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    Ethnograph’s Kitchen The making of an Ronee imagined community: “sealers The press as a mediator ‘senate cor in ethnographic research . into Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) Carles Salazar University of Lleida, Spain Gemma Orobitg University of Barcelona, Spain Abstract ‘The purpose of this article is to discuss the concept of community as a methodological tool in the absence of a face-to-face interaction context. Our perspective emphasizes the constitutive role of the researcher and his or her methods in creating communities in any kind of social research. In our case study of research that we conducted in a private medical centre in Barcelona, we show how Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) users were ‘imagined’ as 2 community through the use of press clippings as mediation tool in the ethnographic interview. Keywords Assisted Reproductive Technologies, community, context, ethnography, family, fertility, imagined community, interviews, media, method In this article we wish to discuss the concept of community as a methodological tool that will enable us to construct an ethnographic object. We have in mind an ethnographic object that is not necessarily localized, but takes into account the Corresponding author: Carles Saar, University of li, Spain mal: salzar@hahsudlest Solazar and Orobitg 237 connections between subjects, ideas and experiences — connections that may be intangible though they may constitute a community of feeling and meanings. How, from this point of view, do we draw the limits of the community? Do com- munities exist by themselves, or are they a product of the ethnographic method ~ and if So, to what extent? Our interest in the methodological implications of the concept of community originated in a research project carried out in a private centre for reproductive medicine in Barcelona, Spain, which explored the social and cultural implications of infertility treatments. In this particular context the concept of community was also important as a frame of meaning. Apparently, the community existed neither as an objective space of social relationships nor as a collective representation in the individuals’ consciousness; however, the use of the concept of community as a methodological tool turned out to be crucial in the development of our rescarch., In this article we highlight the relevance of the con- cept of community in the analysis of social relations in a situation where the com- ‘munity is apparently inexistent Why do we insist on using this concept if the community was so insubstantial in ‘our case study? Ethnographers have used the concept of community in two differ= cent ways: as an object of analysis, and as a context. Community as a context is not only a space of social relationships but also a frame of meaning, that is, a domain inside which “things make sense’ (Agar, 1983; Bruner, 1990; Goffman, 1974; Schutz, 1970). Taking into account the different meanings that it has acquired throughout the history of ethnographic research, by using the concept of commu- nity as a methodological tool we can integrate at least two different sorts of polar ities. The first is to do with the process of knowledge production, that is, between theory and the practice of field work; and the second is to do, on the one hand, with a space of social relations and, on the other, a system of representations. Interaction between these two polarities has enabled us to propose a tentative typology of three forms of community: localized, dispersed and imagined. This typology covers different kinds of social reality and different positions of the eth- nographer in relation to them, positions from which the researcher builds a par- ticular context and its consequent theorization, Equally these three types of community reflect the relation between the material dimensions of particular forms of sociality and the representational ones. We shall briefly discuss each of these types, but it is the third one, imagined communities, which will constitute our object of analysis. Community and method ‘Traditional ethnography made use of @ type of community as an object of analysis, that we shall call the localized community. In localized communities, the members coexist and create a common space by means of multiple bonds ~ economic, moral, political and historical (Redfield, 1989). Established examples of localized commu- nities are tribal communities, villages and neighbourhoods. Participant observation is the method used to carry out research in these contexts because it responds to the 238 Ethnography 13(2) need to localize a community. In ‘naturalistic ethnographies’, which were the expected product of research conducted in localized communities, the role of the ethnographer in the constitution of the community under study was largely ignored. Communities existed as objective realities by themselves and the purpose of research was merely to turn that objective existence into an object of scientific scrutiny, More recent concerns with intersubjectivity, ethnographic authority and the problematization of context have consistently debunked this model of objective localized communities (Clifford, 1988; Dilley, 1999; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; ‘Marcus, 1998; Marcus and Fisher, 1986). Now ethnographers are seen as active participants in the very constitution of their object of analysis, Even though local- ized communities continue to provide much of the data in contemporary ethno- graphical research, those communities are no longer seen as pre-cxisting objects but rather as interactive spaces between researcher and informants that constitute the particular products of a scientific practice (Burrell, 2009; Cicourel, 1992; Jenkins, 1994). According to Fabian, contexts ~ and this can also be applied to communities “must be constituted in a practice that is individually and therefore historically situated and determined’ (1995: 48) But what happens when the community is not apparent and, as a result, cannot be apprehended with the traditional method of participant observation? How do ‘we organize ethnographic research in areas where people do not interact directly with each other on a regular basis, when different social processes call into question the need to identify a territorially localized community? According