Prof. Heather Anne Paxson

Professor Paxson is a cultural anthropologist at MIT. She is interested in how people craft a sense of themselves as moral beings in everyday, bodily practices including sex, reproduction, and eating.

Paxson conducted her doctoral research in Athens, Greece, where she investigated the apparent paradox of a child-loving Mediterranean society in which the abortion rate is twice the national birth rate. Her book, Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece, argues that Athenian women have incorporated abortion into a moral -- indeed, maternal -- framework, in which it is better to interrupt a pregnancy than to raise a child inadequately. But the story is not that simple. Amidst nationalist concern over declining birth rates, the book details how the consumption of imported consumer goods and reproductive technologies generates profound ambivalence in Athenians' moral evaluations of abortion, contraception, and in vitro fertilization. At stake are ideas about what it means to be Greek -- or more particularly, to be a Greek woman or man -- in the modern world.

Closer to home, Paxson's new project furthers her concern with ethics and embodiment: this time the subject is food. After writing on the Slow Food movement for Gastronomica, Paxson has begun studying a 'renaissance' in New England artisanal cheese production. Farmstead cheese provides a ripe opportunity to investigate the legal, moral, and community politics that organize food production, distribution, and eating in the U.S.