A Stable Environment: Surrogacy and the Good Life in Scotland
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The London School of Economics and Political Science A Stable Environment: Surrogacy and the Good Life in Scotland Katharine Dow A thesis submitted to the Department of Social Anthropology of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, London, September 2009 1 Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it). The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of the author. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. 2 Abstract In this thesis I describe the claims that a group of people living in rural Scotland make about maternal surrogacy. For them, surrogacy is a topical issue that provokes speculative ethical judgements. This is in a context in which they are building good lives, strongly informed by environmentalist ‘ethical living’ and local wildlife conservation. I describe the kinds of ideas they employ and reproduce in discussing the ethics of surrogacy to capture the nuanced judgements that go into ethical claim-making. I argue that, in order to understand these people’s ideas about what is natural and what is moral, they should be considered along with their more ordinary ideas and practices. I describe how some of the same concepts they use to talk about surrogacy figure in their conceptions of goodness and what makes a good life, in order to both contextualise and extend their ideas about the ethics of surrogacy. Through ethnography of their everyday lives, I show the importance of effort and care in the making of relationships with other people, animals and the land and in fashioning an ethical subjectivity. I analyse the connections between nature, kinship and ethics in lives that are structured by efforts to protect the natural world, feel closer to other people and experience a fulfilling life. I examine the importance of choice and money in enabling these lives and raise questions about the location and status of transcendent values in contemporary Britain. I discuss the temporal orientation of these people in relation to the influence of environmentalist ideas of impending ecological crisis and consider how this links with their ideas about how to live in the present as well as how these connect up with their ideas about parenthood and kinship. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………….6 Prologue: The Sperm Whale’s Jaw…………………………………………….11 Introduction: Where the River Meets the Sea…………………………………14 Part One: Extraordinary Ethics Chapter 1: Scrambled Eggs…………………………………………….72 Chapter 2: Love and Money…………………………………………….91 Part Two: Everyday Ethics Chapter 3: Living on a Nature Reserve……………………………....128 Chapter 4: Charity Work………………………………………………..167 Chapter 5: Choosing a Good Life……………………………………..194 Part Three: A Stable Environment? Chapter 6: Climate Change……………………………………………216 Conclusion: Surrogacy and the Good Life in Scotland………………………242 Appendix 1: Ancestral Voices by John Mackie…………………………….....251 Appendix 2: Where the River Meets the Sea by John Mackie……………...253 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….257 4 List of Illustrations Figure 1: Onlookers at the scene of the stranded sperm whale’s body, Roseisle, Moray, December 2006.…………………………………………………………….10 Figure 2: Spey Bay from Garmouth, on the opposite bank of the Spey.………16 Figure 3: One side of Fochabers town square with the larger of its churches..29 Figure 4: Tugnet, Spey Bay, on a sunny afternoon.…………………………….127 Figure 5: A beach barbecue, Spey Bay, May 2007.…………………………….156 Figure 6: Wildlife centre staff grapple with their model of a minke whale surrounded by local children dressed as sea creatures before processing around Spey Bay as part of Save the Whale week, July 2007..……………….172 All photographs by the author. Map 1: Northern and central Scotland……………………………………………..12 Map 2: Spey Bay and surrounding area…………………………………………...13 Map 3: Spey Bay – detailed map…………………………………………………...21 (Copyright Google Maps.) 5 Acknowledgements My work on this thesis was made possible by a 1+3 postgraduate studentship from the ESRC (award number PTA-031-2004-00303), for which I am extremely grateful. Fenella Cannell and Sarah Franklin were my supervisors. Fenella, thank you so much for your consistent incisiveness and for pushing me to do more than I knew I could. Sarah, thank ewe! Your endless encouragement, insight and capacity for following connections have been inspirational. Catherine Allerton stepped in with great generosity to help with the final draft of the chapters and advised me earlier on in the process. Max Bolt also discussed parts of the final draft with me in a way that was both thought- provoking and revitalising. I received various kinds of support from Rita Astuti, Matthew Engelke and Charles Stafford along the way and I would also like to thank my PhD cohort for their input. It has become almost de riguer to describe the writing process in social science studies of reproduction as like a gestation. About nine months into writing up, Sarah Franklin remarked that Vicky Boydell and I were like co- parents to each others’ theses and as ever she had a point. My eternal thanks, Vicky – you rock my world! For the Eliot, for making me think and for getting me through it, thank you, Barry Watt. Thanks also to Judith Bovensiepen and Carrie Heitmeyer for being great friends throughout the writing up process and beyond. Some Scottish friends must be mentioned by name. Hannah Bird, I am forever in your debt for everything you have given me with your inimitable enthusiasm and honesty. Kate Orton, Laura Smith and Andy Holtby, thank you too for being yourselves and being great friends. Chris Gunn, thank you for being there, for making me laugh and for all the good times. John Mackie, for the poetry, champagne and whale song – thank you. I am very grateful to Cate, Norman and Carina Macdonald for helping me settle into life up north. Many thanks to my father, step-mother, brother and sister – David, Selda, James and Alison Dow respectively – for being a particular, other corner of Scotland, for introducing friends scattered around the country and for all the pit-stops on the way north. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to everyone who donated their thoughts, experiences, ideas and time to this project, the ‘respondents’. I cannot 6 name you personally as it goes against the conventions (and logic) of anonymisation, but I am truly grateful, not only for the data, but more importantly for the friendship, warmth and welcome. I can only apologise for reciprocating this by lumping you together with such an indecorous collective noun. You made Spey Bay home for me, for a time. It may be unconventional to thank places and animals, but here it seems appropriate, so thank you also to Spey Bay and, of course, the dolphins. This thesis is dedicated to my mother, Juliet Emerson, for everything – and for the scrambled eggs. 7 I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten By the dwellers in cities – ever, however, implacable. Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting. His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom, In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard, In the smell of grapes on the autumn table, And the evening circle in the winter gaslight. T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages 8 Prologue The Sperm Whale’s Jaw I found this jawbone at the sea's edge Ted Hughes, Relic Early one Friday morning in December 2006 I went with some of my friends and neighbours to see the body of a sperm whale that had washed up at Roseisle beach. The whale was an adult male that had died from malnutrition, which my friends attributed to environmental change and the threats of human activity to cetacean habitats and food sources. At the beach there were about ten others including a local journalist. Each person simply looked at the whale, occasionally talking in hushed tones. It lay on its right side in a shallow indentation of sand filled with bright, clear blood – a jolting reminder that this had once been a living being. Later, Sophie said she felt an atmosphere of reverence amongst the onlookers, which I had also sensed. On the way home she said, “It’s so sad to see something so beautiful in life in death. Although it’s still beautiful in a way, it’s just sad because you get so excited about seeing a sperm whale in the place where you live and then the only opportunity you get is when it’s dead”. One person touched the animal gingerly, as if letting everyone know that she harboured no ill intention; a few others followed as though they had received permission. Despite not having touched the body, Willow said afterwards, “I know it’s irrational but I feel sort of unclean, like I need to wash my hands”. The most striking thing about this body was that its jaw had been removed during the night.