically than in the situations just mentioned. In any case, despite the important disparities between different contexts, it seems to me that there is substantial continuity between all these cases. We find the same principle, albeit never operating in isolation, which affirms that something is transmitted by the act of sexual reproduction. It is by virtue of this consideration that a group is ostracized. Such exclusion reflects the belief that all members of the group are a different type of person. But if this helps maintain the idea of the stability of the boundaries that are set up, the fear of mixed marriages or sexual relations that recurs so frequently suggests something else which requires further analysis. In my view, this fear points to a key element, rarely found in anthropological perspectives on European kinship: marriage and alliance in general are not a function of belonging to genealogical groups marked or not marked by different kinds of economic or symbolic capital, to adopt Pierre Bourdieu’s terms. The reverse is actually true: in cognatic kinship systems such as our own, genealogical identity, as expressed for instance in sexual and matrimonial prohibitions, is a function of the alliance realm. It is the cumulative history of past marriages or socially recognized adult procreative relations that constitute the present ego’s kindred. This structural feature opens up a new dimension in the study of racism: a dimension having to do with instability, with the potential subversion of what is claimed to be a nature-based social order as it appears in the genealogical classificatory systems that characterize racist contexts. I will be examining this idea by considering a major trait of European kinship, one that has a perfect correlate in the logic of genetics. There is a tension, central to European cognatic kinship systems, which allows for a clearer understanding of certain dimensions of racist contexts. As it appears in the legal and theological definitions of kinship, which are the basis of the canon law that has informed the ways Europeans and European legislative bodies think about kinship (Porqueres 2000), a person’s consanguines are defined through reference to shared blood: a common ancestor is identified as the source of the blood ties existing between ego and the people included in the category of consanguine. Inscribed in the past through genealogy, blood ties appear as something that constitutes the individual in his or her relations to others, thereby functioning independently of his or her actions or desires. Blood is there because of its transmission at the moment of the conception of ego, a conception in which he or she obviously played no active role. We are then, so to speak, in the domain of the fatality of being. To me, the efficacy of systems of social classification based on genealogy and shared blood – very common in Western social life and not just in racist contexts (for instance, they appear in French legislation on patrimonial inheritance, penalizing transmission outside the close family) – is to be understood in terms of this reference to an important component of our ideas about what constitutes a person. It is because we are the progeny of a specific mother and father, and not of other parents, that we are closer to these two people and their consanguines than to others. An important component of our identity is determined by the very act of generation, defined in terms of the consubstantiality contained in the blood, which at least from Christian times has been the major symbol of our kinship system.

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We can now consider how, in terms of transmissible substances, mainly of blood, a person is supposed to be generated. Let us change our perspective in order to focus directly on the crucial question: What is blood? And, more precisely, where does blood come from? If, instead of conceptualizing blood and genealogy from the position of the infant ego, we change the perspective to that of an adult having socially recognized procreative relations with another adult, the essential stability normally associated with blood relations tends to disappear. In our kinship system, we find the formation of the blood – this key identity element of the human body – represented in a way that is consistent with the cognatic character of the system. An infant is linked in the same way to the paternal and to the maternal consanguines and in-laws. And the child is so related because his or her blood is not an unchanged substance which is transmitted unvaryingly from generation to generation. A person’s blood is by definition the result of the blending of the blood of the father and the mother. Obviously, in the absence of a cultural pattern impelling individuals to follow any form of positive obligations concerning alliances, the mixture could have been different from the one actually inscribed through genealogy in the body of the individual. This leads us to consider the profound instability and historicity of the notion of identity by blood as it appears in the symbolic economy of our kinship system. In this way, sexual relations inscribed in the genealogical past appear less as a fixed source of identity than as crucial instances when blood becomes redefined. It seems to me that a more or less explicitly expressed consciousness of this element is at play when, in different racist contexts, we find references to the need to avoid certain kinds of marriages – exogamous marriages. As an anthropologist, I am persuaded that the rhetoric used in social life is something more than just discourse that happens to accompany social action. This rhetoric constitutes the social by providing it with a framework of meaning and, by doing so, it generates a set of plausible courses of social action while, at the same time, it makes another set of them impossible. From this perspective, it seems to me logical to expect that where the language of kinship is used to construct social boundaries, we would also find instances of the social instabilities implied by the reference to kinship. Where, in cognatic contexts, genealogical idioms of blood are used to express racial differences, presenting them as inscribed in the basically unchangeable nature of the persons included in the groups created by these idioms, we also find the basis for the eventual subversion of the categories created in this way. Socially recognized procreative relations and, a fortiori, marriage between people belonging to two racial sets, represented as discrete groups, necessarily entail innovation. If endogamy is the condition sine qua non of reproducing such nonoverlapping groups, the absence of endogamy creates a major crisis by subverting the reproduction of their naturalized limits. Here, the very core of the racially constructed sets is being challenged. When the critical endogamy of racialized groups is not respected, there are two main outcomes. The first is the emergence of intermediary groups of mestizos, ‘mixed bloods’ or ‘cross-breeds’. Latin American contexts seem to have been consistently following this path. The other possibility is the progressive dissolution of the genealogically based social labels themselves, or at

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least of one of them. Obviously, such progressive weakening may at some point be interrupted, if exogamy is also interrupted. Let me illustrate briefly what I have been proposing with two examples on which I have conducted research: the case of the race maudite of the Xuetes of Majorca; and the transformations of the definition of the national person in the nationalist Basque movement.

The Xuetes of Majorca In Majorca, people called Abram, Maymó or David – family names which have existed since the Middle Ages – are not considered to be descendants of the ancient Jews of the island, who were already there at the time of the Christian conquest in the thirteenth century. This may not appear very surprising since we know that the ancient Jewish community converted to Christianity as early as 1435 – before the Catholic kings expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492. Nevertheless, the denial of these people’s genealogical link with Majorcan Judaism merits more attention if we consider that, even today, other persons on the island are instead imputed to have Jewish ancestry. Individuals with what would elsewhere be relatively anodyne names – Aguiló, Bonnín, Cortés, Fuster, Forteza, Martí, Miró, Picó, Pomar, Pinya, Segura, Teronjí, Valleriola, Valentí and Valls – are, because of their family names, considered to be the descendants of the ancient Jews of Majorca. Society at large and the interested folks themselves consider this group of the Xuetes as coming from a particular genealogical stock, a Jewish stock. To explain the paradox which arises from the contradiction between family names and current ethnic identifications, those acquainted even partly with the social history of the island will recall the vicissitudes of the members of the group of ‘those of the street’ or the Xuetes. They will argue that people having one of the family names I have mentioned are not really the only descendants of the Jews of Majorca but, in fact, the descendants of the last group of crypto-Jews of Majorca. Xuetes are thus presented as being the descendants of those among the conversos (people who converted from Judaism to Christianity from 1435) who were punished by the Spanish Inquisition, as late as 1691, because of their continuing secret fidelity to the rituals and religious beliefs of their Jewish ancestors. But even this explanation does not provide the key to adequately understanding the process of marginalization of this group. Let’s have a look at the seventeenth century, a critical period in the history of the Xuetes. Contrary to the dynamics widespread in the kingdom of Castile (in mainland Spain), on the island of Majorca there was no institutionalized discrimination against the descendants of the converted Jews during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even if a group of people identified as the descendants of the Jews of the island, and associated with a particular street in Palma, is sometimes mentioned in the historical records, there was no logic of the purity of blood operating in Majorcan society. Existing estatutos de limpieza de sangre (statutes of the cleanliness of blood), which excluded the conversos from certain guilds, were not applied. Recognized descendants of Jews are, for instance, members of the

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Corporation of Notaries of the island during this period even though the corporation had estatutos that, in principle, excluded them. Things changed after 1678. From this date, the local tribunal of the Inquisition pursued people practising Jewish rituals in Majorcan society. Two important autodafés occurred, punishing approximately 180 persons from a community of 1,000.2 But, in spite of the substantial number of crypto-Jews present in Majorca, the details of the cases show clearly the existence of a religious division within those who claimed for themselves, and for whom others claimed, Jewish ancestry. In fact, following the information provided by those directly involved, found in the enormous amount of documentation available from the persecution period,3 there were two types or ‘races’ of people among ‘those of the street’: those following the Law of Moses and those who did not follow it: ‘raça de gent que fa la llei de Moisès, i raça de gent que no fa la llei de Moisès’. This distinction is paralleled by the significant number of Catholic priests and pious Catholic people among the Xueta group during this period. In accordance with this, we find that, as with the presentation of the group as a whole, the Xuetes and the other Majorcans claim that those sharing the same origin intermarry ‘within their faith’, thereby maintaining the boundaries between the different genealogical groups: first between Xuetes and Old Christians (cristians de natura), secondly, between Xuetes following Jewish rituals and Xuetes not following these rituals. Besides, this vision of things runs parallel with the common idea that the Xuetes are particularly consanguineous in their marriages – a notion that is frequently found in the processes of exclusion of different races maudites: both for groups in which there is substantial consanguinity (the Xuetes or the Gypsies, for instance) and equally for those, such as the much-studied Cagots of Béarn and the Vaqueiros de Alzada from Asturias, where members of the marginalizing society practise more endogamous marriages than the supposedly incestuous marginalized themselves. In any case, it is interesting for the purposes of this analysis to examine what actually happens in the sphere of marriage, which is, as I argued above, the moment of the constitution of future socially recognized genealogies. By focusing on this, it becomes possible to understand the mobile character of the essentialized blood boundaries of the Xueta world. I will summarize here arguments fully developed elsewhere (Porqueres 1995). If we compare the genealogical identity discourse presented earlier with the actual marital behaviour of people, we have to conclude that the naturalizing discourse is misleading. Returning to the religious division among the Xuetes, it is disconcerting frequently to find opposite religious orientations between siblings, who are, of course, considered to share blood and genealogy. Such divisions may lead to situations in which a Catholic priest has a sister or even a mother who has been punished by the Inquisition. In fact, young people’s religious identity in this secretive society is only established at the moment of contracting marriage. As a function of the identity of the chosen partner, certain elements of ritual knowledge and faith either would or would not be activated. In this way, the static religious divisions drawn up by various forms of discourse, which privileged the idea of continuity against the awareness of change, appear to be

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essentially mobile. But maybe it is more relevant for my purpose, which is to show the creativity of alliances, to concentrate on the question of the ethnic boundary between Xuetes and Old Christians – cristianos viejos – or, in Catalan, cristians de natura. Some structural elements will then become clearer. Before the major marginalization process based on blood arguments and before the autodafés at the end of the seventeenth century that led to the Xuetes becoming a marginalized group in Majorcan society, a process that has continued up until today, we mainly find that a genealogical discourse about identity came from the Xuetes themselves. In this sense, in contrast with the absence of an equivalent discourse among Old Christians, during this period they consider ‘mixed marriages’ in a negative light. So they exclude from common sociability those marrying Old Christians – the so-called ‘Canaaneans’ – naming them ‘badly mixed’ (malmesclats) and their offspring ‘apple peach’ (poma pressec). Indeed, both before and after this marginalization, for Xuetes as well as for the rest of the Majorcan population, it is clear that, because they were the descendants of the Jews of the island, Xuetes normally married inside their group. In truth, if any sense is to be made of the changing boundaries of the group constituting the descendants of the Jews of Majorca, it is more accurate to reverse the proposed terms and say that it is not because they are the descendants of the Jews from Majorca that Xuetes intermarry, but that they are the descendants of the Jews of the island because they intermarry. It is appropriate here to return the problem raised by the bearers of the names of Abram, Maymó, David and others who are not considered as descendants of the Jews in Majorca. Up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, seventy years before the autodafés, we actually find many other descendants of Jews associating with those that we recognize nowadays as Xuetes. The end of the sixteenth century introduced a new element that was to separate in matrimony certain descendants of the Majorcan Jews from the others. From this time onwards, those bearing certain family names disappeared from the marital arena of the conversos by marrying Old Christians and only those that remained endogamous continued to claim Jewish ancestry. Consistent with this, in the later racist period that exploited the logic of the purity of blood in Majorcan society, only the latter people were marginalized because of this affiliation, independently of their actual religious behaviour in the critical period of the autodafés:4 Those with the family names of Picó or Segura, always present in the matrimonial Xueta arena, would be considered Xuetes despite the fact that they were never condemned by the Inquisition. On the other hand, the carriers of the ambiguous names of Reyó, Sureda and Moyà, shared by conversos and Old Christians and including some persons punished by the Inquisition, would disappear from the Xueta world following the disappearance of the Xueta branches of those patronymics and the exogamous marriages of their last feminine members. There is an important tension between whom one marries and who one is – the marrying and the being – that seems to be resolved in favour of the first of the terms in the Xueta world. In my view, this is a clear indication that in the anthropology of kinship, we have to go beyond what is said in the essentialist idioms of native

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genealogical systems of social classification if we want to escape the limitations of a commonsense-based analysis. We should not assume that marriage occurs between people who are socially equal or equivalent just because natives say this is the case. Revealingly enough, native systems of social classification that assign stability to social groups approximate closely the ways in which the social sciences have traditionally treated European kinship and marriage: basically always as a dependent social variable, as a means of social reproduction. Concepts such as ‘matrimonial strategy’, widespread in current analyses, at least since the major theorization developed by Pierre Bourdieu, are strongly linked to the idea of an overarching principle of social reproduction. So, it is said, identity depends on which family one belongs to, and marriage is dependent on familial identity. Returning to Bourdieu’s terminology, this leads us to consider embodied social identity, habitus, as the key motive force of individual social action, which is by definition concordant with social stratification. It is therefore the individual ethics and aesthetics acquired by ego in his or her initial childhood learning – functioning as a mother-tongue, Bourdieu says, that inhabits the social actor – that he or she mobilizes in his or her strategically motivated moves. The result of this process is necessarily the preservation of social hierarchies and values that acquire their real existence in the very bodies and bodily predispositions of individuals. My reading is that this constitutes a kind of anthropological effect. Actually, Bourdieu’s social reasoning appears as another way of formulating the one described by Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of Bourdieu’s major targets of criticism, in his Elementary Structures of Kinship. In the classical structuralist view, it is because the male ego belongs to a social unit that he enters in a circle of reciprocity that leads him to marry, for instance, a mother’s brother’s daughter. If Lévi-Strauss’s analysis was based on societies where discrete kinship groups exist, and where, at least in the model, an alliance appears as a function of descent belonging (Porqueres 2000), it is clear, from what has already been said, that in Europe the cognatic characteristics of the kinship system do not permit such a generalization. At least, this is the case if we reject the ethnocentric view that our kinship system works on a radically different basis from the kinship systems in the rest of the world, and operates exclusively on a commonsense socioeconomic basis.

Basque Nationalism I will now present a quite different case of racism, in order to further illustrate my point concerning the need to construct a way of studying European kinship that takes seriously the major structural elements of this parental complex and avoids the cliché that we are different because modernity – mainly coinciding with the emergence of the nation-state – has rendered kinship irrelevant, reducing it to the private sphere (Schneider 1980). This case involves recent significant changes in the ideologies of the Basque nationalist movement.5 The presentation will include two analytical moments: the first focused on the establishment of a national identity based on genealogy; the second on the transformation of this national identity from a very strict jus sanguinis

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reference into its apparent opposite, an identity based on soil and language. The first Basque nationalism, closely tied to the political thinker Sabino Arana, erected a racial conception of the nation at a time when immigration from other parts of Spain was becoming increasingly important in the Basque heartland cities of Bilbao and San Sebastian and their surrounding provinces, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa. This first nationalism interpreted immigration, strongly increasing at the end of the nineteenth century, as a Spanish invasion. This was in the context of delicate relations with the Spanish liberal state, immediately following the military reverses of the Wars of Succession, referred to as guerras carlistas which, in 1876, entailed the loss of the traditional political and juridical autonomy and privileges of the Basque country. Within this general political frame, Arana developed a historical discourse to justify the political struggle to recover the near independent status of the Basque country, said to have existed before the military defeat. It was claimed that, unlike their neighbours, the Basques had always maintained the purity of their culture. They were characterized as not having been in contact with the Romans or the Muslims during the different occupations of the Iberian Peninsula, thus explaining the survival of their language. But if these cultural references were important in the conception of what makes up the particularity of Basque people, it was stressed from the beginning that what really defined the Basque nation was the blood of its members. Language, territory and history then appeared as accessories to Basque identity. Language was mainly seen as a prophylactic tool of differentiation,6 territory as a mere support for where the Basque race lives.7 For Arana and his direct followers in the nationalist party, the PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco, founded 1895), the truth of Basqueness was rooted in the biology of reproduction. It was Basque blood that would carry the noble characteristics of Basque ‘nature’ from generation to generation and that was depicted as establishing a real breach between themselves and the in-migrating Spanish population, the maketos, defined by the constant genealogical mixing of their ancestors, leading to degeneration. Since the seminal writings of Arana, it is often said that Basque blood has remained pure, protected from contact with conversos and ‘Moors’ from the fifteenth century onwards by municipal and provincial estatutos de limpieza de sangre.8 Engracio de Aranzadi, nicknamed Kizkitza, a disciple of Arana who was to play a major role at the head of the nationalist party until the end of the Republican period (1936), praised the traditional Basque conflation between origin and citizenship. In his Basque Nation, a book published in 1918 and reedited in 1931, he argued that in spite of an ancient disposition of the Government of Gipuzkoa – Las Juntas Generales de Guipúzcoa – that granted foreigners of noble origin the title of ‘native’, in practice nonacceptance of them was the rule: ‘nobility (hidalguía) is citizenship (ciudadanía), citizenship is Basque origin, and Basque origin, proclaimed as a principle of recognition of the political rights of the Basque, is the fervent, practical, logical and wise proclamation of the principle of nationality, as the regulator of the existence of Euskadi [Basque country]’ (Aranzadi 1931: 68). Arana himself discussed the equivalence of nationality and descent in a way that marked future political discourse:

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The Basque people do not need to be constituted, their essence lies in the fact that they are alive: their core is the blood of an unmistakable race, they have as a possible isolating character a unique language, which is a demonstration and proof of their existence, their own history … race is the same as nation or people; it designates a large family, and expresses a natural object, existing independently of the will of men. Such is the sense of the word nation, because it is derived from nasco (to be born), as is nature; just as gens (people) and geno (engender) come from a common root.9 Following the biologizing idioms used to describe Basque identity, the relations deriving from a common race and blood are then presented as ‘natural’, in opposition to the artificial links deriving from liberal ideas of contractual arrangement as the foundation of society. Let us now consider Basque nationalism’s most widely read political text, the nationalist catechism A mi vasco, by the Capuchin Evangelisto de Ibero, the true authority of the nationalist movement. He wrote this book in 1907, shortly after the death of Arana. It was reedited on several occasions, including during the period of the Basque nationalists’ American exile after the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) – then expunged of its most virulently racist paragraphs. He used the classical question-andanswer format in order to provide militants (for example, the women’s group within the nationalist movement, Emakume Abertzale Batza) with the keys to the thought of the founder. Its reading was recommended by the hierarchy of the party (Ugalde 1993: 267). ‘The nation is a natural entity, created by nature itself; the State is something artificial, dependent on human will. The nation is indestructible while the race subsists; States are created and destroyed following the caprices of kings and conquerors’ (de Ibero 1907: 7). Following the same line of argument, Kizkitza, quoting Frantz, Tommasco and Bluntschli, reiterated: ‘First of all and above all, the nation speaks to us of birth, origin and blood. The nations speak to us of races, of the large groups of families made up through the unity of their blood that is shown by the consequent unity of their physical and spiritual qualities’ (Aranzadi 1931: 20). Certainly, kinship and the language of kinship played a major role in the construction of the Basque People as a political subject. But, when dealing with kinship, as has already been pointed out, naturalization does not necessarily entail stability. We will see below the extent to which social actors are aware of this. Consistent with the earlier definitions of Basqueness, blood and race were put at the centre of Basque survival. In order to preserve the Basque nation, conceived of explicitly as a large family, nationalists argued that exogamous marriages had to be prevented and they were seen as a major threat to the nation. Sometimes, as when addressing Basque girls in A mi vasco, the insistence could be particularly virulent: ‘Young Basques; you should not give your hand to any foreigner; any woman who does this disowns her People (Patria); you stoop, you prostitute yourselves, you trample the hidalguía and the nobility of your blood when you cast your eyes on the maketo sham’ (de Ibero 1907: 17). Recalling the founder’s ideas and his obsession with family names (considered the measure of nationality),

