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Anthropological Theory

Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
Vol 3(1): 65–85
[1463-4996(200303)3:1;65–85;031752]

Re-thinking
nature–culture
Anthropology and the new genetics1
Sarah Franklin
Lancaster University, UK

Abstract
This article explores the implications of ‘the new genetics’ for anthropology as
questions of articulation, connection, and relation – or as the production of
difference. Using Marilyn Strathern’s model of merographic connection, and drawing
on recent ethnographic work on the new genetics, including my own, the question of
what kinds of connections and relations are being forged through emergent forms of
genetic information is critically explored both empirically and theoretically. In
particular, the theme of a genetic ‘gap’, between ‘objective’ genetic facts and socially-
forged identities and categorizations, provides the occasion to contrast different
ethnographic and theoretical models of the social meaning of DNA. I argue that the
ways in which genetic information is always partial – in both senses, of being already
invested with presumptions and always incomplete – have consequences for how
genetic connections are formed, and genetic relationships are understood. The desire
to extract ‘clear’ biological messages from genes conflicts with the desire to instruct,
and alter, them, recapitulating a familiar hybridity at the heart of English kinship
thinking – that our biology is both made and bred.

Key Words
genetic identity • human embryos • kinship • merography • nature–culture debates

The question posed for anthropology by the new genetics has widely been interpreted
in terms of a long-established disciplinary language of biological and social facts, or the
nature–culture opposition, and in particular the relationship between biological and
social ties. While many have convincingly argued the social facts vs biological facts
distinction is increasingly inadequate to describe the context of the new genetics, as the
biological is literally being rebuilt in ways that make it more social than ‘natural’, it is
also claimed, as Edwards and Strathern have done, that ‘at the core of English kinship
thinking for much of the 20th century has been the combination and division of
phenomena for which at the end of the century we are just beginning to find metaphors’

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(2000: 163). Following Edwards and Strathern, I argue here that the natural facts–social
facts distinction may need to be reinvented, rather than discarded, in order to under-
stand the kinds of connections and relations being produced in the context of the new
genetics.2
I begin with Marilyn Strathern’s concept of ‘merographic connections’ to explore this
‘combination and division of phenomena’ in terms of biological and social connections
as they have been described in recent anthropological work on the new genetics – both
theoretical and ethnographic. In Part Two, I draw on ethnographic work in progress in
an IVF laboratory where genetic diagnosis of embryos is being performed in order to
explore these connections from a different angle, in terms of what constitutes ‘a
biological fact’. Developing from Strathern’s model of ‘partial connections’, I explore
how biological facts are assembled, and how this process is seen and understood, using
transcribed conversations with the senior clinical embryologist at the St Thomas clinic,
Dr Susan Pickering. Working from the perspective of ethnographic engagement with
biology-in/as-culture, I conclude with a discussion of ethnographic method and the new
genetics that raises some methodological, as well as conceptual, questions.

MEROGRAPHIC CONNECTIONS
Marilyn Strathern introduces the idea of ‘merographic connections’ in her discussion of
biological and social facts in English kinship thinking (1992: 76) as a means of distin-
guishing a specific kind of cultural borrowing involved in the way ideas travel, connect,
disconnect, and contain one another. Describing English kinship in terms of parts and
wholes, Strathern writes that:

The popular supposition that kinship is only ‘part’ of society rests on the fact that it
is also ‘part’ of biological process. Such parts are not equal to one another. The
perspective that gives each of them its distinctive nature appears always as a different
order of phenomena. Each order that encompasses the parts may be thought of as a
whole, as the individual parts may also be thought of as wholes. But parts in this view
do not make wholes. . . . Thus the logic of the totality is not necessarily to be found
in the logic of the parts, but in principles, forces, relations that exist between the parts.
(1992: 76, my emphasis)

Strathern uses the odd discordances between ‘parts’ and ‘wholes’ (or other ‘parts’) to
explore the ways in which ‘parts’ overlap in the production of ideas about relatedness.
The natural/biological fact of relatedness belongs, in this view, to the domain of the
biological, itself a kind of totality, or, in Strathern’s words, ‘whole’. The genome is an
idea of this kind, referring to a biological totality, as in ‘the human genome’, and to a
technological project (the human genome initiative).3 Social facts, such as the names
people give to biological relationships – mother, father, sibling, cousin – belong to the
domain of social which is ‘after nature’, and is also a totality, or whole, in itself. Simi-
larly, the names that are given to the protein sequences that comprise ‘genes’, or ‘genetic
markers’ belong to the realm of science, which describes its objects in terms of techno-
logical processes of identification and intervention. Both kinship and the new genetics
connect these distinct domains ‘merographically’ because in the idea of a kinship
relation, or a genetic marker, is the idea of a co-mingling of parts that belong to different

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FRANKLIN Re-thinking nature–culture

‘wholes’. 4 In this sense, kinship is a realm of ‘borrowing’, and also a realm of hybridity.
This hybridity is of a merographic kind insofar as the separateness of the two domains
acts as the cultural background to the figuring of kinship, which ‘contains’ the two
distinctive orders of the social and the biological. In Strathern’s view, kinship is the pre-
eminent example of the way in which ‘ideas contain other ideas’, but this model applies
equally well to many of the concepts central to the new genetics.
Paul Rabinow’s model of biosociality (1996), and Donna Haraway’s concept of the
cyborg (1991), offer slightly different versions of how the social and the biological, or
nature, culture, and technology are ‘mixed’.5 Rabinow argues that the domain of nature
or biology can no longer be seen as a prior condition for the social, because the social
is no longer ‘after nature’, but is the model for a new nature ‘remade through tech-
nique’ (1996: 99). He famously claims that ‘in biosociality nature will be modelled on
culture understood as practice. Nature will be known and remade through technique,
just as culture becomes natural’ (1996: 99). This transformation, whereby the new
genetics engenders ‘a truly new type of autoproduction . . . which I call “biosociality” ’
(1996: 99), is linked to what Rabinow describes as ‘the dissolution of the category of
“the social” ’ (1996: 99), by which he means ‘the whole way of life of a people’ (1996:
99).6
A similar philosophical/historical argument is made by Hans-Jorg Rheinberger
(2000), who offers a more precise formulation in parallel with Rabinow’s claim that ‘the
new genetics will prove to be a greater force for reshaping society and life than was the
revolution in physics, because it will be embedded throughout the social fabric at the
micro-level by a variety of biopolitical practices and discourses’ (1996: 98). Rheinberger’s
version of the process Rabinow describes as ‘modelling’ is more molecular:

With the advent of recombinant DNA technologies, a radical change of perspective

ensued. The momentum of gene technology is based on the prospect of an inter-
cellular representation of extracellular projects – the potential of ‘rewriting’ life. (2000:
19, my emphasis)

In other words, Rheinberger describes a shift in the kind of intervention recombinant

DNA technology has made, with increasing momentum, since the mid-1970s. Whereas
Rabinow describes this shift as an inversion, through which the social becomes the model
for the natural, Rheinberger’s account describes an intensification of intervention into
life itself:

With gene technology, informational molecules are constructed according to an

extracellular project and are subsequently implanted into the intracellular environ-
ment. The organism itself transposes them, reproduces them, and ‘tests’ their
characteristics. With that, the organism as a whole advances to the status of a locus
technicus – that is, to the status of a space of representation in which new genotypic
and phenotypic patterns are becoming probed and articulated . . . For the first time,
it is on the level of instruction that metabolic processes are becoming subject to
manipulation. Until that point was reached, medical intervention, even in its most
intrusive physical, chemical and pharmacological forms, was restricted to the level of
metabolic performance. (2000: 25, original emphasis)

