Heartbreaking anthropology hurts: Studying fertility rituals while struggling with infertility

Abstract

Summary 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.

After Dobbs: Reflections on political and legal anthropology

“…No one can do this kind of work alone, whether ethnographically or in their workplaces. Ethnographic agency seeks the company of others (Arumugan, 2023). Perhaps this helps explain why anthropology's periods of theoretical innovation over the course of its history have coincided with times of crisis.…”