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Introduction: Restoring Nuance to Imagining the Fetus

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In contemporary Western culture, the wordfetus” introduces either a political subject or a literal, medicalized entity. Neither of these frameworks gives suffi cient credit to the vast array of literature and oral traditions emerging from religious cultures around the world that see within the fetus a symbol, a metaphor, an imagination. It is our argument that the fetus has been hijacked by two dominant and powerful modes— the political and the medical—and the potential of the fetus as symbol to serve as a gateway to imagination has been reduced as a result. Th is book grows out of the acknowledgment of the fact that, throughout much of human history and across most of the world’s cultures, when the fetus was imagined, it enjoyed a much wider range of symbolic and cultural subjectivities, oft en contributing possibilities of inclusivity, emergence, liminality, and transformation. Th e editors recognize that even within contemporary language of the fetus as political or medical subject, the fetus functions as both a symbol and a sign—a symbol of the vulnerable, the unrecognized, even the violated; as a sign, pointing toward one’s ethical stand on issues of modern culture from embryonic stem cell research to abortion and the debate about when life begins. Th is circumscription of the fetus as literal subject has limited its symbolic potential, and our symbolic language is the poorer for it. Th e purpose of this book is to restore the nuance of the symbolism of the fetus, liberating it from the stultifying parameters of the abortion/embryonic stem cell debate, giving it room once again to function as a symbol of greater and more complex human emotions, dilemmas, and aspirations.

It has been well noted that the current cultural tendency to regard the fetus as both a medicalized entity and a political subject has been generated in large part by the relatively new phenomenon of widely available photographic and sonographic images. From the first in utero images of the fetus that appeared in Life magazine on April 30, 1965 (highly manipulated images designed, at the dawn of the abortion debate, to depict fetal personhood in visual form), to the now nearly routine procedure of pregnant women viewing sonographic images of their unborn fetuses, the fetus has moved from the realm of the largely imagined and unseen to that of the literal and visual in just one generation.1 Such contemporary viewing of the fetus has led to an unfortunately narrow range of questions: Does the fetus have personhood and rights? Is it a boy or a girl? How many weeks of gestation is it at? Is it healthy or malformed? In other words, the questions generated by the widespread availability of the fetus as image are decidedly literal, medical, and/or political in nature. It would appear that from the vantage point of the human symbolic imagination, the nuance and texture of the questions being generated by imagining the fetus are in an inverse relationship to the availability of concrete depictions of the fetus in utero. We might query, Is it true that the more we see concretely, the less we imagine and symbolize?

Imagining the fetus and attempting concomitantly to depict it is not a new enterprise. Carolyn E. Tate’s chapter in this volume demonstrates how important visualizing the fetus was to the Olmec people more than three thousand years ago. Th e Olmec carved sculptures of fetuses out of stone, some towering more than two meters in height, as part of a larger cosmogonic architecture engraved onto the landscape. Th eir images of the fetus were, moreover, strikingly accurate depictions of various stages of fetal development, illustrating a meticulous eye on the part of the carvers for their appropriated symbol.2 Robert Kritzer’s chapter here likewise highlights careful attention paid to detail in imagining the fetus. He explores Indian Buddhist embryology and notes how accurate the descriptions of fetal development were—particularly surprising given that these texts were produced in male monastic settings. Marten Stol, in his examination of ancient Near Eastern embryology, comes to the same conclusion. Jane Marie Law argues that the Japanese Leech Child derives its name from a careful observation of miscarried fetal tissue. So although our current technologies may allow us to see the fetus in utero with less (or even no) risk to the woman’s body or the fetus, the impetus to view the fetus and observe it in detail is nothing new in human history. Th e question has to do with the demographic availability of these images and the imaginative purposes to which they are put in a given cultural context.

