Bodies, Markets, and the Experimental in South Asia

The laboratory has extended its walls to the whole planet. Instruments are everywhere. Houses, factories, hospitals have become so many subsidiaries of the labs. Think, for instance of global positioning systems: thanks to this satellite network geologists, naturalists, can now take measurements with the same range of precision outside and inside their laboratories. … Think of the new requirements for traceability… which are as stringent outside factories as those for inside production sites. The difference between natural history, outdoor science, and lab science, has slowly been eroded. (Latour 2001)

Mohandas Gandhi's struggle for non-violence and civil disobedience through acts of Satyagraha, meaning ‘truth force’, or literally ‘holding firmly to truth’, was a struggle for India's independence from British rule that centered on testing the potential and limits of his own body. It was because of his self-experiments and trials that he developed dietetics, hydropathy, naturopathy, and non-violence as decolonizing political philosophies. His autobiographical investment was also an experimental tool for self-making and re-making in which he writes about instances in life when he had struggled with truth, which he considered to be the ultimate source of energy. In the long history of experiments, Gandhi's autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth shows that though associated with the project of modernity and modern scientific method in particular, concerns about and engagement with experimentality are not necessarily emergent or limited to the clinical context in South Asia. Gandhi's experiments with ‘truth’ invite us to examine both the colonial and racialized history of experimentation, where European colonies served as laboratories to test all kinds of unproven technologies (Latour 1988; Rabinow 1989; MacLeod 2000; Anderson 2003, 2006), including the role of the experimental mode itself as a tool of self-definition, resistance (testing and questioning truth), and decolonization in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

As experiments move beyond the biomedical laboratory and the clinic into everyday life, we see that an orientation of experimentality in everyday practices is not only central to the production of bio-scientific knowledge and social policies, but also to the very meaning of what it means to be modern. A signature of modernity, the experiment is a technology of truth-making, or in the scientific register, producing facts, to test application of ‘new’ theories through observation. It is a test to demonstrate a known truth, to examine the validity of a hypothesis, or to determine the efficacy and safety of something previously untried. ‘Experimentation’ is the process of conducting tests that bring together the experimenter/researcher and the study subject/object. Experimentation typically presumes that the human on trial is a liberal subject (Rawls 1999), unlike the experimental bodies of animals, which are ‘substituted for patients’ (Löwy 2000).

As the contributions to this issue suggest, experimentation also emerges as a subjective orientation toward the world and toward society in everyday practices. Experimentation in this second sense moves beyond the realm of the laboratory and clinic into the larger field of material culture and consumption. These domains are characterized by a mode of inhabiting rapidly shifting and increasingly global social/market contact zones like the clinic offering cutting-edge experimental therapies (Bharadwaj 2013), the transnational assisted reproductive technology clinic (ART) (Vora 2013), the international chain restaurant shaping middle-class ‘taste’ making (Harris 2013), and the home birth arena as shifting between private and public space through international pharmaco-politics (Towghi 2013b).

Though experimental research/science is most often conducted in a controlled environment of the laboratory or clinical trial, there is also historical precedent for observational research in which the practitioner engages social and cultural contexts outside these controlled environments, such as in epidemiological research. Contemporary experimental medicine, especially clinical trials and now their rapid globalization into lax regulatory national contexts, typically operates under the assumption of ‘biological commensurability’, the idea that people can be sorted into standardized groups and populations because their biology is assumed to be the same (Lock & Nguyen 2010: 176). But as evinced in the short history of post-colonial development and population health practices, ‘experiments’ to limit population growth in order to improve health have exceeded the assumptions of biological sameness as well as the laboratory and clinical context. The contributions in this issue by Smith, Towghi, and Vora all focus on this history. They, along with the other contributions, suggest that medical and public health practices and ideas about the connections between biology, sociality, and modernity can produce different populations as experimental bodies without explicitly marking the subjects as objects of experimentation or the space of the experiment as a laboratory.

