Over the past several decades social scientists researching Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) principally focused their studies on the United States and Europe. These technologies, developed and first implemented in the ‘West’, have challenged many popular assumptions about the inextricability of intercourse and pregnancy, and with the possibility of surrogacy, the indivisibility of gestation and motherhood. In tandem with these reconfigurations of some of society's most salient connections, longstanding anthropological approaches to kinship were called into question. This technologically inspired introspection led to paradigm-shifting ethnographic work at the end of the twentieth century. Almost two decades after the retooling of anthropology's analytics of the family and relatedness, Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes brings together medical anthropological investigations into the cultural life of ARTs outside of the Euro-American context that maintains a dominant presence in the literature.

This compendium of ethnographic accounts of reproductive technologies is comparative in form and spans South East Asia, the Middle East, South America, Northern Africa, Southern Asia and Eastern Europe as well as migrant communities in Western Europe. In addition to focusing on more standard techniques of in vitro fertilization, this volume delves into the related practices of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, DNA paternity testing, human embryonic stem cell research, and newer techniques to overcome male impotence. Together, the chapters of this book lend wide-ranging empirical credence to the editors' theoretical aim of demonstrating that ART-related practices are not merely technologically determined across the globe but rather ARTs are implemented, funded and experienced differently across cultural contexts. This objective is accomplished principally though the cross-cultural documentation of the diversity of ‘local moral worlds’ that manifest a plurality of ART realities from Buenos Aires to Beirut.

In these contexts the field of biotechnological negotiation by patients and practitioners is broadly defined, for ARTs often remain loosely regulated. The spaces yielded by legal ambiguities are filled by the influences of clinical profit, national identity, links between fecundity and gender, religious dicta and family alliances. This is not to say that the influence of the societal shaping of reproductive technologies is completely circumscribed by the rule of law, or the lack thereof. Namely, support for ARTs by Iranian religious leaders facilitates the clandestine transgression of legal and ethical code. Also genetic declarations of paternity by Brazilian courts often dispel the possibility of socially relevant enactments of fatherhood, relating an antithetical and not merely delimiting relationship between the lived realities of genetic testing and the law.

The editors align this volume with the science studies imperative of elucidating the ways in which society and technology are mutually informed. However, very little, if any, mention is made of local variability of the technical processes that constitute ARTs. Instead contributors focus upon a realm more easily defined as ‘cultural’, thereby leaving half of the technosocial field unexamined. This incongruence between theoretical scaffolding and actual anthropological observations is, however, mitigated by the ethnographic elbow grease evident in almost every chapter of this volume. Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes does not yield theoretical innovations but rather collects a rich anthropological record of engagements with ARTs. As such, this volume functions as a concise ethnographic atlas of reproduction and relatedness technologies in the non-‘Western’ world. This work is vital to mapping such procedures in parts of the world that exhibit higher rates of infertility than Euro-America, providing a sturdy foundation and giving traction to later theoretical work.

Although it would have been helpful for the editors to have included comparisons between the findings of this volume and the large swaths of Euro-American ethnography, intentionally sidestepped by the book's focus, contributors skillfully assembled such juxtapositions in their chapters. This volume serves as a concise introduction to, and robust repository of, the variable impacts of ARTs and related technologies as they traverse the globe. The editors of this collection have assembled an array of ethnographically rich texts suitable for introductory coursework. Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes largely reproduces existing theoretical approaches instead of investigating the ways in which the analytics anthropologists utilize to explain variations in ART-related practices might change in tandem with cultural context. In spite of this shortcoming, this book helps to lay the groundwork necessary for further theoretical expounding.