Rayna Rapp
Biographic Data
| ID | 3581987 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rayna Rapp |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rayna |
| FAMILY NAME | Rapp |
| SIGNATURE | RAPP R |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0177-2224 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 855 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 56 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Village remains: Research legacy at the foothills of the southern French Alps
This essay reflects on the impact of fieldwork conducted for my dissertation in Southern France more than a half century ago. My life as an anthropologist was profoundly shaped by this initial Provençal village‐based study, yet I quickly moved into other fields of inquiry, writing, and institution‐building quite distinct from this first grounded research. Engaged with student movements against the Vietnam War, for racial justice, and constructing…
Confident Futures: Making Connections
Unleashing Youth Creativity in Times of Covid: Reflections from a Collaborative Research Project
The Reproduction of Inequality: How Class Shapes the Pregnant Body and Infant Health
Moral Pioneers: Women, Men, and Fetuses on a Frontier of Reproductive Technology
Confident futures: Community-based organizations as first responders and agents of change in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic
Reprotech in France and the United States: Differences and similarities – an introduction
We are all in the image of God’: Reproductive imaginaries and prenatal genetic testing in American Jewish communities
How are we to understand the complexities of prenatal genetic testing across social and cultural worlds? Availability and uptake of this biotechnology is variable, deeply influenced not only by national frameworks but also by local regimes of value. We argue that these intersections of genetic testing and local cultural worlds must be understood as part of broader 'reproductive imaginaries', including everything from kinship, pregnancy and gender…
Afterword: Unsettling Care for Anthropologists
Disability/Anthropology: Rethinking the Parameters of the Human
As an analytic and an object of study, disability provides a powerful lens to refocus and potentially transform thinking about new and enduring concerns shaping contemporary anthropology. At its most basic, the recognition of disability as a universal social fact helps us to understand the cultural specificities of personhood and to reconsider the unstable boundaries of the category of the human. This special issue of Current Anthropology is base…
Race & Reproduction: An Enduring Conversation
“History is always on our heel”Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States, 2017-2019Radio Hour 5 July 19 (Remnick 2019)The articles in this special issue of Medical Anthropology make a powe
Enduring innovation in reproduction
Epigenetics at work
AFA's Live Annual Review 2017
Cognitive Disability
This afterword to this special issue of The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, entitled ‘For an Anthropology of Cognitive Disability’, explores the intersections of disability studies and ethnographic research on cognitive difference. We offer a brief scholarly genealogy, discuss how these articles provide recognition for ‘the disarticulate’, and consider how anthropologists working on this subject might contribute to an ethics of possibility
Toward an Ethically Sensitive Implementation of Noninvasive Prenatal Screening in the Global Context
Noninvasive prenatal screening using cell‐free DNA, which analyzes placental DNA circulating in maternal blood to provide information about fetal chromosomal disorders early in pregnancy and without risk to the fetus, has been hailed as a potential “paradigm shift” in prenatal genetic screening. Commercial provision of cell‐free DNA screening has contributed to a rapid expansion of the tests included in the screening panels. The tests can include…
Big data, small kids: Medico-scientific, familial and advocacy visions of human brains
Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy by Melinda Cooper, Catherine Waldby (review)
Reviewed by: Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy by Melinda Cooper, Catherine Waldby Rayna Rapp Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby. Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. 279pp. $24.95 (978-0-8223-5622-6). Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby’s Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy offer…
Roundtable: Reproductive Technologies and Reproductive Justice
Laura Briggs, Faye Ginsburg, Elena R. Gutiérrez, Rosalind Petchesky, Rayna Rapp, Andrea Smith, Chikako Takeshita, Roundtable: Reproductive Technologies and Reproductive Justice, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3, Special Issue: Reproductive Technologies and Reproductive Justice (2013), pp. 102-125
Commentary: Thinking through Public Health Genomics
Entangled ethnography: Imagining a future for young adults with learning disabilities
Gender on the Prenatal Horizon
Disability Worlds
Disability is a profoundly relational category, shaped by social conditions that exclude full participation in society. What counts as an impairment in different sociocultural settings is highly variable. Recently, new approaches by disability scholars and activists show that disability is not simply lodged in the body, but created by the social and material conditions that "dis-able" the full participation of those considered atypical. Historica…
Anthropology and the Study of Disability Worlds
Reproduction, Globalization, and the State: New Theoretical and Ethnographic Perspectives
creative, new anthropological research investigating the impact of these processes on human reproductive activities (Barnard 2000; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Van Hollen 2003).To help ameliorate this situation, in June 2006 we convened a workshop with eighteen scholars from Asia, Africa, Western Europe, and the United States.Our objectives were to enhance understanding of the consequences for reproduction, reproductive health, …
Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction
This groundbreaking volume provides a dramatic investigation of the dynamics of reproduction. In an unusually broad spectrum of essays, a distinguished group of international feminist scholars and activists explores the complexity of contemporary sexual politics around the globe. Using reproduction as an entry point in the study of social life and placing it at the center of social theory, the authors examine how cultures are produced, contested,…
