Heartbreaking anthropology hurts

Studying fertility rituals while struggling with infertility

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3029927
AutoresI Arumugam (0000-0002-7623-6517, autor correspondente)
Ano2023
Volume48
Fascículo1
Páginas40-52
Data de publicação2023-06-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAnthropology & Humanism (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1548-1409 • E-ISSN: 1559-9167
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/anhu.12425
OpenAlexW4313887549
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas26

Ethnography involves using the self as the mechanism to try to understand others and their life worlds. How is knowledge and knowledge production affected by the apparatus of knowing, the ethnographer experiencing cataclysms in their personal life? In this article, I grapple with the fraught dilemmas of doing fieldwork on mother goddesses and ritual cults premised on the cultivation of fertility while experiencing infertility and undergoing assisted reproductive treatments (ART). My recovery from pregnancy losses and fertility failures was compromised by my research on fertility, which continuously resurrected my trauma. Juxtaposing research on ritual technologies with personal experience of biomedical treatments-different means to overcome the limits of nature to bring about reproductive success-I foreground the ceding of human control and agency demanded by both therapies. My ethnographic writing similarly loosened to admit emotions, ambivalences, and absences that I had normally excluded or edited out. Even as it provokes theoretical insights, to keep probing ongoing personal trauma has become unbearable. To salve heartbreak and to salvage some control has warranted rebuilding a few of the enclosures keeping the personal away from the professional

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Biology · Ethnography · Fertility · Infertility · Population · Pregnancy · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · History · Reproductive Health and Technologies