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According to Rheinberger, then, what is ‘new’ is both the kind of intervention that is
possible, and the scale of biological control that is enabled by the ability to ‘instruct’
metabolic processes using ‘informational molecules’ to redirect bodily processes. This is
the ‘wet’ end of the production of what Rabinow calls ‘biosociality’, because it is where
the key transformation occurs from a state of being able to influence biological or meta-
bolic (‘natural’) processes and being able to create ‘new genotypic and phenotypic
patterns’. To Rabinow’s broad thesis of ‘nature remade as technique’, Rheinberger adds
a description of specific processes, of recombination, transposition, implantation,
probing, testing, and above all instruction.
Whereas both Rheinberger and Rabinow are attempting to describe actual, onto-
logical, and historical shifts (which they attribute to technical and epistemological
developments in the genetic sciences), Strathern and Haraway are more concerned with
the question, to return to Strathern’s formulation cited earlier, of the kinds of ‘principles,
forces, relations that exist between the parts’. For Strathern, the apparent dissolution of
the differences between nature and culture, or biology and society, derives from a
collapse of the analogy between nature and culture, that is only sustained partially, and
cannot function in a ‘post-plural’ context (1992: 83, 87).7 In Rheinberger’s terms, we
are today ‘witnessing a global, irreversible transformation of living beings, animals and
plants, toward deliberately engineered beings’ to the extent that ‘future natural evolution
will appear as insignificant’ (Rheinberger, 2000: 27). In this epochal view, the ability to
rewrite the script of life itself, including our own, means that ‘the traditional dichotomy
between “nature” and “nurture,” between “biology” and “culture,” is about to collapse’
(2000: 28) and indeed that ‘the “natural” and the “social” can no longer be perceived as
ontologically different’ (2000: 29). Citing Latour, Rheinberger concludes that ‘the
activity of nature/society making becomes the source from which societies and natures
originate’ (Latour in Rheinberger, 2000: 29).
Such claims by Latour, Rabinow, and Rheinberger closely resemble the critique of
natural facts as objective, literal, ontological conditions which has emerged out of both
feminist anthropology and feminist science studies, particularly in the work of Strathern
and Haraway. However, this resemblance obscures an important difference between a
critique of the natural facts/social facts dichotomy, and the claim that it is now
redundant or obsolete. In our book Global Nature, Global Culture, Celia Lury, Jackie
Stacey and I offer an interpretation of changes in the way the category of the natural has
come to signify in ways that may be more fluid and flexible, but we argue they are in
some ways even more powerful as a result (Franklin et al., 2000). By analysing the traffic
in nature, we suggest that ‘while nature and culture are increasingly isomorphic, in that
they are acquiring each other’s powers, their distinctiveness continues also to remain
crucial’. We argue that the category of the natural remains central to the production of
difference, not only as a shifting classificatory category, but through processes of natural-
ization, de-naturalization, and re-naturalization (Franklin et al., 2000: 9–10). This
processual model is able to emphasize, and to track, the movements enabling ideas of the
natural to signify with the notable fluidity, contradictoriness, and power that is their
distinctive feature, which, we suggest, it has not lost (2000: 19). Following Strathern,
we ask how ‘the uses of nature as models for context’ are shifting (Franklin et al., 2000:
20), and what effects, entities and embodiments are generated as a result.
An extension of this argument which is of particular relevance to the new genetics can

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FRANKLIN Re-thinking nature–culture

be seen in the way the concept of the biological is being asked to do a very similar kind
of merographic work to that described by Strathern for kinship. What is the biological
if it is not a category in which nature is both unavoidably present, and yet increasingly
absent? Whereas kinship is merographic in the way it connects ideas of nature, society
and the individual, the biological too can be seen to be composed of distinct orders that
belong, in Strathern’s sense, to different, distinct, and irreconcilable wholes. Increasingly,
the biological refers to ‘a combination and division of phenomena’ that not only requires
new metaphors, but also comes to embody them, producing an interesting reproductive
process. The biological increasingly refers to mixtures of the biological and the techni-
cal, as is ubiquitously signified by the vaguely potent prefix ‘bio-’, as in the biosciences,
biomedicine, biopolitics, or bioethics. Rabinow’s ‘biosociality’ similarly combines the
idea of the biological, the technical, and the social to make a classically ‘merographic’
assemblage. Like kinship, biology is increasingly ‘after nature’.

ETHNOGRAPHIC FACTS
To explore further what is merographic about ‘the biological’ (and to suggest what might
be merographic about ‘the genetic’), it is helpful to shift into a more ethnographic
consideration of the question of nature–culture recombination. Moving away from a
characterization of this question in broad sociological or historical terms, and returning
to the issue of the ‘principles, forces, relations that exist between the parts’, it is useful
to consider social practice as a way of sketching emergent cultural forms. Hence we turn
to two recent ethnographic monographs which explore the new genetics anthropologi-
cally, by Kaja Finkler (2000) and Rayna Rapp (1999).
In contrast to the claims of all of the theorists discussed earlier, Kaja Finkler argues
that the new genetics have not precipitated the decline of the natural facts–social facts
dichotomy, but have, instead, reinforced it. Carefully reprising Schneider’s account of
American families (1980), Finkler notes the ways in which family ties are increasingly
defined by love and by choice against the backdrop of a belief in the objective reality of
blood-based biological ties established through shared reproductive substance. Schneider,
she notes, ‘underscores that choice defines who precisely are considered kinsfolk. In
contemporary American society, where the ideology of choice rules, one is not surprised
that the notion of choice is extended to biogenetic ties with regard to kinsfolk and family’
(Finkler, 2000: 35–6). Following Judith Stacey (1990), Finkler adds that the ‘post-
modern family of the latter part of the 20th century is characterized by uncertainty,
insecurity and doubt, and its arrangements, like postmodernism, are diverse, fluid, and
unresolved, opening the way for an array of kinship relations’ (2000: 36). In contrast to
this trend, Finkler argues that ‘biomedical explanations reinforce our notions that family
and kinship are anchored in genetic ties, flowing from past to future, possessing a perma-
nence that transcends time’ (2000: 43). She calls this process the ‘medicalization of
kinship’, claiming that ‘our kinship relations have been given a new dimension that
stresses faulty genes’ (2000: 181). Finkler’s main thesis is that ‘the medicalization of
kinship thus subverts the ideology of choice regarding the people one selects as one’s kin’
(2000: 185).
Using case studies of adoptees in search of their biological parents, and women at
risk of inherited cancer, Finkler provides examples of the ways in which individuals
become reconnected to wider kin networks through ‘inherently impersonal’ DNA

