Nameless Relations: Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchange between British Ova Donors and Recipients (review)

This thought-provoking study of ova donation in Great Britain offers a detailed ethnographic account of donors and recipients' reflections on their involvement in what Konrad defines as an anonymous gift economy. The donor-recipient exchange practices are in complex ways integrated into the market of reproductive technology: they are linked to the commercialized services of the clinics of assisted reproduction. Nevertheless, the giving and receiving of an essential female body substance and its high-tech manipulation and replacement in new female bodies are, for the women concerned, shielded from commodification and also from the dynamics of debt relations. This kind of assisted reproduction is regulated by law and policy practice through a rationale of anonymity, and this practiced anonymity constitutes a proper field of procreation and for the making and non-making of essential relatedness.

Ova donation involves what Konrad's informants call the "gift of life": the free gift that women hand over to women voluntarily and without expecting a return, or making a social relationship. Hence, anonymous sociality and exchange are issues of analytical concern because they treat the transfer of a body substance that engenders new life. These donations do not only enable the production of new persons but also the production of new relations and new kinds of relatedness: "The 'exchange' between donor and recipient through anonymized donation augurs practices of relatedness that take distinctively unexpected form" (41). The unexpected form seems to hinge on a conceived contradiction of exchange logics. Exchange of objects detached from the persons exchanging is as Gregory has detailed one of the main features of commodity transactions. In these the object is circulated without a personal or person identity: object and person are alienable. Ova donation sets an object into circulation which is alienable in this way. However, these transferences are regulated by law in Britain as non-commercial, and hence, this form of exchange is framed as a generous or altruistic gift practice. The free gift does not require or expect reciprocation.

The anonymous free gift, declared as logic impossibility in Derrida's critique of Mauss and as a social anomaly by Douglas in her support for Mauss, suggests itself rather convincingly in this ethnography as a possibility. This altruistic form of exchange puts a body part into circulation which brings about a difference causing a disturbance. This difference was codified in Britain in1990 through the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. It confirms that the "biogenetic component of motherhood," i.e. conception, is less important for the constitution of kinship than that of "gestational 'carrying'" (103). Definitive motherhood is related to pregnancy and birth: to the first nurturing work of growing the child in the womb and introducing it into the world of the living. This change of legal definition implies that the female human egg as agent in the procreation of a child can be dissociated permanently from the woman to which it belongs. At the same time, this body substance as such could not be biogenetically disconnected from its origins. Although the carrying mother is given the right to enact motherhood, the existence of the genetic mother could not be set aside. The ambivalence, produced by ova donation, is that the cutting of kinship down to the size of the family implies letting a part of a unique woman's reproductive material be permanently separated from her. In this sense, the ova donor is not easily delimitated. An essential part of her has permanent constitutive effects in other bodies and in other social loci.

The paradox or challenge staged by ova, gamete, and embryo donation concerns what Strathern (1995) names "dispersed conception" and "dispersed kinship." These concepts refer to a situation where there are more contributors to the act of procreation or the production of the child than there are biogenetic relationships activated as social. In other words, there is more to British kinship than family life; there "exists a field of procreators...