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the theatre and newspapers, which were the major nationalist means of propaganda, insisted on this point up to the end of the Spanish Civil War. Promoted by the local Party headquarters (known as batzoki), nationalist representations unveiled the true nature of the Spanish immigrants, always searching for young and ingenuous young girls, lacking any scruples when faced with the prospect of treachery. These images were dramatized in two theatrical pieces written by Sabino Arana himself: Libe, a historical drama, and De fuera vendrán, both of which were being staged up to the 1930s. Numerous articles in the nationalist press propagated the same message during the Republican period (Ugalde 1993: 57). Subsequently, some of the classic works of the political movement were reedited and new ideologists within the PNV continued to insist on the racial definition of the Basques. Thus, long after the Second World War, in American exile, the survival of the Basque race would be considered of crucial importance. Vicente de Amezaga, writer and influential PNV politician, founder of the American Institute of Basque Studies and professor at the University of Montevideo – even while showing tolerance to the immigrants into the Basque country, qualifying them as often being true Basque patriots – expressed himself clearly in his work, El hombre vasco (1967): The first of our rights and duties, as men and as a people, is that of surviving, and Euskadi will live as long as our race lives. So that, while accepting the current of immigration, up to the point at which reason and the instinct to survive allow us to do so, it is necessary to fight, with all the means available, against the flood that threatens to destroy us; it is necessary to wage war, with all the resources at our disposal, for the survival of this millenarian race, proclaiming the great truth of its existence, putting aside any scruple and showing no sign of weakness. So that, on the land, never captured by any outside group, kept free for endless centuries, the large Basque family can flourish in a sovereign state, with its modern projects, and never cease to be the legitimate heir and link in the generational chain, the first rings of which are lost in the mists of pre-history. (Amezaga 1967: 30–31) More recently, the firm insistence on genealogy and blood has been giving way to a more open definition of Basque citizenship, based on residence and the expression of the will to belong. Actually, this alternative way of conceiving citizenship was already emerging among critical nationalist groups in the 1930s; it was confirmed by ETA in the 1950s, and became accepted definitively by all political parties after the Spanish democratic transition, which began with the death of Franco (1975). Nowadays, even if there is still a manifest tendency which insists on the definition of the Basque People (el pueblo vasco) by references to the ancestors and genealogy,10 and even if the ethnic associations of family names matter in politics and society, it is the land, the free choice to belong and especially the use of the language that are central in definitions of the Basques in official political discourse, on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. In order to understand this transformation, it is important to consider a major component of the dynamics of Basque society that has

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forced itself upon the current identity discourse. Obviously, despite the desiderata of many Basque nationalists, marriages between genealogical Basques and immigrants have occurred. These marriages have redefined the basis on which the system of national classification had been constructed: the ‘purity of Basque blood’, the critical element supposed to ensure the survival of the Basque people. As mixed marriages have increased in number, the genealogical grid of the society has clearly become more varied. The supposed existence of two genealogically separate social groups, on which the initial Basque nationalism constructed its naturalizing conception of identity, has been seriously challenged. The emergence of a third genealogical category, the so-called mestizos (mixed people), has imposed major changes within the representational world of the political movement. Even if they are rarely given any special attention in the official ideological texts, mestizos have progressively become part of the institutions linked to Basque nationalism. In fact, even before 1914 – the year in which, on the occasion of the third national assembly of the Party, persons having a Basque name as just one of their four first family names were accepted as nationalist militants (Letamendia 1990: 181) – mestizos already occupied important positions within the political movement (Lorenzo Espinosa 1995: 100). Finally, in spite of the official ideology of purity of blood, in the militancy during the 1930s, these people acquired the same rights as the ‘pure Basques’ (people whose first eight family names were Basque). But the existence of mestizos both within and outside the PNV implied more than an enlargement of the genealogical category of the Basques; it entailed the end of the legitimacy of the central idea about the purity of the Basque race. The critics to the left of the movement increasingly insisted on presenting the purity of race as nonexistent, a carry-over from the past and basically extinct (Lorenzo Espinosa 1992). Besides moral and more general political arguments, this confirmation that ‘the Basque race’ no longer existed would be the basis for constructing a new way of defining citizenship. In the Republican period (1931–39), Manuel de la Sota and other young militants initiated the recognition of this, insisting later on the importance of the current commitment to the ‘patria’ in defining who is a good Basque. In their writings, critical references were made to ‘anti-Christian’ racism, and to the importance of actually doing something for Euskadi. Political activism, together with learning and using the Basque language, which had almost disappeared in the cities, emerged as the basic ‘proofs of love’ required of every patriot, of every abertzale (etymologically, a person who loves the homeland, aberri). While, as we have seen through the example of Amezaga, race continued to occupy a central position in PNV political discourse until long after the end of the Second World War and the subsequent international political disqualification of racist discourses, ideologists linked to ETA during the late 1950s and the 1960s followed the path marked by de la Sota. In this context as well, reference to the evidence that pure races did not exist any more in European societies were made by those openly criticizing apellidismo (literally, ‘surname-ism’, that is, considering as Basques only those having a pure Basque genealogy inscribed in their family names). Vasconia, one of the founding texts of ETA, is clear in this sense: ‘Basque apellidismo is nothing more than

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a nationalist axiom for ancestors … which has the serious inconvenience of comforting those who are lazy in their idea that they are free from any patriotic obligation. In the Basque case it would be worth definitively burying the apellidist myth, which has almost no meaning. We should instead consider that grafts from the roots of alien plants furnish the best fruits’ (Krutwig 1963: 90). Certainly the notion of pure Basque ancestry, distinguishing between different types of people (for instance between ‘Basque’ and the ‘Basque–Basque’),11 still has currency in Basque society, as do considerations of some of the qualities of Basque blood – particularly the high proportions of the Rh-negative blood group or, more recently, references to Basque genetic differences as they appear in the work of Cavalli-Sforza, or in recent newspaper appropriations of genetic research on mitochondrial DNA.12 But these kinds of representations tend to disappear from the political arena. Nevertheless, it is interesting here to point out that these ways of talking about Basqueness are more common in regions where ‘mixed marriages’ are less frequent. Contrary to what might be expected, major cities present a lower rate of this kind of marriage. Immigrants tend to keep matrimonially separate in the cities while, in midsize towns with a long industrial history, immigrants integrate more easily into the local marriage market. This correlates with the political behaviour of the different areas being considered. Nationalist radical parties have thus traditionally gained more votes in areas with high levels of intermarriage, where people tend to define as Basque those who speak the language (euskaldun). In cities like Bilbao, mainly Hispanophone, nationalists tend to vote for the PNV, more closely linked to the ideas of Sabino Arana. Here, in practice, people openly classify as Basque those having, at least partially, Basque ancestry. In any case, there remains an important issue to discuss concerning the transformation of Basque nationalist ideas. The shift towards a model conferring Basque national identity through the use of the language and, at a more formal level, through the place of birth or place of residence instead of ancestry, appears too great a change to be assumed by any society in such a short period of time.13 In order to understand the social legitimacy of such arguments and the very audibility of their central elements, it is important to pay attention to the shifting status of what constitutes Basque territory in the ideologies of Basque nationalism. As we know, for Arana the place where the race lived was largely inconsequential. In an article dealing with the critical importance of race to national identity, presented as a dialogue taking place in a train between a Frenchman and a Basque, both men agree on the national insignificance of the place of birth, ‘because being born here or there obviously does not mean anything about race. The son of a Biscayan couple born in Madagascar or Dahomey will be as racially Biscayan as the son born in Olakueta; on the other hand, a descendant of Spaniards born in Biscay will never become racially Biscayan’.14 The sharp distinction between race and territory underwent significant rethinking in Basque nationalism. Already in 1933, those born on Basque territory or having lived a minimum of ten years in Euskadi acquired the right to become PNV members. However, in no case were these people allowed to occupy positions

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of responsibility within the organization, either at a regional or a national level (Ugalde 1993: 319). Political projects elaborated after the Spanish Civil War, in 1941 and in 1945, followed the same line: the ancestral lands of the Basques – the neighbouring provinces of Rioja, Aragón, Santander and Burgos in Spain, and Béarn in France – were claimed as Basque; on the other hand, Basque citizenship was granted to people of Basque origin, wherever they were born, to naturalized foreigners, to the wives of Basque men and to persons born in the Basque Country if they did not choose another nationality (Krutwig 1963: 290–91). I will now consider how, within a tradition that has kept repeating its fidelity to Arana, a political conception of the territory has been drawn up that, a priori, appears to represent a clear rupture with the strict genealogical logic of ‘belonging to a nation’ promoted by the founder himself. The first to introduce this transformation was Evangelista de Ibero, who asked why, in spite of its secondary role in the definition of the nation, patriots love the land where the Basque race is established. He immediately gave a clue, opening up major rethinking within the political movement: it was the presence of the ancestors in this land which explained such affection: Because this land has been the dwelling-place and property of our ancestors who for centuries have occupied and cultivated it; because it is the bulwark in which our race has been defended; because it contains the ashes of our ancestors and has been watered by their blood, sweat and tears, and because in it are set the temples to Christ built by our parents, from where they sent their prayers to heaven thousands of times; because it is like a blessed inheritance bequeathed to their offspring after they had worked and beautified it. (1907: 15) With minor variations, Engracio de Aranzadi insisted on the ancestral appropriation of the land, in a book that was called, significantly, La casa solar vasca. O casa y tierra del apellido (The Basque ancestral home. Or home and land of the surname). After defining the traditional Basque house as ‘the temple of the race’, the leader of the PNV took up the words of the nineteenth-century Dominican orator Lacordaire, stressing the then widely held idea that, through their work, men blend with the land: According to tradition and the Gospel – these are the words of Father Lacordaire – God said to man: ‘You own your work because your work is your activity, and your activity is yourself. To separate you from the dominion of your work would be to remove you from the dominion of your activity, that is to say, the possession of yourself, of what makes you a living and free human being. You are, then, the owner of your work. You are also owner of the land on that part of the land that has fecundated your work. Because your work amounts to nothing without the land, and the land is nothing without your work: one and the other are supported and vivified reciprocally. Then, when you mix your sweat with the land and you have so fecundated it, it will belong to you; because it will be a part of yourself, a

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prolongation of your own body, fertilized with your flesh and your blood: so it is just that I reserve its dominion for you. It is true that I have played an initial role as the Breeder, but I yield it unto you, thereby uniting what comes from my part with what comes from your part, and the whole will be yours. Still, your property will not terminate when your life ends: you will be able to pass it on to your descendants, because your descendants are you, because there is unity among the father and the offspring, and to disinherit the latter of the patrimonial land would be to disinherit the children of the sweat and tears of their father. And to whom else can that land of your pain and your blood be transmitted? To someone that has not worked it? It is better, then, that you survive and maintain yourself in your posterity.’ (Aranzadi 1932: 109, my translation) Aranzadi, or Kitzkitza, persistently refers to the strong ties to the land through references to ancestry and the centrality of the family in the constitution of the Basque nation.15 Kitzkitza also affirms that the land at the same time provides security for the future. Reflecting on the negative influences of the presence of immigrants and on the fact that the traditional isolation of the Basques has come to an end, the author affirms the vital force of the land linked to one’s family name: ‘There are no more solitudes that save [us]; there are no more isolations that defend us. There is a tide of mud that is rising, accompanied by the fury of the storms. What shall we do at this critical moment? How shall we save our nationality and ourselves? How? By resorting to the hidden origins of life itself; by entering the farmhouse and embracing the land of our surnames’ (1932: 11). These reflections, contemporaneous with the increasingly nostalgic allusions in Basque nationalism to the harmonious world of the past of the traditional Basque farmhouse – the caserío (Elorza 1978: 163) – provide the key to understanding later developments of the question of territoriality, within a nationalistic movement defined at that time as ‘a noble sentiment for the land and for the dead’ (Díaz Freire 2001: 81). Even during the periods when traditional nationalist racism was being directly criticized, the ancestral definition of the Basque soil is still centre stage. For instance, when the Christian humanist Manu Sota asks himself about the characteristics of the Basque land, he argues that, unlike territories frequented by Basque emigrants, the Basque land exercises an important influence on those who inhabit it. In an important 1933 article published in Jagi-Jagi,16 the weekly revue of the mendigoixales, the nationalist youth critical of the PNV, Manu Sota wrote: ‘Our land has the mysterious power of taking hold of people and, as if it worked with magical hands in the national atmosphere [en el ambiente patrio], the land models foreigners both physically and morally, transforming their native personality into another that is peculiarly Basque. It has a powerful assimilatory force, at its whim stealing their soul to make it Basque, inspiring racial particularities that make it become like ours, differentiated from theirs.’ Mainly since the generalization of the thesis of the absolute autochthony of the Basques, which appears in the archaeological research of the mid-twentieth century

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(Amezaga 1967: 17–21), we find a proliferation of references to the land as both ancestral sanctuary and source of life. Vicente de Amezaga thus writes about ‘the green land of our race sanctified by the white bones of our martyrs and the red blood of our heroes’ (1967: 100), insisting at the same time on the productivity of the land: ‘the work of many generations has fertilized it; the births and deaths of many branches of the same lineage have sanctified it, and these venerable breeding-grounds of our lineage have to be approached with the heart replete with love and, on our lips, the words of our great [poet] Elizanburu: Naiz ez den gaztelua / maite dut nik sor-lekua, / aiten aitek autatua [Although it is not a castle, I love the house of my birth, which was chosen by the parents of my parents]’ (1967: 107). In the same line of argument, can be placed the increasing interest in mythical stories about Mari, a female creator character inhabiting the bowels of the earth. This myth contained clear political connotations because of Mari’s representation, in historical Basque chronicles, as the wife of the lords of Biscay (Aranzadi 1981). Along the same lines, since the Spanish political transition to democracy, we find rituals such as Korrika, a noncompetitive relay race that, with strong reference to the prehistoric origins of Euskal Herria (the Basque country), affirms the two elements of attribution of identity that have acquired legitimacy in the contemporary political arena. Marking the limits of the claimed political community, which extends on both sides of the Pyrenees border, Korrika is a dramatization of the ties of the population to the land of the Basque language (del Valle 1988).

Conclusion The examples discussed above, in my opinion, bring out something important about race that has been emphasized by Peter Wade in his recent book Race, Nature and Culture (2002): race based on blood implies something more than a static notion of identity. Thus, to conclude, I want to stress that, as the racist contexts I have considered here make clear, the acquired characteristics of the person are frequently, in public discourse, supposed to embody blood and so are thought susceptible of being transmitted through genealogy, thus shaping future identities. On the other hand, the very characteristics of the symbol of blood, considered within its major frame of reference, our kinship system, testify to its deep historicity. In spite of the idea of natural fatality associated with the blood of genealogies, this symbolic element appears in our bilateral kinship system basically as a composite, redefined by the socially recognized reproductive acts that are its very source. Thus, in my view, paying attention to how blood is believed to be produced may contribute to better understanding of some of the dynamics of race and ethnicity. This means attributing to kinship potential capacities in the construction of the social order, in spite of the repeated idea that modernity is defined by the absence of any social role for kinship, which is reduced to the private sphere of the family – an idea that, at least since Schneider (1980 [1968]), anthropologists seem to accept. By stressing that our culture is not so different from all the other cultures of the world, by recognizing that the symbolic efficacy of kinship also works among

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ourselves, we will be able to grasp better the political and social implications of the manipulations of the notion of the person as inscribed in our cognatic kinship system. To my mind, there are clear ethical and epistemological reasons for doing so. Just thinking about the second, the changes over time linked to the systems of social classification dealt with in this article alert us to the benefits to be gained from associating kinship studies with major elements in representations of our culture: historicity and change. The evolution of the boundaries of the Xueta and Basque groups induced by the matrimonial practices of individuals, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the subverting capacity of ‘mixed marriages’, attested to in the crisis of the racist Basque model, compel us to take seriously a major component of our cognatic kinship system: in spite of native and current scholarly statements about the centrality of social reproduction – inscribed in the very important notion of matrimonial strategy as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu (Porqueres 1995: 77–91) – which affirm that marriage is a moment of social reproduction and hence that matrimony operates to reinforce the social identity acquired during family education, it is clear that the logic of a cognatic kinship system allows things to work out quite differently in practice. In a cognatic system without positive rules of marriage, genealogical identity depends much more on the marriages of individuals than actual marriages depend on genealogical belonging. The indeterminacy linked to individual acts, and its eventual effects on genealogical groups, lead people constructing such naturalizing frames to assign political significance to marriage. Those who support such genealogical frames of meaning are perfectly aware of their fragility, of the menacing weight of marriage, and try consequently to transform the endogamy they desire into a powerful social injunction. It is by virtue of the recurrence of key marriages that racist systems of social classification are able or unable to continue to operate as such. In this sense, the long history of racism in Europe appears inscribed in a kind of constitutive tension that merits further exploration. Mainly because of its reference to a crucial part of our notion of the person that states that we are the product of the mixture of our father and mother, genealogical systems of social classification acquire an immediate legitimacy and operate to potentially condition, through their naturalizing idioms, the actual behaviour of people. At the same time, mainly because of their insertion in a bilateral kinship logic, people’s matrimonial acts emerge as potential correctors of ideologies based on the maintaining of discrete blood lines. It has equally been shown how, when marriages redefine the genealogical grid of society referred to in racist classifications, transitions to nonracist positions operate only gradually. Passing from blood to soil as a criterion of national belonging does not therefore imply a radical negation of the importance of blood. Naturalizing idioms based on the language of kinship that tend, in a way that is deeply rooted in Christian tradition,17 to identify soil with blood, allow for a transition that otherwise would not be understandable. The acceptability of jus solis, which seems to be the opposite of jus sanguinis, then appears to be rooted in ideas about the person as this is inscribed in the kinship system.

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Notes 1.

Francisque Michel (1809–87) was a French antiquary, author of Histoire des races maudites de la France et de l'Espagne (1847). 2. An autodafé was a ceremony of the Spanish Inquisition, which involved passing and carrying out sentences handed down to those found guilty of heresy and other such crimes. 3. The Xuetes are the best-documented community of conversos. One hundred procesos de fé (documents from autodafés) are preserved in the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid. Some 20,000 pages of Inquisitorial trials are complemented by the rich Majorcan archives, providing extensive information on the demographic and economic dynamics of the community. For more details, see Porqueres (1995). 4. It is interesting to note that, during the period previous to the autodafés, some bearers of Xueta names, in fact some members of some families of Pinya and Bonnín, systematically married outside the converso group, developing particular social dynamics. The reification of the group after the autodafés brought to an end a process that would normally have had the effect of creating two family-name based groups ambiguous in terms of identity. As was already the case with the Martí, the Moyà (then partly considered as a converso name), the Valls, the Pinya and the Bonnín would, normally, not have been identified exclusively as Xuetes. 5. The arguments developed here are partially present in Porqueres (2001, 2002). 6. Arana, who devoted half of his writings to Basque philology, had very pragmatic ideas about euskera (the Basque language). Criticizing the politics of the Catalanist movement, he explained why it would be a disaster if the maketo (the Spanish) learned euskera. This would increase the contacts between the two populations, autochthonous and foreigners, seriously endangering the survival of the race: ‘Purity of blood is, like language, one of the bases of the Bizkaian lemma; but, while, language can be restored as long as there is a good grammar and a good dictionary, even if nobody actually speaks it, race cannot be resurrected once it has been lost’ (‘Minuta. Errores catalanistas’, Bizkaitarra 16, 31 October 1894; in Arana 1980). (‘Lemma’ is a grammatical term that refers to the canonical form of a given lexeme, or word.) 7. For Arana it is clear that if one day Basque people emigrated, it would only be a removal. ‘Is it perchance the land that we walk on that constitutes our country (la Patria)? What do we care to have a free Biscay here, among these mountains, or to have it elsewhere?’ (‘La pureza de raza’, Bizkaitarra 24, 31 March 1895, in Arana 1980). 8. See El partido carlista y los fueros vasko-navarros (1897), in Arana (1980). 9. ‘Fe de erratas de la Gaceta del Norte’, Patria 81, 10 May 1903, in Arana (1980). 10. Leaving aside some declarations of PNV leaders concerning the characteristics of Basque genetic patrimony and blood, the PNV still seems very close to its initial position. On the occasion of the first centenary of the Party in 1995, a formal declaration was adopted, and widely circulated, stating an anti-racist political argument, paradoxically defined through genealogy: ‘We, the daughters and sons of Euskal Herria [the Basque country], of this people that has lived and worked at this crossroads of Europe from the time before there was any historical memory, today, at the threshold of the twenty-first century, declare freely and firmly that … the Basques of the six territories are a common people, united by origin and by will, our own masters, not recognizing any other sovereignty … we will accept as a brother everyone, independently of their origin, who wants to share with us the fate of our people’ (‘Aberriaren aldeko agiria’, Muga 93, September 1995).

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11. A distinction made in the Bascophone milieu between Basque speakers, Euskaldun, with a Basque ancestry, and Euskaldun without such ancestry. 12. See for example, Bertranpetit and Cavalli-Sforza (1991). 13. There is a strong contrast between the proposals of Arana and the more recent Basque constitutional projects. Even if none of them contain any reference to language, the tone has considerably changed. In his important article ‘La pureza de raza’ (1895), Sabino Arana argued that the future independent Basque country should control the entry of foreigners; for Spaniards already there, the Juntas Generales should decide about their right to remain in the Basque country and, in any case, no Spaniard would be allowed to enter the territory in the years following independence. In this context, as a consequence of ‘natural and traditional law’, only racially Basque families would have Basque citizenship; mixed families would face some restrictions. The president of the Autonomous Community of Euskadi, Juan José Ibarretxe, states in his Plan Ibarretxe (2003) that Basque citizens would be those having their residence in Basque territory, or those having had such a residence in the past, as well as their descendants wherever they happen to be living. 14. ‘¿Somos españoles?’, Bizkaitarra 4, 17 December 1893, in Arana (1980). The articles published during these years led to Sabino being imprisoned. 15. One of the conclusions of this work is that ‘the sovereign fact of Basque life is that of the unity of the family, the house, the land and the tomb’ (1932: 252). 16. ‘Los Maketos al servicio de Euskadi’, Jagi-Jagi 22, February 1933. 17. I have explored elsewhere (Porqueres 2002) the Christian opposition between spirit and flesh and the equivalence made, since Saint Paul, through Saint Augustine to Lacordaire, between flesh and soil. Thus, in the characterizations of the Christ in some passages on the incarnation of Jesus, Saint Augustine explains the sense of Psalm 84, verse 12 – ‘Truth is sprung out of the earth: and justice hath looked down from heaven’ – by reference to Genesis on the creation of man from the earth and to Saint Paul on the distinction between the men of heaven and the men of earth: ‘The truth has sprung from the earth; Christ has been born of a woman; the truth has sprung from the earth: The Son of God has sprung from the flesh. What is the earth? The flesh’ (Augustine 1878, XII: 551–52).