to our defini- lion, dispersed and imagined communities would be instances of these invisible communities, and represent concrete examples with which to develop the answers to those questions. Accase in point of a dispersed community can be found in pastoralists and stock- breeders with scattered habitats. According to Garcia Garcia (2000), a Spanish anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in a community of stockbreeders in the north of Spain, face-to-face sociability had been replaced by a network of commu nication without which day-to-day life would be totally different, A shared dis- course, appearing as a form of social relationship, substitutes the shared space. This does not mean that the community does not indentify itself with a particular geographical location, but that this geographical location is not constituent of the main forms of sociability within the community. These communities are dispersed but are not totally unlocalized since they are still within the limits of a territorial unit. The constitutive role of the ethnographer, on the other hand, is in this case much more apparent since it is through a shared discourse between ethnographers and informants as a form of social relationship that ethnographers create links with their research communities. The last type of community we wish to look at is the imagined community. All communities — localized, dispersed and imagined — are integrated by individuals who identify themselves with what Charles Taylor has defined as a particular “social imaginary’: ‘that common understanding which makes possible common Solazar and Orobitg 239. practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’ (Taylor, 2004: 23). Benedict Anderson’s (1991) concept of ‘imagined community’ refers to the ways in which national communities have built their own social imaginaries in the process of capitalist development. An imagined community is a community of people who have never met each other and, in most cases, never will, but they imagine them- selves as a community through particular forms of mass communication made possible by printed texts, such as newspapers and novels. In the following decade, Arjun Appadurai (1996) developed Anderson’s ideas further in order to analyse what he called the processes of deterritorialization in the formation of contemporary social identities. For him, the culture of a group of migrants (ie. a diaspora community) who move to a new location and rebuild their history and ethnic project is, above all, an ‘imagined culture’ (p. 49). And mass media such as television and cinema, ‘electronic capitalism’ in his words, have a central role as creators and diffusers of new images and as legitimators of individual imaginations (p. 53). In contrast to Anderson, Appadurai disengages the formation of imagined communities from the process of nation-state building, Instead, he places the indi- vidual, individual imagination and the different life projects that a single individual ‘may conceive for himjherself at the centre of the analysis of the societies of the late 1990s. This change of theoretical object for the social sciences highlights the ten- sions between delocalized and imagined lives, since the latter create a sense of locality that is dissolved into the former, that is, as processes of deterritoria- lization make identity formation more challenging. Appadurai provides exam- ples from his own life to emphasize the ethnographers’ position as coctancous with social actors in the very social reality they want to analyse. Coevalness or coetaneousness (Fabian, 1983) have a distinctive political meaning inherent to the practice of ethnography in Appadurai’s conception of social research. None of the authors who developed this idea in the 1980s and 1990s went beyond Fabian’s theoretical criticism of contemporary anthropology and its obsession with localizing and turning physical space into temporal distance. This theo- retical criticism together with Anderson's notion of imagined community and Appadurai’s emphasis on the different individual imaginations as constitutive ‘of a new perspective upon cultures and social identities has enabled us 10 see the viability of a new form of ethnography. In our rescarch with infertile couples undergoing assisted reproduction treat ment, we carried out an ethnographical study of a non-localized social reality without a common social discourse, without durable social relationships that could be observed, and without @ shared project as a community, present or Future. We believe that it is the concept of imagined community that most clearly reflects this social reality. But an imagined community, as we have seen, cannot exist in isolation from the means by which the process of imagination takes place — the press, mass media and electronic capitalism in the above examples. What are the means by which this ‘imagined community’ of ART users is created? During ‘our research we found that these sets of isolated couples, which apparently had 240 Ethnography 13(2) nothing in common other than going through an ART treatment, constituted a community of experience and meanings. To address this question we have divided the remainder of this article into four main sections. In the first section, ‘From invisible community to imagined com- munity’, we analyse the particular social circumstances that make the community invisible and why it makes sense to turn this invisible community into an imagined community. The second section, “The written press and the ethnographic interview in the ART context’, contains a description, justification and contextualization of the method of ‘journalistic mediation’ used during the research, In the third sec- tion, ‘Contextualizing personal trajectories through the press’, we present a brie description of the way in which the press makes the community as it makes the ART context. Finally, in the fourth section, ‘The imagined community in action: Contrasts and identifications’, we analyse some of the conversations that arose in the interviews using press clippings, focusing our attention, specifically, on the clash of antagonisms and identifications that the cases reported in the press gen- crated and how they contributed, among the couples undergoing ART treatments, to make explicit ideas, values and kinds of knowledge that put to work different coetaneous representations concerning