1. A number of excellent monographs address this cultural phenomenon and its implications in contemporary visual and political culture. See R. P. Petchesky, “Fetal Images: Th e Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” Feminist Studies 13, 2 (1987): 263–92 for a discussion of how a visual image can assume both a descriptive role and a vehicle for imagination and mythologizing. A thoroughgoing collection addressing how visual images in the contemporary era aff ect the politics of reproduction is L. M. Morgan and M. W. Michaels, eds., Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1999). See also R. Rapp, “Real-Time Fetus: Th e Role of the Sonogram in the Age of Monitored Reproduction,” in Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies, ed. G. L. Downey and J. Dumit (Santa Fe, N.M.: American School of Research: 1997), 23–57.

2. Newman’s work, Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996) traces the European history of obstetrical drawings of the fetus from the ninth century ce onward, demonstrating that the desire to visually represent or “see” the fetus has been a consistent subject of interest for a very long time.

Even with such historical and religious precedents, however, we nevertheless fi nd ourselves in a very particular situation today. In her chapter in this volume, Sallie Han explores the phenomenon of “seeing” fetuses in modern Western culture, and demonstrates how sonography has managed to radically alter our relationship—on both a public and private level—with the fetus. Songraphic images have transformed the ambiguity of the fetus into something much more fi xed and, consequently, much more marketable. She notes in particular the new phenomenon of “ultrasound boutiques” that provide jubilant and expectant families with a wide range of consumer goods. Th e photo albums produced render the fetus a commodity to be consumed and thus translate into a sense of parental appropriation available to both parents, and not just the pregnant, experiencing body of the woman. Han argues that this phenomenon can be located in our “ocularcentrism,” a term she uses to describe our cultural need for constant visual evidence and stimulation. Imaging (and subsequently imagining) the fetus in this context leads to very strong, easily manipulated emotive responses. So long as the fetus is not “seen” or visually emphasized, it remains a liminal, transient, and obscure entity. It remains part of the mother’s body and is understood as a creature in the process of becoming, one that has not yet become. By visually imaging the fetus, however, be it in vivid color on the cover of Life magazine, in a hazy grayscale sonography printout fawned over by expectant parents, or in manipulated images produced by antiabortion activists, one easily concludes that it exists independently, as a being already become. Th e image freezes the fetus temporally, and its transient, transformative nature consequently slips past the viewer’s consciousness. Such occularcentrism, to use Han’s term, which in this case presents us with a barrage of freeze-framed images of fetuses, limits symbolic imagination. Rather than functioning as an opportunity for mythic enchantment, the fetus is reduced to an occasion for political arguments and medical investigations. Politically, such images serve to liberate the fetus from its mother’s body, creating the illusion that it exists independently, fl oating in space somewhere far away. It was no accident that the Life images showed the fetus fl oating in a sea of stars, providing a cosmic, as opposed to uterine, home for these almost mythical beings. Indeed, this is one of Karen Newman’s principal arguments, as she notes a tendency in contemporary society to regard the fetus as somehow separate from the female body carrying it.3 Petchesky likewise argues that sonographic images of the fetus tend to represent it as “primary and autonomous, the woman as absent or peripheral.”

It is tempting to regard this isolationist language of the fetus vis-à-vis the mother as solely a product of the modern age. In her chapter in this volume, however, Vanessa R. Sasson demonstrates that these same tendencies to marginalize the pregnant woman appear in the Buddha’s fetal narratives, as the Buddha is described as having been encased in a palace while gestating in his mother’s womb, physically separated from her body. He fed himself with the nectar of a celestial lotus fl ower brought to him by the god Brahmā, so as to not even use his mother’s body for food.