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molecules (Finkler, 2000: 187). By means of family medical history, Finkler argues,
people’s day-to-day realities are changed by reconnecting to their genetic heritage,
acquiring ‘a new sense of continuity with the past’ (2000: 186) through ties of suffer-
ing. These ties, though urgently prominent, are, in Finkler’s view, fundamentally
ambivalent. At the suggestion of her genetic counsellor, Karen, a 39-year-old woman at
risk of breast cancer, initiated a reunion with her 77-year-old maternal aunt, Alice, in
order to learn more about her medical background. Finkler describes Karen’s feelings of
guilt about having lost contact with her mother’s sister, only re-establishing the connec-
tion to acquire a blood sample. Moreover, Finkler depicts Karen’s ‘contradictory feelings’
about the positive outcome of the genetic tests – the option of a prophylactic mastec-
tomy – ‘which will touch her at the core of her being as a traditional mother and wife
and may physically convert her to the protected child she feels she is’ (Finkler, 2000:
69). Alice, Karen’s aunt, is willing to contribute a blood sample out of a sense of family
obligation, even though she herself does not believe the disease is inherited, and
complains that ‘Karen just called me because I knew a lot, but they never come to see
me’ (2000: 73). Alice, then, may well be what Finkler describes as a paradigmatic
‘example of someone reunited with a family member only because of genetic ideologies
of inheritance’, but it is less clear if such an example is as ‘remarkable’ as Finkler claims
(2000: 74). The experiences of Alice and Karen may be ‘especially instructive in how the
ideology of genetic inheritance defines for them a relationship with family and kin’, but
it is less clear what kind of relationship this is, and while Karen’s case is cited as one in
which ‘the belief in the genetic inheritance of disease has unwittingly brought [her] closer
to [her] family’ (2000: 74), it is not clear what the ‘closeness’ consists of in this example,
which could be said to reinforce their continuing distance in spite of genetic proximity.
Possibly, Finkler’s argument is somewhat tautological, by assuming a medical connec-
tion is a ‘kinship’ one. The question remains as to whether ‘the medicalization of kinship’
and ‘the hegemony of the gene’ actually have the effect of reinforcing consanguineal ties,
de-emphasizing conjugal and affinal ties, and deepening the significance of biological
ties to distant kin, as Finkler claims (2000: 208), or whether this effect is somewhat
undermined by her emphasis on the extent to which these ‘postmodern’ kinship ties are
also profoundly alienating. ‘By assigning shared identities to people who may have little
in common in the past or in the present’ and by linking them to ‘people with whom
they have shared few experiences’, the ideology of genetic inheritance, in Finkler’s view,
‘distanc[es] the person from his or her being’, opening up a gap between their experi-
ence and their genetic identity (2000: 209). Is this kinship?
Finkler describes this situation as a phenomenological paradox in the form of a
collision between everything known and familiar in a person’s biography and experience
and abstract medical knowledge about a genetic disorder. It could also be portrayed as
the kind of merographic connection outlined earlier, in which two very different orders
of connection make up a whole that is thought of as a kin tie. Hence, as Finkler notes,
‘the compartmentalized postmodern fragmented individual has become joined to his or
her ancestors by DNA and to living relatives by the ideology of genetic inheritance’
(2000: 209). This fragmented genetic tie is an example of what I have elsewhere described
as an ‘absurd connection’ (Franklin, 2001c), to emphasize the extremity of the breach
of registers or contexts that are being brought together in a form of knowledge, or in
this case discovery, in which the familiar and quotidian are at once intimate and remote,

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familiar and strange.8 The sense of alienation and fragmentation, or of disorientation

and estrangement, that comes from becoming ‘medicalized kin’ can be seen to result
from the awkward partial connection linking abstract scientific information with
intimate personal identity categories, such as kinship. Similarly, the kind of ‘kinship’
invoked in the act of phoning a distant relative in order to confirm suspected family
pathology by requesting a blood donation returns us to the familiar question of what
kinship is ‘based on’ in a whole new guise. This newly-geneticized kinship comes into
being as a request to mobilize traditional kinship ties and obligations to collect the
material needed to perform a biochemical assay, thus conjoining widely divergent scales,
domains, or orders of connection that are at once intimately personal and remotely tech-
nical. In such a situation, the sought-after, possibly morbid, protein molecular structure
of the targeted DNA suggests that the ‘principles, forces, relations that exist between the
parts’ may be familiar, but the resulting relation, connection, or ‘whole’ is not. It is,
indeed, a connection somewhat at odds with itself, which is precisely the disjunction
Finkler recounts very skilfully in her troubling account of the experience of family and
kinship ties on the ‘medical frontier’ of the new genetics.
Rayna Rapp uses a similar analogy of ‘moral pioneers’ in her study of prenatal genetic
testing in New York City (Rapp, 1999: 306), which introduces yet another set of ‘partial
connections’ at the level of both individual experience and institutional structures. In
attempting to provide a ‘topography’ of amniocentesis through a multi-sited ethno-
graphic account of personal and professional encounters with this form of prenatal
chromosomal analysis, Rapp describes at length the ‘inadvertent imbrications’ that
‘frame the social conditions under which prenatal diagnosis became conceivable’ (1999:
34).
These ‘inadvertent imbrications’ produce a somewhat different genetic gap in Rapp’s
study from that of Finkler, which could be described as the gap between genetic infor-
mation – which is often highly technical but incomplete – and meaningful knowledge,
which, by definition, is socially, not medically, defined, evaluated, and acted upon. This
genetic knowledge gap is compounded both by the time-lag built in to the technique of
amniocentesis (between extraction of amniotic fluid and analysis of its chromosomal
content), and by the social stratifications which mark encounters with the forms of
reproductive choice and control the technique is designed to facilitate. Although medical
information is understood as ‘objective’, and genetic counselling is dedicated to the prin-
ciples of non-interference and neutrality, no one comes to amniocentesis with an objec-
tive or neutral social positioning, individual identity, or cultural background. On the
contrary, the difficult choices involved in amniocentesis are highly stratified and differ-
entiated by personal circumstances, including gender, racial, ethnic, and class-based
forms of privilege, exclusion, and subordination.
These factors produce the ‘multiple intersections’ (Rapp, 1999: 24) that require
‘complex choreography’ (1999: 100) for both patients and professionals in the world of
prenatal genetic diagnosis and decision-making. Rapp shows how ‘alternative and some-
times competing rationales’ (1999: 10) must be weighed up and evaluated, often in
complicated marital or family settings that can generate what she describes as ‘kinship
friction’ (1999: 153). Initially based on her own experience of amniocentesis, involving
a positive diagnosis for Down’s, and the subsequently painful decision to terminate her
pregnancy, Rapp’s own retrospection about her encounter with pre-natal genetic