Scholars have demonstrated how individuals become experimental subjects at the intersection of biomedicine, clinical expertise, and the state (Ong 1995; Cohen 1999, 2001; Sunder Rajan 2006, 2007; Petryna 2009), as well as in the absence of the state (Nguyen 2009, 2010). In this special issue of Ethnos, we rethink the notion of ‘experimental’ as a condition of material life and of the capitalist market, but also of the active reworking of subjective orientations to modernity, society, and sociality by locating variously formed implicit and explicit articulations of the experimental outside its medico-scientific meanings. By ‘implicit’ we suggest that differentially located populations serve as un-enunciated and unmarked sites of experimentation and knowledge production, where the ‘distinction between the inside and the outside of the laboratory’ is erased (Latour 2001).

The articles in this issue examine how bodies and subjects are made available as experimental through differential material conditions under which people live in the contexts of domestic and transnationally circulating policies, regulations, bodies, and commercial interests, and within the frameworks of humanitarian discourses on rights and social reform projects. Engaging medical anthropology, science studies, and feminist critique of the social sciences, medicine, and technology, we consider the social relations and understandings of personhood, the body, and its ownership that are produced at the sites of contact between bodies, technologies, and medico-humanitarian interventions. Pigg (2009) states that the concept of ‘experiment’ is helpful for medical anthropology because it advances our inquiries into the production of medical knowledge. The clinical trial, and particularly the idea of being able to prove ‘what works’ holds a special place in the logic of biomedical authority. It also has a complicated relation to regimes of regulation and therefore to markets for pharmaceuticals and other therapies. The experiment is an apparatus of scientific knowledge production – procedures, technologies, and techniques – that exceeds the laboratory and the clinic and spills out into policy, political action, and shapes the subjectivity of the experimental subject and his/her bodily relations with state- and non-state-mediated technologies (Nguyen 2009; Petryna 2009). If, as Rheinberger (1995) delineated, the unknown future is a crucial element of the experimental system, then, we suggest, the unmarked experimental social practices further mask the relations of power between the ‘truth’ producer and the object/subject of experimentation that enables the production of a ‘truth’, at times at the expense the subjects of experimentation, thus veiling the exploitative and expropriative aspects of experiments (Towghi 2013b; Vora 2013). But, the state of experimental subjectification can also be empowering and life affirming (Bharadwaj 2013). Indeed, an experiment in process may in fact transcend the distinction between evidence and enjoyment (Solomon 2013). This potential of the experiment to break out of its own scientific confines raises the questions of how the process of finding out ‘what works’, a necessarily experimental process, becomes social. How, for instance, is the experiment invested in – and how does it materialize – differences of gender, race/ethnicity/caste, class, religion, and nationality? Such differences can mediate how bodies and subjects are differently socially enabled or constrained in their reproduction (Lock & Kaufert 1998). We ask what norms, counter-norms, understandings, and contestation are produced in the governance of the subjects of such experimentation, particularly as medical and scientific technologies intersect with classed and gendered bodies. How, for example, does women's labor work as a form of reproductive service (Vora 2013)? How does female reproductive technology (RT) confirm women as reproducers of the nation (Smith 2013)? And do the female reproductive bodies that are ‘at-risk’ in experiments become increasingly tied to technologically mediated human and biological reproductive capacities (Towghi 2013b)? How, in other words, is the experiment deployed to yield women and women's bodies as sites for the ‘safe’ reproduction of and for others, whether through actual bodies and biology, territorial and nationalist aspirations, or reconstituting the risk-benefit threshold of RTs themselves? How do subjects themselves experiment with remodeling and reforming the self-understanding of the meaning of their bodies and relationships (Vora 2013), their class-based consumption (Solomon 2013), and their relationship to institutions as they negotiate the cultural shifts associated with experimental spaces and processes (Bharadwaj 2013)?

Governmentality to Experimentality?