3. Th is argument is strewn throughout her book, but see in particular Newman, Fetal Positions, 11–15.

4. Petchesky, “Fetal Images,” 268.


Th e Buddha is therefore entirely isolated and independent, and the mother is marginalized, eventually to the point of extinction: seven days aft er she gives birth, she dies. Eva De Clercq likewise brings forth numerous examples of early Jain fetal narratives in which mothers are so marginalized that their sons seem to gestate without them. Th e Jain example of a fetal transfer furthermore suggests that if a mother is not good enough, she, and not the fetus, can be replaced with another womb. All of these arguments suggest that imagining the fetus as separate from the mother is a common tendency in how people have conceived of this inescapable period of human life. It can be argued, then, that the power of women as givers of life and their apparent singular position during these months of gestation has not been an unproblematic reality in various cultural settings and traditions.

Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, however, brings forth a much more positive religious expression of motherhood in her chapter on the Sikh tradition. She notes how mother-centered the Guru Granth Sahib is, with imagery of fertility remarkably recurrent throughout the Sikh textual tradition. She argues that Sikh scripture takes the female body seriously, recognizing in the pregnant woman a symbol of continuity and an ability to affi rm life over death. Singh argues that the pregnant woman and her fetus are ultimately one in the pages of the Guru Granth Sahib, and Singh laments the fact that modern Sikh culture has largely forgotten the femaleaffi rming beauty of its tradition, as evidenced by a recent surge in female feticides in the Punjab. Justin McDaniel likewise notes the ritual importance of motherhood in Southeast Asia, as he describes the fascinating ritual transformation of the dead into new fetuses during funerals, which is achieved via the incantation of various segments of a particular corpus of Buddhist philosophical literature identifi ed as a kind of ritual mother, leading the dead into its new life. Although hagiographically, mothers in Buddhism might be largely dismissed, McDaniel’s chapter demonstrates how revered the role of motherhood is as it becomes attached to these extremely sophisticated texts. Undeniably, the mother plays a pivotal role in the life of the fetus, and the social, political, or religious response to her reveals a larger underlying perspective.

Th e above discussion demonstrates how richly situated fetal symbolism can be within larger imaginations of the human condition. Th e fetus can express key cultural and religious priorities and serve as a vehicle for political propositions and religious identities. It can, moreover, symbolically reveal profound human needs and emotions, such as the universal experience of vulnerability. Indeed, what greater expression of human vulnerability than a fetus, utterly possessing a woman’s body on the one hand and yet completely dependent on that body on the other? It is no surprise that in contemporary North America, where signifi cant instability and economic fragility are emerging, an antiabortion movement has arisen with fi erce determination to protect that which appears most vulnerable. Expressions such as “fetal violation” ultimately communicate an undercurrent of profound social instability, and thus it may be argued that the rise of such vehement doctrine concerning the fetus is in fact a signal for a much more serious social vulnerability brimming beneath the surface. Daniel C. Peterson notes this relationship between fetal symbolism and political/social expression in his chapter on the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. He

argues that the early legends surrounding Muhammad in the womb, which produced a series of miraculous phenomena, functioned in part to articulate the political sovereignty of Islam. He notes in particular the legends of the sudden extinction of the eternal Zoroastrian fi res at the moment of the Prophet’s conception—an obvious indicator of such a strategy. Catherine Playoust and Ellen Bradshaw Aitken make a similar argument about the early Christian relationship to the unborn. Focusing primarily on the Lukan narrative about John the Baptist and early apocryphal accounts of Mary and Jesus in the womb, they demonstrate how the unborn function to establish relationships between competing religious groups. With such a focus, the vulnerability of the unborn is replaced by a larger social, cultural, and religious agenda.

Th e vulnerability of the fetus can also indicate another symbolic nexus: that of violating the other. Jane Marie Law’s chapter concludes with the problematic postwar imagination of the violated pregnant female body, with the welldocumented allegation of fetuses cut from the bodies of women in the Nanjing massacre in December of 1937, and the manner in which this image of Japanese wartime military atrocity has haunted postwar Japanese cultural memory. She argues that this violation takes the common practice of demoralizing a wartime population through rape to a new level of showing disregard for the humanity of the other. Th is image of the violated fetus comes to operate in a symbolic landscape of postwar Japan coming to terms with its past.

