the more assistance someone or something receives from these sources, the more it exists. throughout this book I trace this emphasis on interdependence by focusing on the ways in which IVF and gamete donation are used and reshaped in the context of care and the value placed on assistance, rather than on autonomy. In Ecuador, assisted reproduction is an extension of earlier reproductive practices. Making new people was already perceived as an assisted process. these new tech-nological practices are seen as supplementing God’s intervention.

Western gay interest in and representations of sexuality in the Arab and Muslimworlds coincided with the emergence of Western gay scholarship on sexuality.12It was John Boswell who inaugurated a debate on the Muslim world in whichWestern white gay scholars are still engaged. Boswell’s romantic and unsup-ported assertion that “most Muslim societies have treated homosexuality withindifference, if not admiration” was in fact a familiar claim: Christian portrayalsof the Muslim world as immoral and sexually licentious have been around forcenturies.1

Because I have known women like Zaynab through my years do-ing ethnographic research, I am often bewildered by what I read or hear about “the Muslim woman.” It is hard to reconcile my experiences with the women I have met in rural Egypt with what the American media present, or with what people say to me ca-sually at dinner parties, in doctors’ offi ces, and on the sidelines at my children’s soccer games when they learn that I write about the Middle East. I am surprised by how easily people presume that Muslim women do not have rights.

An ethnographic unpacking of our politics that notonly looks diagnostically at how positionality shapes ac-tors’efforts to exercise political agency but also exploresthewaysinwhichthoseeffortsmediatetheirownin-ternal and irresolvable contradictions can deepen ourunderstanding of humans’bizarre political proclivities.Such a project would approach normative markers ofpositionality (such as socioeconomic demographics) notas the primary determinant of a subject’s politics butinstead as a key component of a broader web of con-tradictory discourses and practices through which thesubject becomes legible. Elizabeth Keating’s(2000)eth-nographic work on political positionality in Pohnpei,Micronesia, is illuminating toward this end.

so, logics of capital as they expand globally exclude certain popula-tions from the therapeutic market but include them as experimental subjects in global pharmaceutical clinical trials (K. Sunder Rajan 2007). These are populations that are incorporated as labor in the process of biomedical value generation, but not as consumers. Hence, the very imagination of trial popu-lations in India is merely as risked experimental subjects, without the im-plicit social contract of therapeutic access at the end of the day. Layered onto these structural logics are the historical conditions that lead to the possibility of the configuration of such merely risked experimental subjectivities in the first place. I have described in earlier work how the kinds of subjects who get recruited into especially early stage clinical trials on healthy volunteers in India are often those who are victims of other kinds of prior dispossession (K. Sunder Rajan 2005, 2007). (Examples include mill workers in Bombay who have lost their jobs because of the evisceration of the textile industry, or, more recently, diamond workers in Surat who are following similar trajecto-ries of de-proletarianization leading to experimental subjectivity

Ask for the parent’s perspective. Clarify the parent’s feelingsand beliefs on the issue. Ask questions to learn, not to passjudgment: “What are acceptable ways to you for Erica to expressher angry feelings? What do you do at home? What do you findworks? What doesn’t work? Would you be open to finding ways todiscipline her other than hitting?”

In the #$02s and early #$/2s traditional Chinese medicine served, in the rhetoric of the time, shijie renmin or “people of the world.” In practice, the worlding of traditional Chinese medicine was mainly oriented toward Af-rica, Latin America, and parts of Asia (see chapter #). As the Soviet Union and the United States were also sending medical teams to the )ird World, the encounters between “traditional Chinese medicine” and “biomedicine” were not about local-meets-universal but rather competing world-making projects. )e worlding of traditional Chinese medicine not only drew on the universality and therefore legitimacy of science but, more important, it also succeeded in offering the proletariat of the world something that neither the Soviet medical teams nor those of the United States were able to offer—namely, acupuncture