Influenced by Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality and understanding of power, anthropologists have examined how political technologies guide, encourage, and orchestrate actions among subjects, and whose agency becomes ‘deployed’ rather than ‘destroyed’ by government (Mehta 1999; Rose 1999; Ong 2006). Governmentality works through the agency of subjects, encouraging conduct and forms of self-discipline that target improvements in welfare and security (Foucault 1979). Government is a crucial term in Foucault's work because it connects a concern for the detailed regulation of individual conduct with the regulation of whole populations (biopower). The concept thus links the micro-domains of individual behavior that are shaped by disciplinary technologies to the macro-domains of large interests and practices of large institutions (Bennett 2003). Moore (2005: 7) eloquently clarifies through his reading of Foucault that government consists of ruling relations, rather than things. That is, governmentality is a ‘triangle of sovereignty-discipline-government’ (Foucault 1979: 19). This means that the state does not wholly displace other forms of sovereign powers, but operates alongside other regimes of governance; this has also been demonstrated by post-colonial theorists examining ‘colonial governmentality’ (Scott 1995; Mitchell 1991; Prakash 1999; Mbembe 2001). An emerging body of scholarship concerned with the relationship between biomedical research and public healthcare argues that the boundary between laboratory and life outside the laboratory is being transgressed in specific ways that results in the emergence of novel forms of social and public experiments. This scholarship asks if Foucault's ‘governmentality’ is being displaced by ‘experimentality’ as the dominant mode of social ordering (Rottenburg 2009).

In When Experiments Travel, Adriana Petryna examines how populations and global–local relations are reconfigured as ‘objects of governmentality’ due to the rapid globalization of biomedical clinical-research enterprises. Although this is the instance in which she invokes the term governmentality, she marks this transformation as a ‘distinct modus operandi’, calling it ‘experimentality’. Experimentality, in her view, supports the global drug market in a ‘decentralized’ and ‘diffused manner’, and suggests that this experimentality does not lend itself easily to ‘prevailing’ tools of accountability. Consequently, ‘the line between what counts as experimentation and what counts as medical care is in flux’ (Petryna 2005: 188). However, evinced in the history of colonial governmentality, population control polices, and contemporary pharmaceuticalization of women's bodies, the line between experiments and medical care has never been clearly demarcated (Scott 1995; Hartman 1987; Mehta 1999; Anderson 2006; Towghi & Randeria 2013; Towghi 2013a; 2013b). In revealing the off-shored dimensions and accelerated temporality of experimentality, Petryna raises questions about the adequacy of norms of protection that are in place in the USA and internationally, how they are modified, how they vary from place to place, and how data are strategically manufactured and at times strategically withheld. In her words, ‘the benefits deriving from globalized research are arguably uncertain, and its risks are unevenly distributed and its costs, unjust’ (188). In short, according to her, risks are ‘ethically variable’, or measured differently depending on location. This variability is opposed to the operation of universal ethical norms (Petryna 2005). The questions of uneven ethics and risks are further complicated by the fact that measurement relies on reference to a universalized (Eurocentric post-Enlightenment) sense of the ethical, and dehistoricized liberal subject, and geographies. As the Towghi, Vora, and Bharadwaj's articles in this issue insist, risks must be measured differently depending on bodily difference and the subjective conditions of actors' bodies, their class, gender, and geographic locations, as well as their connection to colonial pasts. While invoked to advance equal treatment, universality is a form of reductionism (Haraway 1988), and in practice it is always mediated by contingent, historically formed power relations and structural inequalities. We ask if ‘experimentality’ is an adequate term to describe the effects of the post-colonial globalization of medical technologies for research on vulnerable populations, wherein questions of both sameness and difference rest not just on the biological (Epstein 2007) but also on the social and the historical? Can it adequately capture the enabling role of the state in neoliberal regimes of governance, the privatization of research, and the colonial sedimentation and structuring of contemporary formations of ethical cum humanitarian norms in medical research and bodily investments?

Reproductive Bodies

For some feminists, population control programs mark one of the first clear post-colonial examples of the conjunction of globalization, the marketing of RTs, and the colonization of women's bodies enabled by private and public research and commercial interests (Bandarage 1997; Clarke 1998). This issue also highlights the fact that gender, whether attached to bodies, nations, technologies, or markets, becomes a central concern in analyzing experimental subjectification and markets. The technologies of human, biological and even social reproduction that current work in anthropology is attending to may be new, but the relationships between technology, the experimental, and reproductive bodies are arguably central to the project of provincializing (neoliberal) markets and governmentality in general. There is a rich literature in anthropology on the relationship between reproduction and biomedical technologies (Martin 1987; Koenig 1988; Browner and Sargent 1990; Rapp 1999; Bharadwaj 2006, among others). However, the effect of RTs on the agency and bodies of women in the global South demands further attention.