Disability Worlds
Disability is a profoundly relational category, shaped by social conditions that exclude full participation in society. What counts as an impairment in different sociocultural settings is highly variable. Recently, new approaches by disability scholars and activists show that disability is not simply lodged in the body, but created by the social and material conditions that "dis-able" the full participation of those considered atypical. Historica…
Chromosomes and Communication: The Discourse of Genetic Counseling
Amniocentesis is one of the new reproductive technologies, and a new health profession, the genetic counselor, has been developed to communicate medical information to patients about its risks and benefits. In this article I examine the language of genetic counseling as it communicates and miscommunicates not only medical information but also structural power arrangements, social knowledge, and popular meanings about medically defined disability.…
Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship
Public Culture - Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2001
Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America
Rich with the voices and stories of participants, these touching, firsthand accounts examine how women of diverse racial, ethnic, class and religious backgrounds perceive prenatal testing, the most prevalent and routinized of the new reproducing technologies. Based on the author's decade of research and her own personal experiences with amniocentesis, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus explores the "geneticization" of family life in all its complex…
Gender, Body, Biomedicine: How Some Feminist Concerns Dragged Reproduction to the Center of Social Theory
This article tracks the growth of medical anthropology in the United States in the decades since the 1970s, as it has intersected the expansion of feminist activism and scholarship. I argue that feminist attention to embodied inequalities quickly focused on reproduction as a site of investigation and intervention. Medical anthropology has benefited from feminist concern with stratified reproduction, especially its interrogation of nonnormative an…
Reverberations: Disability and the New Kinship Imaginary
The concept of Learning Disabilities (LD) didn't exist until 1963. Now, LDs are the most commonly diagnosed category for American children in special education. Based on long-term fieldwork and focused interviews in NYC with parents of "atypical" children, the authors analyze how experiences of family life with a disability reverberate through the life cycle as well as the domestic cycle. Our findings show that families are reimagining kinship na…
The use of race variables in genetic studies of complex traits and the goal of reducing health disparities: A transdisciplinary perspective
The use of racial variables in genetic studies has become a matter of intense public debate, with implications for research design and translation into practice. Using research on smoking as a springboard, the authors examine the history of racial categories, current research practices, and arguments for and against using race variables in genetic analyses. The authors argue that the sociopolitical constructs appropriate for monitoring health dis…
Disability/Anthropology: Rethinking the Parameters of the Human
As an analytic and an object of study, disability provides a powerful lens to refocus and potentially transform thinking about new and enduring concerns shaping contemporary anthropology. At its most basic, the recognition of disability as a universal social fact helps us to understand the cultural specificities of personhood and to reconsider the unstable boundaries of the category of the human. This special issue of Current Anthropology is base…
Refusing Prenatal Diagnosis: The Meanings of Bioscience in a Multicultural World
This article explores the reasons women of diverse class, racial ethnic, national, and religious backgrounds give for their decisions not to accept an amniocentesis or, having accepted one, not to pursue an abortion after diagnosis of serious fetal disability. The narratives of refusers reveal conflicts and tensions between the universalizing rationality of biomedical interventions into pregnancy and the wider heterogeneous social frame work to w…
Sex and Society: A Research Note from Social History and Anthropology
The personal is political' was a central insight of the wave of feminism which gathered momentum in the 1960s.Within that phrase is condensed the understanding that the seemingly most intimate details of private existence are actually structured by larger social relations. Attention to the personal politics of intimate life soon focused on sexuality, and many canons of sexual meaning were challenged. The discovery of erotic art and symbols as mal…
Reproduction, Globalization, and the State: New Theoretical and Ethnographic Perspectives
creative, new anthropological research investigating the impact of these processes on human reproductive activities (Barnard 2000; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Van Hollen 2003).To help ameliorate this situation, in June 2006 we convened a workshop with eighteen scholars from Asia, Africa, Western Europe, and the United States.Our objectives were to enhance understanding of the consequences for reproduction, reproductive health, …
Examining Family History
Chasing Science: Children's Brains, Scientific Inquiries, and Family Labors
Over the last three decades, an escalating portion of U.S. school children has been classified for special education; those with diagnoses entitled to services now number 15 percent of all public school pupils. At the same time, American scientists have focused increasingly on juvenile brains, studying what one psychiatric epidemiologist labeled ''social incapacities.'' This article reports on the laboratory labors of two scientific groups: neuro…
Femmes, Greniers et Capitaux: Claude Meillassoux (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1975)
Entangled ethnography: Imagining a future for young adults with learning disabilities
Reproductive Entanglements: Body, State, and Culture in the Dys/Regulation of Child-Bearing
