God's Laboratory

By: Elizabeth F. Roberts

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Synopsis: Assisted reproduction, with its test tubes, injections, and gamete donors, often raises important concerns regarding matters of life and kinship. Yet these concerns do not take the same form everywhere around the world. In this innovative ethnography of in vitro fertilization in Ecuador, Elizabeth Roberts shows how having children through biotechnological intervention is not only tolerated, it is embraced by the population, despite widespread poverty and official condemnation by the Catholic Church. Roberts takes us into clinics, laboratories, and homes, providing a textured picture of the integration of these biotechnologies into Andean life. Intimate portraits of patients, donors, and practitioners reveal profoundly different understandings of nature and the self compared with those found in other countries. Andean understanding of the body as malleable resonates with cutting-edge theories of the material world put forth by contemporary scholars of science and technology. The Ecuadorian embrace of reproductive technology, however, is less a reflection of a desire to be "modern", than it is a product of colonial racial history, Catholic theologies, and kinship systems. This clearly written account offers a grounded introduction to debates in science studies and medical anthropology, as well as nuanced ethnography of the mingling of science, religion, and history in Andean family life.