Nearly two decades ago, Ginsburg and Rapp (1995) argued that reproduction is a key site of social control over women, as well as a site in which social stratifications have been profoundly exercised. RTs and the creation of families are embedded in the politics of reproductive and sexual health, where significant disparities in access to health-related information and care exist across intersectional lines of race and class. Inhorn (2003) has studied the growth of an international industry in travel related to reproductive therapies, tracking how locations in the global South re-organize fertility treatments to cater to a global clientele that demands high-tech services. Paradoxically, the majority of infertility cases in these locations could be addressed through improved nutrition and preventative care (Inhorn & Birenbaum-Carmeli 2008). Attention to the growth of new RTs may have also produced an inaccurate perception that globalization of RTs is an emergent formation. This view overlooks the fact that the history of the governance of population is also a history of the globalization of RTs. This history includes the migration of policies and science experts, as well as experimentation on women's bodies worldwide (Hartman 1987; Bandarage 1997; Connelly 2008). New technologies addressing issues like infertility (Inhorn and Van Balen 2002; Vora 2009) and maternal deaths (Towghi 2012, 2013b) co-exist with longstanding global movements of older RTs. While anthropologists have noted the increasing ‘(bio)medicalization’ (Clarke et al. 2003) of women's bodies, what remains understudied is the uneven impact of the globalization of new and old (low-tech and high-tech) RTs on women's bodies, subjectivities, and social relations across sites and scales. How are the effects of new RTs distinct or continuous from earlier colonial and post-colonial, RTs? How are these technologies distributed, marketed, and administered as part of broader international policy to govern women's reproduction in the name of securing their health?

Another site of experimentation is found in the growth of interest in locating and supporting reproduction outside of women's bodies (Bharadwaj 2006, 2010; Waldby & Mitchell 2006; Franklin 2007; Landecker 2007; Cooper 2008; Vora forthcoming). Cooper (2008) ties the growth of neoliberal market logics and the life sciences to the neoliberal experiment initiated by the USA and the UK in the 1980s, which she describes as partially a response to the market's relocation of wealth in the creative forces of human biological life rather than the fruits of the land. How do vectors of power that are attached to embodied difference get transposed to other sites of reproduction, even as reproduction is distanced from human bodies? Despite the way that research and development in laboratories is imagined as a separate site of generation and reproduction, thus creating distance from human bodies, questions of race, gender, class, and sexuality remain relevant. This experimentation still evokes concerns about access to its fruits and to the privilege of reproducing one's own community and life.

In the context of South Asian histories of women and women's bodies as experimental sites, one must attend to both state projects within national contexts as well as the differential treatment of women's bodies in the global North and global South as a line of stratification. As Smith, Towghi, and Vora point out in this issue, even experimental interventions intended to improve the lives of women have the potential to reproduce extant and new forms of inequities. This set of articles builds upon scholarship examining stratified reproduction as it is both continuous with these histories and as it emerges in novel areas engaged with reproduction, governmentality, gender, and experimentality.

South Asia as Exemplary

… This country [India], in a far greater degree than any other in the world, offers an unlimited field for ethnological observation and enquiry, and presents an infinity of varieties of almost every one of the great divisions of the human race, so also there is no lack of able and qualified men to reap this abundant harvest. (George Campbell, governor of Bengal in Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, January to December 1866 (Calcutta 1867), 46 cited in Prakash 1992: 174 n.5)

In response to Petryna's (2005) critique of the operation of ‘ethical variability’ in off-shored clinical trials, Sunder Rajan argues that contrary to mainstream understandings, in India both state and corporate actors are keen to demonstrate the integration of universal ethical standards in the conduct of clinical trials. Their investment is in the interest of developing India as a global experimental site for clinical trials (Sunder Rajan 2007: 76). Thus, he suggests that the clinical-research landscape in India cannot be reduced to neo-colonial exploitation of the local population as ‘guinea pigs’ by rapacious multinational interests, where cutting corners is the norm and ethics easily sacrificed. Instead he locates the problem within the structural violence of global biocapital, where clinical trial participation and its accompanying benefits come to attract subjects who have been structurally dispossessed, for example, unemployed mill workers as a consequence of the demise of the textile industry. The vast differences in access to resources between sites in the global bio-economy complicates the efficacy of any established state-based ethical or otherwise regulatory norms, raising the problem that, ‘a comprehensive attention to ethics is quite compatible with the structural violence of global biocapital’ (Sunder Rajan 2007 :76). As such he suggests that the line between regulation and institutional coercion becomes hard to define, and in fact ‘good clinical practice’ can facilitate the structural violence of capitalist exploitation (Sunder Rajan 2007 :83). Theorists of post-colonial relations have, of course, long delineated the ongoing material (cultural and economic) effects on post-colonial subjects of European colonialism.

