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Social Science Cultural

Moral Figures

Making Reproduction Public in Vanuatu

by (author) Alexandra Widmer

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Feb 2023
Category
Cultural, History, Physical
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781487543204
    Publish Date
    Feb 2023
    List Price
    $78.00
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781487543211
    Publish Date
    Jan 2023
    List Price
    $29.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487543228
    Publish Date
    Feb 2023
    List Price
    $29.95

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Description

In the early twentieth century, people in the southwestern Pacific nation of Vanuatu experienced rapid population decline, while in the early twenty-first century, they experienced rapid population growth. From colonial governance to postcolonial sovereignty, Moral Figures shows that despite attempts to govern population size and birth, reproduction in Vanuatu continues to exceed bureaucratic economization through Ni-Vanuatu insistence on Indigenous relationalities.

 

Through Alexandra Widmer’s examination of how reproduction is made public, she demonstrates how population sciences have a naturalized focus on women’s fertility and privileged issues of wage labour over women’s land access, as well as broader social relations of reproduction. Widmer draws on oral histories with retired village midwives and massage healers on the changes to care for pregnancy and birth, as well as ethnographic research in a village outside the capital of Port Vila. Locating the Pacific Islands in global histories of demographic science and the medicalization of birth, the book presents archival material in a way that emphasizes bureaucratic practices in how colonial documents attempted to render Indigenous relationalities of reproduction governable.

 

While demographic imaginaries and biomedical practices increasingly frame fertility control as an investment in the reproductive health of individual bodies, the Ni-Vanuatu worlds presented in Moral Figures show that relationships between people, land, knowledge, kin, and care make reproduction a distributed and assisted process.

About the author

Alexandra Widmer is an assistant professor of social anthropology at York University.

Alexandra Widmer's profile page