All three of these modalities of imagining the fetus vis-à-vis the female body carrying it—as divorced from the fetus, as central to it and positively evaluated, and as dehumanized along with the fetus—suggests that imagining the fetus always brings us into conversation with a continuum of other stages of life: conception, motherhood, and the role of women in society in a given situation (including war).

One of the more commanding symbols associated with the fetus to emerge from this volume is creation/transformation. Many of the essays in this volume have touched on this subject, with the fetus revealing yet again social and cultural values. André Couture, in his chapter on Krishna, shows how one might read Krishna’s fetal narrative as a cosmogony, with Krishna’s creation functioning as a microcosmic map for the creation of the universe. His emergence is thus directly paralleled with the emergence of the macrocosm. Sasson, on the other hand, notes how the Buddha defi es the laws of creation and transformation. Th e Buddha’s fetal narratives present a being of awakening already in the womb, and thus a being already become. And Nikky Singh explores an entirely diff erent perspective as she urges her readers of Sikh scripture to remember the creative potential represented by the fetus, with divinity lying deep within.

Other contributors in this volume emphasize the power of inscription provided by the symbolic fetus. Th e fetus is the ultimate blank slate, and, as Gwynn Kessler so aptly demonstrates in her contribution, religious traditions are quick to inscribe their priorities and principles onto it. Th e rabbinic literature she explores is laced with such inscriptions, Jacob and Esau functioning as perfect examples in this regard. Jacob was appropriated as a patriarch of the Jewish tradition, whereas Esau was relegated to its outskirts. Jacob was consequently believed to have studied Torah in the womb, was circumcised there, and jumped for joy in his mother’s belly whenever they passed a synagogue. Esau, sharing the very same womb, did the opposite. Such an example demonstrates, according to Kessler, that the literature uses the image of the fetus to inscribe Jewishness as something already established in the womb. A similar phenomenon can be found in Tibetan Buddhist embryology, as Frances Garrett points out. Karma is inscribed onto the fetus, so that it brings into the world the baggage of its past actions. And because it bears the marks of its samsaric existence, it functions as mythic evidence for Buddhist teachings. Th e fetus’s gradual transformation, moreover, mirrors the religious path structure that must also take place in stages. Robert Kritzer joins Garrett in this regard, arguing that the extensive descriptions in the Indian embryological literature of the suffering experienced by fetuses, emphasizing as they do the horror that is sam․sāra, are designed to motivate the reader to embark upon the religious path of liberation. Jane Marie Law’s article suggests that it is the view of a fetus as a being with agency that has prevailed in Japanese imaginings of the fetus, but with special attention paid to those fetal beings who are somehow unique (i.e., a mythical imperial fetus) or in the wrong place (miscarried or aborted).

Th is discussion does not exhaust the range of imagination of the fetus in human history. As diverse as the fields of inquiry are here—embryology, mythology, philosophy, ritual, cultural memory—all of the contributions share the same goal: to uncover the potential of fetal symbolism to focus attention on or problematize important dimensions of human experience in various cultures around the world. Th e modern Western imagining of the fetus is, as we said above, too deeply obscured by the venues and debates of reproduction politics, medicine, and obstetrics. We would not argue that the fetus does not belong in those areas, but we challenge the tendency to corral it there. A literature search for scholarship dealing with the effects of modern scientific fetal imagery on contemporary legal or ethical imagination yields a wealth of excellent monographs, only a few of which are noted here. But very little has been produced of late that surveys the vast array of imaginings of the fetus outside the current medicalized and politicized arena. Religious studies has more to contribute than to weigh in on the ethical debates about fetal personhood. Scholars of religion have much to say about the other ways of imagining the fetus, and these imaginary modes could have a great deal to say about other problems in society, such as gender, war and peace, self-cultivation, power and hegemony, and coming to terms with the past. Although neither of us lament the medical advances made possible by developments in fetal sonography, both of us wish to see the broader range of human meanings oft en conveyed through imagining the fetus, the fetal/mother relationship, and the processes of conception, in utero development, and birth.