References Amezaga Aresti, V. de. 1967. El hombre vasco. Buenos Aires: Editorial Vasca Ekin, Biblioteca de Cultura Vasca. Arana, S. 1980. Obras completas de Sabino Arana Goiri, 2nd ed. Zarautz: Sendoa Argitaldaria. Aranzadi, E. de (Kizkitza). 1931. La nación vasca, 2nd ed. Bilbao: Editorial Verdes Achirica. ———. 1932. La casa solar vasca. O casa y tierra del apellido. Zarautz: Editorial Vasca. Aranzadi, J. 1981. Milenarismo vasco. Edad de oro, etnia y nativismo. Madrid: Taurus. Augustine, Saint. 1878. Œuvres complètes de Saint Augustin. Paris: Libraire de Louis Vivès éditeur. Bertranpetit, J. and L. Cavalli-Sforza. 1991. ‘A Genetic Reconstruction of the History of the Population of the Iberian Peninsula’, Annals of Human Genetics 55: 51–67. Conte, E. and C. Essner. 1995. La quête de la race: une anthropologie du nazisme. Paris: Hachette. Díaz Freire, J.J. 2001.‘El cuerpo de Aitor: emoción y discurso en la creación de la comunidad nacional vasca’, Historia Social 40: 79–96.

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Elorza, A. 1978. Ideologías del nacionalismo vasco 1876–1937. De los euskaros a Jagi Jagi. Zarautz: L. Haramburu. Ibero, E. de. 1907. Muera la mentira y viva la verdad. Buenos Aires: Irrintzi. Krutwig Sagredo, F. 1963. Vasconia. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Norbait. ———. 1981. ‘El hecho vasco, el euskera y el territorio de Euzkadi’, Euskal Batzar Orokorra, 2nd ed. Bilbao: Servicio Central de Publicaciones del Govierno Vasco, pp. 130–31. Letamendia Belzunce (Ortzi), F. 1990. Euskadi, pueblo y nación: los vascos en la historia. San Sebastián: Kriselu. Lorenzo Espinosa, J.M. 1992. Gudari, una pasión útil. Eli Gallastegi (1892–1974). Tafalla: Txalaparta. ———. 1995. Historia de Euskal Herria. Tomo III. El nacimiento de una nación. Tafalla: Txalaparta. Nikipowetzky, V. 1979. ‘Réflexions sur la genèse du discours antisémite’, in V. Nikipowetzky (ed.), De l’antijudaïsme antique à l’antisémitisme contemporain. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, pp. 277–90. Porqueres i Gené, E. 1995. Lourde alliance. Mariage et identité chez les descendants de juifs convertis à Majorque (1435–1750). Paris: Kimé. ———. 2000. ‘Cognatisme et voies du sang. La créativité du mariage canonique’, L’Homme 154–55: 335–56. ———. 2001. ‘Le mariage qui dérange. Redéfinitions de l’identité nationale basque’, Ethnologie Française, 31(3): 527–36. ———. 2002.‘Nación, parentesco y religión: el nacionalismo vasco entre la sangre y la tierra de la patria’, in J. Bestard Camps (ed.), Identidades, relaciones y contextos. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, pp. 47–70. Schneider, D.M. 1980 [1968]. American Kinship: A Cultural Account, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ugalde Solano, M. 1993. Mujeres y nacionalismo vasco. Génesis y desarrollo de Emakume Abertzale Batza (1906–1936). Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco. Valle, T. del. 1988. Korrika. Rituales de la lengua en el espacio. Barcelona: Anthropos. Wade, P. 2002. Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. London: Pluto Press.

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7 The Transmission of Ethnicity Family and State – A Lithuanian Perspective Darius Dauks˘as

Introduction In this chapter, I will look at how naturalizing idioms of ‘kinship’, ‘inheritance’, ‘blood’ and, indeed, culture operate in the understanding of ethnicity and nationalism. More specifically, I will address the role of ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ connectedness in defining ethnic and national identities: I examine how ideas about blood, inheritance, biology and culture are deployed in thinking about ethnic and national belonging. The article concentrates on the issue of how people become involved in classificatory thinking, in the context of political change. I focus on a recent period of state building in Lithuania and on the state’s project of homogenization (Williams 1989: 429). I start with the premise that the end of the Soviet Union and the new era of an independent Lithuanian state influenced the definition of personal and group identities. This was the period of 1988–91, which in part coincided with Gorbachev’s perestroika. The beginning of this period is marked by the emergence of a national movement in Lithuania, called Sajudis,1 which gained a majority in the Lithuanian Parliament and proclaimed the Independence of Lithuania on 11 March 1990. The end of this period coincided with the coup d’etat in Moscow, and the fall of the Soviet Union. It was also during this period that events in political, economic and social spheres became the unintended catalysts for dismantling the familiar sense of stability and regrouping people according to ethnic, social and political considerations. The active role of Lithuanians in seeking to emerge as the dominant group in the new nation was an important factor in resurrecting the dilemmas associated with belonging to other ethnic groups living in Lithuania, and influencing members of such groups in the reevaluation of their positions.

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The sources for this chapter are newspaper articles that focused on the issues of ethnic identification and categorization, data on individual representations of ethnic belonging and on state practices of ethnic categorization, as well as field research. I will discuss how ethnicity is seen from the point of view of the mass media, which have strategic aims in mind; how ordinary people express their individual views in classifying themselves according to difference and sameness; how they fix themselves in particular ethnic groups and how they undermine that fixity; what ideas and criteria they employ as mediators of this fixity; and how they utilize arguments constructing or deconstructing ethnic fixity. Theoretical Approaches The examination of categories such as biology, blood, inheritance and culture requires some explanation of what we mean by biology and culture in defining ethnic belonging. For a long time the nature–culture dichotomy was a central dogma in anthropology (Descola and Pálsson 1996: 2). This dichotomy was widely explored in anthropology by materialists, structuralists, sociobiologists and others, who ‘took the dichotomy for granted and shared an identical, universalistic conception of nature’ (ibid.: 3). However, this understanding has recently been challenged and ‘many anthropologists and historians now agree that conceptions of nature are socially constructed, that they vary according to cultural and historical determinations’ (Descola 1996: 82). In this article I will follow Descola in his account of patterns ‘which seem to organise the relations between humans’ (Descola 1996: 86). He insists on the idea that these ‘are simply objectified properties of social practices, cognitive templates or intermediary representations which help to subsume the diversity of real life under a basic set of categories of relation’ (ibid.: 87). He explains this process by using the analogy of kinship systems: This sphere of social practice is structured by a combination of rules of marriage alliance, ordering principles of the social domain by terminologies and modes of behaviour, and ideas about compatibility between bodily substances and between discrete elements defining the ascription and transmission of rights and identities, both collective and individual. Kinship systems thus organise modes of relation, modes of classification, and modes of identification in a variety of combinations which are far from having been exhaustively described and understood, but which many anthropologists are willing to treat as a finite group of transformation. (Descola 1996: 87) The same schema might be applied in exploring ideas of blood, inheritance and biology in general, deployed in thinking about ethnic and national belonging. Ethnicity is about the notion of relatedness (Eriksen 2004: 60). Ideas such as place, kinship or origin are emphasized in various degrees by many scholars as providing the basis for this kind of relationship (Eriksen 2004; Schneider 1977; Wade 1997). Thus place and kinship are ‘the prime movers in human collective identification’ (Eriksen

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2004: 60). At the same time, ideas of place and kinship are the basis of ethnic nationalism (Eriksen 2004: 58; Williams 1989: 429). In Eriksen’s words: The force of nationhood depends on the national ideology’s ability to transfer the sentiments and commitments of citizens from their personal experiences to that abstract and imagined community called the nation. When national leaders use kinship terminology (‘brothers and sisters’, ‘fatherland’, ‘homeland’, ‘mother tongue’ and so on) to designate features of the abstract community which is the nation, they are busy carrying out this work. It could thus be said that the nation expropriates the personal sentiments and experiences of its citizens, transferring them to the much larger and loftier stage of the nation. (Eriksen 2004: 58–59) In other words, I consider the criteria of kinship, place, language and religion to be meaningful when they are used in framing people’s actions, rather than having some inherent meaning of their own (Eriksen 2000: 187). According to Alonso, the nation-state produces totalizing and homogenizing projects which ‘produce an imagined sense of political community that conflates peoplehood, territory, and state’ (Alonso 1994: 391). She argues that Anderson’s statement that nations are ‘imagined political communities’ does not go far enough in identifying the strategies through which ‘the imagined’ becomes ‘second nature’, a ‘structure of feeling’ embodied in material practice and lived experience (Alonso 1994: 382). According to her, ‘modern forms of state surveillance and control of population … have depended on the homogenizing, rationalizing, and partitioning of space’ (ibid.: 382). The later transformation of space to territory has shaped the imagining of personhood as well as place through botanical metaphors of shared bodily substance of blood or genes. This process she calls ‘substantialization’ (ibid.: 384). The same process of substantialization through the tropes of kinship and descent is applicable to definitions of ethnicity by which states attempt ‘to substantialize the categorical identities of ethnicity’ (Alonso 1994: 396). This focus on the role of the state is also explored by Wilson and Donnan in their work on ‘border identities’. They argue that ‘identities are shaped by the state and may emerge as a result of, or in response to the state’s attempts to define or redefine its outer limits. Because of their liminal and frequently contested nature, borders tend to be characterised by identities which are shifting and multiple, in ways which are framed by the specific state configurations which encompass them and within which people must attribute meaning to their experience of border life’ (Wilson and Donnan 2000: 12–13). The significant point is the ideological categorization of ethnic groups and the ideological setting of patterns for ethnic categorization – something also shown in Porqueres’ study of Basque constructions of identity (Porqueres, this volume; and 2001: 527–36).

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Multivocality of Ethnographic Sites Methodologically, this article is built on three interlaced levels: the study of printed press, practices of state participations in ethnic negotiations and the representations of members of ethnic groups. Printed Press I undertook an analysis of media articles for the period 1988–91.2 I investigated Lithuanian, Polish and Russian newspapers and selected 146 articles related to my research questions from the following newspapers: Atgimimas, Lietuvos aidas, Czerwony Sztandar, Sovetskaja Litva and Pasaulio Lietuvis. The two publications Atgimimas and Lietuvos aidas (the latter originally a popular interwar newspaper which was restarted in 1990 under the same title) both represented the political line of the Sajudis movement, which took an active position in reconstructing ethnic politics. While studying Atgimimas and Lietuvos aidas, I encountered emerging debates on the issues related to Lithuanian Poles and emigrant Lithuanians. Thus I reviewed newspapers which represented the opinions of Lithuanian Poles and emigrant Lithuanians. Czerwony Sztandar was the only state-supported newspaper for Lithuanian Poles at that time. Another newspaper, Sovietskaja Litva, was also reviewed as the main official newspaper in Russian where the opinions of Lithuanian Poles found a place as well. Pasaulio Lietuvis was the journal of the World Lithuanian Community, which dealt mostly with issues of emigrant Lithuanians. I selected articles that contained some reference to issues of ethnic identification and the categorization of ethnicity. Some of the articles were systematic and ideologically integrated opinion pieces, others merely mentioned questions of ethnic identification. Some of the articles were useful for defining the situation, others (autobiographic or analytical) for personal experiences or conceptual ideas. The Institutional Field Sites in Vilnius In the period under consideration, it was not only the printed press that actively participated in debates about ethnicity. State institutions were active agents in ethnic management too. It was seen from the study of the printed press that many ethnic issues and debates on ethnic belonging were centred around institutions and legislation. In this chapter, I focus on the following state institutions: 1. The Seimas (Parliament) of the Republic of Lithuania, in particular two of its bodies: The Committee on Human Rights, and the Commission of the Representatives of the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania and the Community of Lithuanians in the U.S.A. These two structures were related to the legal definition, governance and political implementation of citizenship, and the legislative work on the amendments and editions of the Law of Citizenship. 2. The Information Centre for Homecoming Lithuanians. The function of the Centre was to provide information for Lithuanians who live abroad. The

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Centre’s website stated: ‘[p]ersons wishing to settle in Lithuania on a permanent basis can get extensive information about citizenship, health care, taxes, transportation, customs, housing and other adaptation matters’ (www.lgitic.lt). In practice, the questions addressed were mainly related to the procedures for reestablishment of citizenship and restitution of property. In most cases, the flow of information was via the internet or through telephone contact. But alongside these activities the Centre attempted to organize Sunday meetings with invited lecturers from various fields. 3. The Lithuanian World Community Office in Vilnius. This is an institution related to Lithuanians living abroad. Although it is located in Seimas (Parliament) building, it is actually a branch of the Lithuanian World Community (Pasaulio Lietuviu Bendruomene). The head of the Office is a person of Lithuanian origin from abroad. The Office is a structure for keeping contacts not only with the Lithuanian World Community, but also between Lithuanians residing in East and West. The activities of the Office mostly concentrate on supporting education and helping Lithuanian schools, particularly in the area of the former Soviet Union. Communities The printed press and institutions were talking about and dealing with people’s lives and methodologically it was necessary to incorporate the opinions and the representations of ordinary people. The ethnographic study was based on interviews and conversations with people whom I met by chance or by appointment during two periods of fieldwork in the two small towns of Salcininkai and Eisiskes in southeast Lithuania. The first study was carried out between February and April 2003, in Vilnius; the second was in April 2003. I interviewed thirty-five people and all the interviews were tape recorded. The interviews were in-depth, were conducted as conversations between the researcher and the interviewee and were semi-structured around the topics of ethnicity and citizenship. Conversations were held in the interviewees’ homes and places of work. The people I met by appointment were mainly from state institutions and people living in Vilnius. The people I talked to in state institutions were mostly those who actively participated in relevant legislation or who implemented the laws in practice. The people I interviewed by chance were from Salcininkai and Eisiskes. I simply walked along the street and tried to approach people – at home or at their place of work – when they were on a break. I kept in mind my aim to talk with the young and the old, with women and men, with the educated and the less educated, locals and newcomers, and people of various occupations and family status. The interviews were carried out in the native language of the interviewee. This was particularly significant in Salcininkai and Eisiskes, where people spoke Russian. The tape-recorded interviews were transcribed in the language in which they were recorded.

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The Ethnic Discourse of 1988–93 and Emerging Lithuanian National Identity When I started to look at the public discussions in the press of 1988–91, I was assuming that there would be a lot of rhetoric about redefining relationships between Lithuanians and Russians. I took it as given that Russians were the politically dominant ethnic group in the Soviet Union and that the emergence of Lithuanian national identity would challenge this stable position. But there were very few articles dealing with the situation of Russians. What I did find were numerous articles dealing with two other groups: Lithuanian Poles and emigrant Lithuanians. I shall discuss both these cases. It was clear that the activity in the two groups was related to particular events which interfered with the existing order within these groups. The first event that stimulated debates around the identity of Lithuanian Poles was the proposal of a new law, which stated that Lithuanian should be the official state language. According to my research, the first published discussions of the proposed law appeared on 15 October 1988.3 This was the time of the wave of new political tendencies and an atmosphere of liberalization which emerged alongside the national movement, Sajudis. Lithuanians promoted the law as an alternative to the bilingualism of the Soviet era, when Russian was the primary language used in administration and within the political sphere.4 The most active opponents of the changing status of the Lithuanian language proved to be not the Russians but the Lithuanian Poles. The majority of Russians were not native to Lithuania, they did not comprise a community as such, and thus did not take a formal stand against the proposed new law. The situation of Russians in Lithuania was quite different from that in other countries of the post-Soviet Union, for example Latvia and Estonia. In contrast to the latter two, Russians in Lithuania did not compose the majority of the population and, in comparison to the other Soviet republics, the Lithuanian Russian intelligentsia was relatively small. This could be the reason that Lithuanian Russians were not politically organized in the period of political transformations in Lithuania. It was also the case that extensive cultural rights were given to ethnic Russians in Lithuania (see Juska 1999: 535; Kasatkina and Leoncikas 2003: 212). It was the Lithuanian Poles who considered themselves to be different from Lithuanians and who presented the strongest arguments against Lithuanian becoming the state language.5 According to the public dialogue in the press, a second aspect that influenced debates about who was to be defined as Lithuanian was the Law of Citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania. This law was adopted after the reestablishment of independence, and came into power on 5 December 1991. According to the law, persons who had had Lithuanian citizenship until 15 June 1940 lost that status when they accepted the citizenship of another state (Sinkevicius 2002: 145). This meant that the large community of Lithuanian emigrants, particularly those people who considered themselves to be political refugees, were not able to become citizens of the newly emerging Lithuania unless they relinquished their present citizenship of another state. Thus the Law of Citizenship became a subject for discussions about the identity of émigré Lithuanians and their sameness and difference in relation to

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Lithuanians living in Lithuania. This was especially controversial in the sense that the reestablishment of Lithuanian independence in 1990 was based on the idea of continuity with the statehood of pre-Second World War Lithuania. According to this idea, it would seem logical to activate the Lithuanian citizenship of those persons who left Lithuania at the end of the Second World War because of political circumstances. But this was not so in practice. The Law of Citizenship of 1991 drew a clear line between two groups which considered themselves to be the same: Lithuanians in Lithuania and Lithuanians who emigrated abroad. Furthermore, this law stimulated debates and discussions on ethnic issues, rife with rhetoric about who were ‘true’ and ‘not true’ Lithuanians. As seen in the press of that time, the most active roles in these discussions were played by emigrant Lithuanians and political officials in Lithuania. To sum up, these two events provoked public discussions in the printed press: Lithuanian becoming the state language and the Law on Citizenship. It was mainly two ethnic groups that debated these two events: Lithuanian Poles and emigrant Lithuanians.

Two Communities: Emigrant Lithuanians and Lithuanian Poles In this section, I briefly outline the two sets of Lithuanians whose constructions of identity I explore in this chapter. The Community of Lithuanians in Exile In discussing the Lithuanian émigré community, we have to keep in mind that there were several major waves of emigration from Lithuania. There were massive emigrations during the period starting from the nineteenth century and ending with the Second World War. These were people who left the country in the hope of finding a better material existence. The next wave was at the end of the Second War and consisted mostly of political refugees. The largest part of these emigrated to the United States, where they are commonly called American Lithuanians. The community of Lithuanians in the U.S.A. was well organized and had an influential voice. Other strong Lithuanian communities were in Australia and Canada, and there were smaller groups in several European and Latin American countries. Most of the post-Second World War Lithuanian emigrants belonged to the intelligentsia. Their communities abroad were organized around the concept of the political, social and cultural continuity of an independent Lithuania. Many of them spent much of their free time on what was referred to as Lithuanian activities. Family and parish were the main social institutions in promoting such activities. The ideological guidelines of Lithuanian emigrants, which defined their political, ethnic, national and cultural being, were declared in the Lithuanian Charter (Lietuviu Charta) in 1949. Under the declaration of the Lithuanian Charter, the institution of the World Lithuanian Community (Pasaulio Lietuviu Bendruomene) was established, the purpose of which was to unite all Lithuanians living outside Lithuania. The post-Second World War Lithuanian emigrants were the most active members within this institution. The World Lithuanian Community

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could be considered a national, political and social movement and its goals were formulated in the Lithuanian Charter as being, in the short term, ‘to fight for a free and Independent Lithuanian State’ and, in the longer term, ‘to preserve the vitality of the Lithuanian nation: its language, culture, customs, traditions, the concept of statehood’.6 The relevance and durability of the ideas of the Lithuanian Charter were confirmed by the fact of its reprinting in 1993. I had meetings with emigrant Lithuanians in Vilnius who were permanently or temporarily living in Lithuania. Among them there were retired persons as well as young people who had come to Lithuania from the U.S.A., Canada and Australia, and had gone through the legal procedures of application for Lithuanian citizenship. Some of them had returned to spend their last days in their homeland; others had aspirations to help their homeland, and participated in social and professional activities there. There were also those who established their private businesses there. Lithuanian Polish Communities in Salcininkai and Eisiskes Lithuanian Poles are local people of East Lithuania who live in Vilnius, Salcininkai and some other regions. It is a unique ethnic group in Lithuania, in the sense that they are people of native origin living compactly in a geographical territory in east and southeast Lithuania, close to the Byelorussian border. This is a territory the administrative borders of which have changed several times during the course of history, including the period 1920–39, when the region was part of Poland.7 Another, more significant geopolitical aspect is the fact that Vilnius, the historical capital of Lithuania, is located within this territory. That is why the region is sometimes called the Vilnius District. The Second World War and the Soviet era brought significant changes to the region, both political and demographic. It was included into Lithuania in 1939 and 171,158 people were repatriated to Poland in 1944–47. People from all over the Soviet Union as well as from Lithuania settled in the area. The majority of them were from Byelorussia, while others were from Russia and other Soviet republics (Kalnius 1998). Russian schools were established there as part of the Soviet educational policy. Today, the majority of those people who consider themselves to be local by origin (that is, their parents and grandparents were born in or around the area) still consider themselves to be Poles, despite the fact that they speak Russian and live in Lithuanian territory. It is important to stress that the political challenges in Lithuania during the 1988–91 period not only inspired Lithuanian Poles to react towards particular laws and regulations related to ethnic issues, but also gave birth to ideas and actions related to various forms of autonomy for this east and southeast region of Lithuania. Ideas about autonomy varied from the so-called cultural (bilingualism in Lithuanian and Polish, and trilingualism in Lithuanian, Polish and Russian) to the political, with control over the territory and a separate constitution. It was also a time when the Lithuanian Polish community began to organize politically. The Association of Lithuanian Poles was established in 1989 and later participated in elections as a political party. I did field research in the small towns of Salcininkai and Eisiskes. The region around Salcininkai, which includes the small town of Eisiskes, is inhabited by 39,525

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people, of which 79.6 per cent consider themselves to be Poles.8 These two small towns are located in the south east of Lithuania and are approximately fifty kilometres from the capital, Vilnius. In Salcininkai and Eisiskes there are a few small enterprises, such as construction, sewing and food production. Small private farms are also a source of family income for many people. However, the rate of unemployment there is one of the highest in Lithuania. The majority of my interviewees were unemployed or partly unemployed. I observed that the middle generation felt themselves not to be integrated into Lithuanian society. One woman told me that they could not become an integral part of Lithuania when they are not able even to watch the television because the programmes are in Lithuanian. However, the younger generation, who know the Lithuanian language, and who attend Lithuanian schools or study at universities in Lithuania or in Poland, feel more comfortable. The social life of people living in this region is closely related to the locality and is organized through kin networks. People’s relatives live nearby and nobody reported that they have kinsfolk in other places in Lithuania. However, it appeared that almost all of them have relatives in Poland. Although their contacts with Polish relatives were strong in Soviet times, today only a few visit their kin in Poland.