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diagnosis frames her investigation of the experiences of others. She is attentive both to
the burdens of decision-making for those in a position of disenfranchisement and social
deprivation, and to the very different burdens of privileged middle-class women, who
frequently become highly self-critical despite doing everything in their power to act
responsibly toward others. Both the burdens of lack – of literacy, language, entitlement,
financial resources, adequate healthcare, and basic social support – and the costs of
middle-class privilege, with all of its over-valuation of control, rationality, and medical
technology, are exhaustively chronicled in Rapp’s nuanced and compassionate study of
what has come to be called the geneticization of reproductive choice.9
‘Inadvertent imbrications’ (Rapp, 1999: 34) is thus another way to describe the
complex linking up of the ordinary and the quotidian into odd, and sometimes bizarre,
combinations in the context of the new genetics. This phrase could describe the circum-
stances of the well-educated woman who changed her mind about having an amnio-
centesis because, by coincidence, she met three women who had lost pregnancies after
the test – a situation Rapp attributes to ‘the gap between statistical risk figures and
phenomenological experience’ (1999: 175). It could also describe the ‘ordinary labora-
tory occurrence’ of reading a cell with a chromosome count of 47, identifying the extra
chromosome as number 21, counting 30 more cells to be sure, and logging a diagnosis
of Down’s syndrome, destined ‘to set off an extraordinary reaction in the hearts and
minds of pregnant women and their supporters to whom it is shortly reported’ (Rapp,
1999: 219). The macro-sociological histories of birth control, access to abortion, atti-
tudes toward disability, and the development of DNA amplification technology are also
part of the ‘potent and heterogeneous social mix’ Rapp refers to in her linkage analysis
of what is ‘testing’ about genetic tests.
When the pieces of a genetic diagnosis do not quite cohere, that is, when there is an
ambiguous relation between the well-characterized cellular parts and an unknown
phenotypic ‘whole’, the forces and principles which hold genetic diagnosis together
along a fragile logic of enhanced reproductive choice begin to unravel. The following
case from Rapp’s account provides what might be described as a merographic ethno-
graphic fragment, of conjoined and simultaneous dialogue, which is tellingly incoher-
ent, and in which two different logics of genetic interpretation are seamlessly interwoven
to produce what Rapp describes as a diagnostic ‘stand-off ’ (1999: 188).
The background to the case is the discovery of ‘something ambiguous on the #9
chromosome of the sample’ and a provisional diagnosis of ‘#9+’. The closest condition to
which this could be assimilated is ‘some clinical reports on trisomy 9’, resulting in physical
anomalies and mental retardation. After counselling, the mother decides to keep the preg-
nancy, and gives birth in early June. A month later the genetics laboratory requests a
consultation via the mother’s obstetrician, and she agrees to attend with her baby son.

He was a six-week-old Haitian boy named Etienne St-Croix. His mother, Veronique,
spoke reasonably good English and good French. His grandmother, Marie-Lucie,
who carried the child, spoke Creole and some French. The two geneticists spoke
English, Polish, Hebrew and Chinese between them. I translated into French, osten-
sibly for the grandmother and mother . . . The geneticist was gracious with Veronique
but after a moment’s chit-chat asked to examine the baby. She never spoke again to
the mother during the examination. Instead, she and a second geneticist, both trained

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in pediatrics, handled the newborn with confidence and interest. The counselor took
notes as the geneticists measured and discussed the baby. ‘Note the oblique palpebral
fissure and micrognathia,’ one called out. ‘Yes,’ answered Veronique in perfect time
to the conversation, ‘he has the nose of my uncle Herve and the ears of Aunt
Mathilde.’ As the geneticists pathologized, the mother genealogized, the genetic
counselor remained silent, furiously taking notes, and the anthropologist tried to
keep score. (Rapp, 1999: 187)

This episode, from Rapp’s chapter on ‘Refusing’, is presented as an example of the

problem of diagnostic ambiguity, and also as ‘a dramatic instance of interpretive standoff
between biomedical discourse and family life’ (1999: 188). The geneticists are working
from known precedents to increase their scientific understanding by comparing a new
case with previous cases through physical examination of the newborn ‘trisomy 9’. Rapp
observes that:

While the geneticists are confident that this child will share the developmental
pattern reported in the literature for other children with very similar chromosomal
patterns, the mother was quite aware of the idiosyncratic nature of the case, its lack
of a clear-cut label and known syndrome. She therefore decided that the contest for
interpretation was still an open one. (1999: 188)

Here, then, is the opposite finding from Finkler, in which a medicalized version of a
genetic tie is resisted in favour of a more colloquial, and adamantly familial one. The
rejection of the medicalized version of genealogical connection is, furthermore, under-
scored by the decision to have the child – more or less against medical advice. Asked
about her decision after the examination is over, on the way to the subway, Veronique
explains that:

If it had been Down’s, maybe, just maybe I would have had an abortion. Once I had
an abortion, but now I am a Seventh Day Adventist, and I don’t believe in abortion
anymore. Maybe for Down’s, just maybe. But when they told me this, who knows?
I was so scared, but the more they talked, the less they said. They do not know what
this is. And I do not know either. So now, it’s my baby. We’ll just have to wait and
see what happens. And so will they. (1999: 188)

In one sense, a perfectly comprehensible exchange has taken place between two sets
of interested parties, who both have different relationships to Etienne’s birth, and
different knowledge priorities about the future. The shared context of diagnostic ambi-
guity is not a source of conflict: all of the parties involved, including the genetic coun-
sellor and the anthropologist, leave the conversation with their pre-existing assumptions
unaffected by it, despite their lack of a shared interpretation or standpoint having been
reinforced, and despite the seriousness of the occasion in terms of what is at stake in the
form of suspected genetic impairment.
For Rapp, what is important about this scene is not only that it is paradoxical, contra-
dictory, and made up of ‘alternative and competing rationales’ (1999: 10), but that it
involves a direct rejection of biomedical expertise. Using Paul Rabinow’s concept of
biosociality’ discussed earlier, Rapp argues that:

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Biomedicine provides discourses with hegemonic claims . . . encouraging enrolment

in the categories of biosociality. Yet these claims do not go uncontested, nor are these new
categories of identity used untransformed. Religious orientations and practices, informal
folk beliefs, class-based and ethnic traditions as well as scientifically-inflected coun-
terdiscourses also lay claim to the interpretation of extra chromosom[al material].
(Rapp, 1999: 302, my emphasis)

What is clear from both Finkler’s and Rapp’s ethnographic accounts of the new
genetics is the resilience of strategic agency in the face of conflicting versions of normal-
ity and abnormality. There is a lot of picking and choosing going on at the level of which
information is accepted as useful knowledge, what kinds of authority are relied upon,
and how individual decisions are reached amidst often conflicting individual, marital,
and familial priorities. The central paradox of prenatal testing is that it is primarily
sought as a form of reassurance that everything is ‘normal’, when it is designed to detect
exactly the reverse. Moreover, it is only when a test returns a ‘positive’ outcome that there
are difficult decisions to be made. The most difficult decisions of all occur when normal-
ity is no longer a predicted outcome, which is, ironically, after the test has been ‘success-
ful’ in detecting genetic disease.
However, two different models of geneticization also emerge from these two ethno-
graphies. In Finkler’s terms, geneticization is the cause of genealogical reconnection – it
re-establishes kinship. For Rapp, existing social definitions of kinship can supersede
geneticization, displacing it in favour of stronger, pre-existing kinship ties.

