God's Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes - Paperback

by Elizabeth F. S. Roberts (Author)

Assisted reproduction, with its test tubes, injections, and gamete donors, raises concerns about the nature of life and kinship. Yet these concerns do not take the same shape around the world. In this innovative ethnography of in vitro fertilization in Ecuador, Elizabeth F.S. Roberts explores how reproduction by way of biotechnological assistance is not only accepted but embraced despite widespread poverty and condemnation from the Catholic Church. Roberts' intimate portrait of IVF practitioners and their patients reveals how technological intervention is folded into an Andean understanding of reproduction as always assisted, whether through kin or God. She argues that the Ecuadorian incarnation of reproductive technology is less about a national desire for modernity than it is a product of colonial racial history, Catholic practice, and kinship configurations. God's Laboratory offers a grounded introduction to critical debates in medical anthropology and science studies, as well as a nuanced ethnography of the interplay between science, religion, race and history in the formation of Andean families.

Front Jacket

Bold and gripping, God's Laboratory is ethnography at its best. The book's unforgettable characters and their desperate travails to reproduce via global medicine are the very fabric of a highly-original and much-needed social theory for our twenty-first century technological societies. - João Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment

God's Laboratory is the perfect anthropological antidote to the fetishization of reproductive materials as 'life itself.' Roberts shows in meticulous detail and in luminous prose how Catholic scientists and technicians in Ecuador invite God into private IVF labs to 'bless the work' of producing embryos. Kinship, care, and cultivation -- not embryonic life -- define reproduction in this uncertain world. - Nancy Scheper-Hughes, author of Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil

"Written with clarity, compassion, and self-reflection, God's Laboratory is a beautiful book which puts the ethnographic method to excellent use. Roberts's painstaking fieldwork unearthed the many layers through which the aspirations for fertility and use of infertility technologies instantiate not only gender and kinship in Ecuador, but ethnicity, race and region in the national project of modernity. The book is a stunning instance of the benefits which accrue when the study of reproduction is used as an optic for understanding social life." - Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America

"God's Laboratory is a strong, intriguing and careful look at the daily connections between faith and science that underpin the process of human assisted reproduction in urban Ecuador. -Marisol de la Cadena, author of Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1910-1991

Back Jacket

Bold and gripping, God's Laboratory is ethnography at its best. The book's unforgettable characters and their desperate travails to reproduce via global medicine are the very fabric of a highly-original and much-needed social theory for our twenty-first century technological societies.--João Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment

Author Biography

Elizabeth Roberts is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Michigan, investigating scientific and public health knowledge production and its embodied effects in Latin America and the United States.