A Place to Belong: Name and Origin, Filiation and Inscription among Lithuanian Poles Name and Origin National activists and intellectuals of both Lithuanian and Lithuanian Polish identity presented opinions and various arguments in the printed press that aimed to establish or undermine the historical, political and cultural claims of Lithuanian Poles to control of the territory they lived in. In this rhetoric on contested identities, I consider the very name of the group as the first point in the debate. The newspapers presented several variations: ‘Poles’, ‘Lithuanian Poles’, ‘Slavs’ and ‘tuteisi’ (which can be loosely translated as ‘natives’ or ‘people who are from here’, from the Polish word for ‘here’). There were also names which implied a hybrid character for the group: ‘Polish-speaking Lithuanians’, ‘Polonized Lithuanians’, ‘Polonized Byelorussians’, ‘Soviet Polish’ and ‘PolishRussian speakers’. I even found the interpretation that this was an ethnic group that had recently lost its ethnic identity and was ‘a re-emerging ethnos in the process of formation’.9 Such an interest in the name of the group is important in these debates because it was often a strategic ploy by Lithuanians to claim that the people living in this particular territory had no proper ‘ethnic properties’ and at best were just ‘local people’ with various, mainly hybrid, ‘ethnic properties’. Lithuanian Poles have argued this a different way, by filling in the ethnic substance in the name of the group: for example, describing them as ‘Polish ethnics living in southern Lithuania’. However, even when naming the group in ethnic terms, the aspect of locality is preserved. This aspect of locality was most evident in the debates over the notion of tuteisi: ‘We could not treat Poles living in Lithuania, Ukraine and Byelorussia as part

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of Polonia. Those people did not come from anywhere, they have their roots there. They are natives [sa tutejszie]’.10 The usage of a local name seems to be problematic at a strategic level. Lithuanian Poles themselves use the name with the meaning ‘local’ and this is met with disagreement when Lithuanians use the same name. Both groups, Lithuanian Poles and Lithuanians, are using the names to show the aspect of origin of this particular ethnic group. But the difference is that Lithuanians are trying to argue the local nature of this group without emphasizing ‘Polishness’, while Lithuanian Poles insist on the idea that this is a Polish community which has some local features. This is the reason why the naming of Lithuanian Poles as tuteisi by Lithuanians resulted in a strong reaction from Poles in Poland. The chairman of the Society of Grodno and Vilnius Fellows, which was established in Poland in 1989, was the first to sign the Memorandum Concerning the Situation of Poles in Lithuania. This Memorandum, addressed to the authorities of Poland, to the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations and to the European Council in Strasbourg, stated that Lithuania has no legal rights to the Vilnius District.11 The category tuteisi was mentioned as evidence of the Lithuanian attempt to argue that Lithuanian Poles were not Poles in origin: ‘The Lithuanian government recently discovered among Polish residents two new ethnic groups – “tuteisi” (“native”), as opposed to “Poles”, and “vicius” – people whom they define according to the surname suffix “vic”’.12 As seen in the press, Lithuanians attempted to argue that tuteisi is not a term of their invention. An article with the title, ‘Who Are Those “Tuteisi”?’ says that the category of tuteisi appeared during the census taken during the period between the two world wars, when the Vilnius District was under Polish rule.13 It would seem that the use of the name tuteisi was influenced by the intention of Lithuanians to fit people who were living in this particular region of east and south east Lithuania into an identity different from Poles. I would point out that even Poles in Poland, who consider the Lithuanian Poles to be Polish, agreed that this group is, to some extent, different, and the difference was the result of their having lived in Lithuania for a long time. Lithuanians, in turn, by using the name tuteisi created a space for the process of ethnic fragmentation, fixing identity within more than a single group. These debates on naming and varied ways of fixing identity were framed by the interpretations of the identities of people in this region as border identities. The name of the group was not the only aspect debated about the origin of Lithuanian Poles. Academic research, such as linguistic, historical and archaeological studies by Lithuanian, Polish and Russian scientists, as well as historical annals, data from historical demographic studies and statistics, were utilized as arguments too.14 These arguments focused on exposing the aspect of native origin. It seems that in debating the identity of people living in this area and in attempts to argue whether they were ‘true’ or ‘not true’ Poles, their origin was a significant factor for both sides. The main point, however, was not the origin of the group, but in what was happening around it, how it was constructed and what implications it held. In this context, ideas on origin were significant ones. Mostly the ‘evidence’ of origin were historical arguments and the surnames of individual people, which were differently structured by Lithuanian Poles and Lithuanians.

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One of the ideas utilized by both Lithuanians and Poles about the historical origin of Poles in this particular territory was based on a historical fact from the annals. According to this, Poles living there were the descendants of prisoners of war of the Lithuanian Grand Dukes during the Middle Ages.15 The Lithuanians followed this with another argument – that autochthones of Lithuania and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were Lithuanians and Byelorussians, who had lived there for 2,000 years, but not Poles.16 To authenticate this, historical demographic data were added.17 Poles, on the other hand, argued that Lithuanians were not the first inhabitants in this territory and have no privileged claim to the region. According to linguistic research, the first inhabitants were Finno-Ugric tribes, and the Balts came after them. The first Slavic tribes in the present Lithuanian territory appeared in the sixth century. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, they had grown into a majority in the Vilnius District.18 The newspapers had many expressions of the opinion that Poles were an ethnic majority in this region and had been living there for ages.19 Alongside the ideas about origins went the arguments based on individual ethnic identity according to surnames. Personal data were used not in relation to individual cases, but as part of arguments covering the identification of an entire group, which were also in close relationship with the notion of origin of the group. For example, a Polish newspaper wrote: ‘A church, which was burnt in 1982, was 193 years old, and it had a cemetery nearby. Could you find even one Lithuanian surname on the old gravestones? No!’20 Lithuanians, on their part, questioned this argument based on surnames. They presented a thesis about how the Polish surnames in this region appeared, emphasizing the aspect of translation from Lithuanian into Polish, and rewriting names in the Polish style.21 The difference between Polish and Lithuanian surnames was only in a suffix – vicius, which is a common Polish ending. However, the essence here is not only a particular linguistic feature of language, but one of the criteria of ethnic identity. Another way to deconstruct the Polish origins of surnames was the use of translation. The examples presented in articles used arguments such as this: the surname Wrublewski was actually the translation of the Lithuanian surname Zvirblis, which means sparrow.22 Thus the fixing of identity by surnames as a valuable argument in the search for ethnic identities was questioned, placing them in the context of different languages. Thus ideas about surnames and origin were used for the same purpose: to legitimize or deny the ‘true’ origin of the group. Significant here is the absence of the individual level when debating personal surnames which are then made to appear as the property of the whole group. Allied to surname and origin, there were two further items in the construction of identity: language and religion. An article titled ‘Poles as Seen by a Lithuanian’ says that: ‘In the Vilnius District there are no Poles, only “tuteisi”, who speak in a dialect akin to Polish.’23 I observed that interpretations of the language spoken by the Lithuanian Poles appeared to be the most sensitive argument in undermining their fixed identification as Poles. Particular stress was laid on explanations of its difference from ‘pure’ Polish. For example, the Lithuanian side, even on the official level,

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presented the idea that Lithuanian Poles in the region spoke a ‘local mixed language’ (known as po prostu, which means simple, ordinary, plain).24 It is evident that hybrid properties were implied by this terminology.25 The nuances of debates about the distinctiveness of this language lie in its interpretation by Lithuanians as a hybrid, mixed language and its interpretation by the Poles as a local dialect of the Polish language, defined only by quantitative (not qualitative) properties.26 There is one more aspect to the discussion of language identity. Some people living in this region, particularly the younger generation, were Russian speakers. They often selfidentified by saying, ‘We are Poles, but often we are Russian-speaking Poles’.27 In such cases the idea of language as a criterion for ethnic classification becomes void. According to my research, the criterion of national consciousness was employed instead.28 However, the criterion of national consciousness, which actually meant ethnic self-identification, was not conceptually developed and thus did not play any significant role in the debate over identity. In some cases, another criterion, that of religion, appears in defining the ethnicity of Lithuanian Poles. It appears that language and religion are on the same level as ethnic markers.29 I would like to stress that the aspect of religiousness, and membership of the Catholic Church, were utilized in the debates not only in developing ideas on classificatory criteria, but also in introducing ideas about the origin of Lithuanian Poles.30 The people I spoke with in the communities presented understandings about ethnicity that were different in some ways from that in the periodicals, but in most cases these commentaries were more variants on a theme than opposite ways of understanding ethnic belonging. Filiation and Inscription: Everyday Discourse among Lithuanian Poles It was observed that, in the newspaper debates, language was a component used to claim and deny ethnic belonging. The perceived ‘purity’ of language was mainly involved in those debates and, for the commentators, it was clear that ‘language differences signify categories of person defined by ethnic or national origin and that these categories are opposed to each other. People act in ways that are taken as “having” a language, which is equated to “belonging” to origin group’ (Urciuoli 1995: 525). During my fieldwork in the community of Lithuanian Poles, I found the situation to be quite different. In most cases, the people I talked with did not speak Polish as it is spoken in Poland. They spoke po prostu, a mixture of Polish, Byelorussian and Lithuanian, although some people defined it as a Polish dialect. One retired woman made a point of saying that all the people in Salcininkai speak po prostu: Do all the people in Salcininkai speak po prostu? Po prostu. The Russians as well as the Poles? The Russians, the Poles, the Lithuanians – everyone speaks the one language. And they all understand one another – the Pole, the Russian, the Lithuanian. Everybody speaks the same language here.

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They did not consider the language of po prostu an ‘ethnic’ language, but rather as a means of communication, or an ‘interethnic’ language. Po prostu is closely related to the name of local people – tuteisi. Neither the language nor the classification of the people as local are considered to be ethnic markers there. A middle-aged man who was living in the same house as his parents and grandparents explained that a tuteisi was simply an indigenous inhabitant of the area. But it doesn’t mean the same as a Pole? He can be a Pole. He can be a Byelorussian, he can be a Lithuanian – someone who was born here, who lives here. The name tuteisi is generally used to describe people who live in that particular territory, speak the language of that territory, and, judging from the fieldwork results, it may be applied to Poles, Russians and Lithuanians alike. The same man explained that ethnicity is completely different from that notion of tuteisi: ‘[I]f you’re Lithuanian, you’ll always remain a Lithuanian, no matter where you are.’ According to him, ethnicity does not depend on the place of residence. This position was quite different from the one set forth in the media discourse. Thus we must ask the question: what constitutes a person’s ‘Polishness’, if it does not depend on language or place of residence? In the words of one woman: Is it really necessary to know Polish? No, not really. If, for instance, I grew up in Russia, I would write down as a Pole, though I spoke no Polish. In that case, what makes a person a Pole, a Russian, a Lithuanian? If his grandfather, great-grandfather – all of them were Polish. But then, if he (a person) found himself in an area where no one spoke Polish, if his parents didn’t teach him Polish, of course he won’t be able to speak it. So he’s Polish because his father, his grandfather were Polish? Yes, the roots are in the family. Just like a tree – the roots. His grandfather was Polish, his great-grandfather was Polish – and so it goes, farther and farther back. If he’s Polish but, for example, lives somewhere in the middle of Lithuania, then he won’t know any Polish. Unless he learns it at home. He goes to a Lithuanian school, his native language is Lithuanian. But he is Polish? He is Polish because his grandfather, his great-grandfather were Polish – he is Polish. But his native language can be anything, depending on where he lives. Here a person’s ethnic belonging is confirmed through filiation, and ethnicity is being transmitted from one generation to another. Such thinking, that ethnicity is passed through the filiation and based on ‘roots’, is very common among the Lithuanian Poles I met. One can live anywhere, but if one’s parents are Poles, if one’s grandparents are Poles, it follows that one is a Pole. Grandparents and parents thus constitute the ‘physical’ body of a person’s ethnicity, which people call ‘roots’. In

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many cases people named themselves as ‘rooted’ (коренные in Russian) and ‘roots’ seem to be a significant part of their identity. As evidence for defining who they were, and why they were ‘rooted’, people presented concrete persons whom they knew, such as their parents, or grandparents: Why do you consider yourself a Pole? It’s always been like that – my parents were Poles, and I am too, and that’s all there is to that. Do you know your family history, where your kindred come from? I know everything – they were ‘rooted’ Poles [коренные поляки]. What does ‘rooted’ [коренные] mean? Well, the ‘roots’ are Polish. My father, my grandmother, my mother – everyone was Polish. How do you know that? I know because they’re dead, and the headstones are there. We’ve been visiting them since we were children. Were they born in Poland? They were born here. … So why are they ‘rooted’ [коренные]? Well, you know, they were born Polish. Their ancestors were Poles. Such thinking ignored any aspect of constructed ethnicity through culturally distinctive components which establish ethnically meaningful differences and sameness for a group. One man from Salcininkai gave a curt answer to my question, ‘What elements constitute ethnicity?’: ‘What kind of elements can there be? You die the same kind of person as you were born – and that’s all.’ The concept of ethnicity as an ‘inherited’ feature was not the same with all my interviewees in the Lithuanian Polish community. I met a man in his forties whose idea of his identity included his passport information: Why do you consider yourself a Pole? I don’t consider myself a Pole. Nationality – yes, I’m Polish, and there is a stamp saying so in my passport. But I consider myself a Lithuanian citizen. The aspect of fixing ethnicity through the inscription in a passport involves two components – bureaucracy and personal experience. Garcelon describes the Soviet internal passport as a handy compendium of biographical information of their holders available for on-the-spot inspection by Party–State administrators and local police officials. Beyond ‘class background’ as a ‘worker’, ‘bourgeois’, ‘landlord’, ‘peasant’, or ‘intellectual’, one of over a hundred official nationality designations was to be entered in each passport. Designation of social status and nationality were permanent and irrevocable; in the case of nationality only children of mixed

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marriages had a choice, between the nationality of either parent, and only once in life – at the age of sixteen. (Garcelon 2001: 96) The Soviet Union was divided into fifteen Republics each bearing the name of the particular national group. Theoretically, these states were given wide autonomy. For the most part, the autonomy was just a constitutional fiction, though such division did help to protect and cultivate national languages and cultures. But this ethnoterritorial federalism was a distinct system of personal nationality (Brubaker 1994: 53). This personal nationality can be defined as ethnic nationality, for it was not simply a statistical category. Rather, it was ‘an obligatory and mainly ascriptive legal category, a key element of an individual’s legal status. As such, it was registered in internal passports and other personal documents, transmitted by descent’ (ibid.). It is important to stress that personal nationality was an autonomous classification scheme, based on descent, not on residence – it did not have a territorial component. My argument here is that although those divisions of citizenship and nationality existed on a legal and administrative level, they influenced to some degree the popular understanding of ethnicity as an inborn feature ‘inherited’ by descent. The idea that ethnicity is transmitted through generations is partly a result of the state’s homogenizing project. The role of passport inscription as fixing ethnic belonging is crucial: the record of nationality in the passport is protected by bureaucratic procedures and legal regulations, and is not easily changeable. The interviews indicate that the inscription generates how a person identifies himself and how he is perceived by others. Thus the inscription becomes an individual’s ‘objective’ property. What if the area where a Pole lives is Lithuanian, where everyone speaks Lithuanian, and he never learns to speak Polish – is he still a Pole? Depends on what they write [in his passport] … If it’s written that he’s Lithuanian – he’ll be a Lithuanian, if they write that he’s Polish – he’ll be a Pole. It seems, judging from the interviews, that such inscription of ethnicity is ‘inherited’ by descent in the same way as understanding that ethnicity is transmitted from parents and grandparents. If, for example, a person’s parents are Poles, and are designated in their passports as Poles, it means that according to the Soviet legal system that person is automatically given the inscription ‘Pole’ in his/her passport. That is to say, a person is given a fixed ethnic belonging and it is not up to him/her to change it. Such choice is only available to the children of mixed marriages. As one woman from Salcininkai told me about her sister’s daughter who was married to a Lithuanian man: What if your sister had married a Pole? What would their children be? Their children speak both, Polish and Lithuanian. But what nationality are they? They are written down as Poles.

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It can be deduced from the answers to my questions that an inscription of a person’s ethnic belonging is later understood as the property of that person. It is not a language or ‘culture’ that makes somebody a Pole or a Lithuanian, but an inscription. A man with whom I spoke explained: How does a child choose his nationality when his father is Lithuanian? I don’t understand how there can be a choice. It was before. It’s not his to make. But if one [parent] is Russian, the other – Polish? How it is written down? Depends on what the father is. Nobody asks the child to choose when he’s little. When the stamp from the passport is gone – then he’ll be able to make his choice. He seemed to be surprised at my question on choosing one’s ethnicity. Even in the case of mixed marriages choice was limited. Although the Soviet system allowed persons from mixed marriages to choose the nationality of either the father or the mother, it was quite common that a son inherited his father’s ethnicity, while a daughter took her mother’s. There is one other aspect which appears in the interviews – that of the instability of such apparent fixity. On the one hand, a man sees the inscription as a rigid position, but on the other, he stresses that this type of defining of ethnicity would disappear if the system of passport inscription were eliminated. To sum up, in the ‘settlement’ of the territory the main cultural items centred around the notion of origin, which included the name of the group, individual surnames, and historical data. Cultural components such as language and religion were employed in the debates about origin as well. Such ‘evidence’ was used by Lithuanian Poles as a means to prove their territorial claims to the area in which they lived; and were also used by Lithuanians to question such claims. This follows Alonso, when she speaks about the state’s strategies of spatialization. By this she means that ethnic differentiation can be constructed according to location within national territory by a notion of ‘boundaries that differentiate inside from outside in absolute terms. These boundaries are often imagined through tropes of differential origin according to place’ (Alonso 1994: 395). I would argue that the debates in the periodicals were using such spatialization strategies, which emphasized territory by substantializing the soil and construing residence on the soil as a quasi-natural part of the people. What is evident from this material is the ambiguity of any division between idioms of nature and culture in thinking about ethnic identity for Lithuanian Poles. The question of origin is central and this is construed as a cultural–natural construct in which place of birth, place of upbringing (the soil), religion, language and ancestry (reckoned as much through bureaucratic inscription as through kinship ties) all work together to construct contested ideas of authentic origin. There is a trafficking between idioms of nature and culture.