An introduction seems as suitable a place as any to comment on the process of editing a volume with this scope. The editors have recognized the impossibility of covering every religious tradition featuring fetal mythologies and embryologies. In some cases, because of the continuing controversy over abortion in the United States, we found that many scholars working on material highly relevant to these discussions are reluctant to publish in this field for fear that their work would be read or quoted out of context or used for ends not in keeping with their own understandings of the traditions they represent. For this reason, some of the major religious traditions are covered either broadly or in limited historical contexts. Th e reader will also notice a wide range of academic voices and rhetorical styles in the chapters of this volume. We felt that the variety of scholarly styles intrigued by this topic would itself be a point of interest to the reader.

We have intentionally not imposed an interpretative framework on the multiplicity of traditions and academic disciplines represented here. Th e reader is welcome to read individual chapters in comparison with others, but comparison was not the sole interpretive exercise intended by this collection of chapters. Th e reader might also use this collection to see the vast diff erences and scope of issues arising, in traditions and in the interpretations of scholars, from this one symbolic focal point.

We have attempted, as best we can, to assemble a group of scholars working on major world religious traditions. Unfortunately, while oral indigenous traditions have oft en produced the most fascinating mythologies of the fetus, currently there is a dearth of scholars working on fetal mythology in these traditions. It is our hope that this volume can serve as a beginning, encouraging scholars of myth, ritual, and symbol to ask some of the same questions that embarked us on this project: How is the fetus imagined in a particular tradition? What special powers does it have? What stories indicate its degree of agency to infl uence human life, its own destiny, and even the cosmos? What other social, religious, and cultural virtues, problems, and concerns are worked through by craft ing and presenting narratives about fetal life? Our hope is that these questions will continue to be addressed by scholars of religion in the near future, and that they might use this particular volume as a jumping off point for further research and not as an end.

In many ways it is fitting that this volume should be produced through a series within the American Academy of Religion. This project is, rightly, a true child of the AAR. The editors Jane Marie Law and Vanessa R. Sasson first met at a regional meeting of the Eastern International Region of the American Academy of Religion in March of 2003. This meeting coincided exactly to the hour with the commencement of the current Iraq War. As the military strategy known as “Shock and Awe” was unleashed over Baghdad and broadcast in vague distant images on the television (labeled by CNN as “Shock and Awe Now Underway in Baghdad”), we discussed images and mythologies of hope, fecundity, transformation, and generation. In our anguish at the state of world affairs, we looked to the work of our own scholarship to see what the range of images of human creativity could be. That original impetus for this volume took us into discussions we never imagined were present in this rich material. The idea of this volume was born, if you will, in that conversation at the AAR dinner. But the AAR served as a gestational setting for this volume in other ways as well.

It was through the national meetings of the American Academy of Religion, in Atlanta in 2003 and San Antonio in 2004, and the Eastern International Regional meeting in Montreal in 2005 that we convened many of the scholars to contribute to this project. It is our hope that this volume, an incomplete beginning though it we discussed images and mythologies of hope, fecundity, transformation, and generation. In our anguish at the state of world affairs, we looked to the work of our own scholarship to see what the range of images of human creativity could be. That original impetus for this volume took us into discussions we never imagined were present in this rich material. The idea of this volume was born, if you will, in that conversation at the AAR dinner. But the AAR served as a gestational setting for this volume in other ways as well.

It was through the national meetings of the American Academy of Religion, in Atlanta in 2003 and San Antonio in 2004, and the Eastern International Regional meeting in Montreal in 2005 that we convened many of the scholars to contribute to this project. It is our hope that this volume, an incomplete beginning though it


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