Abstract:

‘Conflicted Kinship in a Transnational World’ is an ethnographic study of the practice of commercial gestational surrogacy in a transnational context. The focus here is on the different participants who enter the arrangement to produce a baby (or babies). Such as: the commissioning couples/ intended parents; the doctors and surrogacy agents who help couples and individuals navigate the assisted reproductive technologies, such as in-vitro fertilization (IVF); and the Indian commercial gestational surrogate mothers who help incubate an artificially fertilized pregnancy. Embedded in an Indian setting but involving a transnational engagement with technology, laws, people and relationships, this lecture seeks to explore the ways in which kin are made and understood. The cross-cultural navigation of kinship beliefs, especially those regarding genes, biology and blood, is mapped through the process of the commercial gestational surrogacy arrangement. Through the choice of the arrangement, the surrogate pregnancy, and the seeking of state identity and membership for the newborn—kinship and relatedness are constructed, understood and dismantled through multiple other processes that inform the commercial gestational surrogacy arrangement in India. Debates on biology and the social within the anthropology of kinship are revisited through the process of commercial gestational surrogacy in India, especially in the ways in which motherhood and fatherhood are re-imagined through the
socializing role of technology.


About the Speaker:

Anindita Majumdar is currently a Fellow at Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, Manipal University and has been awarded her doctoral degree by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi. Her thesis ‘Kinship and Relatedness in Commercial Gestational Surrogacy in India’ has been awarded the ‘Distinction in Doctoral Research Award’ at IIT-Delhi. Anindita completed her Masters and Mphil in Sociology from the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. She has also taught undergraduate sociology at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi from 2006-09. Her research has been published in the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Economic and Political Weekly and she also writes regularly for the Op-Ed column in Mail Today. She has contributed to curriculum structuring and writing at the University of Delhi and at Indira Gandhi National Open University. Anindita worked as consultant on a UNFPA-funded project on mapping surrogacy in South Asia with the Delhi-based Sama Resource Group for Women and Health between 2014-15 and helped produce an information kit for women wanting to be surrogates. She is currently looking at the objects of infertility at the Manipal Assisted
Reproduction Centre, Kasturba Medical Hospital, Manipal University.