family, paternity and maternity. From invisible community to imagined community The research participants were 25 couples, who did not know each other, lived in different towns in Catalonia and had different jobs. They formed a heterogeneous group of people who did not seem to have much in common apart from the fact that they all had been born in Catalonia, although some of the couples lived in a different place from where they had been born, and they were all paying for IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) treatment with their own gametes in a private clinic ‘The age range was 29 to 35. Most had been married for between three and five years and were house-owners, living in new buildings in middle-class suburbs. For some of them, this was the first treatment after the infertility diagnosis, whereas for others it was part of a long-term process using artificial insemination or other ART treatments. Whatever the particularities of each case, during the interview they all reported feeling misunderstood by their immediate social environment, by society in general, or by political agencies which, in their view, did nothing to allow simpler, fairer access (0 these techniques. Infertile couples undergoing assisted reproduction described their experience as unique, something that can only be understood by someone who has been through the same process. This was @ recurrent theme in our informants’ conversations which corroborated the idea of a tacit community of experience and meaning (Csordas, 1994). Nevertheless, these infertile couples have no interest in seeing themselves as members of this community or in participating in any form of socia- bility within that community; infertility is assumed as a temporary experience that does not entail any identity investment, Even though there are infertility associa- tions, membership is very ephemeral. Solazar and Orobitg 241 ‘The clinical context, which is focused on ease work, reinforces an individualized relationship with the couples. These relationships are above all dyadic relationships between professionals (doctors, biologists, nurses and psychologists) and the couple. So the atmosphere of the clinic does not encourage sociability between patients in any way. Furthermore, couples may perceive their relationship with, their clinicians to be depersonalized because, during the treatment, they are in contact with a team of experts instead of a single individual. This is something that patients found unsettling in so far as, in their view, it risked transforming a deeply personal and emotional experience into a cold technological procedure. This type of dyadic relationship turned out to be a template for ethnographic research, since the relationship between the ethnographer and informants became another form of dyadie relationship. This is partly due to the fact that the clinic oriented the ethnographical rescarch in terms of a set of interviews between the ethnographer and the couples. Furthermore, a requisite for conducting interviews in the clinic was that patients should sign an agreement to participate in this research, thus reproducing these very same dyadic conditions. As the research progressed, we realized that ethnographic interviews conducted in these terms were clearly insufficient. A very important part of the experience of patients was rendered invisible, As the relationship with some couples became stronger, they told us that fundamental aspects of their experience had been ‘missed in the interviews. We concluded that there was a complex system of cultural ‘meanings originating in a common experience of a biotechnological process and that could not be disclosed in the dyadic relationship of the interview. In order to grasp this complexity we decided to carry out interviews in a different way by introducing press clippings during the interview, instead of just asking questions, to elicit more complex narratives from the ART users’ experiences. It was then that we became aware of the existence of an invisible, latent community, in the process of being imagined. In general terms, the press and the mass media are very much part of the cultural construction of ART. In this particular field, media events do not merely report on some external reality but are part of that reality in so far as ART users become conscious of their own experience (as a shared experience) above all through the press. To a large extent, ART simultaneously comprises individual experiences and media events (Melhuus, 2009). This dual nature of ART as an object supports our methodological option of using press clippings in the ethnographic interview. The written press and the ethnographic interview in the ART context While planning the research, with the cooperation of the physicians and biologists at the reproduction centre, we decided to hold three interviews with each couple: ‘one before the beginning of the IVF treatment, another during the treatment and another after the treatment. We used written press articles during the interviews with the couples in order to solve three main methodological questions which 22 Ethnography 13(2) emerged during fieldwork. In the first place, it was impossible to carry out direct observations in order to contrast them with the information oblained in the inter- views to the couples. Indeed, during the first year of our research we were not even allowed to observe the doctor-patient interactions. Second, we needed to integrate the innovations and new debates which were constantly emerging in the field of ART within our research, including these developments as a ‘context’ of the inter- view. And finally, we realized that the same question could not be put to all inter- viewees in the same way, especially while working with people immersed in what ‘was, Lo a large extent, a painful and laborious process. The press articles enabled us to ask questions that were relevant to our research without taking over the couples’ experiences. In this article we describe and analyse only the first interview, the one held before the treatment. Interviews were conducted with both members of the couple in their home. The couples were informed at the beginning that the inter- views would be divided into two parts. In the first part, they were asked to talk about their personal experiences up to the time of the interview. In the second part, they were shown a selection