Although conventionally tracked in the "overdeveloped world" (to use philosopher Sandra Harding's felicitous phrase), assistive reproductive technologies are now available in many parts of the globe. This review essay reports on qualitative social science research on techniques such as In Vitro Fertilization, egg purchase, gestational surrogacy, and sex selection across national boundaries. It highlights the disruptions and recuperations of gende…
Confident futures: Community-based organizations as first responders and agents of change in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic
On Nature and the Human
A major contribution of anthropological work has been to challenge a unitary theory of the human. In thisAmerican Anthropologistvital topics forum, a range of prominent anthropologists contribute to this challenge and provide musings on the human. The essays in this forum reflect diversity and unity of anthropological thought on human nature. Some note humans' connection to other primates, and others emphasize our distinction from ancestral patte…
Afterword: Unsettling Care for Anthropologists
Anthropology
Ritual of Reversion: On Fieldwork and Festivity in Haute Provence
Race & Reproduction: An Enduring Conversation
“History is always on our heel”Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States, 2017-2019Radio Hour 5 July 19 (Remnick 2019)The articles in this special issue of Medical Anthropology make a powe
Anthropologists Speak Out on Nuclear Disarmament
We are all in the image of God’: Reproductive imaginaries and prenatal genetic testing in American Jewish communities
How are we to understand the complexities of prenatal genetic testing across social and cultural worlds? Availability and uptake of this biotechnology is variable, deeply influenced not only by national frameworks but also by local regimes of value. We argue that these intersections of genetic testing and local cultural worlds must be understood as part of broader 'reproductive imaginaries', including everything from kinship, pregnancy and gender…
Gender and class: An archaeology of knowledge concerning the origin of the state
Femmes, Greniers et Capitaux: Claude Meillassoux (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1975)
Family and Class in Contemporary America: Notes toward an Understanding of Ideology
Women, Religion, and Archaic Civilizations: An Introduction
Examining Family History
Anthropology
Sex and Society: A Research Note from Social History and Anthropology
The personal is political' was a central insight of the wave of feminism which gathered momentum in the 1960s.Within that phrase is condensed the understanding that the seemingly most intimate details of private existence are actually structured by larger social relations. Attention to the personal politics of intimate life soon focused on sexuality, and many canons of sexual meaning were challenged. The discovery of erotic art and symbols as mal…
Anthropologists Speak Out on Nuclear Disarmament
Ritual of Reversion: On Fieldwork and Festivity in Haute Provence
Poor Women, Powerful Men: America's Great Experiment in Family Planning . Martha C. Ward
Chromosomes and Communication: The Discourse of Genetic Counseling
Amniocentesis is one of the new reproductive technologies, and a new health profession, the genetic counselor, has been developed to communicate medical information to patients about its risks and benefits. In this article I examine the language of genetic counseling as it communicates and miscommunicates not only medical information but also structural power arrangements, social knowledge, and popular meanings about medically defined disability.…
Bob Scholte: A Personal Reminiscence
TWELVE. Moral Pioneers: Women, Men, and Fetuses on a Frontier of Reproductive Technology
Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism
The Politics of Reproduction
The topic of human reproduction encompasses events throughout the human and especially female life-cycle as well as ideas and practices surrounding fertility, birth, and child care. Most of the scholarship on the subject, up through the 1960s, was based on cross-cultural surveys focused on the beliefs, norms, and values surrounding reproductive behaviors. Multiple methodologies and subspecialties, and fields like social history, human biology, an…
Social/Cultural Anthropology: A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility. Margery Wolf
Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf
ONE Introduction: Conceiving the New World Order
Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction
This groundbreaking volume provides a dramatic investigation of the dynamics of reproduction. In an unusually broad spectrum of essays, a distinguished group of international feminist scholars and activists explores the complexity of contemporary sexual politics around the globe. Using reproduction as an entry point in the study of social life and placing it at the center of social theory, the authors examine how cultures are produced, contested,…
Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-Cultural Perspectives
Refusing Prenatal Diagnosis: The Meanings of Bioscience in a Multicultural World
This article explores the reasons women of diverse class, racial ethnic, national, and religious backgrounds give for their decisions not to accept an amniocentesis or, having accepted one, not to pursue an abortion after diagnosis of serious fetal disability. The narratives of refusers reveal conflicts and tensions between the universalizing rationality of biomedical interventions into pregnancy and the wider heterogeneous social frame work to w…
Genealogical Dis-Ease: Where Hereditary Abnormality, Biomedical Explanation, and Family Responsibility Meet
Gender, Body, Biomedicine: How Some Feminist Concerns Dragged Reproduction to the Center of Social Theory
This article tracks the growth of medical anthropology in the United States in the decades since the 1970s, as it has intersected the expansion of feminist activism and scholarship. I argue that feminist attention to embodied inequalities quickly focused on reproduction as a site of investigation and intervention. Medical anthropology has benefited from feminist concern with stratified reproduction, especially its interrogation of nonnormative an…
Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship
Public Culture - Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2001
Technologies of Pregnancy and Birth
Sociology (38 works) · Political science (22 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Anthropology (18 works) · Gender Studies (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Medicine (14 works) · Biology (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Epistemology (10 works)