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Is the test result positive or negative? Tests that occur in labs and doctors' offices pose specific questions to try to obtain specific information. But what happens in the social world when these tests never see the inside of a lab or doctor's office, and instead they are used in a house, in a Walmart bathroom, or in a dormitory bathroom stall? Putting the diagnosis aside, what does the presence of these tests do to social life? This paper examines one such test, the home pregnancy test, and specifically, its use in contemporary intimate life of people who do not want to be pregnant. Pregnancy tests test for pregnancy. But what else is the pregnancy test putting to the test? To investigate this, I spent 8 years studying American pregnancy tests using a qualitative mixed methods approach. This paper draws on some of my research materials, specifically, 85 life history interviews. Each participant was asked to recall, in full, all of their experiences with home pregnancy tests throughout their lives, resulting in well over 300 narratives of home pregnancy test usage which I qualitatively analyzed. I find that more than just a test for a pregnancy, the use of the home pregnancy test is a test of roles, relationships, and responsibilities in social life. These findings suggest implications for social life as more biomedical tests move out of the purview of the medical establishment. K E Y W O R D S gender, pregnancy, reproduction, test, women | 461 ROBINSON | INTRODUC TI ON"I touched my stomach and said, 'Test' and they understood." Paulette was abroad in Poland. It was a family trip with her elderly grandmother to a homeland Nana had not seen since she fled the Nazis. Paulette described her role in her big, hectic family trip, and the multiple ironies of discovering a possible pregnancy in, of all places, Poland, were not lost on Paulette. They had tried to exterminate her family and lineage, but had narrowly failed, and here she was possibly defying them once again. But front and center in her mind were her intimate relationships. She considered her new boyfriend. "Oh, my God, what if I'm pregnant? We've only been together a short time, like, I don't know what I would do." How would the outcomes of the test affect this new relationship? I had told him before because he was the one who wanted to not use condoms and I was a little apprehensive about it. And I had told him, like, honestly, I don't think I would have an abortion if I got pregnant. Like, I am totally 100 percent in favor of abortion. . . but I'm in an age where I really want children and, like, I just don't think I could do it. Testing herself in the context of her family's trip brought to the fore her relationships with her mother and her mother's mother, Nana: I'm with my entire family-like, Nana, my mom, my two uncles . . . we drove from Warsaw to this small town where my grandmother was born in Poland and then my family erupted into a huge fight that lasted, like, three hours. . . Of course, I'm trying to find a pharmacy on the way and come up wit...
Is the test result positive or negative? Tests that occur in labs and doctors' offices pose specific questions to try to obtain specific information. But what happens in the social world when these tests never see the inside of a lab or doctor's office, and instead they are used in a house, in a Walmart bathroom, or in a dormitory bathroom stall? Putting the diagnosis aside, what does the presence of these tests do to social life? This paper examines one such test, the home pregnancy test, and specifically, its use in contemporary intimate life of people who do not want to be pregnant. Pregnancy tests test for pregnancy. But what else is the pregnancy test putting to the test? To investigate this, I spent 8 years studying American pregnancy tests using a qualitative mixed methods approach. This paper draws on some of my research materials, specifically, 85 life history interviews. Each participant was asked to recall, in full, all of their experiences with home pregnancy tests throughout their lives, resulting in well over 300 narratives of home pregnancy test usage which I qualitatively analyzed. I find that more than just a test for a pregnancy, the use of the home pregnancy test is a test of roles, relationships, and responsibilities in social life. These findings suggest implications for social life as more biomedical tests move out of the purview of the medical establishment. K E Y W O R D S gender, pregnancy, reproduction, test, women | 461 ROBINSON | INTRODUC TI ON"I touched my stomach and said, 'Test' and they understood." Paulette was abroad in Poland. It was a family trip with her elderly grandmother to a homeland Nana had not seen since she fled the Nazis. Paulette described her role in her big, hectic family trip, and the multiple ironies of discovering a possible pregnancy in, of all places, Poland, were not lost on Paulette. They had tried to exterminate her family and lineage, but had narrowly failed, and here she was possibly defying them once again. But front and center in her mind were her intimate relationships. She considered her new boyfriend. "Oh, my God, what if I'm pregnant? We've only been together a short time, like, I don't know what I would do." How would the outcomes of the test affect this new relationship? I had told him before because he was the one who wanted to not use condoms and I was a little apprehensive about it. And I had told him, like, honestly, I don't think I would have an abortion if I got pregnant. Like, I am totally 100 percent in favor of abortion. . . but I'm in an age where I really want children and, like, I just don't think I could do it. Testing herself in the context of her family's trip brought to the fore her relationships with her mother and her mother's mother, Nana: I'm with my entire family-like, Nana, my mom, my two uncles . . . we drove from Warsaw to this small town where my grandmother was born in Poland and then my family erupted into a huge fight that lasted, like, three hours. . . Of course, I'm trying to find a pharmacy on the way and come up wit...
Classical logic, Hegel observed, is premised on atomistic categories, forcing its thinkers to apply either-or judgements-contingency or necessity, universal or particular, discrete or continuous, and so forth. Dialectical reason, by contrast, recognizes such seeming antitheses as mutuallyconstitutive sides of conceptual wholes-empty, that is, in and of themselves (Hegel 2010(Hegel [1812). This insight gains relevance for the anthropology of capitalism due to our discipline's penchant for polemical reasoning, and one notable instance thereof. While its roots lie in earlier debates, the birth of anthropology's culture wars can be most readily set in the mid-1970s. For it was then that Marvin Harris (1974) published his Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches, followed by Marshall Sahlins ' (1976) Culture and Practical Reason. For Harris (1974:4), human cultural diversity could best be understood, not through 'spiritualized' explanations, but by tracing particular cultural phenomena back to their 'down-to-earth' material causes. For Sahlins (1976), by contrast, cultures were to be understood as symbolic orders operating according to meaningful internal logics rather than to cross-culturally recognizable material conditions.With the ascendancy of postmodernism in anthropology by the late 1980s, support for the materialist camp declined precipitously. For anthropological studies of capitalism, this meant a turn away from the earlier structural Marxism of Maurice Godelier and Claude Meillassoux, for
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