Main description:

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.

Contents:

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