Following Marilyn Strathern, social anthropologists have interrogated the “awkward relationship” between anthropology and feminism. This chapter revisits the awkwardness of British social anthropology by looking at its problematic relationship not only with feminism but also with anthropology “at home” and with ethical or moral judgments. Its focus is on cosmetic surgery and other quasi-medical cosmetic procedures such as the use of botulinum toxins (e.g., Botox) and dermal fillers. The chapter discusses the tension between anthropological and feminist approaches, revealed when the anthropologist is tasked with taking an ethical stance. It draws on the experience of the anthropologist having, in their early career, to defend anthropology “at home” and, in their late career, chairing a bioethical committee on the ethics of cosmetic procedures, and concludes that there are times when anthropology and feminism best serve each other by maintaining a mutually critical relation: by continuing to trouble each other.

The chapters in this collection are connected through the inspiration they draw from the scholarship of Marilyn Strathern, one of the most compelling and innovative social anthropologists of contemporary times. From early fieldwork and a series of monographs on the Hagen people of Papua New Guinea, Strathern earned a reputation as a Melanesianist, but her theoretical interests have always also been oriented towards Euro-American (that is, her own) society. Scholars in both the social sciences and the humanities know her as a feminist and trailblazing anthropologist of, amongst other things, new reproductive technologies, gender, kinship, economics and law. Over a forty-year career, Strathern has insisted on the constructed nature of such marks of professional and other identification, often convening them into new relations or radically recasting their accepted bearing to each other.

Strathern’s reconfigurations have yielded a number of particularly invigorating conceptions of knowledge that have surprised in both their representations and their effects. Her pioneering works on the social and cultural dimension and implications of a range of technological and ethical changes in our time have had a defining, or perhaps a definitively unsettling, role in articulations of what is at stake in a number of current research projects across the humanities and social sciences. How, then, to begin to unpack and introduce Strathern’s enormous contribution to scholarship generally and social anthropology specifically? Chronologically? Thematically? Through an archaeology of her key concepts? A review of her writings? Such strategies seem inadequate – inappropriate even. They go against the grain, risking the imposition of an arbitrary structure on a contribution that defies a linear account and is as immeasurable as it is uncontainable. Strathern’s writings hold up for scrutiny familiar and ‘taken for granted’ concepts and she pays sharp attention to the premises on which ‘western’ scholarship is built. Such a compulsion is as destabilising as it is exhilarating and its impact, as noted above, is felt beyond the discipline of social anthropology. Yet ‘impact’, again, does not seem quite the right word. Strathern’s insights are subtle. They get under the skin and niggle. They work on you as much as you (have to) work on them.

An anthropological perspective

Developments and innovations in assisted conception have raised questions that go beyond the practical and pragmatic application of the techniques themselves. In Britain, for example, attention has focused on, amongst other things, whether or not women should be allowed to donate ova to their sisters, whether maternal surrogacy arrangements should be allowed, or, in the case of DI whether sperm providers should be, and remain, anonymous. From a social anthropological perspective, such concerns reveal a culture's understanding of the way in which significant social relationships are created and maintained. Stories about conception and the ways in which people perceive themselves to be related, as well as the forms that such relationships take, come under the rubric of kinship; and the demarcation of kinship and its study has been central in the development of social anthropology.

This chapter draws on anthropological research in a town in the north of England, which for present purposes I call Alltown. I returned to Alltown, a place where I had previously carried out residential fieldwork, in order to investigate residents' ideas about new reproductive technologies. In the process of this research, I was constantly ‘passed on’ to residents who were perceived to have different kinds of knowledge about creating and maintaining family relationships. Hence, women said I ought to speak to men, or to other women who were perhaps younger or older, or to other women who had smaller or larger families – to people, in other words, who were perceived to have a different experience of kinship.