Where There Is No Midwife

Birth and Loss in Rural India
1. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84545-310-7
Verlag: Berghahn Books

Buch, Englisch, Band 10, 342 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 650 g

Reihe: Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives

In the Sitapurdistrict of Uttar Pradesh, an agricultural region with high rates of infant mortality, maternal health services are poor while family planning efforts are intensive. By following the daily lives of women in this setting, the author considers the women’s own experiences of birth and infant death, their ways of making-do, and the hierarchies they create and contend with. This book develops an approach to the care that focuses on emotion, domestic spaces, illicit and extra-institutional biomedicine, and household and neighborly relations that these women are able to access. It shows that, as part of the concatenation of affect and access, globalized moralities about reproduction are dependent on ambiguous ideas about caste. Through the unfolding of birth and death, a new vision of "untouchability" emerges that is integral to visions of progress.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pinto, Sarah

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Agrarsoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Note on transliterations

Acknowledgments

Beginnings

Chapter 1. Work: Where there is no midwife

Chapter 2. Bodies: The poisonous lotus

Chapter 3. Medicine: Development without institutions

Chapter 4. Seeing: Visuality in pregnancy

Chapter 5. Dying: In the big, big hands of God

Chapter 6. Ideals: Ciphers of tradition

Chapter 7. Talking: Casting desire

Continuing Notes

Works Cited

Über Autor(innen)

Pinto, Sarah
Sarah Pinto is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. She teaches courses on medical anthropology, gender, and feminist and social theory, with particular attention to cultures of biomedicine, kinship, and political, cultural, and epistemological concerns related to the human body. Her geographic area of specialization is India.  She is co-editor of Postcolonial Disorders (University of California 2008), and author of numerous articles on medicine and health intervention in South Asia.  She is completing an ethnography of psychiatry's treatment of women patients in urban India, asking how kinship and legal processes related to family life shape clinical practice, and how clinical practice informs subjectivities in and of intimacy. This work is particularly interested in the stakes of mental illness for divorced or divorcing women in India, and asks what these circumstances can tell us about the place of gender in framing culturally relevant ethical frameworks.  Pinto is currently developing a research project on the transnational history of hysteria, focusing on dialogues on hysteria between India and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries and their role in shaping contemporary etiologies.