Gayatri Spivak and other scholars have demonstrated that the link between history and anthropology is crucial to understanding how colonialism shaped the ideal material situation from which national economic and social development planning and the concomitant regimes of development aid could emerge as they did at the end of World War II. Spivak draws attention to the ways in which colonialism continues to operate, reflected in the ongoing exploitation of the Third World's resources by advanced capitalist nations and corporations. The global power relations that enable this exploitation are supported by various regimes of representation and interpretation that constitute what she frames as ‘worlding’ (Spivak 1990: 129). She employs this term to describe the nineteenth-century imperialist and colonial conceptions of Third World space. In representing such spaces, these conceptions effectively constituted the people, places, and geography they represented as stable and knowable objects of the Western academy. As such, the ‘conquest of India was a conquest of knowledge’ under British colonial rule that concomitantly shaped Indian and British bureaucracies (Cohn 1996: 16), as well as the terms of India's future relations with Western powers. In the colonial era, the process of state building in Britain and India was intimately linked, suggesting that, ‘metropole and colony have to be seen in a unitary field of analysis’ (Cohn 1996: 16) and that European colonialism and modernity are co-constitutive historical formations (Scott 1995). As such, the signs and practices of the global regulation of economies and societies of the nineteenth-century colonialism are manifest in the twentieth-century US foreign policy-making, development and economic policies of the World Bank and World Trade Organization (Ludden 1992; Skaria 1999). Thus, for Spivak, the colonial representation of territory as empty spaces and ‘people without history’ (Wolf 1982) persists today and enables new forms of cultural and economic colonization of previously colonized people even while efforts are underway to make many more of them into modern subjects, for example, in the name of humanitarianism, health improvement, and economic development (Towghi 2013a; 2013b).

It then makes sense when Cohen (2004) emphasizes the necessity of placing the ushering of the subject into post-colonial modernity through medicine into the historical context of the Indian state's institutionalization of material difference linked to categories of subalternity. For example, both the ‘donor’ and recipient of an organ for transplant become subjected to medical intervention, but Cohen uses the terms ‘operability’ and ‘bioavailability’ to distinguish the difference between entering modern citizenship through the operation, versus becoming a site made available for the mining of resources. The latter does not allow for entering into a modern citizenship subject position, whereas the operation serves as a mark that can allow a subject to become ‘as if modern’ (Cohen 2004). This differentiation marks an important ethical distinction in subjects of medicine, and can be extended to experimental subjects in general, as suggested in the articles of this issue of Ethnos.

Gyan Prakash has noted how India was an ideal modern laboratory for colonial scientists hungry for data that would enable them to advance ‘new scientific’ knowledge. It provided a rich diversity that could be mined for knowledge and, as a colony, offered the space for an unhindered pursuit of science (Prakash 1992: 155). South Asia, as a region constituted by shared overlapping histories, including most recently through colonization and decolonization, provides an example of a post-colonial location that is also uniquely informative in its historical role as a laboratory for Western modes of subjectivity, governmentality, and modernity. Prakash (1999) and Arnold (1993) have charted the ways that during British colonialism, scientific knowledge, and medicine in particular, underwent developments that produced relationships between subjects and technology that contained within them the relations of power through which they were born. Two ways in which the hegemonic impulse of colonial governance worked was through power over the body and over the mind (Mitchell 1991). Mitchell shows the bio-political strategies employed in the late colonial rule in Egypt that created an elite-driven conception of the Egyptian subject and character in school texts translated from English to Arabic. This was part of the project of creating the mind-body split and normalization of a particular ‘modern’, ‘civil’, and ordered society. The working upon the body and mind thorough colonial governance also took place in India. Prakash (1999: 72) argues that India's modernity is a product of translation from what had been thought to be part of Western science and what was desired, legitimated, and accepted as uniquely Indian modern science. He argues that the elite in India gave ideological direction and force to Indian modernity by creating intelligibility about Western science to Indians in a language sensitive to the nuances of Indian cultural/language forms. The translation and renegotiation of science by Indian elites entailed a simultaneous acceptance, appropriation, and subversion of British colonial objectives and dominance. Scientific power-knowledge was desired, but its association with colonial power was a source of great discomfort among elites, as colonial dominance for Indians was associated with a rejection of traditional moral and religious values. Through ‘indigenization’ of its authority, Western science lost its authority and originality and consequently a space opened for the renegotiation of science's status as the truth. For Prakash, ‘the signification of science as a sign of modernity was renegotiated as it was articulated with the archaic, the other’ (81). Values of science thus played a crucial role in creating the space to displace the hegemony of the colonial mission, even while it also enabled biomedicine to justify its differentiated technologies of interventions over native and European bodies.

