Bonnex Kaunda: "There are too many goings-on these days." -- Dangerous modernities -- Agnesi Kunjirima: "You can make your pregnancy safe." -- Knowing bodies -- Lillian Siska: "I help them right here at home." -- Ambivalent technologies -- Chimwemwe Bruce: "Changes, yes, but no development." -- Abundant scarcity -- Rhoda Nantongwe: "By the time she comes to the hospital, it is too late." -- Countless accountings -- Dyna Ng'ong'ola and Kettie Pensulo: "Women in this community are very much concerned." -- Fragile authority.
Summary:
"Partial Stories takes readers to Malawi, where roughly one in twenty women can expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication, despite decades of safe-motherhood programs. The stories of these mothers are told in hospitals and villages, by chiefs and doctors, herbalists and nurses, epidemiologists and healers, and competing explanations proliferate. The mothers' stories are used by elders for technical education and moral instruction at a coming-of-age-ritual, a district hospital's mortality review, and in the reflected glow of a computer screen at an international conference. After orienting readers to urban Malawi's context of therapeutic pluralism and material scarcity, Claire Wendland discusses the ways various experts account for maternal death, showing how their diverse explanations reflect competing visions of the past and shared concerns about social change. She looks to a series of pregnancy-related deaths in order to consider bodies as biosocial phenomena, shaped from before birth by history and social inequality. Wendland reveals an uneven therapeutic landscape that pushes experts to improvise, clinically and ethically. Their creative, essential, and sometimes deadly improvisations ask us to reconsider the "best practice" dogmas of global health and transnational research, as well as the nature of medical authority and expertise. Wendland demonstrates how strategies of legitimation render care more dangerous and knowledge more partial than it might otherwise be"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.