The chapters in this volume stand heir to more than one genealogy in the way in which they approach the conceptualization of maternal embodiment. The first genealogy links the volume to anthropological conceptualizations of the relations between culture and bodily experience. This epilogue opens with reflections on anthropological traditions, presenting them not only as internally diverse and contested, but as a tradition capable of being recast into new forms of life. The second genealogy links the volume to controversies within feminism regarding the most appropriate ways in which to understand the construction of the female body within and through relations of power.

The two genealogies are not commensurate. Feminist theory has grown out of a fundamental ethical and political impulse rather than out of any notion of a ‘pure’ pursuit of knowledge, and withers where divorced from those impulses. Anthropology, for all the necessary departures of its practitioners from the halls of Western academia for life in very different cultures, and for all the internal complexities of anthropology as cultural critique, remains firmly located within the power/knowledge nexus of academic discourse.

Anthropology and feminism are also not commensurate in respect of the part they play in shaping this epilogue. Without attempting to do justice to all the anthropological questions raised by this volume, I will endeavour to characterize the debates over just two key terms which are central to the anthropology of maternity: the body, and culture. Taking advantage of the prerogative of the epilogue writer to revisit the concerns of a volume, I have chosen to elaborate and in some ways recontextualize just one concern, albeit a central concern of the volume.

The antinomies of the practical and the emotional, of the use value of our bodies and the psychic investment we place on it, continues to structure the way in which biomedicine is interpreted to the female subject by even the most sympathetic practitioners in Australia today. Choices structured by these discursive oppositions compel women to participate in conceptually dissecting their reproductive bodies even before they experience the surgical dissection. Fertility is reduced in its meanings to the finite and concrete behavioural actions and decisions as to whether or not to have a(nother) child, and the focus is placed on the uterus as a purely mechanical organ, now impaired in its functioning. To continue to experience one's body as a more integral unity becomes a matter of emotional attachment to an organ that is clearly impaired – an allowable scenario, but one closely aligned with the irrational.

Meanwhile, as the woman wrestles with the ‘choices’ she becomes a participant in a process where, more than ever, she comes to view her own body as an object of visualization and spectatorship.