When put in the same frame, colonialism, typically understood as happening in spaces of territorial colonization, and European modernity, with its premier epistemological privileging of science, allow us to see both the non-colonial aspects of scientific practices and knowledge in South Asia, as well as the ways that biomedical science can be colonizing in spaces that are not recognized as colonial. The contribution of this issue is not just of a ‘regional focus’ on the experimental, but also the ‘provincializing’ of governmentality as well as experimentality (Chakrabarty 2000). Post-colonial studies of science, health and medicine underline the numerous processes associated with modernity that were perfected in the colonies and then enacted in European metropoles (Marks 1997; Ram & Jolly 1998). The evolution of markets and subjectification in the experimental mode in South Asia occur in a space with multiple histories and multiple modernities (Randeria 2002; Sivaramakrishnan & Agrawal 2003), and therefore outcomes become unpredictable along many vectors. The ‘co-production’ (Jasanoff 2004) of a provincialized European modernity and science gives us a history for framing the coloniality of biomedicine in spaces already marked as ‘modern’. In other words, we can understand experimentality in scientific and specifically biomedical practice as colonial even in non-colonial spaces such as European metropoles, thus creating new registers in which to think about women's bodies, and is therefore a feminist project. Simultaneously, the multiple histories and modernities at work refuse a reading that marks them as only colonial (Marks 1997, 1998; Stanton 2001; Witz 2001).

Contributions in the Issue

Sara Smith's article shows the social and corporeal effects of the nexus between geopolitics, politics of religious identities, and reproduction.

As individuals come to understand themselves as biological and bio-territorial citizens they are asked to understand their relationship to territory itself. Stories about the self are also territorial stories, as women tell about the complex ways that their bodies are caught in divergent experimental projects. (Smith 2013)

These experimental processes reveal not indisputable new knowledge, but a struggle to reconcile the incompatible dictates of state programs, local political struggles, and family and individual desires. Focusing on the town of Leh in the contested region of Jammu–Kashmir in India, Smith explains that in the face of becoming bio-territorial objects of the nation, women's insistence on ‘unknowing’ or uncertainty resists the subjectification that comes along with knowing oneself as a modern subject. She explains how women in Leh can refuse birth control as a means of asserting the impossibility of the demands upon them as bio-territorial objects of the state, and discusses the contradictory demands of family, community and nation upon them as reproductive bodies at all of these levels. In her assessment, the relationship between bodies and territory emerges in women's stories in a tentative and contingent state of play. This experimental regime of living is in part the continuation of the colonial project itself, resulting from the partition of India and Pakistan which continues to shape the post-colonial context of connection between the intimate and the geopolitical. Contingent and strategic decisions about territory, borders, and identities produce new understandings of the relations between women's bodies, the nation-state, and sub-national territory, shaping political identities that are enabled by the mediation of biomedical technologies.

Harris Solomon's article reveals experiments in the production of subjects through the marketing, consumption, and service labor associated with pizza and pizza restaurants in Mumbai. At the one level, experiments in taste-making are targeted to middle-class consumers, where a fantasy of a global middle-class way of being in the world becomes part of the fantasy product constructed and cultivated by advertising and marketing. At another, the production of service-laboring subjects, NGO-facilitated training in responsibility, punctuality, respect, and service allows low-earning Indians to become ‘experimentally-savvy in their own right’ as service providers. Solomon analyzes this experimental savviness as a trait that is an essential component of the consumer experience of pizza in the context of urban India. He argues that these experiments link nutrition, consumption, and discipline of the body and tastes to techniques of subjectivation, self-discipline, and the shaping of markets and politics around individualized practices of molding the self. These techniques and practices arise within efforts of India's growing middle-class to practice cosmopolitan modernity.