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A Family to Belong to: Lineage and ‘Inherited Culture’ among Émigré Lithuanians Lineage Emigrant Lithuanians reckoned their identity differently from Lithuanian Poles. Emigrant Lithuanians formed a community without a territory, in the sense that they lived far away from Lithuania. It is apparent that, in the public discussions of 1988–91, the notion of territory was absent. The idea of Lithuanian ethnicity was constructed to show that common territory was not a significant factor in defining ethnicity. Instead, the idea of family was explored as a social space where ethnic identity could be grounded. This community of emigrant Lithuanians thus might be thought of as a community of family. In the press, I found an important criterion for categorizing people was that of Lithuanian lineage. In some articles it is juxtaposed closely with notion of common consciousness: ‘The Lithuanian nation consists of people with a common consciousness and of Lithuanian descent.’31 But what aspects and ideas did the idea of Lithuanian lineage reflect? Looking at the Lithuanian Charter, we find ideas of ethnic belonging related to family: ‘Family is the vitality of a nation. Lithuanians establish Lithuanian families’; ‘A Lithuanian passes the life-blood of the Lithuanian nation, preserved by his parents, to future generations so that we would not cease to exist’.32 Such emphasis on family as the fundamental social institution, as the agency of the nation’s vitality, consequently goes hand in hand with the perception of nationality as an inherited trait. ‘We were born Lithuanians, we must continue to be Lithuanians’; ‘A nation is a primordial community of human beings’.33 I observed the relationship between Lithuanian lineage and family and their function as classificatory criteria in individual cases as well. For example, a Lithuanian emigrant, in his letter to the editors, used his personal example in the article, ‘Who Is a “True” Lithuanian?’ He wrote: There is an opinion that true Lithuanians are those who lived, struggled, suffered during the 50 years of occupation. … I was born in Germany during the first years following the Second World War. My parents told me that they were Lithuanians, that I too was Lithuanian, though we did not live in Lithuania. I told my children the same. But it would seem that to many indigenous Lithuanians not only I and my children, but my parents and their entire generation, born and nurtured in Lithuania, are not ‘true’ Lithuanians.34 As seen from this letter, the construction of Lithuanian identity based on family descent and kinship is opposed to another concept, based on common fate and life in a common territory during the period of Soviet occupation. There is a further aspect, which follows from the criterion of lineage. There are some cases where the notion of Lithuanian descent and family is ‘enlarged’ by the

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metaphor of ‘blood’ and ‘blood kinship’. For example, ‘[t]he essence of being Lithuanian is Lithuanian lineage, blood kinship’,35 or ‘[h]ere in Eastern Europe the sanguineous (blood) criterion more often prevails over that of the actual place of birth’.36 I assume that biological metaphors of ‘blood’ in these cases are images functioning on a symbolic level. They are literary phrases and metaphors, denoting the type of kinship and its normative aspect, as of jus sanguinis in a traditional normative understanding. The main task of emigrant Lithuanians was the preservation of the identity of the Lithuanian family. Among emigrant Lithuanians, special attention was paid, in the majority of publications, to language. It was often added to the other cultural categories, such as customs, traditions and character.37 Of those, language was seen to be the most significant basis of ethnic solidarity, creating links between members of a community. Its particular role was defined in the Lithuanian Charter: ‘Language is the strongest link of a national community. To a Lithuanian, the Lithuanian language is his national pride.’38 This aspect of essentializing the Lithuanian language had an historical precedent in the National Revival movement of the 1880s–1910s. It is important to stress that the criteria of language and culture were utilized for conceptualizing the identities of Lithuanians among both groups – Lithuanians in exile and Lithuanians in Lithuania. ‘Inherited culture’ In the press, it was clear that Lithuanian lineage and language were seen as key criteria by those writing articles and letters. The notion of Lithuanian lineage, in the context of the emigrant Lithuanians, was used to motivate their inner solidarity and as argument that they were an organic part of all Lithuanians, the world over. But in the course of my field studies amongst emigrant Lithuanians I found quite different arguments about what it meant to be a Lithuanian. I interviewed a retired man in his sixties who had previously lived in Australia and now spends most of his time in Vilnius. I asked him what it meant to be Lithuanian: ‘You grow into a cultural environment, maybe this is the most important thing. Anglo-Saxons, for example, don’t have such an understanding of ethnicity – they see ethnicity along with citizenship.’ In his account, he later used the term ‘inheritance’. His understanding of inheritance was based on the transmission of cultural items and on the nurturing of a person as the main components for constructing and preserving ethnic belonging. Maybe this is an inheritance from the parents, everything is inherited: customs, even religion. What exactly is inherited from parents? Customs, language – that determine why you are Lithuanian. In this and other interviews, the naming of a cultural environment of ‘Lithuanianness’ as a key aspect of nurture appeared to be a crucial basis for ethnicity. This can be compared with Katharine Tyler’s discussion of mixed-race identity, in

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which she proposes that cultural traditions which include foods, music, language and religious beliefs may ‘embody a deep, naturalised and permanent sense of being black’ (Tyler 2002; see also Tyler 2005). As we can see from the above example, this man puts together Lithuanianness and nurture at the same time as he eliminates nature (genes) as having nothing to do with Lithuanianness: What does it mean to be Lithuanian? Lithuanianness – that is. … I think it is not genes that determine a person’s ethnicity but the nurture of that person. I remember from the interwar period a black skinned Lithuanian child. He was a proper Lithuanian. One famous scientist adopted him. What genes could it be? No genes at all. How could you know that he was a Lithuanian? He was adopted and grew up in the Lithuanian family. This is the same as a duck that brings up a chicken and it tries to follow its supposed mother into the water. Another ethnographic example questions biology in defining ethnic belonging. A person who formerly lived in the U.S.A. and now runs his own business in Lithuania described Lithuanianness as follows: There is … Zemkalnis39 – you couldn’t find a more passionate Lithuanian. They are Germans in origin but I don’t think anyone would doubt their Lithuanianness. Their past is not Lithuanian. In general, there are no sanguineous Lithuanians. They are constantly mixing, they live here and Lithuanianness is absorbed and passed somehow from one to another. For this informant, Lithuanianness is based on the sharing of culture. As some authors have pointed out before, emigrant Lithuanians and especially the second wave of American Lithuanians (who emigrated for political reasons) have valorized the notion of culture: ‘Lithuanian culture was and is a firm value and many of them contribute to it by devoting their private lives to a great range of Lithuanian cultural projects and practices’ (Ciubrinskas 2004: 59). The importance of Lithuanian culture was even supported by the U.S. government as part of a policy of nonrecognition of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States. This ‘gave political motivation for Lithuanian culture in the US to become one more of many ethnic cultures within the “American dream”, and to acquire a “public” and “prestigious” image’ (ibid.: 59). To sum up: in discussions of Lithuanian identity in the printed press the criteria of Lithuanian lineage and language were established as central. But in interviews with emigrant Lithuanians in Lithuania it appeared that Lithuanian lineage as described in the newspapers was not the main constitutive element of ethnic belonging. For my interviewees, Lithuanian lineage was a route along which cultural items such as customs, language and religion were passed. Some authors have already argued that emigrant Lithuanians maintain a strongly primordial ethnic identity

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(Kelly 2000). I would add that this primordial identity seems to involve interwoven conceptions of culture and nature, in which there are no clear boundaries between the two. Family and lineage are involved in transmission of ‘blood’ and kinship but also language and culture. In that sense, ideas of nature and culture are inextricably entwined.

Conclusions Clifford Geertz described a ‘primordial attachment’ as follows: By a primordial attachment is meant one that stems from the ‘givens’ – or, more precisely, as culture is inevitably involved in such matters, the assumed ‘givens’ – of social existence: immediate contiguity and kin connection mainly, but beyond them the givenness that stems from being born into a particular religious community, speaking a particular language, or even a dialect of a language, and following particular social practices. These congruities of blood, speech, custom, and so on, are seen to have an ineffable, and at times overpowering, coerciveness in and for themselves. One is bound to one’s kinsman, one’s neighbour, one’s fellow believer, ipso facto; as the result not merely of personal affection, practical necessity, common interest, or incurred obligation, but at least in great part by virtue of some unaccountable absolute import attributed to the very tie itself. (Geertz 1973: 259) Here ‘primordial attachment’ is based on a relation or tie in which both nature and culture operate. Thus nature and culture become interwoven, culture becomes substantialized and naturalized, while nature becomes culturalized. The ethnographic data I have presented in this article show the use of ideas of ‘primordial attachment’ which are, in Descola’s words, ‘objectified properties of social practices … which help to subsume the diversity of real life under a basic set of categories of relation’ (Descola 1996: 87). The categories of relation I have discussed seem to involve both nature and culture and seem to challenge a simple distinction between nature and culture. National activists and intellectuals among emigrant Lithuanians, Lithuanians and Lithuanian Poles presented opinions and various arguments in the printed press which aimed to establish or undermine historical, political and cultural claims about Lithuanian identity. The strategic politics of Lithuanian Poles and emigrant Lithuanians in this intellectual discourse were, in the case of Lithuanian Poles, oriented towards their control of the territory they lived in; and, in the case of emigrant Lithuanians, being seen as equal to all other Lithuanians and an integral part of Lithuania. The two groups of intellectuals were different in the sense that Lithuanian Poles based their identity on the territory in which they lived, while the diasporic emigrant Lithuanians were structuring their ethnic identity through the family as the key transmitter of ‘blood’ and culture.

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The ordinary people from the two communities sometimes seemed to present a different understanding of ethnic belonging from that observed in the printed press. However, I would argue that the everyday and the intellectual discourses are more variants on a theme than they are opposite ways of approaching ethnic belonging. For the Lithuanian Poles, whether intellectual or not, questions of origin are central and origin is seen as a cultural–natural inheritance operating through residence, surname, language and religion, or through filiation. The debates in the press emphasized territory, but made place and the soil into elements which shaped the constitution of persons and construed residence on the soil into a quasi-natural part of the people. The discourse of members of the Lithuanian Polish community was clearly about filiation, but this was a hybrid of genealogical descent and bureaucratic inscription. How someone was ‘written down’ in his or her passport was as important as the reckoning of real kinship links. Hence this understanding of filiation itself trafficked between idioms of nature and culture. For emigrant Lithuanians, the notion of origins was vital too. In the press debates, descent was seen as the key to origin, but culture and consciousness were also important. Everyday discourse focused more on culture, language and Lithuanian activity and less on descent, with some indications of an explicit rejection of genetically determinist explanations. But culture and language were seen as being transmitted by the family, and inserting ideas about the transmission of culture and language into a discourse about family and kinship indicates that idioms of nature and culture are being interwoven in defining ethnic belonging. In both cases, of Lithuanian Poles and emigrant Lithuanians, the role of family as a mediator between nature and culture is crucial. The family acts as the ‘normal’ means for the transmission of elements seen as natural and as cultural and it is therefore easy to blur the boundaries between the two when talking about connections, relatedness, belonging and inheritance.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Auksuole Cepaitiene and Peter Wade for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

A movement which was established in 1988 for the democratization of society. In some cases I studied the newspapers until 1993 as there was a clear continuity to themes which had been under discussion in 1988–91. Atgimimas, 15 October 1988. The Lithuanian language was used mainly in the educational system, cultural activities and the mass media. Atgimimas, 15 October 1988; Atgimimas, 20 January 1989. Pasaulio Lietuvis, May 1993. For two hundred years, from the end of the eighteenth century till the end of the twentieth century, with a few brief exceptions, the southeastern part of Lithuania was not

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

Darius Dauksˇas a part of the Lithuanian republic (Kalnius 1998: 32). On the other hand, the fact of being a part of the Lithuanian Grand Duchy until the end of the eighteenth century was also significant in this respect. Lietuvos apskritys: ekonomine ir socialine raida (Vilnius: Statistikos centras, 2000), p. 16. Atgimimas, 5–12 December 1990. Czerwony Sztandar, 29 January 1989. Atgimimas, 28 November–5 December 1990. Ibid. ‘In the press of the 1920s there were numerous articles about “tuteisi”, many of who are still living in Polesia. Their stubborn resistance to Russification and Polonization was reflected in the census taken during the Pilsudski occupation. A category for “tuteisi” was conceived in the statistical forms – not by contemporary census officers in Vilnius, but by the statisticians of the J. Pilsudski era’ (Atgimimas, 20 January 1989). Political correctness was a particular feature defining the construction of these arguments. For example, in many cases Poles based their opinions on studies by Lithuanian linguists, and Lithuanians, in turn, used the demographic statistics of the Polish state. Atgimimas, 20 January 1989. Ibid. Atgimimas, 21 April 1989. Czerwony Sztandar, 25 January 1990. Czerwony Sztandar, 4 August 1988. In the debates on origin, the historically determined social images of Lithuanian and Polish ethnic groups – Polish as ‘a nation of nobles’ and Lithuanians as peasants – were used by Lithuanians to deconstruct the idea of Lithuanian Poles as autochthones of this region. It was said that ‘from the time of the Liublin Union [sixteenth century] the gentry of Lithuania and Poland – “The Nobles’ Nation” – were co-mingling, intermarrying among themselves, but the peasantry – the serfs – led a settled, entrenched existence’ (Atgimimas, 20 January 1989). According to such an interpretation, only the nobles can be Polish by descent. However, the region of east and southeast Lithuania was a region of farmers. It was stressed that there was no historical evidence of a large movement of Polish peasants into Lithuanian territory (Atgimimas, 20 January 1989). Czerwony Sztandar, 15 February 1989. One article said: ‘We cannot blame the Lithuanian serfs of the seventeenth, eighteenth or even the nineteenth centuries when they, being ignorant and untutored, did not manifest any national consciousness or determination and raised no protest when a Polish landlord forced someone named Stulgis to become “Stulginskis”, or when a Polonised priest, baptising Balsys’ son, wrote “Balsevicius” instead of “Balsys” (Lietuvos aidas, 13 November 1990). Lietuvos aidas, 13 November 1990. Atgimimas, 21 April 1989. Atgimimas, 28 July 1993. Close to this interpretation, I found other related ideas: for example, that the language of the Vilnius District is a language of Lithuanians who speak Polish, or even a Slavonic language (Czerwony sztandar, 23 January 1990; Atgimimas, 7–14 November 1990). It is important to stress that the Poles, by insisting that it was not a new language but an ancient dialect, placed it into the group of many Polish dialects, saying that there were no qualitative properties defining this language (Czerwony sztandar, 23 January 1990). Czerwony sztandar, 9 January 1990.

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28. ‘Outside the church, old women talked with us in Polish. Quite decent Polish. They told us that their children did not speak Polish as well as they. And the grandchildren speak only Russian. So are they Russians? Not Russians – Poles! And here once again: national consciousness – Polish; the spoken language – Russian’ (Czerwony sztandar, 9 January 1990). 29. For example, one article said: ‘Opinion about Polish religiousness and Catholicism are widespread. It is an integral component of Polishness. But how does it withstand a quick shift of Poles towards speaking the Russian language?’ (Atgimimas, 20 January 1989). 30. Atgimimas, 20 January 1989. 31. Atgimimas, 30 June 1993. 32. Pasaulio lietuvis, May 1993. 33. Ibid. 34. Atgimimas, 23 February 1993. 35. Pasaulio Lietuvis, October 1993. 36. Atgimimas, 10 November 1993. 37. ‘The sustenance of national identity, among those Lithuanians living outside Lithuania, is based on the Lithuanian language, character, culture, customs, traditions’ (Pasaulio lietuvis, November 1992). 38. Pasaulio lietuvis, November 1992. Or another example: ‘The cornerstone for national survival, whether in one’s native land or in exile, is language. All scientifically based theories show that a member of any given nation loses his national awareness when he forgets his native tongue. We, Lithuanians in exile, are not exceptions to this theory’ (Pasaulio lietuvis, May 1992). 39. The name of the Representative of the World Lithuanian Community in Lithuania.

References Alonso, A.M. 1994. ‘The Politics of Space, Time and Space: State Formation, Nationalism, and Ethnicity’, Annual Review of Anthropology 23: 379–405. Brubaker, R. 1994. ‘Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Post Soviet Eurasia: An Institutional Account’, Theory and Society 23(1): 47–78. Ciubrinskas, V. 2004. ‘Transnational Identity and Heritage: Lithuania Imagined, Constructed and Contested’, in U. Kockel and M. Nic Craith (eds), Communicating Cultures. Münster: Lit Verlag, pp. 42–66. Descola, P. 1996. ‘Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice’, in P. Descola and G. Pálsson (eds), Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 82–102. Descola, P. and G. Pálsson (eds). 1996. Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. Eriksen, T.H. 1991. ‘The Cultural Contexts of Ethnic Differences’, Man 26(1): 127–44. ———. 2000. ‘Ethnicity and Culture – A Second Look’, in R. Bendix and H. Roodenburg (eds), Managing Ethnicity. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis Publishers, pp. 185–205. ———. 2004. ‘Place, Kinship and the Case for Non-ethnic Nations’, Nations and Nationalism 10(1/2): 49–62. Garcelon, M. 2001. ‘Colonizing the Subject: The Genealogy an Legacy of the Soviet Internal Passport’, in J. Caplan and J. Torpey (eds), Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 83–100.

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Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Juska, A. 1999. ‘Ethno-Political Transformation in the States of the Former USSR’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(3): 524–53. Kalnius, P. 1998. Etniniai Procesai Pietryciu Lietuvoje XX A. Antrojoje Puseje. Vilnius: Zara. Kasatkina, N. and T. Leoncikas. 2003. Lietuvos Etniniu Grupiu Adaptacija: Kontekstas ir Eiga. Vilnius: Eugrimas. Kelly, M. 2000. ‘Ethnic Pilgrimages: People of Lithuanian Descent in Lithuania’, Sociological Spectrum 20(1): 65–91. Porqueres, E. 2001. ‘Le marriage qui dérange. Redefinition de l’identité nationale Basque’, Ethnologie Française 31(3): 527–36. Schneider, D. 1977. ‘Kinship, Nationality and Religion in American Culture: Toward a Definition of Kinship’, in J. Dolgin, D. Kemnitzer and D. Schneider (eds), Symbolic Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 63–71. Sinkevicius, V. 2002. Lietuvos Respublikos Pilietybe 1918–2001 Metais. Vilnius: Teisines Informacijos Centras. Tyler, K. 2002. ‘Race, Kinship and Genetics’. Paper presented at workshop: ‘Kinship, Personhood and PUG’. Vilnius, 26–30 June 2002. ———. 2005. ‘The Genealogical Imagination: The Inheritance of Interracial Identities’, Sociological Review 53(3): 476–94. Urciuoli, B. 1995. ‘Language and Borders’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 525–46. Wade, P. 1997. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto Press. Williams, B. 1989. ‘A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain’, Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 401–44. Wilson, T. and H. Donnan (eds). 2000. Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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8 Media Storylines of Culturally Hybrid Persons and Nation Ben Campbell

Introduction This chapter takes a complementary approach to the discussion, in my other chapter in this book, about regulatory framings for ethnic matching of donated gametes. Here the focus is on how the British media has found genetics newsworthy within stories about changing notions of identity; and how DNA is seen as offering added narrative value in relation to stories of race, ethnicity and nation. Instead of seeing race through public policy and ethical deliberation (which perpetuate raciological categories in avoiding mixture), the spotlight is now turned on accounts of the experiences of people whose situations call attention to the lived tensions and solidarities of being ‘mixed race’. This category became included for the first time among options for ethnic self-description in the U.K.’s 2001 census, and 1.31 per cent of the population identified themselves with this label.1 By looking at ‘mixed’ identities in ancestral tracings, in experiences of marriage and family, and in the eye of public visibility, I consider the ways in which media accounts are made of people relating to and creatively positioning themselves towards issues of mixed identity. The chapter reflects on narrative linkages between genes, persons and nation, in which life-histories are entangled with the attractions or allures of racial categorization. This is meant both in Gilroy’s (2000) sense of the ready-made structures race provides for simplistically ordering solidarities, and as a system of difference making that has been perpetuated by particular constructions of mixedrace sexuality, moving from miscegenation to defiant intimacies and tentatively towards normalization.

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The chapter examines a range of newspaper stories that featured themes of race, nation and genes. These were collected over a two-month period (February and March 2003) from U.K. newspapers selected from across the political spectrum, with some supplementary materials included. The argument is that, in these media stories, genetic knowledge is moved in tension with other sources of personal identity (e.g., ‘environmental’, ‘cultural’) and that its key feature for narrative making is the possibility of supplanting the influence of these other sources, such that genetic knowledge contributes to an idea of a ‘true self ’ that can be discovered beneath a superficial or socially constructed façade. However, it is not necessarily the case that genes provide the most compelling basis for a true self. By drawing from the work of Gilroy (2000) on ambiguities in racializing practices of body imagery in contemporary consumption, and Doniger (2005) on the plays of self and authenticity in mythological and contemporary cultural production, I argue that media stories about or using genes do so in recognizably mythological ways. These involve twists of ‘revelation’ which never end with clarity, but are trapped in a regressive binarism of surface representations pitted against concealed authenticity. I present the nation too as a territorializing masquerade that requires myths of belonging which draw on diverse and contradictory logics of claim to membership. These oscillate between the idea of primordial or bloodied connectedness and that of pragmatic coexistence. The chapter argues that narratives of personal life histories do not just underscore ‘malleable’ aspects of contemporary public understandings of race (Wade, this volume), but that the popular idea of genetics intensifies possibilities for cultivated ‘mythologies of self-imitation’ (Doniger 2005) that are at work at the levels of person, ethnicity and nation.

