Citation:
Thesis Type:
PhD dissertationAbstract:
This dissertation addresses the efforts of contemporary Jewish Israelis to harness the new reproductive technologies to the task of reproducing Jews. In my thesis, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Israel, I focus particular analytic attention on the unusual confluence of social forces that have come together to enable unmarried Israeli women to conceive and give birth to children using state-subsidized, rabbinically-sanctioned artificial insemination. This ethnographic focus serves to highlight my larger theoretical concerns about how cultures are produced, contested and transformed through cultural imaginings of reproduction.
At the core of my research lies the question: How are Jews believed to come into being? A question that both secular and religious Jewish Israelis have been hard-pressed and yet eager to answer as they attempt to create cogent legislation for the appropriate uses of reproductive technology to assist in the reproduction of Jews. Indeed, the fact that secular legislation regarding the new reproductive technologies is grounded in orthodox rabbinic interpretations of Halakhic sources makes for very imaginative and innovative laws concerning the appropriate combinations of reproductive genetic material.
My dissertation research is grounded in two methodologies; one half of the dissertation is based on traditional ethnographic field research among Israelis who are using the new reproductive technologies to get pregnant; the second half is based on textual analysis of public discourse, government documents, legal materials and rabbinic responsa concerning the origins and nature of relatedness.
This research contributes directly to current anthropological debates about the nature of kinship and the ways the new reproductive technologies force cultural assumptions about relatedness to become explicit. I argue that the social uses of the new reproductive technologies in Israel do not necessarily destabilize foundational assumptions about kinship, nor do they necessarily privilege biogenetic understandings of relatedness. Indeed, in Israel the social uses of these technologies serve to enhance the authority of rabbinic conceptions of kinship while reinforcing the cultural imperative to reproduce.