Incorporating incest: Gamete, body and relation in assisted conception

This article is about the ways in which residents of an English town explore everchanging possibilities presented by new reproductive technologies (NRTs). It focuses on the way in which the idiom of incest emerges as a conceptual brake to certain possibilities presented by biotechnological intervention in conception. In this specific ethnographic example, we see that the meaning of incest is neither fixed nor predictable and goes beyond ideas about either biogenetic connection or appropriate and inappropriate sexual relations, even while embracing them. I argue that we need to pay attention to the bodies in which procreative substances that ought not to be mixed are combined and grown into new persons. The article also shows that exploration of NRTs continues to be animated by problematics of kinship. © Royal Anthropological Institute 2004.