Motherland In his outline to historical changes in how the gaze of race has been constituted by visual and other means, Gilroy (2000: 45–48) identifies shifts from cranial ‘political anatomy’, to a focus on the scale of the skin (‘epidermalization’) and, in the era of nano-politics, to submolecular penetrations of the body, in ever-more microscopic searches for a truth to race. These shifts in scale are accompanied by further associated relationships of inside–outside polarity.2 Genetic knowledge pursues an inward momentum in making human difference visible, generating new questions about how the body is considered as partial and composite, and about the extent to which supposed symmetries of human social groups are affected by novel understandings of corporeality. How have stories of these inner explorations of hereditary lines been reported and overlain with interpretation? The BBC television documentary Motherland (14 February 2003) provoked widespread commentary in British newspapers. The film particularly challenged the certainties attaching to allegiances of colour among black people in British society. It followed the experiences of people who had participated in a genetic survey conducted by the University of Leicester, and emphasized the surprise of these people to discover a more mixed personal genetic heritage than they had imagined. In the

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Sunday Observer newspaper, an array of male celebrity faces in three rows was used to convey a sense of linear continuum between the poles of blackness and whiteness, with the England footballer Emile Heskey at one end, and the eccentric Conservative politician Boris Johnson at the other end. The article was entitled ‘Is Race only Skin Deep?’, and concentrated on the discovery that of the black men in the survey, 26 per cent were revealed to have white male ancestry shown in the tracing of their Y chromosomes. In the case of a Jamaican, Les Garrison, the article elaborated: ‘Somewhere in his distant family history, a white male had “helped” to conceive one of his ancestors – most probably a white slave-master who sired a child with a black slave’ (Observer, 9 February 2003, p. 20). On the African side of Garrison’s ancestry, certain genes were identified as originating from fifteen different ‘tribal’ groups. This fact ‘astounded and delighted him – for he believes studies like these will change the way black British people see themselves’. He interpreted the mixed results positively by suggesting that AfroCaribbeans need no longer feel ‘in limbo’ about their dual heritage: ‘It means that people like myself have a right to claim a heritage in this country and that this country has a clear responsibility to Afro-Caribbeans’ (Observer, 9 February 2003, p. 20). Here, the newspaper article’s intended message was that genetics can help people find out and settle issues of who they ‘really are’ as persons through knowledge of ancestral lines. (In the documentary, some participants in the study were taken back to genetic relatives in Africa, although the revealed complicity of African tribal elites with the slave trade gave a sinister twist to the affirmatory potential of African origin.)3 Simultaneously, the Observer article provided a national story that Britain’s history of settlement and the interactions of its peoples can be more definitively known by examining the distributions of Y chromosomes originating from longdead, white European males. The article claimed that the marked difference in Y chromosomes between the Welsh and the English (‘almost identical to those from Friesland’ in northern Germany) demonstrated that in early medieval times the Anglo-Saxon incomers’ genetic influence was widespread in the population, and not just restricted to the commercial and political elite. However, the Observer article warned against the idea that such understandings of people’s personal pasts, and the ‘familial surprises’ that are ‘revealed by the revolution in genetics’, are transformative and provide definitive accounts of an individual’s ancestry. The archaeologist Colin Renfrew was cited as arguing that, by looking only at direct lines of transmission through mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes, ‘you miss all the rest’, i.e., the greater multitude of bilateral ancestry. Further caution against oversimplifying views of ancestry and confusing ‘ethnicity’ (here meaning language and culture) with ‘racial make-up’ was given by Helen Wallace of the organization Genewatch U.K., pointing out the danger of attributing some diseases to genetic difference which might be due to factors like poverty. Such critiques begin to address how racialized personae can never be spoken for or explained by genes alone, and are made in the context of shifting cultural politics of difference. By implying that race is ‘only skin deep’ and that stories of genetic mixture complicate the lines of cultural allegiances which people take up within

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British society, the article uses genetics to deconstruct binary perceptions of categorical racial difference. The article implicitly validates ‘British’ identity as a de facto umbrella of modern inclusive diversity. Genetic arguments are used to back up or substantialize claims of immigrant communities to belong in British society, as their ancestral history can be seen as an outcome of Britain’s role in reshaping the territorial, sexual and economic relations of people under colonialism. However, the article does little to recognize the resilience of race as an organizing template beyond genetics, in moulding perceptions of the faces of inequality in modern society. Instead, it implies that in the cultural management of appearances by a notion of objective racial fact, intrinsic genetic pathways can be used to ground explanations of history and power. Rather than see different domains of truth in genetics and cultural history as separate perspectives, the power of their mutual tension can instead be understood as creating a dialectic between a true self and a presentational mask of identity. As the documentary successfully showed, even the fragmentary picture of genetic origin revealed by DNA testing had destabilizing effects on how individuals thought of themselves and the way they chose to locate the genetic information in their own self projecting identification with past and present African or European alignments. The genetic and cultural do not attach in paired correspondence to the truth/mask dyad and this opens a space of inventive practice in techniques of self-making, that pull genes and culture into ‘Möbius strip’ reversals of a front/back relationship, in which they incompletely contend for claims to be ‘the truth’.4 In the article devoted to the Motherland documentary in the Mail on Sunday, a more ‘knowing’ media play was made with the idea of people connecting to images of who they ‘really are’. The cover story of its review section had a banner title ‘I knew it, I’m really a Nubian Princess’. The article was written by Angela Johnson, a British Jamaican, but while a small photograph of her was put in the bottom lefthand corner, taking up four-fifths of the page was an Elizabeth Taylor-as-Cleopatra look-alike in truly inauthentic Hollywood costume. In small print the absurd caption read: ‘as she is now, left, and how one of her ancestors from the ancient land of Nubia might have looked’ (Mail on Sunday, 2 March 2003). As if the imagery of this report on a ‘science’ story was not already salacious enough, the article lead-in announced a DNA test to reveal Johnson’s genetic make-up, and ‘discovers an extraordinary tale of kidnap, slavery and rape’, tracing a movement from origins in northeast Africa to the Caribbean. Inside the article, behind the distracting glamour of its frontage, the surprises of DNA findings, such as that one black Caribbean man in the Motherland sample was shown to have Y chromosome genes originating in Germany, were mixed with cautions about the incompleteness of much ancestry testing. Here, the message was that people can find some information through genetics, to compensate for the erasure of language and oral sources of cultural transmission that happened under slavery, even if most black Britons will simply find results that point to a general West African origin. As a twist to the prevalent notion about the public understanding of genetics being characterized by a ‘knowledge deficit’, here it is not so much that the

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public does not grasp the genetics, as that genetics can substitute as socially relevant knowledge where lines of cultural transmission have been truncated. Yet the absurd idea given by the story’s picture montage, that genetic pathways will bring the seeker of African origins to discover a picture of herself as a Caucasian actress ‘passing’ for African royalty, contains the germ of truth, whether intended or not, that an authentic self is as elusive a quest as the possibility of identifying with a mask of one’s own or another’s making. If genetic stories of ancestry among ethnic minorities of Britain have provided accounts that challenge narratives of purity and stable populations of difference, in the Daily Mail the ethnic narrative of the British nation was given a prehistoric foundation with some selective genetic assistance. A story with the title ‘Savages! Forget it. We ancient Brits, it now seems, were a very civilized lot’ (Daily Mail, 21 February 2003) used the work of archaeologist Francis Pryor to play with a series of implicit parallels with the present day. The story’s writer, Trevor Grove, cast the Celts and Romans as coming to a preexisting civilization in the British Isles, where, since the retreat of the last ice age, technological sophistication in subsistence, farming, mine-working, trade and ritual architecture were strongly in evidence. A connection with the present day was found in the mitochondrial DNA of ‘Cheddar Man’. He had lived 9,000 years ago, and was found in caves in 1903, in Somerset in the west of England. ‘Had the original Stone Age Britons been massacred or driven away by invaders, their DNA would have vanished too. Instead of which, there it was, popping up in Internet-Age villagers in Somerset’ (Daily Mail, 21 February 2003). Thus, as a total contrast to the experience of cultural rupture among Britain’s Caribbean ethnic minorities – which gene lines can partially compensate for in providing continuities across historical migrations – the Mail propounds a majoritarian myth of primordial (at least postglacial) continuity of genes, set in unbroken fashion alongside prehistoric evidence for technological aptitude and a propensity for trade, which is written up as an unchanging narrative of biocultural reproduction for the nation, resilient against waves of sometimes more powerful incomers. In these various storylines of origin for the population of contemporary Britain, the role of genetic knowledge shifts from underscoring narratives of national ethnic integrity, to fragmenting the lines of difference naturalized by positions taken in current multicultural politics. The partial and selective illuminations of genetic traces serve, almost at will, the narrative purposes of shoring up or breaching the totalizing encompassment of persons by race and nation.

Mixing and Masking The same issue of the Mail on Sunday that ran the ‘I’m really a Nubian princess’ story, carried a feature on the personal history of the talented young British rap artist Ms Dynamite. She had received critical approval from music reviewers, yet remained close to her ‘street’ scene inspirations. She shot to national prominence with an interview on the high-brow BBC Newsnight programme, in which she was treated as a spokesperson for disaffected black youth, and she also gave a key address to the massive February

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2003 anti-war rally in London. The article’s title, clearly intended to shift the perception of Ms Dynamite as representing the black London experience, was ‘The white mother who guides Ms Dynamite’ (Mail on Sunday, 2 March 2003, p. 32). The article presented an origin story that was ‘a world away from the grimy, traffic-choked streets of north London’. On the Scottish Hebridean island of Benbecula, ‘giant Atlantic rollers crash in on the pristine white beaches’. The text continued: ‘Unlikely as it may seem, the windswept island of Benbecula is the family home of 21–year-old Ms Dynamite, the fast-talking, opinionated queen of the London street music scene and the epitome of backstreet cool’ (Mail on Sunday, 2 March 2003, p. 32). While in her Newsnight interview Ms Dynamite had described Britain as a strongly racist country and said that in school she had been taught very little about black history, for the Mail on Sunday the emphasis on her black identity is a selective strategy of self-presentation, with strategically commercial dividends in building an image of ‘cool’ authenticity. The paper claimed it was her publicists who chose to ‘stress her urban credentials and build the legend by emphasizing that she is the eldest of 11 children, only six of whom survived childbirth. [And that] she came from a broken home in a tough neighbourhood of North London’ (Mail on Sunday, 2 March 2003, p. 33). The Mail on Sunday’s alternative biography chose to deemphasize Ms Dynamite’s black affiliations and reveal from behind the urban façade an authentic half of herself that belongs in an archetypal part of the British landscape. It reported a friend as saying: The thing that has made Ms Dynamite such a unique and powerful talent is the incredible mix of genes and different cultures that have influenced her ... Her real life-story is an extraordinary and exotic one, far richer and more complex than the one-dimensional stereotype put about by her imagemakers. It starts not on the mean streets of a drug-riddled council estate ... [but where her grandmother was born] in a family of crofters and fishermen who had struggled for centuries to make a living from the cruel sea and bleak land. (Mail on Sunday, 2 March 2003, p. 33) It was here that the future singer was taken for school holidays by her mother, keeping her in touch with a ‘Hebridean heritage’. Thus, the newspaper’s enfolding of Ms Dynamite in a sentiment of a ‘true’ affective home, away from the city, unsettles her ‘black’ identity and reclaims her as a British success story. It is a strategy of multiplying the self of Ms Dynamite, away from the image of defiant singularity that nonwhite Britishness presents. But in contrast to how Doniger (2005: 229) writes about the illusion of an authentic self (that there’s no inner concealment as with a coconut or avocado, just onion-like layers), the Mail on Sunday uses the formative upbringing of Ms Dynamite’s mother, evoking a robust, native ‘islander’ trope, to make a claim for influence in the character-building necessary for the star’s success, and to discredit the mask of a black identity: ‘Admirers say she is “tuned in” to the opinions and aspirations of the urban black poor … But on Benbecula, Ms

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Dynamite will always be “wee Niomi”, the chubby little girl who adored playing in the sand. Islanders were bred to be survivors. Just like Ms Dynamite’ (Mail on Sunday, 2 March 2003, p. 33). The article on Ms Dynamite used multiple genetic and environmental mixes to make an iconic personality from the new multiethnic Britain acceptable to ‘middle England’, by emphasizing her supposedly native qualities. In contrast to the Mail on Sunday’s deconstructive rendering of this new, culturally innovative, outspoken and angry voice of the street, which is presented as masking a bucolic upbringing playing in the sand, the Observer explored ongoing issues of racism in Britain’s multicultural society. It devoted several pages on 6 April 2003 to marking the tenth anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a young victim of racist violence in London. The journalist Geraldine Bedell introduced a set of interviews with mixed-race couples under the headline ‘Between two worlds’. Taking note of the fact that the 2001 census showed that Britain’s mixed-race population is rapidly increasing, with one in twenty preschool children considered mixed race, and with celebrities in high-profile mixed partner relationships, she contrasted this trend with mention of continuing hostility to interracial couples.5 Perhaps signalling awareness of this wider hostility, Bedell remarked on the fact that, ‘in parts of our big cities, interracial relationships are so common that even to notice them is considered bad manners. When we set out to find couples for this article, some people thought that even taking an interest in the subject was racist’ (Observer, 6 April 2003, Review section, p. 4). Exploring the contentious territory of debate about social workers who suggest that white single mothers may not be able to socialize children from black fathers into ‘their black culture’, Bedell quoted Paul Gilroy’s position that racism and anti-racism share similar essentialist assumptions about totality, identity and exclusion. Her introduction ends with the claim that, ‘interracial relationships have shown, time and time again, that no amount of social construct can kill human attractions’. Later I will take up the question whether social construct and attraction can be so simply opposed, but the intended meaning given to this framing, that individuals have defied others’ prejudices, is evident in the interviews held with the featured couples. One of the couples involved was a white woman, Jill, married to Seye, a Nigerian. Jill used to receive insults of the ‘nigger-loving whore’ variety, and Seye’s marriage led to problems with both white and black communities through his chosen profession in the church: ‘Training for the ministry was fine, but marrying a white woman was moving above your station.’ He found that whites would treat him as an honorary insider, and then tell racist stories; despite his wish that within his marital relationship colour should not be a big deal, ‘the big deal is foisted upon you’. Similarly, Jill countered others’ distorted view of them from the outside by choosing to emphasize the commonalities of their upbringing: ‘We actually have very similar backgrounds. We both had slightly repressed, churchy, not very wealthy upbringings – poor but decent. But people look for differences’ (Observer, 6 April 2003, Review section, p. 4). A second couple consisted of a white British man and his Chinese partner, whose mother had been adopted by white English ‘grandparents’. Some people even assumed

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she was a Thai bride he had paid for. The third featured couple were a woman with an Iranian father and Italian mother, married to a mixed-race Jamaican whose father was half-French, and mother half-Indian. The woman was quoted as saying: I’d grown up feeling like an insider and an outsider, belonging and not belonging. Your body becomes a question: people are always asking where you’re from. People want to bulldoze you into an identity. I think there’s a bit of ethnic jealousy: why should you have access to two cultures? Then there’s the racism that says you’re not mixed-race because you’re not dark enough. (Observer, 6 April 2003, Review section, p. 4) As for their son, she expected he would simply think of himself as a Londoner. Her husband expressed a decidedly mixed sense of self, resisting binary alternatives, ‘when you mix black and white you get a new colour, but then you can’t break that up again. It isn’t black and it isn’t white, it’s just itself ’ (ibid.). This last couple was characterized as having experienced difficulties to do with different class and educational backgrounds affecting the expectations of the couple from their respective families. In her study of colour affiliations among mixed-race children, Suki Ali observes that while class can act as a ‘buffer’ against racism, some black parents with bitter experiences of racism are reluctant to consider their own children as ‘mixed race’, wanting not to forget how difference had formed them. Ali comments: ‘Either way, the discourses of colour had to be managed in a society that recognizes them as important’ (2003: 175). It is this reality of race as a public social fact that informs the left-leaning newspapers’ approach to ‘race mixture’, and the biographical experiences examined in Bedell’s Observer article demonstrate precisely how the formation of identity through interplays of race, gender, class and education takes effect within the situated subjectivities of kinship and family contexts. The bringing together of colour discourse, management and recognition by Ali can be linked to the argument of Doniger, that the phenomenon of identity ‘passing’ constitutes a strategy of actively projecting readings of the self by others in intertextual substitutions (2005: 184–86).6 This effectively denies the possibility of achieving a ‘core’ identity beyond the gaze of others, and opens out the question of how people’s perceptions are conditioned by racializing filters. A very bitter account of how being mixed race can leave a person caught in a no man’s land, and vulnerable to discriminatory antagonism from both black and white, was written in the Guardian (22 February 2003) by Clare Gorham. In contrast to the ‘one-drop’ ideology of black solidarity in the U.S.A., Gorham remarks on the hypersensitivity to shades of blackness that she has encountered from voices in the U.K. black community, especially in relation to perceptions of her, as a media figure, having benefited from being able to access two cultures. In this pincer operation of categorical essentialism, where Gorham finds herself, struggles for maintaining boundaries of authenticity carry the trace of genetic ideas of purity. The fact that Gorham is seen, indeed actively ‘passed’, by people from two camps as being from another, demonstrates the difficulty in actively managing faces

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of identity. The idea of a separate ‘mixed’ category clearly sits awkwardly in a binary framework of power, which offers little by way of a middle-ground comfort zone, and propels people to be either/or rather than both/and. In the overall treatment in media stories, mixed-race people encounter being exposed as one thing rather than another, where genes and upbringing are used to deflate claims of legitimate alterity (e.g., the story on Ms Dynamite), or the defiance of racial stereotypes by individuals is portrayed as mostly impotent in relation to the greater asymmetries of power in which colour continues to organize social expectations, even if genes are seen as merely an arbitrary means of distributing different life chances. In contrast to this binarism, Ali’s study found children particularly resistant to being forced to choose between singular positions (2003: 180). Mixed-race ontologies present cause for reflection on tactics of subjectivity and their effects on reworking the paradigms for imagining difference. Doniger comments: In both race and gender, social pressures force individuals to masquerade, usually (though not always) as someone of a higher and/or more powerful class. And in both race and gender, the simplistic paradigm (black passing as white, woman passing as man/man as woman) is destabilized by the intrinsic insubstantiality of the original categories and dichotomies that are the basis of their construction. (2005: 183) As an example of how individuals can actively manage perceptions of themselves by others, in one of the interviews conducted by Katharine Tyler for the PUG project, a student in Leicester with a black Antiguan mother and white father talked confidently about choosing when to ‘act black’. She said: I don’t see myself as black or white. It depends which situation, to which I would say I was. I would classify myself as mixed race. If I was with white people I act more white, and if I’m with black people I act more black. ’Cos one of my friends at work, I told her that I was coming to do your study and you know that you said it was about identity, and she said how do you identify, ’cos you’re like a white person anyway. And I thought yeah right, that is how I am with you, ’cos she doesn’t see that side. ’Cos like I’m definitely into black music, black attitudes and I prefer the things that black people wear, and the way that I do my hair is more to the black side of things than the white side. ’Cos my dad as well is more around with black people. All his friends are black, he doesn’t have any white friends. My dad listens to black music as well, he doesn’t listen to Elvis Presley. My dad listens to reggae and soul and stuff, so my dad is more into the black side. I think that sometimes they just don’t know where they fit in. But then sometimes I do feel like that, you know, that I am sort of in the middle. Because you know that that white thing isn’t what you want to be and then sometimes you know that that black thing isn’t what you want to be either. (Katharine Tyler, interview 24)

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In Ali’s study of how children orient themselves to self-identify, she draws attention to British children’s readings of attractiveness and desirability. This brings her to conclude that race is less ‘salient’ than their ‘perceived ideas about sexual attractiveness’ (2003: 171). While she found the children’s possibilities of working through who they were, where they were from, and who they could be were rather impoverished within explicit discourses of race and ethnicity, their ideas of ‘doing’ girl and boy generated the basis on which other properties of race, class and ability were developed (ibid.). It was specifically in the children’s responses to visual signs in the media that they examined ‘“raced” heterosexuality through discourses of attractiveness’ (ibid.: 172).