Kalindi Vora's study of commercial surrogacy in India examines experimental modes of sociality that arise out of the transnational Indian ART clinic as a contact zone between elite doctors, laboring class, and lower middle-class women who become surrogates, and transnational commissioning parents. As an unmarked experimental space, the clinic yields socialities that can be seen as experiments with modernities, with different relationships to the body and the social meaning of biological reproduction, and with understanding the role of the market and altruism in the practice of gestational surrogacy. The nature of the market in transnational surrogacy services as reflected in the clinic also marks a shift in medicine from a technique of caring for the body to one of producing bodies as the instruments of service work and subjects as sites of new forms of social and medical risk. One place this process can be tracked is in draft legislation proposed to regulate commercial surrogacy in India.

Fouzieyha Towghi's article elaborates the ways that home and homebirth practices in ‘resource-poor’ areas in the global South, and particularly those of poor women in Pakistan, become effective unmarked and un-enunciated zones of experimentation with the drug Misoprostol, which is deemed too risky for similar uses, even in the hospitals, in resource-rich nations. Medical humanitarian interventions construct ‘the culture of homebirth’ as responsible for maternal and infant mortality, which becomes the justification for the un-enunciated experimental off-label use of Misoprostol in the absence of clinical trials and proper safety testing. Towghi argues that Misoprostol is an emerging technology as it is advanced for use outside of hospitals, and is a form of risky ‘medical relativism’ that burdens poor women with undue risk as an experimental practice. The advocacy of this risky prostaglandin on humanitarian grounds is part of post-colonial histories of such RTs administered to women in the global South that resemble practices of colonial governmentality of bodies, medicines, and healthcare enacted in other parts of Asia and Africa. Now as it was then, the ‘pill’ becomes the substitute for the structural and economic transformation required to prevent death and disease and to bring about the quality of health care necessary to genuinely secure women's health.

Aditya Bharadwaj reworks the notion of self-formation as experimental subjectification in his contribution, in which he refigures research subjects from the USA undergoing experimental stem cell therapies in India as research collaborators. Bracketing the subject of informed consent, he looks at experimental subjectification in one Indian clinic as ‘an empowering expression of agency, hope and resolve’. He argues that in this context, an ‘active process of self-formation or subjectification is…appropriate to understanding experimental subjectivity’. For Bharadwaj, the process of subjectification can itself be experimental. Following Rabinow (1991), he suggests that both the experimenter and experimentee symbiotically reformulate each other within a zone of social and technical stability. In the case of the clinic, its scientific director, and attending patients, this is a ‘zone of relegation’ where the space and the actors are cast by media and conservative scientific representations as illegitimately experimental. As such, he argues that it is the ‘tropic boundaries of science’ that mark ‘what counts as authentic authority capable of overseeing the very process of subjectification’, ethical rules, and norms of experiments in the clinic.

Though they may not be marked as such, experimental social and subjective practices characterize ongoing connections between subjects, the state, and technology in post-colonial South Asia. This special issue brings together research that illustrates how the experimental process of finding out ‘what works’ in changing social contexts has historical roots in colonial South Asia and the continuing post-colonial co-production of science and modernity. This history is one in which processes of both individual and community self-fashioning, as well as state practices, materialize social, and cultural differences. They do this even as such processes strive to produce facts and truths in and outside of clinical contexts in efforts to care for an assumed biologically universal body. In this sense, bodies and social practices continue to be important sites for tracking unmarked experiments on marginalized bodies and in unconventional spaces in contemporary South Asia and other regions where the production of modernity engage science, the market and technology.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Nils Bubandt for his critical recommendations and along with the rest of the Ethnos editorial team for their support, helping us to successfully bring this special issue into fruition. The theme and all but one paper of this issue emerge from a panel we organized for the Society for Medical Anthropology Conference at Yale University in 2009. We are thankful to Nancy Chen for encouraging us to publish the panel papers in the journal of Ethnos.