Download or read book Plundered Kitchens Empty Wombs written by Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminates the dynamics of social and cultural disintegration through the social construction of female infertility

Download or read book Infertility around the Globe written by Marcia Inhorn and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-05-30 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exceptional collection of essays breaks new ground by examining the global impact of infertility as a major reproductive health issue, one that has profoundly affected the lives of countless women and men. Based on original research by seventeen internationally acclaimed social scientists, it is the first book to investigate the use of reproductive technologies in non-Western countries. Provocative and incisive, it is the most substantial work to date on the subject of infertility. With infertility as the lens through which a wide range of social issues is explored, the contributors address a far-reaching array of topics: why infertility has been neglected in population studies, how the deeply gendered nature of infertility sets the blame squarely on women's shoulders, how infertility and its treatment transform family dynamics and relationships, and the distribution of medical and marital power. The chapters present informed and sophisticated investigations into cultural perceptions of infertility in numerous countries, including China, India, the nations of sub-Saharan Africa, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Egypt, Israel, the United States, and the nations of Europe. Poised to become the quintessential reference on infertility from an international social science perspective, Infertility around the Globe makes a powerful argument that involuntary childlessness is a complex phenomenon that has far-reaching significance worldwide.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender written by Carol R. Ember and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2003-12-31 with total page 1059 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central aim of this encyclopedia is to give the reader a comparative perspective on issues involving conceptions of gender, gender differences, gender roles, relationships between the genders, and sexuality. The encyclopedia is divided into two volumes: Topics and Cultures. The combination of topical overviews and varying cultural portraits is what makes this encyclopedia a unique reference work for students, researchers and teachers interested in gender studies and cross-cultural variation in sex and gender. It deserves a place in the library of every university and every social science and health department. Contents:- Glossary. Cultural Conceptions of Gender. Gender Roles, Status, and Institutions. Sexuality and Male-Female Interaction. Sex and Gender in the World's Cultures. Culture Name Index. Subject Index.

Download or read book Uncertain Honor written by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering an intimate look at the lives of African women trying to reconcile motherhood with new professional roles, the author argues that Beti women delay motherhood as part of a broader attempt to assert a modern form of honor only recently made possible by formal education, Catholicism, and economic change.

Download or read book Beyond Bodies written by Todd Sanders and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Bodies examines the Ihanzu sensibilities about gender through a fine-grained ethnography of rainmaking rites.

Download or read book Conceptions written by Aditya Bharadwaj and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in India lie at the confluence of multiple cultural conceptions. These ‘conceptions’ are key to understanding the burgeoning spread of assisted reproductive technologies and the social implications of infertility and childlessness in India. This longitudinal study is situated in a number of diverse locales which, when taken together, unravel the complex nature of infertility and assisted conception in contemporary India.

Download or read book Local Babies Global Science written by Marcia C. Inhorn and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Egpyt is at the forefront of IVF technology in the Middle East & also a centre of Islamic education in the region.

Download or read book Fipa Families written by Kathleen R. Smythe and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-05-30 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ufipa, a labor reserve for Tanganyika, witnessed minimal colonial development. Instead, evangelization by White Fathers' Catholic missionaries began in the 1870s. By the 1950s, the missionaries had secured varying degrees of political, economic and social authority in the region, witnessed by the fact that the vast majority of Fipa had converted to Catholicism. Fipa Families examines how this happened from the Fipa perspective. Written primarily for scholars and students of African colonial history, mission history, and family and childhood history, this study is based on a rich collection of oral and documentary sources. Working with this wealth of information, Smythe breaks new ground in placing African social and moral concerns parallel to those of missionaries, resurrecting the study of the family (rather than kinship, lineage, or clan) within African history, and demonstrating at the level of the family and village the ways in which ideas of socialization, reproduction, and education were challenged and re-created in the colonial context in Ufipa. Initially, employees of the mission sought to oversee the education and moral upbringing of at least one child from each family, substituting boarding school for the care relatives would otherwise have provided. A few mission parents even opted to forego the multiple benefits of grandchildren so a child could pursue the celibate path of a religious vocation. The opportunities of the Catholic Church complemented and competed with Fipa processes of social and biological reproduction, and Catholicism became part of the fabric of Fipa society because of, and despite, its resonance with Fipa culture. At the heart of both Fipa and missionary concerns were the processes of socialization (social reproduction) and biological reproduction, processes carried out within the context of the family.

Download or read book A Nervous State written by Nancy Rose Hunt and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-30 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Nervous State, Nancy Rose Hunt considers the afterlives of violence and harm in King Leopold’s Congo Free State. Discarding catastrophe as narrative form, she instead brings alive a history of colonial nervousness. This mood suffused medical investigations, security operations, and vernacular healing movements. With a heuristic of two colonial states—one "nervous," one biopolitical—the analysis alternates between medical research into birthrates, gonorrhea, and childlessness and the securitization of subaltern "therapeutic insurgencies." By the time of Belgian Congo’s famed postwar developmentalist schemes, a shining infertility clinic stood near a bleak penal colony, both sited where a notorious Leopoldian rubber company once enabled rape and mutilation. Hunt’s history bursts with layers of perceptibility and song, conveying everyday surfaces and daydreams of subalterns and colonials alike. Congolese endured and evaded forced labor and medical and security screening. Quick-witted, they stirred unease through healing, wonder, memory, and dance. This capacious medical history sheds light on Congolese sexual and musical economies, on practices of distraction, urbanity, and hedonism. Drawing on theoretical concepts from Georges Canguilhem, Georges Balandier, and Gaston Bachelard, Hunt provides a bold new framework for teasing out the complexities of colonial history.