PARTS AND WHOLES

The main ‘merographic connection’ that recurs throughout these two ethnographic
accounts of experiences of the new genetics is that between the parts of DNA molecules
that belong to the scientific domain of genetic ‘facts’, and the parts of social interaction
and personal identity that inform decisions about health, reproduction, and parentage.
It is true that at one level this is a false distinction, since it is only the social production
of genetic knowledge as choice which makes such decisions possible, desirable, or as
Rapp says, ‘conceivable’ to begin with. However, what is helpful about Strathern’s atten-
tion to the merographic nature of (EuroAmerican) kinship thinking is precisely that it
describes how what is ‘conceivable’ about amniocentesis testing, or genetic screening for
breast cancer, or paternity testing, is already built into the conception of kinship as a
hybrid of individual and society, of natural and cultural facts. The dilemma of ‘what to
make of our genes’ derives from the assumption that they make us who we are to begin
with. And this is nowhere tragically more evident than for parents who are aware they
are at risk of passing on severe genetic diseases to their offspring, and who, understand-
ably and admirably, interpret genetic responsibility to mean they must take all possible
measures to avoid imposing such suffering on their children in the future. Yet, as Rapp
notes, ‘in some sense, all positive diagnoses appear ambiguous to pregnant women’
(1999: 188), because genetic information is always partial. Even when a chromosomal
analysis is known with all possible certainty, it will not reveal how serious the disease
will be, when its onset will occur, or how it may affect a child’s lifespan. Even in the very
rare cases of single gene disorders where the outcome can be predicted with tragically
accurate clinical precision, such as Tay-Sachs disease, Spinal Muscular Atrophy, or

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Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, the potential offspring is never fully reducible to a

potential syndrome, even if it is terminal. Hence, the assumption that genes make us
who we are is both too true to ignore, and too partial to be enough truth by itself.
As Edwards and Strathern have noted, ‘at the core of English kinship thinking for
much of the twentieth century has been the combination and division of phenomena
for which at the end of the century we are just beginning to find metaphors’ (2000:
163). This appears all the more true in the context of the new genetics. While increas-
ing information about genes might be imagined to confirm beyond any doubt that
kinship is a social system ‘based on’ the biological facts of genetic connection, the
question of what this information means to people, and the overwhelming ethnographic
evidence that it is far from straightforward – no matter how ‘scientifically literate’, well-
educated, middle-class, or even medically-trained its interpreters are – suggests that the
new genetics is simply another occasion to visit the ‘old’ problem of what kinship is ‘all
about’. It is for this reason the question of what kinship connects needs also to be inves-
tigated in terms of how those connections are formed, or, in Strathern’s words, the kinds
of ‘principles, forces, relations that exist between the parts’.

CONNECTIONS AND UNCERTAINTIES

The process of understanding the relationship between genetic information and a
medical prognosis, or between a medical prognosis and a child, is complicated by
biological facts as well as social ones. Another way to describe geneticization is the
process by which genes become over-privileged parts of resulting wholes, in the way they
are seen as determinants – as codes or blueprints – and as unalterable components of
the biological design of living things. However, this aspect of ‘geneticization’ is increas-
ingly uncertain amidst the current shift from structural to functional genomics. Even
before the Human Genome Project reached the major milestone of ‘the first panoramic
view of the landscape of our genome’ (Dennis et al., 2001: 813), major questions about
the role of nuclear DNA in development had begun to be asked. The cloning of Dolly
the sheep, for example, suggested that nuclear genetic material could be ‘reprogrammed’
by the cell cytoplasm, raising questions about the central dogma of molecular genetics
– that DNA makes RNA makes protein (Wilmut et al., 2000). The one-way, irreversible
path of development, assumed to be one of the bedrocks of modern biology, is increas-
ingly under scrutiny as experiments with stem cells suggest the possibility of ‘trans-
differentiating’ adult cells to make them newly viable as pluripotent cell lines (Royal
Society, 2002).
New forms of genetic diagnosis have also become more complex. For example, it is
now possible for couples at risk of passing on severe, often terminal, genetic disorders
to have their embryos tested for a specific genetic condition prior to implantation. This
technique, known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), resembles other forms
of assisted conception and pre-natal testing in the challenges it presents to clinicians and
patients. A relatively new technique, currently licensed at only six clinics in Britain, PGD
often involves decision-making on the basis of partial or incomplete information.
Especially because it is so technically complex, clinicians, embryologists, and geneticists
must work very closely with patients, as well as each other, throughout PGD treatment.
The opportunity to conduct ethnographic research on PGD is thus a unique situ-
ation in which to become part of the broad process of making sense of increasing

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amounts of genetic information – which is another way to describe what ‘geneticization’

means.10 Observing the extensive communication among medical and scientific staff
necessary to coordinate treatment, conducting interviews with patients, sitting in on
patient consultations, and learning about highly technical scientific procedures in the
laboratory, have presented the opportunity to witness a complex translation of diagnostic
genetic technology into reproductive decision-making. Among many notable features of
this process is the palpable sense of uncertainty which characterizes so many aspects of a
procedure that is constantly being scrutinized at every level to allow the maximum
chance of success.
As patients themselves are quick to point out, every effort is made to allow them to
participate in decision-making.

Phil: I don’t look at them as doctors. Do you?

Melissa: No.
Phil: Not ’cause they’re not professional or nothing, just because they’re really,
really good to you. They never ever speak down to you. And they involve
you with everything, which is great.

Even when information is so difficult to comprehend it is daunting, and the decisions to

be made are especially challenging because of the amount of unknown factors involved,
all of the patients Celia Roberts and I have interviewed express a deep appreciation of what
we have come to call ‘uncertainty value’ (Franklin and Roberts, 2002). Unlike the patients
and adoptees interviewed by Finkler and Rapp, the couples in the PGD study are a highly
self-selected group of people making choices at the very cutting edge of genetic technology.
Like all the other participants in our study, we have also become part of the process of
making sense of new kinds of genetic information closely tied to new forms of genetic
choice. Among other things, this has meant learning a great deal about the technical
aspects of genetic diagnosis, including the sophisticated embryology involved in biopsying
8 cell embryos for testing. Like the patients we have interviewed, we, as ethnographers,
have also appreciated the willingness of the Guy’s and St Thomas PGD team to share with
us the full complexity and difficulty of this technique.
In the following section, I have drawn on my own experience of learning to see the
embryo during a mock biopsy at St Thomas Hospital conducted by Dr Sue Pickering,
the senior clinical embryologist and scientific director of the The Assisted Conception
Unit. Part of my instruction is about learning to see the nuclei of embryonic cells while
they are being micro-manipulated – a lesson I initially find very difficult. The way in
which the nuclei become visible as part of a larger whole takes place through conversation:
I am literally taught to see, through verbal instruction, something that is initially, despite
my best efforts, invisible. The role of conversation in the production of visible form
instantiates a crucial component of what might be called the socialization of genetic
medicine. This socialization process, as shown here, extends from the most technical
aspects of reproductive biology as a science to the most intimate encounters with it as a
form of reproductive choice. The merographic connection here is thus between biology
and anthropology, as mediated by ethnography. Asking how these connections work,
from the perspective of personal experience, I try to restage the questions about
biological and social facts outlined earlier as a process of dialogue.

