Vaccines, reproduction, and the life course

The premise of this chapter is that vaccines and vaccination have not explicitly been situated in the anthropology of reproductive medicine and technology and the author argues that vaccines are in fact inextricable from the analysis of reproduction and social reproduction. Anthropologists have illustrated how reproductive technologies raise implications for central tenets of social reproduction, for example, by having the potential to disrupt ideas of lineage, descent, and the sanctity of life. The author traces the analytical continuities and discontinuities between vaccination and this broader body of work concerned with social responses to biomedical innovation and state-sanctioned technologies. Lastly, he then considers how nonvaccination is represented in public health discourse, and how nonvaccination among ethnic and religious minorities is framed as a unique form of exemption and exceptionalism from statecraft projects and social reproduction.