Notre thèse s’attache à l’étude des systèmes représentationnels impliqués par la parenté par recours au don de spermatozoïdes. D’un point de vue théorique en psychologie sociale, l’objectif est de saisir la logique de ces systèmes (contenus et processus d’élaboration et de transformation) et leur efficacité au sein de la pratique sociale. La problématique porte sur les manières dont le sens commun traduit les enjeux anthropologiques relatifs à la parenté et au don dans le cas du don de spermatozoïdes. Nous nous inscrivons dans une approche sociogénétique des représentations sociales nous permettant de retracer les éléments et les jalons des processus d’appropriation symbolique en œuvre pour ceux qui ont pour tâche d’institutionnaliser ces pratiques et pour ceux qui en ont une expérience vécue. Nous avons développé un plan de recherche fonctionnant selon le principe de la triangulation des méthodes et organisant une étude multi-niveaux des phénomènes représentationnels. Grâce au partenariat scientifique avec la Fédération française des CECOS, nous avons rencontré des parents par recours au don de spermatozoïdes dans le cadre d’enquêtes quantitative et qualitative (entretiens individuels et focus groups). L’analyse des débats parlementaires de la révision de 2011 de la loi relative à la bioéthique complète ce design méthodologique. Les résultats ont permis de mettre au jour les systèmes représentationnels actualisés dans la sphère publique pour penser la parenté par recours au don, via la mise en évidence des tensions entre catégories de pensée fondamentales (thêmata) qui organisent le champ représentationnel des acteurs parlementaires. Le croisement des analyses dégage des similarités entre les logiques parentales et parlementaires (pro-anonymat) quant à cet anonymat du donneur, sans qu’il n’y ait de détermination, par ce régime anonyme, des pratiques parentales (majoritaires) de récits de sa conception à l’enfant. Les analyses des processus d’inscriptions psychosociales et culturelles du vécu de la parenté par recours au don témoignent toutefois d’un projet représentationnel partagé qui s’ancre dans des modes de parenté normalisés. Il s’actualise de manières paradoxales par un ensemble signifiant de pratiques (récits à l’enfant du recours au don ; dons d’ovocytes) qui se constituent en actions représentationnelles. La discussion souligne l’intérêt qu’il y a à considérer une pluralité de sociogenèses. Elles produisent des états représentationnels composites et la complexité de phénomènes en tensions, dont des actions représentationnelles transgressant et prolongeant l’ordre établi des attendus culturels et des rapports sociaux. / This thesis focuses on the representational systems involved in family building through sperm donation. Drawing on psychosocial theories, it investigates the logic behind these systems and their efficacy in social practices. Specifically, we explore how anthropological issues to do with kinship/relatedness and giving-receiving relationships are transformed into common sense knowledge in the case of sperm donation. This issue is considered using a sociogenetic approach, through the lens of social representations theory. Adopting this theoretical perspective allowed us to trace the elements and milestones of the processes of symbolic coping at play among those whose task is to institutionalise these practices, and among those who experience them.We developed a research programme organised according to principles of method triangulation, hence conducting multi-level studies of representational phenomena. Owing to our scientific partnership with the French federation of CECOS (certified clinics), we conducted quantitative and qualitative research (interviews and focus groups) with parents who conceived their children using sperm donation. A further aspect of our research was based upon an analysis of parliamentary debates regarding the 2011 revision to bioethics legislation in France.Our findings indicated the significance of representational systems for meaning making about parenthood through sperm donation. Specifically, the representational fields of parliamentary players were shown to be organised by tensions between fundamental categories of thought (themata). We found similarities between parental and parliamentary logics that both favoured anonymity, but no relationship between parents’ disclosure decisions and donor anonymity. We did however observe that parents make sense of sperm donation through a shared - yet negotiated - representational project anchored in a rather traditional family model. This project was found to be enacted paradoxically by a set of significant practices (disclosure strategies; egg donation) that constitute representational actions.Our discussion underlines the intense dynamic that underpins the investigated representational systems, studied in different areas of production and transformation. It leads to complex and tense representational phenomena, including actions that transgress and prolong the established cultural and social order.

The shifting topography of contemporary Japanese society is engendering a significant reorientation of men’s family relations. However, exactly how Japanese men are adapting to these broad-based trends, including parent-child relations, demographics, marriage norms, care provision, residential choices, and gender roles, as well as in the decline of Confucian worldviews, remains relatively obscure. In this dissertation, I explore men’s everyday practices underpinning their family relations as husbands, fathers, sons-in-law, and grandfathers. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the summers of 2013 and 2014 in Hyogo, through narrative interviews and participant-observation. I find husbands’ view of their wives transitioning from having a culturally prescribed duty to perform domestic matters to simply having responsibility for domestic matters. This opens up space for negotiation within married couples, with my informants providing what I refer to as additional help, which offers new insight into charting the evolution of hegemonic masculinity. I evidence relatedness founded on exchange as an approach to understand relations across the extended family, which importantly involves additional help, financial resources, and intimacy. I underscore how men selectively seek intimacy in some family relations, notably as fathers and grandfathers. Provision of additional help and seeking of intimacy lead to men’s (re)construction of masculinities differing across family relations, with an important reason for men to select their practices so as to craft their family relations is to address their sense of well-being. Further, the pattern of men’s family relations reveals the emergence of substantially novel sons-in-law relations, as compared to that found in ie patriarchal norms. This evidence suggests a fundamental shift from a vertically-dominated set of family relations, as in the ie household, to a more horizontal, fluid set of relations across the extended family.

Ideas of kinship play a significant role in structuring everyday life, and yet kinship has been neglected in Christian ethics, as well as moral philosophy and bioethics. Attention has been paid in these disciplines to the ethics of ‘family,’ but little regard has been paid to the fact that kinship is not a given, but is culturally contingent. The thesis seeks to remedy the neglect in recent Christian theological ethics by drawing on resources from the history of Christian thought and practice. It uses social anthropology both to unsettle the accounts of kinship used in Christian ethics, and to expose elements in Christian traditions of thought and practice relating to kinship. Notions of shared bodily substance, the house, gender and personhood recur cross-culturally in giving shape to kinship. By examining these four notions as they inform Christian thought and practice, a theological account is developed. Chapters dedicated to each of these four attempt to provide, in the first instance, a descriptive account of how the notion has structured Christian thought and practice in relation to kinship. Each chapter then turns, in the second instance, to a critical mode, offering a theological treatment of the chapter topic as it bears on kinship. The thesis concludes that kinship in Christ should be considered normatively primary for the Christian, but also that there are ways in which Christians have honoured this kinship in Christ by organising and playing out kinship on a smaller scale. In detailing the distinctively Christian organising principles that structure some practices of kinship ‘in miniature,’ another common practice – the special privileging of the blood tie in structuring kinship – is singled out for critique.