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‘GETTING A CLEAR SIGNAL’

St Thomas is a large urban NHS hospital comprising the usual labyrinthian warren of
units dispersed over an apparent hodge-podge of different wings, floors, annexes, and
units. The Assisted Conception Unit is surrounded by scaffolding on the eighth floor
and is vintage NHS, with a waiting room full of bedraggled chairs clearly accumulated
over several unrelated purchasing rounds. In one corner of the unit the staff room is
crowded with cluttered desks and boxes of medical supplies. Next to it the administra-
tive office seems ceaselessly frantic with activity, while maintaining the impression of
very ordered and routinized procedures. The atmosphere is confident and friendly,
despite the disorganized appearance of the rooms, and the evident age of the facilities.
It would not be immediately obvious this is one of the world’s leading PGD units,
headed by the highly respected Professor Peter Braude.
Down the hall are the patient consultation and procedure rooms, as well as the labora-
tories. The embryology lab is at the far end where I have come to see a biopsy performed
on a human embryo by the head embryologist, Sue Pickering. Sue used to work for Astra
Zeneca, and developed many of their transgenic cell lines. She remains an active research
scientist as well as being responsible for all of the procedures performed on human
embryos in the clinic. Today she has agreed to show me a biopsy and explain how it is
performed. Although I have read extensively about this technique, I have never seen it
undertaken from start to finish.
Micromanipulation techniques are used for three primary procedures in PGD: intra-
cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), polar body removal, and blastomere biopsy. The five
basic micro tools are: a holding pipette to fix and position the oocyte or embryo during
a procedure; a microneedle to create an opening in the zona pellucida; two different
diameters of micropipette for polar body removal and blastomere biopsy; and a spiked
micropipette for ICSI. Micropipettes can be pulled by hand by an experienced em-
bryologist, by softening a glass capillary tube over a burner and pulling it to form an
attenuated tip. Mechanical pipette pullers can also be used, although increasingly
commercially prepared micropipettes are purchased in bulk – often made precisely to a
clinic’s specification, and always by hand. Two additional instruments, a microforge and
a beveller, are used to shape the tips of the micropipettes. In addition to controlling the
diameter of the end of the micropipette, and sharpening, bevelling, or flame-polishing
of the tip, microtools are bent to an angle commensurate with the bed of the micro-
manipulator, so that they are parallel with each other, and with the machine. The
micropipettes are attached to the micromanipulator and properly aligned, prior to the
procedure, via small clamps.
Sue has prepared her pipettes and attached them to the micromanipulator, and has
positioned the embryo under the lens. The following is an extract from our conversa-
tion as she explains to me how to see the separate cells of the embryo, and to identify
the cell nuclei, one of which she will extract in order to examine its DNA. We are under
a large plastic hood that covers the bench, which is set up with a video monitor at a right
angle to the micromanipulator. Sue focuses the microscope, bringing the embryo into
sharp resolution.

Sue: Okay, so there’s the embryo. We’ll have a look at it at high power.
Sarah: Wow. That’s fantastic.

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Sue: So if you want to just walk round and have a look down the eyepiece. And see
if you can see it a lot better. There’s one big cell, and then three, one, two, three,
one, two, three, four, five, probably five others. So if you just look down there
you’ll be able to see, if you just move the outside bit up and down you should
be able to focus. This bit. [I fumble for the controls] This here. [She guides
my hand] This one. Focus up and down through the embryo. You can see the
cells on top, the cells underneath, and then you should be able to begin to see
the nuclei in the cells. So you can actually see . . .
Sarah: So you go right through it.

I’m beginning to get the hang of it – you have to compensate for the lack of depth of
field by moving the focus up and down to get a sense of the embryo’s shape in three
dimensions. It is a bit similar to ultrasound, which offers a thin ‘slice’ of viewing plane,
which is moved back and forth to give a sense of depth and dimension. Sue can obvi-
ously see very clearly what she is describing, but her emphasis on what I can see is prema-
ture, as I have a very weak grasp of this unfamiliar visual environment.

Sue: Yeah. So you look in at each different focal plane and take optical sections
through the embryo.
Sarah: I can’t see the nucleus in the cell.
Sue: Okay, yeah, that really takes a bit of experience.
Sarah: What is it? Where is it?
Sue: I’ll um see if I can find one for you. You can see a hell of a lot more from here
[looking down the eyepiece] than you can from over there [looking at the
screen]. Um, which is why it’s sometimes a bit irritating when Eric starts to
go on about he can see a nucleus because you can’t see it at all. Um, right, there
is one in that big cell.

I am not sure I can see anything, and it is clear from Sue’s description that while ‘you
can see a hell of a lot more’ from the eyepiece (rather than the video screen), it nonethe-
less ‘really takes a bit of experience’ to see anything, and indeed that ‘you can’t see
anything at all’ from the screen itself.

Sarah: The top one?

Sue: Now there’s one, look, there’s one, there’s one. So [pause . . .] there’s one.
Sarah: Ooooh, right there . . .
Sue: So if you look down here . . .
Sarah: It looks like a little nut.
Sue: It does. So if you look down here [eyepiece], and if you know where it is, you
know, from there [video monitor]. Sit down. And have a look down the
microscope. And focus up and down, and you should see like a clear area with
distinct little bobbles inside. Whereas the cytoplasm is quite granular, the
nucleus is a, it’s at the edge of that cell wall. It’s a circular thing. It’s clear. And
it’s got distinct round objects inside it. They’re actually the nucleoli. [Pause]
It’s probably quite difficult to see. [Pause] See if I can adjust the light a little bit.
See if I can show it to you. Yeah, it’s really . . . There’s another one in the top

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cell. Um, laughs, it’s actually quite difficult, quite difficult to describe, ah . . .
[Sue is very focussed on what I should be able to see, and is obviously seeing
it clearly herself. What she can see is ‘a clear area with distinct little bobbles
inside’ which is, at the same time, ‘quite difficult to see’ and ‘quite difficult to
describe’. Meanwhile, I am still struggling.]
Sarah: Where is it in the top cell, is it here?
Sue: That’s it, that’s it there.
Sarah: There, yeah.
Sue: See those little bobbley things, those are the nucleoli, and then in the top cell
. . . Oh, it’s quite difficult to see in the top cell. There’s quite a big one in the,
there’s quite a big one there. In that cell there. But because all the other cells
are in between it’s actually quite difficult for you to see it. [She readjusts the micro-
scope again.] So you see, now that’s good now. Just see if I can get . . . It’s quite
difficult to see actually. Yeah. I think you’re gonna have to trust me. You’ll be
able to see it when I get the cell out.
Sarah: Yeah.

Sue can see everything very clearly with a trained eye, but it is difficult to explain to an
inexperienced observer how to identify the nucleus, which, like the rest of the embryo,
is more or less transparent. I am not helped by poor eyesight and am unsure if I have
identified the right object as the nucleus. It is a bit like learning to see underwater
through a diving mask: it is hard to sort out the interference from the object in question.
Sue tries to clarify the view but experiences technical difficulty with the microscope.

Sue: Oh this bloody microscope, there’s something funny going on with it.
Sarah: Oh it all went blue.
Sue: Well I put a blue filter in, you can actually see better with the blue in but it’s
not giving out enough light. It should actually give out more light. So that you
can get a reasonable signal with the blue filter in. I asked the guy to come and
sort it out and he bloody hasn’t. I’m going to have to phone him again. It’s not
giving out enough light. I think it might need a new bulb or something. The
condenser’s all lined up and everything, I checked the condenser. It’s just the
wrong thing. Okay, well we’ll just have to make do with what we’ve got.
[Pause] Right, so you can see that really, really clearly now.
Sarah: Right.
Sue: If you look.

I am still a bit lost. Since Sue can see what she is improving the view of, it is clearly easier
for her to see changes in the perspective on the elusive nucleus, but I am left swimming
in the change of filters and am once again disorientated.

Sarah: I can’t see where the nucleus is.

Sue: There, that round thing. So if you look down here, even though it’s not very
bright, you should be able to see a very distinct round entity sitting right at
the edge of the cell.
Sarah: Oh, yeah, definitely.

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Sue: Can you see it?

Sarah: Yep. It’s huge, I didn’t realize I was looking for something so big!
Sue: So that’s the nucleus: that’s what you’re looking for.
Sarah: Yeah. That is very hard to see.
Sue: [emphatically] Yes! But it is so obvious once you’ve seen it!

