Rich with the voices and stories of participants, these touching, firsthand accounts examine how women of diverse racial, ethnic, class and religious backgrounds perceive prenatal testing, the most prevalent and routinized of the new reproducing technologies. Based on the author's decade of research and her own personal experiences with amniocentesis, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus explores the "geneticization" of family life in all its complexity and diversity.

Rayna Rapp, one of the leading feminist anthropologists in the United States, explores the complex and contradictory nature of prenatal diagnosis and its social impact and cultural meaning, through the narratives of the people who have experienced it. Rich with the voices and stories of participants, these firsthand accounts examine how women of diverse racial, ethnic, class and religious backgrounds perceive prenatal testing.

This publication explores the notion of motherhood for women of differing classes, races, religions and nations in the light of various strategies and new technologies used to attain motherhood.

With his groundbreaking Europe and the People Without History, Eric R. Wolf powerfully advanced the project of integrating the disciplines of anthropology and history. In Articulating Hidden Histories, many of those influenced by Wolf--both anthropologists and historians--acknowledge the contribution of this great scholar while extending his work by presenting their own original field and archival research.

The "hidden histories" referred to here encompass the histories of economic and political forces capable of dislodging people from their surroundings, of the people thus...

This groundbreaking volume provides a dramatic investigation of the dynamics of reproduction. In an unusually broad spectrum of essays, a distinguished group of international feminist scholars and activists explores the complexity of contemporary sexual politics around the globe. Using reproduction as an entry point in the study of social life and placing it at the center of social theory, the authors examine how cultures are produced, contested, and transformed as people imagine their collective future in the creation of the next generation.

The studies encompass a wide variety of...

Revolutionary socialist movements have held out the promise, in both theory and practice, that women can achieve liberation through their participation in the revolutionary process. But many women in post-revolutionary societies have watched in frustration as this promise has been pushed into the future or dropped from the agenda altogether. The essays in Promissory Notes renew the debate about the connections between feminism and socialism by examining the position of women in socialist thought from the time of Marx to the present. The book looks at the central theoretical formulations of...

Reproduction, Globalization, and the State conceptualizes and puts into practice a global anthropology of reproduction and reproductive health. Leading anthropologists offer new perspectives on how transnational migration and global flows of communications, commodities, and biotechnologies affect the reproductive lives of women and men in diverse societies throughout the world. Based on research in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Western Europe, their fascinating ethnographies provide insight into reproduction and reproductive health broadly conceived to encompass population control,...