Racial Attractions Taking up Ali’s interest in the readings of media-propagated visual signatures of race, in this section I want to ask a different set of questions from the previous discussion of how right- and left-leaning newspaper coverage placed the role of genetic make-up as respectively character-formative, or arbitrary but ideologically salient. New relationships between visualization, corporeality, style and multicultural consumption are at the core of Gilroy’s (2000) analysis of how ideas of race are changing. He sees genetic knowledge as significant primarily insofar as it represents an ever smaller scale of visualizing racial difference in the body, as contrasted to older cranial and epidermal locations. However, the cultural phenomenon he particularly draws our attention to is the use of black physicality for marketing consumer products, in a pick and-mix availability of visually race-coded style, making new parameters of corporeal aesthetic choice consonant with multicultural capitalist ideology. Holding in mind Gilroy’s and Ali’s focus on the visual and desire, I want to turn back to Bedell’s comment in her Observer article (above), about no amount of social construct being able to kill human attractions. The intended reading was clearly to say that two people’s love can overcome others’ prejudice. From a cultural analysis perspective, attraction does not, however, operate on socially innocent subjectivities. Indeed, the notion of unconstructed erotic attraction echoes the discourse of nineteenth-century morally hierarchized racial orders, which differentiated sexual etiquette and propriety from lust and dissipation (Young 1995). For some geneticists, though, more causative hard-wirings are at play between genes and attraction, which feeds cultural construction into a DNA loop. Within the two-month period of the search for ‘genetic’ newspaper stories, there was a discussion of attraction in terms of ‘sexual selection’ within evolutionary theory. This gave insights for seeing how constructions of sexuality are viewed from the supposed operation of sexual attraction in gene pool distribution. The official public spokesman of science in Britain, the geneticist Richard Dawkins, wrote a piece on ‘An Early Flowering of Genetics’ for the Guardian, summarizing his introduction to a new edition of Darwin’s Descent of Man. For Dawkins, ‘What sexual selection explains, better than natural selection, is diversity that seems arbitrary, even driven by aesthetic whim’ (Guardian, 2 February 2003, Review

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section, p. 36). His treatment of the aesthetic assumes a correspondence between culturally specific elaborations of visual physique and genetic outcomes. He argues that ‘[m]ost people have no problem in accepting an analogue of sexual selection’ in respect to culturally transformed bodily presentations such as ‘headdresses, body paint, penis sheaths, ritual mutilations or ornamental clothes’. In Dawkins’ view, culture serves to constrain genetic flow by in-group, coded signs of attraction: ‘Given that cultural differences such as those of language, religion, manners and customs certainly provide resistance to interbreeding and gene flow … it is entirely plausible that genetic differences between peoples of different regions, at least where superficial, externally prominent features are concerned, have evolved through sexual selection’ (ibid.). Here he is presenting Darwin’s argument that certain apparently superficial physical features (not necessary for adaptive survival) show variation across human populations, and that this arbitrary distribution can be attributed to ‘aesthetic whim’. The phrase ‘analogue of sexual selection’ will be problematic for many sociocultural anthropologists. First, it invokes an absolute biological propensity as a driving cause that has particular expression of cultural differences, without asking what practices specific to a European notion of sexual relation might be concealed in a theory of biologically universal desire, in which ‘sexual selection’ can be constituted as a unitary phenomenon, even if recognized to be culturally mediated. Second, how is sexuality configured within practices of relational personhood and gender, which entrain somatic markers in social life, beyond necessarily signalling ‘reproduction’? Gendered inequalities of power and the connections of sensuality to intergroup relations, alliance and conflict and exchange enfold the expression of desire in public domains of interest and legitimacy, replete with ethical tensions in the constitution of erotic normativity (Butler 2002; Collier and Rosaldo 1980). What Dawkins imposes on the world of comparative sexualities is a view of human diversity in which the sexual is presented as externally legible, to those who share a certain aesthetic construction, and in which cultural embellishments to the body serve purposes of genetic accentuation by selecting for traits deemed by arbitrary whim to be attractive. This follows precisely the cosmology of ‘naturalism’ in Descola’s terms, in which culturally relative subjective interiorities are set against a universal, in this case genetic, nature (2005: 417). It locks the agency of human intentions into stable but different cultural formations, with worlds of difference between them. Anthropologists of contemporary society would alternatively want to ask what are the parameters of stability and change in people’s relationship to sexual codes and behaviour, and through what kinds of struggles in the sociality of desire do new frameworks of subjectivity and practices of conformity emerge? This is one of the questions that the media’s interest in mixed-race relationships has raised, and in fact it is at the core of Dawkins’ attempt to rescue Darwin from accusations of racism. Dawkins admits to having to make a special effort not to feel ‘distaste’ at Darwin’s comment in the Descent of Man that, ‘It seems at first sight a monstrous supposition that the jet blackness of the negro has been gained through sexual selection’ [i.e., is attractive to the opposite sex] (Guardian, 2 February 2003, Review

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section, p. 34). In Dawkins’ own words, ‘reading historic documents that violate the taboos of one’s own century gives valuable lessons in the ephemerality of such mores’. Darwin’s science is thus rescued from his personal ethical prejudice by distinguishing his cultural formation as a Victorian from his contribution to understanding nature as a universal process. In his book Mutants,7 which was presented on Start the Week, the benchmark BBC radio programme for the intelligentsia, Leroi (2003) also attempts to bring Darwin’s idea of sexual selection up to date. He finds a less whimsical relation between natural selection for survival and sexual selection for partner choice, and moves from a discussion of discarded old racial theory to a consideration of human genetic variation in terms of selective preferences for bodily beauty, claiming that, ‘the true meaning of beauty is the relative absence of genetic error’ (2004: 355). Turning from Darwin’s interest in how ideas of beauty differ cross-culturally, Leroi ponders the attention we give to reading people’s faces: ‘each image of a beautiful face or perfectly turned limb is not really about the subject that it appears to be, but rather what it is not. It is about the imperfections that are absent’ (2004: 356). He treats the animal world and human sexual selection as one, arguing: ‘Creatures choosing beauty for generation upon generation have given the natural world much of its exuberance. Sexual selection has given the Madagascar chameleon its horns … the Argus pheasants their tails; it has given the human species its variety’ (2004: 349). As with all contemporary geneticists, there is an explicit attempt to create a distance from the old eugenics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet there is a deeply problematic reliance on a eugenically informed idea of the body as an object of visualization, selectively and unequally disposed for evolution. In the film Leroi made with Channel 4, he even turns to the example of a woman featured on the front of Time magazine as having the most beautiful face in the world, notably a multicultural mix of Middle Eastern and American, which is taken to demonstrate universally valid genetic perfection of form and proportion. Dawkins and Leroi struggle to bring genetics and culture into relation. The one opposes Darwin’s Victorian culture to his science, protecting our reading of his words from the scrutiny of contemporary ethics, and acknowledges human interpersonal desire as genetically consequential in parallel with natural selection. The other gives a genetic rationale in terms of lack of error for how beauty is variously beheld. Neither can explain why scientists’ ethics, or people’s senses of beauty and motivations for partner choice can change as radically as they do. Dawkins operates conceptually with an imagery of truth (evolutionary fitness) and mask (aesthetic appeal) for the species, which is similar to that used by some of the newspapers to characterize individuals’ genetics and identity, while Leroi finds a less bipolar genetic narrative to run the natural and the cultural together, with the face not masking but revealing inner properties. Both approaches convey a view of humanity as discretely contained in separate worlds of cultural value, programmed for self-replication. The hybrid or the mixed are not explicable in these formulations; indeed they could be assumed to be ‘unnatural’. Instead, it is the conditions in which the normatively attractive is visualized within unstable regimes of truth, beauty and power (in the ‘ephemerality of mores’, as Dawkins put it) that are of concern for this chapter.

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This leads to the questions of what motivates people to remodel understandings of attraction, and how genetic consequences can be read in bodily beautification and the intentionalities of partner choice. These questions were raised in two further newspaper articles. Taking the partner choice issue first, contemporary biologists are coming to question the gendered and racialized presumptions of previous generations towards sex. This was demonstrated by an article at the bottom of the Daily Telegraph’s front page, entitled ‘Lesbian Japanese monkeys challenge Darwin’ (19 February 2003, p. 1). Darwin’s argument that ‘females are coy, mate rarely and choose mates to ensure the best genetic inheritance’ is put in doubt by a study of macaques by Dr John Vasey (University of Lethbridge), showing the preference by some for same-sex partners. Joan Roughgarden (the controversial animal behaviourist of Stanford University) commented in the article that sex selection theory needs to be more comprehensive, and to take into account ‘social selection’, such that mating could be viewed as contributing to the building and management of relationships as much as it has to do with reproduction. For Roughgarden, ‘Female choice … has much more to do with managing male power than it does with trying to obtain good genes’ (Daily Telegraph, 19 February 2003, p. 4). On the other question raised above, the themes of race, power and changing cultures of attractiveness were explored in an Observer article written by Joanna Pitman, author of the book On Blondes (2003). She notices how, from Japan to Brazil, the popularity of going blonde is on the rise, aided by newly available chemicals. Pitman suggests there is an element of rebelliousness mixed with the cultural power of U.S. influence and the desire of people to appear like American celebrity icons. She remarks on how reading Brazilian magazines would suggest an almost Nordic populace, rather than the ‘racial democracy’ it is known for, and that Brazilian women dye their hair ‘because blond hair distances them from their mixed race compatriots and it also brings them closer to membership of the elite, closer to the aspirational ideal of America’ (Observer, 16 February 2003, Review section, p. 4). Pitman’s argument traces the association of power and colour from the eighteenth-century Englishman Charles White’s hierarchy of races, thinking blondness, associated with the sun, was a sign of greatness, and the Victorian eugenic ‘sexologist’ Havelock-Ellis, whose ‘index of pigmentation’ even attributed the qualities of political reformers to their possession of the blondest features. As far as the genes for blonde colouring are concerned, the article quoted dermatologist Jonathan Rees of Edinburgh University: Many children turn from having almost white blonde hair to having dark brown hair in the space of 10 years. So those who retain their blondeness have something extremely rare. The strange thing is no one knows very much yet about its genetics. All we know is that it has great powers of attraction. (Observer, 16 February 2003, Review section, p. 4)

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Pitman attributes the spreading ideal of blonde femininity to ‘a global culture machine controlled by America’, which packages up ideals of beauty in commodified images for export, luring the world’s billions. The reasons people go blonde often relate to meanings caught up in national geopolitical alignments and population dynamics. Pitman cites the travel writer Colin Thubron on the motivation of Siberians to dye their hair being connected to a desire to create a contrast with the regional influence of China and its migrants into neighbouring states. Pitman argues, ‘For Siberian women, blonde hair is a signal of alignment with the West. They are dyeing their hair for political reasons’ (ibid.). At the heart of America’s cultural vitality is a racialized encounter, across which images, music, style and bodily attribute are dialogically played back and forth. This makes a conversation of contending notions of identity, caught between narratives of biologized fixity and voluntaristic freedom. Doniger (2005) discusses practices of self-imitation, including the phenomenon of racial ‘passing’, in relation to American films, journalism and literature. In her Observer article, Pitman takes note of black celebrities who also play with blondness, but not necessarily in order to ‘pass’. RuPaul, the African American drag queen, is quoted: When I put on a blond wig, I am not selling out my blackness. Wearing a blond wig is not going to make me white. I’m not going to pass as white, and I am not trying to. The truth about the blond wig is simple. It really pops. I want to create an outrageous sensation and blond hair against brown skin is a gorgeous, outrageous combination. (Observer, 16 February 2003, Review section, p. 4) Here, it is not an attempt to become white that is at issue, but the visually powerful use of juxtaposed race-coded elements, in order to disrupt the expectations of body, person and typical difference for the dramatic persona created by a performance artist. For others, whose stage is everyday life, the conscious projection of the self through legible signs, and the possibilities of resistance to ‘being passed’ by others (Ali 2004: 13), constitute a field of self-making that renders racialized fixing not obsolete, but increasingly ambiguous as ‘black’ and ‘white’ traits are borrowed and remorphed (Gilroy 2000). It makes the reduction of different appearances of physical variation to evolutionary ‘sexual selection’ oblivious of the ways people reallocate meanings to visual signs in changing political economies of desire.

Conclusion There are two principal narrative architectures in the media stories discussed in this chapter that bring genes, subjectivities and the nation into relationship. The rightwing Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday present an asymmetry in how genetic heritage affects identity. For these newspapers, the Motherland study’s accounts of ancestral tracings accentuate both the exotic otherness of black British citizens and their fragmentary lines of genetic and cultural continuity. By contrast, a unitary national,

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white British narrative of cultural practice and demographic assimilation is told with the support of selective genetic material. In the case of the singer Ms Dynamite, native genetic input and environmentally influenced personality formation are mobilized to claim the singer’s talent for the nation, and render her affiliations to black culture as overstated and even spurious misrepresentations, manipulated for commercial advantage. Black identity is to be deconstructed (and trivialized), in an approach that is not similarly applied to white British identities in the asymmetry of these papers’ treatment of race. By contrast, the centre-left Guardian and Observer devoted weighty investigations into how genetic knowledge can be interpreted by individuals, and how the nation can come to terms with postcolonial realities in attitudes to mixedrace relationships. In these publications, elements of genetic biographies are subsumed by the overall story of essentialized races being disproved by genetics (that reveal ‘only skin deep’ resemblances), and political importance is assigned to resisting prejudice scientifically in the sociological breeding ground of the changing British nation. Here, it is fear of difference, accompanying global migration and institutional racism that are made into the true objects of social division, against which the liberal aspiration for a passage to a tolerant, race-blind, new multicultural nation is formulated. Both these narrative architectures make use of genetics in explanations of British society and individual subjectivities that rely on the technique of splitting social construction and genetic substrate. Truth and mask are allocated to each side of the split differently by the narrative tellers, according to their respective politics, with genes and culture held apart to be played strategically each against the other. By contrast, leading popular geneticists discussing race attempt to render human diversity and the selfimage-making practices of people into a single explanatory plane. Richard Dawkins specifically cast race-specific bodily features as genetically functional for reproductive attraction (his ‘analogue of sexual selection’, which accentuated certain superficial differences, while human genetic diversity substantially does not support racial cleavage). A further contributor to British television and radio, Armand Leroi, proposed a theory of culturally variable physiognomic beauty that saw genes shaping how we perceive perfection. In arguing ‘absence of genetic error’ to underlie a sense of what is beautiful in the human form, truth and mask are collapsed, and surface appearance merely expresses the genes beneath.8 Dawkins’ and Leroi’s reworkings of Darwin’s race theory are both classic examples of what Descola (2005) has termed ‘naturalistic monism’. They attempt to reduce the autonomy of culture by genetic constraint (or only recognize whimsical cultural mediation where genetically consequential), without recognizing the irreconcilability of bringing a world of universal evolutionary process in conjunction with culturally relative moral orders (2005: 398–99). The comments of Roughgarden in the Telegraph newspaper helped to show that genetic theory itself can be relativized as being conditioned by male cultural presumptions about reproductive endgames, when female perspectives on animal behaviour alternatively suggest sexual attraction as a means of managing social relations. In contrast to the ahistorical treatments of human diversity and bodily beautification within genetic commentaries (Dawkins and Leroi), approaches to race within social

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theory emphasize how categories and criteria of ‘natural’ differentiation move with changing relations of power and conditions of subjectivity. For Ali, British mixed-race children develop ‘technologies of the self in ways that deploy aspects of racialization, heterosexuality, class and gender through discourses of attractiveness, aspirations and ability. Throughout all this their use of (popular) culture was central’ (2003: 171). In this entanglement of self-fashioning with the generation of values in consumer capitalism, reinvented as ‘multicultural’, Gilroy (2000) identifies new workings of body reflexivity that move beyond the old stabilities of racial type. As genetics drives further inward beneath the skin to locate substantial difference, the epidermalized focus of attention gives way to nano-scale groundings of what is ‘real’ beneath appearance. While genetics thus presents the promise of a regrounding of ‘true selves’ beneath the power of social construct, in fact the unit of biological agency has shifted from the organism as a site of conscious being to distributions of DNA code from diverse bioregional origins, with only fragmentary residues for sentient selves to be fashioned from. As such, genes cannot provide a basis for an authentic selfhood in the old terms of visibly evident race, which imagined consciousness and intelligence to be analogous with biology. As the newspapers show, more than the mainstream scientists, genetic information is used in a creative politics of identity, where the contemporary mythologies of self-making for ‘mixed-race’ individuals and the multicultural nation depend on selective regressions and reversals of truths and masks as opposed to genetic reduction pure and simple. Geneticization is not evident as a unitary process in these media accounts, confirming Condit’s (1999) review of the topic in newspaper treatments, because the genes cannot speak. An idea of hidden genetic transcripts, made accessible through tests of Y chromosomes or mitochondrial DNA, would say less about the individuals carrying them and their transmission along sometimes surprising routes, than it does about the particular valuations given to individual and collective identities in the new millennium. Nash’s observation that genetic tests rely on cultural expectations of connections to be revealed for a person’s sense of self to be fulfilled, highlights how identity, while being a prominent factor in political discourses, is yet simultaneously depoliticized in the process of being formed as a kind of knowledge consumption in market-mediated possessive individualism (2004: 26). The ‘kinship’ of genetic test transcripts is of a proprietary, double unilineal descent variety (2004: 20), not the bilateral mixture in which relationships over history have been made to count, where sameness and difference have been worked out interpersonally, and the claims to relational belonging (ethnic and national) have evolved socially and politically. When Britain introduced the self-identification category of mixed race into the census, it could be argued that this kind of distinction serves demands from people to be better able to make themselves known, as much as it enables the state to show its awareness of changes in the salience of categories in its population. Genetic essentialism is not a necessary feature in this propagation of subnational collectivities. If genetics pursues an inner momentum of the truth of human being (Gilroy 2000), this has proven valuable for those who would identify bounded lines of singularity, as much as it has demonstrated historical realities of intermixture and vast areas of

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uncertain kinship. The fascination with genetics as a realm of knowable interior makeup lies in the horizons it presents to individuals and collectivities for thinking about the relation of genetics with its corresponding opposite, the external public field of culture and identity politics. Here, assumptions about what makes us the same or different are confronted with new kinds of evidence to ponder the foundational cosmological split of modernity, to imagine relationships between the two worlds of given inner properties and interactional social contexts of our own making.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Wendy Doniger for making available her SOAS-RAI lecture (September 2003), and to Peter Wade for invaluable suggestions to improve the arguments.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

The category ‘mixed race’ was selected by 1.31 per cent of respondents, while 87 per cent identified as white British. The Daily Mail consistently builds on fears about immigration and scepticism about multicultural coexistence: ‘rather than there being a multi-cultural melting pot, minorities settle in areas favoured by their own and similar groups’. In London, eight out of thirty-three boroughs have a minority of ‘white British’ people. The Mail quotes Migration Watch U.K., a right-wing think-tank: ‘These figures show how quickly and profoundly the character of some parts of our cities is changing’ (Daily Mail, 14 February 2003, p. 29, ‘The changing face of Britain’s inner cities’). By contrast, the Guardian offered a less dramatic report on the census figures, suggesting the rise of the ethnic minority population from 6 per cent in 1991 to 9 per cent in 2001 might be due to the new classification of ‘mixed race’ (Guardian, 14 February 2003, p. 3). Gilroy argues that, ‘[t]oday skin is no longer privileged as the threshold of either identity or particularity. There are good reasons to suppose that the line between inside and out now falls elsewhere’ (2000: 47). He further talks of the ‘“coconut”, “choc-ice”, or “oreo cookie” ontologies with their strict and pernicious divisions between “inside” and “outside”’ (2000: 51). Catherine Nash (2002, 2004) reflects on the destabilizing effects of revealed ancestry for people’s positionings in relation to essentialized communities of difference in Irish political imaginations. Doniger writes, in a final chapter section subtitled ‘The Möbius Strip Tease of the Self ’, of how ‘myths of self-imitation’ use metaphors of revelation to suggest a truth beneath the mask, but, ‘As we go deeper and deeper through the alternating layers of masks and faces, we never reach a core’, and ‘as there is no ur-text, so, in a sense, there is no ur-self ’ (2005: 230, 229). The previous chapter’s discussion of ethnic matching in gamete donation highlights the official hesitance about enabling ‘race mixture’ in fertility practice, which is seen as generating problematic ethical consequences for mixed-race children. In her discussion of real, literary and cinematic examples of the elaborate convolutions involved in race passing, Doniger comments: ‘These reversals of reversals produce a kind of vertigo, so the “true” race is obscured or, more precisely, revealed to be the unknowable and meaningless illusion that it is’ (2005: 184).

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Ben Campbell Also broadcast as a film on Channel 4 in 2005. This argument appears innocently to echo the medieval English idea of describing a person as ‘fair’, meaning ‘unblemished’, rather than a racialized whiteness, which subsequently became refashioned within the emerging discourse of colour-based racism after the sixteenth century (Doniger n.d.).

References Ali, S. 2003. Mixed-Race, Post-Race: Gender, New Ethnicities, and Cultural Practices. Oxford: Berg. Butler, J. 2002. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press. Collier, J. and M. Rosaldo. 1981. ‘Politics and Gender in Simple Societies’, in S. Ortner and H. Whitehead (eds), Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 275–329. Condit, C.M. 1999. The Meanings of the Gene: Public Debates about Human Heredity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Descola, P. 2005. Par delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard. Doniger, W. n.d. ‘Mythologies of Self-imitation: the Politics of Race and Gender’, Fraser Lecture delivered at SOAS, University of London, September 2004. ———. 2005. The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was: Mythologies of Self-imitation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gilroy, P. 2000. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London: Routledge. Leroi, A.M. 2003. Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body. London: Harper Collins. Nash, C. 2002. ‘Genealogical Identities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20: 27–52. ———. 2004. ‘Genetic Kinship’, Cultural Studies 18(1): 1–33. Pitman, J. 2003. On Blondes. London: Bloomsbury. Young, R. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge.

