The u. k. human genetics commission's preliminary discussion document (HGC 2000) on the use of personal genetic information singles out children as a category with special interests. Given that ethical procedures in medicine rest crucially on the principles of informed consent and confidentiality, genetic testing poses a particular nexus of problems where children are concerned. Of course, both the question of young persons being incapable of giving consent in their own right and the need for parents to be informed of medical facts about their offspring long pre-date the new genetics. But genetic medicine introduces a particularly challenging set of issues, such as the testing of children for conditions for which they show no symptoms or for conditions that may only be relevant in adult life; the kind of understanding families might have about Mendelian inheritance; the implications of parentage testing and of who owns knowledge about a child's genes. Generally lumped together as posing ethical dilemmas, these add a significant dimension to the status of being a child. Yet, although they are important, it is arguable that they impinge on relatively few people and are in that sense exotic. I take the contrary view and suggest that such dilemmas arise out of and contribute to some very general currents of thinking in contemporary Euro-American societies. We might then say that these general currents simply point to a recent phenomenon, a self-consciousness about living in a society in which communications and the so-called knowledge economy mobilise whole constellations of values that clamour for attention.

In 2003 the international council for science prepared to launch what it regarded as one of its most important strategic reviews ever. This was a review of the responsibilities of science and society. A fascinating phenomenon of the last decade or so has been the international circulation of the idea that science needs society as much as society needs science. ‘Science and Society’ programmes seem to spring up on all sides. In summoning the combined skills of experts and non-experts alike, such programmes try to make explicit the interdependence of the two. Thus a central formula in U.K. science policy has recently undergone a shift in that direction: from the Public Understanding of Science to the concept of Science and Society. The call is for a greater understanding of how society is implicated in science, and how science might be made accountable to society: a ‘new social contract’. In thinking about what stands for society, how one knows when it has been engaged, society becomes itself an explicit object of inquiry. There is considerable interest here for a social anthropology engaged with what is made explicit and what is left implicit. For anthropologists frequently claim that much knowledge is embedded in habits and practices that render it implicit.

Anthropologists do not generally go about their business thinking that their subject matter is a contingency. Yet that invariably becomes the case when the ethnographic record – however vast – or models of social structure – however illuminating – are brought into relation with other bodies of material. They are hardly alone in this. Insofar as bodies of knowledge form systems, other efforts must lie outside, part of the environment not part of the system.

One body of knowledge that perpetually strives toward the systemic is law. Indeed this reflection on contingency is prompted by Barron's (1998) discussion of the influences that in 1991 were brought to bear on the Australian Federal Court that upheld (against his will in this case) the appropriateness of copyright as a property relation between an Aboriginal artist and his carving of a sacred emblem. In asking how this legal recognition had come about in the first place, she discusses a number of what she calls contingent issues, issues that in her view belonged to the environment not to the system.

I have been dealing with the impetus to kinship thinking provided by technologies that have confronted people with unprecedented explictness about relations where knowledge holds a key role. The people in question are heirs to the scientific revolution. Habits of knowledge already embedded (for Euro-Americans) in everyday practices are made visible, and then made visible again in regulation or legislation. That is what the Human Genetics Commission (HGC) was so concerned about.

Now the HGC documents mentioned in Part I largely confine children to specific chapters; children are treated first and foremost as minors, persons too young to give independent consent to medical treatment. Yet in another sense, the whole exercise is about children, that is, about offspring and what it means to be heirs of another kind, to a genetic inheritance. There would much less concern about human genetics if genetic information were not regarded as revealing inherited characteristics. The HGC generalises this when it says that one of the identifying features of genetic information is that it ‘is not only information about the individual person, but about his or her biological relations’ (HGC 2000: 7). However, although the text refers generally to issues that arise for family members, it is only in the context of children as young persons that it also deals explicitly with children as offspring.

What kind of people is biotechnology turning us into? ‘we’ are no more or less than the users of it, who might be anywhere, although the attendant issues discussed here reflect specifically Euro-American aspirations and concerns. Over the past twenty-five years, biotechnology has provided some powerful food for thought, challenges to how we users of it imagine society and how we imagine our relations to one another. Public opinion has, for example, seized on the idea that the new genetics is making new kinds of persons out of us. Some see these new persons as ultra-individuals. But the new genetics also makes new connections, and here there are some surprises – people find themselves related in unexpected ways. Then again, the kind of people we might be becoming will depend a bit on what we already are, and we are not always quite what we seem. If ours is an age of individualism, as we constantly tell ourselves, and biotechnology feeds into that, then what exactly is biotechnology feeding? Let me start with a case.

AN AGE OF INDIVIDUALISM

Here is a slice of ‘ordinary life’ (after Edwards 2000), even if the circumstances that bring it into public view are not ordinary. It concerns grandparents and grandchildren – two girls – and how much they see of one another.

Anthropologists often find themselves gravitating toward debate, public dispute, litigation even, as telling moments in cultural life. For what may be as interesting as the positions being defended are the cultural resources people bring to their aid, the narratives, tropes and images enlisted in the service of the persuasive point. An unusual state of affairs is rendered familiar or one situation is made vivid through analogy with another; conviction might lie in appeal to the old, or quite new combinations of ideas may be conjured up. Of course, what is said in the heat of argument is likely to be a poor index to what people contemplate in less freighted moments. Yet an unreliable guide in this regard can turn out to be a fascinating guide in another respect. If only in order to persuade, the narratives, images, tropes and analogies must at the least communicate what is possible, and anthropological interest in such resources is an interest in the possibilities entailed by what is said or done for what others say or do.

‘Living men or women should not be allowed to be dealt with as [a] part of compensation payment under any circumstances’. The custom is ‘repugnant to the general principles of humanity’ (PNGLR 1997: 150, 151). Thus said Judge Injia in handing down his verdict on, as it was called in the local headlines, the ‘Compo girl case’. This was at the Mt. Hagen National Court in 1997; it concerned people from the Minj part of the Wahgi region, in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea.

The case offers an interesting comment on the role played by legal technique in the fabrication of persons and things. In some respects it rehearses issues that have long troubled anthropologists describing marriage arrangements. They include the extent to which an equation between women and wealth renders women ‘thing’-like, the locus classicus being bridewealth (bride-price) payments, which feeds an epistemological anxiety, the extent to which anthropological analysis in turn treats its subjects as less than subjects, where the locus classicus is ‘the exchange of women’. With these issues in the background, I note the role played in this case by the reference to human rights. That role assisted in the fabrication of persons; the antithesis between persons and things was never far away.