Theories of conception were of central importance to the nineteenth-century debates about social organization out of which anthropology emerged. Specifically, it was argued by theorists such as Bachofen that the acquisition of accurate knowledge of physical paternity comprised an elementary transition out of primitivism, representing a triumph of intellect over nature as a component of human progress towards civilization. Writing at the same time, McLennan also argued for the central importance of accurate knowledge of physical paternity in the development of marriage practices foundational to civilized society. Morgan argued similarly,presuming an instinctive paternal drive to preserve property through rules designed to consolidate biological and material inheritance. It is Morgan’s formulations that are most closely followed by fEngels in the most famous statement of the importance of physical paternity to evolutionary accounts of social organization, namely On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).
Theories of conception, and specifically knowledge of physical paternity, continued to play a central role in debates about social organization occasioning the ‘birth’ of modern anthropology. As Coward notes in her superb review of this period: ‘The role of paternity and the procreative family were obsessive themes in the discussion of familial forms’ (1983: 60). Insofar as human history was largely viewed by early anthropologists as the slow but steady advance of human reason and knowledge over ignorance and primitivism, ignorance of physical paternity held a privileged place in their debates. Frazer (1910), Hartland (1909), Tylor (1881) and Westermarck (1891) were all preoccupied with its importance, only the more so as evidence of matrilineal societies in which no such ignorance could be found were reported.
Gillen’s 1899 report of extensive ignorance among Australian Aborigines of physical paternity set the stage for a more specifically ethnographic rehearsal of earlier debates. Trained by Westermarck, and having completed his doctoral thesis on marriage and the family among the Australian Aborigines, Malinowski foregrounded the question of ignorance of paternity in his work among the Trobriand Islanders. From early on, Malinowski insisted that the Trobrianders were ‘ignorant’ only insofar as they adjusted their ‘crude’ and ‘incomplete’ theories of conception to fit their overall social pattern of matrilineality. In terms of the basic elements of knowledge (e.g. a virgin cannot conceive), the Trobrianders, Malinowski insisted, were in no way primitive, childlike or ignorant. Developing a model of ‘sociological paternity’, as had fDurkheim and fvan Gennep, Malinowski argued for a separation of fsocial facts from natural facts in the analysis of conception. His insistence that beliefs about conception cannot be separated from their specific social context was further bolstered by Montagu’s exhaustive compilation of conception beliefs among the Australian Aborigines, confirming their ‘ignorance’, in which he concludes that: ‘Common-sense, in short, like every other aspect of thought, is a cultural trait, and its form is determined in and by the culture in which it must function’ (1937: 341).
Malinowski’s analysis of Trobriand conception beliefs first became the subject of heated controversy in the 1920s and 1930s when he clashed with Ernest Jones, a champion of Freud’s, over the universality of the Oedipus complex, which is premised on accurate knowledge of physical paternity (see psychoanalysis). His Trobriand material again became the focus of dispute mid-century, in the exchanges occasioning Edmund Leach’s 1965 Henry Myers lecture entitled ‘Virgin Birth’. In these debates, anthropologists wrestled with the broad ramifications of the ‘ignorance of paternity’ question set against what many (particularly Leach) saw as the racist implications of imputing to any group an ignorance of something so empirically self-evident as the relation between coition and pregnancy.
As Delaney (1986) points out in her excellent review of these debates, the problem can be seen as one of culturally specific theories of knowledge, as well as conception. The paternity question, she points out, has been cast as one of ‘possession’ versus ‘lack’ of true knowledge. Such a view obscures the specific conceptual features of paternity itself, which are variable. Insofar as models of paternity are of creation, they are inevitably embedded in cosmological and religious systems, as well as models of origins and divinity. As Delaney notes on the basis of her own fieldwork in a Turkish village: ‘the symbols and meanings by which procreation is understood and represented provide a means for understanding relationships between such seemingly disparate elements as body, family, house, village, nation, this-world and other-world’ (1991: 32).
David Schneider, in his review (1984) of the importance of a presumed set of biological facts at the base of kinship study, also posed the conception theory question as one of knowledge practices. Insofar as a strict dichotomy between the ‘real’, ‘true’ facts of European biology remained the privileged authenticator of beliefs elsewhere, he argued that kinship study remained a product of ‘folk European’ preoccupations imposed on the ways of life of other peoples.
Theories of conception have again become central to anthropological concerns about kinship, gender and personhood in the context of late-twentieth-century Euro-American debates over new reproductive technologies. In this context, renewed uncertainty about parenthood resulting from unprecedented forms of technological assi-tance to conception has challenged common-sense assumptions about both maternity and paternity. In the context of surrogate arrangements whereby one woman donates her egg and another gestates the fertilized egg to term, it is unclear, for example, who is the ‘real’ mother. Legislative, judicial and ethical debate on such matters has rekindled anthropological interest in both authoritative knowledge claims about ‘the facts of life’ and cultural representations of kinship in the age of assisted conception (Edwards et al. 1993; Strathern 1992a). In turn, the view of conception as a strictly biological matter has been very broadly challenged by the expanding literature on biology as a cultural system, and on the importance of ideas of the natural in the formation of Euro-American certainties (Strathern 1992b; Yanagisako and Delaney 1994).
Theories of conception thus index to the anthropologist a range of cultural questions. On the one hand, traditional questions about the importance of conception theories to accounts of origins, cosmological systems, social divisions, gender and kinship relations, attitudes to life and death, the structures of marriage, family and inheritance patterns, concepts of personhood, and so forth have gained new currency in the context of increased technological control over ‘the facts of life’. On the other hand, the history of anthropological debate about conception represents an important cultural field in its own right, representing as it does the longstanding ‘given-ness’ of certain assumptions concerning the process of coming into being within Euro-American culture. This dual interest is reflected in the work of a growing number of scholars whose contemporary ethnographic work stands to revive anthropological interest in one of the oldest and most important topics within the discipline.