Once I have finally seen the nucleus it is, indeed, extremely clear. My difficulty has
been one of scale: I was expecting something much smaller: I was unprepared for the
size of the nucleus, which is much larger than I had expected. It is not a small, dense
object, but is large and clear, like a big bubble inside the cell. Once I have seen it, it is
unmistakable. It has a very distinct border and I would easily be able to find it again, or
indeed to see the nucleus of another cell.
In this passage of learning to see, it is precisely the clarity and transparency of the
different parts of the embryo that make it difficult to distinguish them. Learning the tech-
nique of moving the focal plane up and down to give form to the otherwise depthless
embryo takes skill, as does translating between the image on the monitor and what is
visible through the eyepiece. As ever, there are also technical interferences to the process
of getting a clear view of the embryo, since there is not enough light with the blue filter.
What is noticeable over the course of our brief tutorial is how unknown forms – the
cell nucleus – literally acquire form and shape through known forms – of conversation
or dialogue. My ability to see is literally produced out of our ability to share a dialogue,
and to have my eyes be guided by Sue’s instructions. Repetition is also important: Sue
has repeatedly told me that something is both clearly and distinctly in front of my eyes,
but that it is also very difficult to see, and she has re-presented this object from a range
of different angles while I struggled to get a visual grip on it. As soon as I have seen it,
I realize the nucleus is not what I expected to see, and that my expectations are what
was getting in the way, as I was searching for a much smaller object, and, having realized
my mistake, the obviousness of the nucleus literally jumps out at me.
Learning to see in the context of an ethnography of the new genetics turns out, like
DNA itself, to be full of gaps and unknown territories, uncertainties and connections,
parts that do and do not make up wholes. In the same way that the nucleus of the embry-
onic cell takes shape in the social form of a dialogue, before it becomes visible, and then
familiar, so too does the means by which DNA takes social shape emerge over the course
of repeated conversations, demonstrations, and explanations. The ‘biological facts’ on
which the new genetics are based emerge out of a complex technical, scientific, and social
process of production before they ever enter the consultation room, to begin yet another
process of emergence, as part of very intimate and high-stakes reproductive decision-
making. As Phil, who was quoted earlier, put it: ‘They tell you the facts and you think,
“God!” ’. Or, as Brenda, another interviewee, put it: ‘Professor Braude said, you know,
“This is a crude and inexact science”. And his words always ring in my ears and, you
know, it’s accepting that that is the hardest thing’.

THE GENETIC GAP

Throughout the emerging anthropological literature on the new genetics, the theme of
a genetic gap re-emerges as a site of both theoretical and ethnographic investigation. It
is worth remembering that anthropological accounts of kinship have puzzled over similar

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themes for the better part of a century. From its inception, kinship was understood as a
social rendering of biological ties, or as the social organization of genealogy. For David
Schneider, American kinship was distinctive in its close reliance on biological science as
a guide: kinship was believed to be genetically based, to the extent that an unknown
person could become kin through the discovery of a genetic tie. Even for Schneider,
however, a gap existed between the belief that kinship is whatever genetic science says it
is, and the amount of picking and choosing, or love and choice, that determined actual
kin reckoning.
Strathern’s model extrapolates from this discrepancy a wider theory of cultural know-
ledge which foregrounds the capacity for distinct and incommensurate ‘parts’ to become
a hybrid totality, such as kinship, by a recombinant form of connection she describes as
merographic. Her model can thus explain the kinds of vascillating movements described
by Finkler and Rapp, who document and investigate the ways people move into and out
of a discourse of genetic connection. For Rapp, these movements are both idiosyncratic,
and derivative of the gap between abstract genetic information and the lived complexity
of social positioning. For Finkler, it is precisely the power of abstract genetic information
which can reinforce kinship connections in the midst of their increasing fragmentation.
At a more epochal level, the models of Rabinow and Rheinberger position the genetic
sciences as sources of new forms of both social and biological facts. Less concerned with
the quotidian impacts of such shifts than with their consequences for modernity, the
genetic gap for these theorists, as for Latour, are the result of greatly enhanced techno-
logical potency, and the corresponding capacities to reshape the human condition.
Yet another view might be contributed from the context of PGD, in which it is
possible to trace the production of genetic information from its technological infancy
to its reproductive fruition, in the form of offspring born through this technique, who
embody its capacity to reshape human reproductive futures. The process of ethnogra-
phy itself recapitulates the transformation of uncertainty into knowledge, invisibility
into form, and genetic risk ratios into clinical decisions about which embryos to transfer.
This embodied learning process proceeds largely though face-to-face interaction, thus
to a degree emulating the experience both of patients who have to learn about highly
technical procedures affecting their treatment, and of the professional clinicians and
scientists who must become much more familiar with each other’s specialized expertise.
What is noticeable about the context of PGD is the amount of faith that is required
to proceed in a context of considerable uncertainty. This faith is largely based on disci-
pline and procedure, which are relied upon to close enough gaps of uncertainty to
proceed with treatment safely, ethically, and now with increasing success. Working in a
context that is constantly at risk of failure, PGD depends upon an unceasing mainten-
ance of checks, rechecks, testing of procedures and equipment, and safeguarding tech-
niques through close co-operation among clinical and laboratory staff. In turn, these
procedures are presented to patients as a protocol, which is known to be beset by the
possibility of failure for both known and unknown reasons. The connections that are
made, then, between patient treatment choice and treatment options (to change the
hormone levels in IVF, which embryos to transfer, how many attempts to undertake)
occur through consultation and negotiation.
These procedural and instrumental features of genetic medicine return us once again
to Strathern’s model of merographic connections, from which we can perhaps draw yet

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another insight, relating to what I have called the genetic gap in the process I am describ-
ing of socializing DNA. In closing, I return to Strathern’s description of kinship thinking
in terms of parts and wholes:

The popular supposition that kinship is only ‘part’ of society rests on the fact that it
is also ‘part’ of biological process. Such parts are not equal to one another. The
perspective that gives each of them its distinctive nature appears always as a different
order of phenomena. Each order that encompasses the parts may be thought of as a
whole, as the individual parts may also be thought of as wholes. But parts in this view
do not make wholes. . . . Thus the logic of the totality is not necessarily to be found
in the logic of the parts, but in principles, forces, relations that exist between the parts.
(1992: 76, my emphasis)