of press clippings about different cases or debates concerning ART and were encouraged to comment on them. In what follows we will concentrate our attention on the second part. A miscellaneous selection of press clippings about ART was shown (o the inter- viewees, articles from the Spanish press between 1999 and 2001 (see Appendix Table 1). A central set of articles focused on different concepts and aspects of ART, As our research progressed we changed some of these articles so that new concepts and new problems were regularly introduced. For instance, the question concerning experimentation on spare embryos from IVF was intro- duced in the final months of the research, when debates on the subject began, afer it had been approved in the UK. This dynamic set of articles enabled us to incorporate ongoing scientific and technical developments and the debates in the public sphere, In order to highlight relations between different groups of people within our research, we used the idea of mediation which some sociological studies have attributed to the mass media (Askew and Wilk, 2002; Bourdieu, 1997). The written press could be said to mediate in the relationships between physicians and research- ets, users’ opinions and political powers. In fact, the media events that we used normally involved one or other of those social subjects During our fieldwork we used the press articles to talk to the biologist or the psychologist at the reproductive medicine centre, as well as to the patients. This was the first justification for the use of what we would call the ‘journalistic medi- ation method’. But above all, these articles helped us to contextualize the couples’ experiences in a broader social framework, enabling them to create a space for reflection and to think about themselves in the third person, as it were, thus ere- ating an ‘illusion of immediacy’. This last aspect was a methodological break- through for our research: by making use of the written press, we were able to create a context of immediacy in which the couples thought about their experience Solazar and Orobitg 243 in terms of other relationships and other couples’ experiences, In other words, the: rescarch framework thus creates an imagined community of sorts. Some couples commented at the end of the first interview or at some other time that they liked this part of the interview, that it made them feel good. In fact, the press clippings did not provide couples with new information, since they were already widely-read in this particular topic. Perhaps, we think, by contextualizing the experience, by connecting it with other individuals attuned in some way to what they were going through, the press clippings helped the couples to overcome their feeling of isolation and social misunderstanding, without violating the privacy of an emotionally painful experience, although this is just a hypothesis (compare narratives as relational act in Seaton, 2008). Let us take a closer look at the sort of context that was created by means of the press clippings, Contextualizing personal trajectories through the press ‘Our aim is not to carry out an analysis of the written press in relation to ART, but to show how, through the written press, our informants are confronted with social alterities and relations with ART that they cannot envisage in their own specific situation, Other anthropologists, who have also done research on ART, such as Edwards (1999) and Hirsch (1999), applied @ similar method in which cultural meanings are elicited by appealing to their informants’ social imaginary. These authors analysed the social imaginary of assisted reproduction by confronting non-users with hypothetical cases, In our research we analyse this social imaginary by confronting ART users, specifically couples undergoing IVF treatments using their own gametes, with other ‘real’ cases as they appeared in the written press (compare the use of vignettes in Jenkins et al., 2010). What social alterities and what relations with ART can be found in the press clippings? Mothers over 49, single women, gay and lesbian couples and fertile couples with inheritable diseases can all become parents with ART. This is the imagined community we have made visible through the press clippings. The main characteristic of this imagined community is exeeptionality. Science makes the impossible possible. ‘Children with two mothers’, ‘male eggs’, “(a child) born to save (another child)’, ‘selecting children’ (selection of embryos for partic~ ular purposes), ‘sperm banks: a safe service’, ‘science is about creating choice, Egg- sezing allows women to have a career’, ‘we are lagging bend’ (freezing cegs was not allowed in Spain at that time and there was a shortage of oocytes) (see Appendix Table 1), These are some of the headlines from the selected press clip- pings. The press uses provocative language to create an image of exceptionality ART solves problems, exceptional problems, but it also produces problems that are no less exceptional, among them technical, ethical and legal problems, such as "Should we freeze eggs” ‘How many embryos should be transferred?” ‘Which inherited diseases justify embryo selection” ‘What do we do with the spare embryos afler IVF?’ ‘Can we use frozen embryos for research?” ‘How many donations, of ‘eggs or sperm, can be done by the same individual? 244 Ethnography 13(2) In relation to ART, the press breaks down and moves the limits between nature and society, between gender and procreation, between substance and persons. Generally speaking, our informants see these articles as transgressing the limits of what is ‘normal in relation to paternity and maternity, of the ‘family’ as a ‘natural’ entity. The question of limits cropped up throughout the conversations generated by the press clippings. “There should be some limits’, ‘I accept things up to a limit’, “These are the things for which there should be some restrictions, some limits’. These were some of the most frequent reactions. But without a doubt the ‘most interesting thing was to see how, throughout the conversation, several social imaginaries were implemented to locate those limits and to suggest their flexibility By using their experiences the couples were able to relate to other ART users that appeared in the press stories in an apparently contradictory way, by simultaneously

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