著者

宇田川 妙子

出版者

京都大学東南アジア研究所

雑誌

Kyoto Working Papers on Area Studies: G-COE Series

巻号頁・発行日

vol.73, pp.1-21, 2009-03

---

Developments in reproductive technologies have been considered to affect and transform not only everyday notions but also academic knowledge practices of kinship, especially anthropology of kinship. In this article I would like to reexamine what really has been changing, because reproductive technologies are now being practiced and discussed more in terms of life, specifically embryo, than of kinship. Embryo-life discourse would mean that person were deprived of any relatedness, highly individualized, and then fragmented to parts such as DNA, cells, internal organs etc.. I am afraid that this shift might alienate reproductive technologies from kinship studies. But embryo-life idiom certainly interweaves with kinship one, and this very idiom might generate some new kind of relatedness that might be unpredicted, reconstructing knowledge also of nature, technology, biological facts, body etc.. So articulating this embryo-life discourse with kinship one will give new and more radical scope to kinship studies. Here I work on this issue through the analysis of the situation in Italy, especially of the debate on the medically assisted procreation law enacted in 2004.