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Notes on Contributors Ben Campbell is a social anthropologist who has taught at the Universities of Edinburgh, Hull, Keele and Manchester and currently lectures at Durham University. He has researched the impact of development and conservation projects on subsistence farming and cultural practice in the Nepal Himalayas. Research interests in the U.K. concern new localizations of ethnicity, changing cultures of food, and environmental citizenship. Recent publications include, ‘Whose Knowledge Counts?: Indigenous Perspectives on Participation in the Development of Biodiversity Conservation in Nepal’, in A. Bicker (ed.) Investigating Local Knowledge (Ashgate, 2004). Darius Dauks˘as is an anthropologist and research associate based at the Lithuanian Institute of History (Department of Ethnology). Recent publications include: ‘Between Tradition and Modernity: The Change of Life Style of the Lithuanians in the Interwar Period’, Liaudies kultura, No. 4, 2004 (Vilnius: Lietuvos liaudies kulturos centras). Signe Howell obtained her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1981 and, from this, published Society and Cosmos: Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia (1984). She subsequently carried out research on religion and kinship in Eastern Indonesia and edited the book For the Sake of Our Future: Sacrificing in Eastern Indonesia (1996). More recently, she has undertaken research on transnational adoption in Norway and has published The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective (Berghahn, 2006). Diana Marre completed her doctorate in Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona focusing on gender, race/ethnicity and nation in South America. As a postdoctoral researcher she worked on immigration and cultural diversity in Spain until 2001 when she joined the PUG project working on social networks around infertility matters and on transnational adoption. Her publications include Mujeres Argentinas: representación, género, territorio y nación (University of Barcelona, 2003), El desafío de la diferencia: representaciones culturales e identidades de género, raza y clase (Universidad del País Vasco, 2003) and Multiculturalismos y género: un estudio interdisciplinar (Bellaterra, 2001).

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Marit Melhuus obtained her D.Phil. (1993) at the University of Oslo. She has worked at the Work Research Institute in Oslo and later at the University of Oslo, where she is Professor of Social Anthropology and served as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences from 1999–2002. She has carried out fieldwork in Argentina (1974–75), in Mexico (1983–84) and in Norway (1980–82; and from 2000 onwards). Her current research focuses on kinship, biotechnology and the comparative issues of law. Her publications include Peasants, Surpluses and Appropriation: A Case Study of Tobacco Growers from Corrientes (1987), Machos, Mistresses and Madonnas: Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery (1996, co-edited with Kristi Anne Stølen), and Holding Worlds Together: Ethnographies of Knowing and Belonging (2007; co-edited with Marianne Lien). Enric Porqueres i Gené is Maître de Conférences at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He works on European kinship, paying particular attention to its cognatic character. The notion of the person inscribed in the kinship system and its implementations in the construction of social borders through the rhetoric of blood and genealogy have been at the centre of his publications. Publications include: Lourde alliance: mariage et identité chez les descendants de juifs convertis à Majorque (1435–1750) (Paris, Kimé, 1995); ‘Cognatisme et voies du sang. La créativité du mariage canonique’, l’Homme 154–155, 2000; ‘Le mariage qui dérange: redéfinitions de l’identité nationale Basque’, Ethnologie Française, XXXI, 3, 2001; ‘David M. Schneider et les symboles de la parenté : l'Inceste et ses Questionnements’, Incidence 1, 2005; ‘Parenté et religion: racines parentales de l’individualisme’, in A. Bresson, M.P. Masson, S. Perentidis and J. Wilgaux (eds), Parenté et société dans le monde grec de l'antiquité à l'âge moderne (Paris, De Boccard, 2006). Katharine Tyler is a Lecturer in Race and Ethnicity in the Department of Sociology at University of Surrey. She did a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her doctoral thesis examined ethnographically the ways in which Englishness/Britishness is portrayed as essentially white, suburban/rural and middle class. Her published articles on this research include ‘The Racialized and Classed Constitution of English Village Life’, Ethnos vol. 68, 2003; ‘Racism, Tradition and Reflexivity in a Former Mining Town’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 27, 2004; and ‘Village People: Race, Nation, Class and the Community Spirit’ in The New Countryside? Ethnicity, Nation and Exclusion in Contemporary Rural Britain, edited by S. Neal and J. Agyeman (2006). She was a postdoctoral Research Associate on the PUG project and her articles from this research include, ‘The Genealogical Imagination: The Inheritance of Interracial Identities’, The Sociological Review vol. 53, 2005. She is currently editing a book for Palgrave on majority cultures and the politics of ethnic difference.

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Peter Wade did a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, focusing on the black population of Colombia. He was a Research Fellow at Queens' College Cambridge, before becoming a Lecturer in Geography and Latin American Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His publications include Blackness and Race Mixture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (Pluto Press, 1997), Music, Race and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia (Chicago University Press, 2000), Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Pluto Press, 2002), and ‘Hybridity Theory and Kinship Thinking’, Cultural Studies 19(5), 2005. His current research focuses on issues of racial identity, embodiment and new genetic and information technologies.

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Glossary Non-English words are in italics. Words in bold type in the definitions have their own entries in the glossary. Affinal. Related by marriage. Anti-essentialism. A current of intellectual thought that criticizes essentialism and argues that persons and groups of people have identities that are multiple and shifting. Assisted conception. See Assisted Reproductive Technologies. Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs). Technologies used to help people with fertility problems to conceive children. Includes in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, sperm donation, etc. Autodafé. A proceeding of the Spanish Inquisition in which people were tried and punished as heretics and sinners. Biological fundamentalism. A form of essentialism which holds that a person or group of people is fundamentally and importantly defined by biological (especially genetic) make-up. Citizenship. The condition or status of being a citizen, that is, a legally recognized member of a nation-state. Cognatic kinship. A mode of reckoning kinship in which roughly equal weight is given to maternal and paternal connections. Cultural fundamentalism. A form of essentialism which holds that the culture of a person or group is deeply engrained, not easily subject to change, and defines the person or group in fundamental ways, which are often thought to make it hard for people of different cultures to get along harmoniously. Cultural racism. A form of racism in which a discourse of race, which focuses on identifying people in terms of physical appearance and linking this to cultural behaviour, is muted or absent. Instead, the same people are discriminated against simply as the bearers of cultural and moral traits deemed inferior or negative. Cultural relativism. The theory that there is no single, universal standard or set of cultural values. Culture. See Nature/Culture. DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid. One of two types of molecules that encode genetic information.

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Donor gametes. Gametes (sperm, eggs) that have been donated by men and women for use in assisted reproductive technologies. Egg donation. The giving of eggs (ova) by one woman to another who has fertility problems. Essentialism. A style of thought that seeks to characterize a thing, or set of things, in terms of a single internal essence. Often used in relation to thinking that does this with regard to people or social categories of people (e.g., ‘women’, ‘whites’, etc.). Estatutos de limpieza de sangre (statutes of the cleanliness of blood). Legislation enacted from the fifteenth century in Christian Spain to discriminate against people thought to be ‘tainted’ with Jewish and Arab descent or ‘blood’. Ethnicity. (There is no agreed definition of this complex term.) A social means of classifying perceived human difference, which relies mainly on ideas about culture and behaviour, but focuses above all on common origins and may also include ideas about genealogy and inherited characteristics. Ethnography. A practice most associated with anthropology, which involves detailed study of the everyday cultural practices and social relationships of people. Eugenics. A social reform movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that focused on controlling the reproduction (especially sexual) of people in order to produce ‘fitter’ (healthier, stronger, more morally upstanding) national populations. It encompassed interventions into practices of child rearing, but was best known for campaigns to sterilize individuals deemed to be ‘unfit’ or ‘feeble-minded’. It was linked to racism, in that certain (nonEuropean) ‘races’ were thought to be inherently less fit than others. Gamete. A male’s sperm or a female’s ovum (egg). Gene. A unit of heredity composed of DNA in one or more locations on a chromosome. Genealogy. Relationships of descent from an ancestor; the study and charting of such relationships. Geneticization. A process in which genes are used to explain human behaviour. (Less commonly: the increasing public profile of the gene as an icon.) Genetics. The scientific study of heredity and variation in organisms, based on the analysis of genes and DNA. Genomics. The mapping and sequencing of DNA with the use of computational techniques. Gestational surrogacy. A form of surrogate motherhood in which the surrogate mother gestates an embryo made from another couple’s own gametes. Governmentality. A term coined by French theorist Michel Foucault, joining ‘governance’ and ‘mentality’ to indicate how people and societies could be governed by shaping mentalities. IVF. In vitro fertilization. The fertilization of ova by sperm ‘in a test-tube’, i.e. in the laboratory. Jus sanguinis. (Literally, the law of blood.) The principle that a person’s nationality at birth is determined by that of his/her biological parents.

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Jus soli. (Literally, law of the soil.) The principle that a person’s nationality at birth is determined by the national territory within which s/he was born. Kinning. A term coined by Signe Howell. It is the process in which families work to incorporate individuals who are not biologically related and convert them into people accepted as kin. Kinship. A way of classifying humans according to notions of ‘relatedness’, in which what is thought to create relatedness varies according to cultural context. In Western contexts, an important (but not the only) means of creating relatedness is thought to be by the ‘blood’ links that result from sexual reproduction. Levirate. The practice in which a man marries the widow of his brother. Listserv. A generic term, derived from Listserv® email list-management software, for email lists, newsletters and discussion groups. Mitochondrial DNA. DNA that is located outside of the nucleus of the cell, which is where all other DNA is located. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the mother. Multiculturalism. An ideology that favours and values the harmonious coexistence of several different cultures in one nation-state and that aims to create spaces in the institutions of the state, and in everyday life, for the recognition of cultural diversity. Nation. An ‘imagined community’ (B. Anderson) of people thought to be bound together by shared history and culture, usually having or desiring political sovereignty and thus forming a nation-state. Nationalism. An ideology and sentiment of identifying with a nation, and usually of claiming political sovereignty for the nation as a nation-state. Nation-state. A nation that has independent political sovereignty and is ruled over by a single state. Naturalization. The process of attributing natural causes and characteristics to social phenomena, making what is cultural seem natural. Nature/Culture. A key conceptual distinction in Western thought, the terms of which have changed meaning over time and do not each have single meanings. In simple terms, the dualism alludes to the idea that there is a realm of nature, independent of human action, which is distinct from the realm of culture, seen as created by human action. The two realms are seen as interacting with each other. They overlap most in the area of ‘human nature’, which addresses the fact that humans are seen as themselves the product of nature and sharing a common natural humanity, while also apparently being ‘above nature’ in terms of their cultural accomplishments. Humans have thus often been conceptualized as having a natural component, sometimes seen as a biological (or genetic) substrate, which is overlain by a cultural component, often understood as modifying or domesticating the natural drives. New Reproductive Technologies. See Assisted Reproductive Technologies. Ontology. A branch of metaphysics that examines the nature of being. In social science, it refers to what is involved, at a fundamental level, in being a certain type of person.

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Orientalism. The term gained currency with Edward Said’s book Orientalism (1978) and has come to mean an academic practice of knowledge gathering and production which sustains a stereotyped view of the Orient (and, by extension, other non European regions or peoples) and underwrites colonialist domination. Parthenogenesis. A form of reproduction in which an unfertilized egg develops into a new individual organism. Patrilines. Lines of genealogical descent reckoned through the father’s side. Perestroika. The economic restructuring of the Soviet economy begun in 1987 under Mikhail Gorbachev. Pharmacogenomics. The study of how genetic make-up influences the body’s response to drug treatments. Phenotype. The physical constitution of an organism as shaped by the interplay of genes and environment; physical appearance. PNV. Partido Nacionalista Vasco (Nationalist Basque Party), founded 1895. Pro-natalism. A belief that promotes high birth rates. PUG. Public Understanding of Genetics: an abbreviation for the research project which gave rise to this volume (‘Public Understanding of Genetics: a Cross-cultural and Ethnographic Study of the “New Genetics” and Social Identity’, directed by Dr Jeanette Edwards (University of Manchester) and funded by the EU). Race. (There is no agreed definition of this complex term.) A social means of classifying perceived human difference, operative in the European sphere of influence in varied forms since about the fourteenth century, which relies on ideas about inheritance and physical appearance, especially when these are seen to characterize geo-continental human variation. Race is generally thought not to have any scientific validity as a biological category. Racialization. The application of racial ways of thinking to diverse human phenomena; a particular racial mode of naturalization. Racism. Discrimination and prejudice directed against people identified as racially different (see Race); an ideology in which certain aspects of physical appearance are taken to indicate certain moral and cultural traits, deemed inferior or negative. Sajudis. A movement, established in 1988, for the democratization of Lithuanian society. Schneider, David. U.S. anthropologist who revolutionized the study of kinship, asserting that not all kinship systems were based on biology and ideas of ‘blood’ relatedness and that anthropologists had unawares been smuggling in the assumption that a biological grid of relatedness underlay all cultures’ ideas of kinship. Stem cell. A type of ‘master cell’, which, in humans, can grow into any one of the body’s more than 200 cell types. Stem cells can be derived from embryos and are used in medical research. Substantialization. A process in which aspects of human behaviour and relationships are explained or talked about in relation to certain substances, usually seen as natural and often located in the body, such as ‘blood’, ‘genes’, or the physical substance of the body itself.

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Surrogacy. Shorthand for surrogate motherhood, in which a woman gestates an embryo on behalf of another couple who have fertility problems. The embryo can be formed from the surrogate’s egg artificially fertilized with the sperm of the couple, or can be formed from the couple’s own gametes (gestational surrogacy). Transnational adoption. Adoption in which the adopting parents come from a different nation-state (usually in Europe and North America) from the adopted child (who usually comes from a developing country, Eastern Europe or Russia). Y chromosome. A chromosome that only males carry.

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Index adoption 11, 64, 75 from Africa 83–4, 87–9 from China 14–5, 73, 77–80, 83–4, 86, 87, 88, 89 compared to sperm donation 61 corruption and 79 gender preference and 80 from Haiti 85, 86, 89 health of child and 79–80 homosexuals and 76 from Latin America 80 as model for immigration 111 from Morocco 76–7, 80 in Norway 54–69, 84 right to know and 62, 67, 105–6 from Russian/Eastern Europe 79–82, 88, 89 in Spain 73–89 selection of country 76–7 Ali, Suki 176–7, 184 ancestry from appearance 35 as determined by DNA 17–18, 182–3 maternal 19 Motherland: A Genetic Journey 20–21, 170–172, 182–3 paternal 20 Anderson, Benedict 147 anthropology 146 anti-racism 46 anti-Semitism 125 Arana, Sabino 133–4, 135 asylum seekers DNA testing of 62 in Norway 59, 60

Bedell, Geraldine 175, 178 biocentrism 62 bioethics 103–4, 117 see also gamete donation black identity 21–2, 163 Hall on 35–6 ‘black twins for white couple’ story 33–48 blood 13–14 and soil 12, 138–9, 141 see also kinship, place and Basques and 128, 133–4, 138–9 Lithuanians and 162, 165 see also jus soli/sanguinis 162 body and nation 95–8, 114, 117 borders 147, 154 Born with Two Mothers 33 Bourdieu, Pierre 127, 132, 141

Basques 12, 126, 132–41, 147 beauty 180

Darwin, Charles 178–80, 183 Dawkins, Richard 178–80, 183, 184

Catholicism 156 Christianity 12, 138–9, 141 climate change 1 colonialism 101–3, 172 consumerism civil rights and 114 DNA knowledge and 101 embraced in Spain 108 fertility and 99, 107 identity and 184 kinship/race and 113 multiculturalism as 101, 184 resisted in Norway 106 culture ethnic groups and 163 as euphemism for race 55 traffic with nature 160, 164–5

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de Amezaga, Vicente 135, 138 de Aranzadi, Engracio (‘Kizkitza’) 138–9 de la Sota, Manuel 136 Denmark 61 determinism 4, 25 DNA ancestry and 17–8 Gilroy on 47–8, 185 knowledge of as commodity 101 mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) 19 progressive/reactionary 47–8, 117 testing of 62, 67, 172, 184 donor selection see gamete donation egg donation see gamete donation endogamy 141 essentialism 4–5, 35–6 ethnicity ‘ethnic bodycare’ 87–8 ‘ethnic drugs’ 3, 25 ethnic groups 104 ethnic markers 156 race and 11–12, 88 in Soviet Union 158–9 surnames and 155 eugenics 3, 53, 102, 104, 180 flexible 17, 117 in Norway 56 IVF and 95 Evangelisto de Ibero 134, 138 exogamy 128–9, 131, 134

regulation of 98, 103–4 see also gamete donation technology and 1, 48 genome project (HGDP, Human Genome Diversity Project) 3–4, 47 Gilroy Paul 2, 5 on DNA revolution 47–8 on nano-racism 170, 178, 184 on race 175 Gorbachev, Mikhail 145 Gorham, Clare 176 Grove, Trevor 173 Gullestad, M. 54 Gypsies see Romani Hall, Stuart 35–6 Hansen, P. 103, 108 Havelock-Ellis, Henry 181 HFEA (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority) 37–8, 98–100, 104, 106, 114–5 homosexuals 76 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority see HFEA

family 165 feminism 75 fertility 99, 107 Finland 61 Foucault, Michel 6, 116 Franklin, Sarah 96 gamete donation 99 commercialism and 106, 108 ethnic matching of 16, 97, 113–4, 117 in Norway 105–6, 113–5 in Spain 105, 106, 113–5 in United Kingdom 98, 104, 106, 113–5 see also egg donation; sperm donation Garrison, Les 171 Geertz, Clifford 164 genetics determinism 4, 25 essentialism 184–5 life insurance and 25 markers 18

identity black identity 21–2, 35–6, 163 as consumer item 184 immigrants Basques and 135, 137 as cause of racism 62 DNA testing of 67 Hansen and Weil on 103, 108 to Norway (innvandrere) 54–69, 108–9 ‘second-generation’ 60 to Spain 15, 109–10 to UK 110–111, 114 IVF (in vitro fertilization) as commerce 99, 106 in Israel 16, 23–4 motherhood and 38–9, 107 racial ‘mix-up’ over 33–48 racism and 95–7, 100–101 right to know and 61–2, 67, 99, 105–6 South Asians and 100 in USA 99 see also gamete donation; sperm donation Jesuits 57 Jews 5, 6, 14, 125–6 Norway and 57 see also Xuetes

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Index Jones, Steve 104 jus soli/sanguinis 11–12, 103, 110, 141 kinship blood ties 127 place and 146–7 see also blood, and soil race and 7–8 Strathern on 1 Kizkitza see de Aranzadi, Engracio language 155–6 Latin America 6, 8 Lawrence, Stephen 175 Lemba 5 Leroi, Armand M. 180, 184 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 132 Lithuania 12–3, 145, 148–57, 160–65 lineage and 161–2, 163–4 Poles in 150, 152–61, 164–5 Russians in 150 masturbation 99 mestizos 6, 128, 136 see also mixed marriage; mixed race miscegenation 23, 101, 112 see also exogamy mixed marriage 127 mixed race 128, 162–3, 169, 175–6, 184 as disadvantage 98 modernity 132, 140 Motherland: A Genetic Journey 20–21, 170–172, 182–3 Ms Dynamite 173–4, 183 mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) 19, 137, 171, 173, 184, 184 multiculturalism 97–8, 101, 108, 110, 111–2, 113, 178 consumerism and 101, 184 nation and 116 Muslims in Norway 62–3, 65–6 IVF and 100 nation 101, 111 Alonso on 147 Eriksen on 147 kinship and 7, 132 race and 5–6 reproductive body and 95–8, 114, 117 in Soviet Union 158–9 nature destabilization of 9–11, 24–5

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nature/culture dichotomy 146 as socially constructed 146 traffic with culture 160, 164–5 Nazis 56, 126 neo-Nazis 58 Norway 14–5, 98 orientalism 100 Oslo 66 passports 159–60, 165 pater est 62 Philips, Trevor 110 Pitman, Joanna 181–2 po prostu 156–7 Poles 150, 152–61, 164–5 primordial attachment 164 Pryor, Francis 173 race culture as 55 disease and 3–4 ethnicity and 11–12, 88 Foucault on 116 genomics and 2–3 Gilroy on 2, 170, 175, 178 kinship and 7–8 mixed see under mixed race as scientific/unscientific 3, 18–9, 25, 35, 56 sexual attraction and 178 races maudites 126 racism 126–8 Basque 140 colonialism and 101–3 criticised in Britain 100–101 cultural 12, 89, 96, 102–3 Daily Mail cartoon 36–7 in Norway 58, 60 new 35 Stoler on 101–2 see also orientalism Rees, Jonathan 181 religion 156 Rénan, E. 111 Romani (Gypsies) 56 roots 157–8 Roughgarden, Joan 181, 183 Rua, Paco 84 Russians 150 Schneider, D.M. 132, 140 Second World War 52

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sexuality 6–7 attraction and 178–81 selection and 179–82 Somalis 67 Sota, Manu 139 South Asians 100 Spain 61 adoption in 73–89 genetic regulation 98 law on biological parents 75–6 Sperling, S. 96 sperm donors 15–16, 61–2, 97 rights of 39 see also gamete donation sperm policy Denmark 16 Norway 15–6 Spain 16 Stoler, A. 101–2, 103 strategic naturalization 22, 24 Strathern, M. on kinship 1 on nature 9–10, 21 Stuart, Wilma 39–40 surnames 155 surrogate mothers disallowed in Norway 61 maternal feelings of 34, 38, 45–6 race and 22, 34 rights of 39, 46 Sykes, Bryan, Nash on 19–20

telegony 45 ‘throwbacks’ 43–4, 45 Thubron, Colin 182 transnational adoption see adoption tuteisi 153–4, 157 Tyler, Katharine 87, 112, 162–3, 177 van Gogh, Theo 62–3 Vasey, John 181 Volkman, T.A. 88–9 Wade, Peter 140 on phenotypes 86 Wallace, Helen 171 Weil, P. 103, 108 Weil, R.H. 89 Wergeland, Henrik Arnold 57 White, Charles 181 Xuetes 129–32, 141 Y chromosomes 171, 172, 184

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