I suggest that the new genetics proceeds precisely in the manner described here, of
assembling parts that belong to different orders of phenomena according to a logic of
totality that is not to be found in the parts, but in the principles, forces and relations
that connect the parts. When PGD treatment is undertaken, whether it is successful or
not, the logic of the totality is the reduction of the risk of producing children with severe,
disabling, and almost always terminal genetic disorders. It is because both kinship and
reproduction are seen to be, at one level, biological, that the manipulation of biological
processes is sought. However, this logic is not in itself sufficient or all-encompassing. A
profound sense of responsibility, obligation, and hope, infuse the process of PGD with
a sense of shared purpose uniting patients and the professionals who provide their care.
This process literally instrumentalizes the model of kinship that says it is part of
biological process and part of society. It is the gap between the two that makes this kind
of treatment both biologically obvious and socially necessary – if it were only one or the
other, the treatment would not exist.
PGD is, in this sense, the instrumentalization of the partial connections that make
up the hybrid kinship widely taken for granted as one of ‘the facts of life’. Both the desire,
and the ability, to instrumentalize kinship in this way – to assist genealogy in the produc-
tion of offspring – are, in this sense, built in to the model of kinship Strathern describes
as merographic. It is, in other words, precisely the linkages merography makes evident
which open kinship up to manipulation, in a manner that is seen to be not only a
biological possibility, but a social obligation.
This reframing of the merographic connection between the social and the biological
at the heart of kinship thus takes on a new light in the context of biomedicine, and the
new genetics in particular. What the case of PGD demonstrates is yet another dimen-
sion to the scenes described by Finkler and Rapp, or the transformations claimed by
Rheinberger and Rabinow. The episode I describe of learning to see cell nuclei recapit-
ulates at a very technical scientific level the assemblage of biological parts to make new
wholes. The very parts themselves become visible in an ethnographic encounter that
demonstrates how a biological form emerges through a social one, that is, how a nucleus
emerges through explanation. Such an event is as quotidian as it is fundamental to the
new genetics, in which there is no such thing as a biological fact that has not been elicited
through a cumulative social and historical process. Indeed, biology is nothing less than
socially-processed ‘nature’.

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If the question for anthropology and the new genetics is how to understand what
Rheinberger describes as an intensification of this social processing through new-found
abilities to instruct nature to perform to order, or what Rabinow describes as biosocial-
ity, it may indeed be the case that the distinction between social and natural, or
biological, facts remains crucial analytically, precisely because it is the enabling
condition of the instrumentalization of genealogy. What the merographic perspective
highlights, in foregrounding the incommensurability of the different totalities to which
DNA belongs, being at once a social object and a natural phenomenon, is that the
efforts to connect genetic manipulation to social obligation will remain partial. In turn,
this suggests that the incommensurability I have described as the genetic gap occurs
throughout the process of technologically producing DNA as a mechanism amenable
to social instruction.
Whether, then, this gap is described as an epochal shift, or a mundane process of
laboratory instruction, or a ‘stand off ’ between patients and geneticists, or a sense of
ambivalence about contacting relatives for blood samples, it is, analytically at least, a
constant feature of the new genetics precisely because it is built in to the attempt to
instrumentalize DNA for social ends. That this logic is partial, in the sense of mero-
graphic, in the sense of connecting incommensurate orders of phenomena, is the reason
DNA will always supersede its social context, in the same way the social context will
always supersede DNA. This is the same as saying, too, that the assumption that genes
make us who we are is both too true to ignore, and too partial to be enough truth by
itself.

Notes
1 This article is based on two lectures, given at the Anthropology and Archaeology
Section of the British Association in Glasgow, 5 September 2001, and at Sussex
University as the inaugural lecture for this journal on 18 October 2001. My very
grateful thanks to Nigel Rapport and to Richard Wilson and Jane Cowan for
organizing and inviting me to speak at these events.
2 This article builds on the arguments about the biological I have developed elsewhere,
Franklin 2001a and b.
3 The ‘human genome’ is commonly used to refer to ‘everyone’s genome’ (Dennis et
al., 2001), although it is technically defined as ‘all of the genes contained in a single
set of chromosomes, i.e. in a haploid nucleus’ (Oxford Dictionary of Biology, 2000:
260).
4 Strathern’s model of partial connections, concerning scale (1991), should be distin-
guished from merographic connections, concerning overlap.
5 Although there are important differences between the nature–culture binarism, and
that of the social vs the biological, the generality of the arguments made about the
dissolution of the one have virtually identical implications for the other in the realm
of the new genetics.
6 In this definition Rabinow follows Raymond Williams’s definitions in Keywords
(1976), much as Strathern also does in After Nature (1992).
7 I am very grateful to Marilyn Strathern for comments on this article and for clarifi-
cation of the difference between ‘merographic’ and ‘partial’ connections. I am also
in agreement with her suggestion that the ‘collapse’ of merographic connections

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 3(1)

attributed to the post-plural condition, where everything can be a part of something

else, and there is no end to pluralism, may have been ‘precipitous’. It is the central
argument of this article that the new genetics can be seen to revive as much as diminish
the nature–culture opposition, or what we might perhaps more accurately describe
as the nature–culture function.
8 In this argument I draw on Marilyn Strathern’s model of ‘partial analogies’, from
After Nature (1992: 72–3, 87, 197), referring to the functions of analogies which are
only partially maintained. It is the partial maintenance of analogies, in Strathern’s
view, which allows meanings to ‘travel back’, in the way, for example, that the geneti-
cization of ‘blood ties’ might be seen to effect a sanguinization of genes – which is
another way to describe the changing relationship between ‘kinship’ and ‘DNA’.
9 Like Emily Martin (1986), Rapp argues that ‘paradoxically, white middle-class
women are both better served by reproductive medicine and also more controlled
by it than women of less privileged groups’ (Rapp, 1999: 141).
10 The material in this section is drawn from ongoing ethnographic research on PGD
based in two clinics, in London and in Leeds. This research has been jointly
conducted with Dr Celia Roberts, and is funded under the ESRC/MRC ‘Innovative
Health Technologies’ programme.

References
Dennis, C., R. Gallagher and P. Campbell (2001) ‘Everyone’s Genome’, Nature 409
(15 February): 815.
Edwards, J. and M. Strathern (2000) ‘Including our own’, in J. Carsten (ed.) Cultures
of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, pp. 149–66. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Finkler, K. (2000) Experiencing the New Genetics: Family and Kinship on the Medical
Frontier. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Franklin, S. (2001a) ‘Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of the
New Biologies’, in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds) Relative Values: Reconfiguring
Kinship Studies, pp. 302–22. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Franklin, S. (2001b) ‘Culturing Biology: Cell Lines for the Second Millennium’,
Health 5(3): 335–54.
Franklin, S. (2001c) ‘Sheepwatching’, Anthropology Today 17(3): 3–9.
Franklin, S. and C. Roberts (2002) ‘Listening to Uncertainties: Preliminary Findings
from an Ethnography of PGD’, paper presented to the Guy’s and St Thomas PGD
team meeting, London, 17 June.
Franklin, S., C. Lury and J. Stacey (2000) Global Nature, Global Culture. London:
Sage.
Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature. New York:
Routledge.
Martin, E. (1986) The Woman in the Body: a Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston,
MA: Beacon.
Rabinow, P. (1996) Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Rapp, R. (1999) Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in
America. New York: Routledge.

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FRANKLIN Re-thinking nature–culture

Rheinberger, H.-J. (2000) ‘Beyond Nature and Culture: Modes of Reasoning in the
Age of Molecular Biology and Medicine’, in M. Lock, A. Young and A. Cambrosio
(eds) Living and Working with the New Medical Technologies: Intersection of Inquiry,
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Biological Control by the Scientists who Cloned Dolly. London: Headline.

SARAH FRANKLIN is Professor of Anthropology of Science at Lancaster University, where she has taught
since 1990. She is the author of Embodied Progress: a Cultural Account of Assisted Conception (1997), co-author
of Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception (1999), and Global Nature, Global Culture
(2000), and co-editor of Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power and Technological Innovation (1998),
Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies (2001), and Remaking Life and Death: Towards an Anthropology
of the Biosciences (forthcoming). She is currently completing a book about cloning entitled Dolly Mixtures.
Address: Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YL, UK. [email: s.franklin@
Lancaster.ac.uk]

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