Download or read book A Colonial Lexicon written by Nancy Rose Hunt and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999-11-15 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Colonial Lexicon is the first historical investigation of how childbirth became medicalized in Africa. Rejecting the “colonial encounter” paradigm pervasive in current studies, Nancy Rose Hunt elegantly weaves together stories about autopsies and bicycles, obstetric surgery and male initiation, to reveal how concerns about strange new objects and procedures fashioned the hybrid social world of colonialism and its aftermath in Mobutu’s Zaire. Relying on archival research in England and Belgium, as well as fieldwork in the Congo, Hunt reconstructs an ethnographic history of a remote British Baptist mission struggling to survive under the successive regimes of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, the hyper-hygienic, pronatalist Belgian Congo, and Mobutu’s Zaire. After exploring the roots of social reproduction in rituals of manhood, she shows how the arrival of the fast and modern ushered in novel productions of gender, seen equally in the forced labor of road construction and the medicalization of childbirth. Hunt focuses on a specifically interwar modernity, where the speed of airplanes and bicycles correlated with a new, mobile medicine aimed at curbing epidemics and enumerating colonial subjects. Fascinating stories about imperial masculinities, Christmas rituals, evangelical humor, colonial terror, and European cannibalism demonstrate that everyday life in the mission, on plantations, and under a strongly Catholic colonial state was never quite what it seemed. In a world where everyone was living in translation, privileged access to new objects and technologies allowed a class of “colonial middle figures”—particularly teachers, nurses, and midwives—to mediate the evolving hybridity of Congolese society. Successfully blurring conventional distinctions between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial situations, Hunt moves on to discuss the unexpected presence of colonial fragments in the vibrant world of today’s postcolonial Africa. With its close attention to semiotics as well as sociology, A Colonial Lexiconwill interest specialists in anthropology, African history, obstetrics and gynecology, medical history, religion, and women’s and cultural studies.

Download or read book The Afterlife Is Where We Come From written by Alma Gottlieb and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-10-31 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a new baby arrives among the Beng people of West Africa, they see it not as being born, but as being reincarnated after a rich life in a previous world. Far from being a tabula rasa, a Beng infant is thought to begin its life filled with spiritual knowledge. How do these beliefs affect the way the Beng rear their children? In this unique and engaging ethnography of babies, Alma Gottlieb explores how religious ideology affects every aspect of Beng childrearing practices—from bathing infants to protecting them from disease to teaching them how to crawl and walk—and how widespread poverty limits these practices. A mother of two, Gottlieb includes moving discussions of how her experiences among the Beng changed the way she saw her own parenting. Throughout the book she also draws telling comparisons between Beng and Euro-American parenting, bringing home just how deeply culture matters to the way we all rear our children. All parents and anyone interested in the place of culture in the lives of infants, and vice versa, will enjoy The Afterlife Is Where We Come From. "This wonderfully reflective text should provide the impetus for formulating research possibilities about infancy and toddlerhood for this century." — Caren J. Frost, Medical Anthropology Quarterly “Alma Gottlieb’s careful and thought-provoking account of infancy sheds spectacular light upon a much neglected topic. . . . [It] makes a strong case for the central place of babies in anthropological accounts of religion. Gottlieb’s remarkably rich account, delivered after a long and reflective period of gestation, deserves a wide audience across a range of disciplines.”—Anthony Simpson, Critique of Anthropology

Download or read book Yearning and Refusal written by Hadiza Moussa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon original in-depth interviews with women in Niamey, Niger, Yearning and Refusal unveils the hidden issue of failed fertility in Niger and the ways in which women continue to strive for reproductive control in a country at the heart of the population growth debate.

Download or read book Rumor Mills written by Veronique Campion-Vincent and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The goal of this volume is to explore the social and political dynamics of rumor and the related concept of urban or contemporary legend. These forms of communication often appear in tandem with social problems, including riots, racial or political violence, and social and economic upheavals. The volume emphasizes the connection of rumor to a set of social concerns from government corruption and corporate scandal, to racial, religious, and other prejudices. Central to the dialogue are issues of truth, belief, history, public policy, and evidence.Rumor has been recognized as one of the most important contributing factors to violence and discrimination. Yet, despite its significance in exacerbating social discord and mistrust, little systematic scholarly attention has been paid to the political origins and consequences of rumor. Rumor is defined as a proposition for belief that is not backed by secure standards of evidence. Rumor can be traditional or not, and can be expressed as a simple claim of fact. In both instances groups of claim-makers, operating out of their own interests and with a set of resources, attempt to depict reality, and if possible, impact the future.The need for this book is underscored by changing patterns of technology. What in the past was grounded in face- to-face interaction is now often found on the Internet, which is a major source of rumor. An appreciation of how new electronic forms of communication affect communal belief is essential for explicating rumor dynamics. The volume is comprehensive. Essays cover race and ethnicity, migration and globalization, corporate malfeasance, and state and government corruption. While editors and contributors well appreciate the dynamic nature of rumors and legends, the high quality of the effort make it evident that the issues that are raised and reoccur will serve to channel and inspire research in this major field of communications research for years to come.

Download or read book Affective Circuits written by Jennifer Cole and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about changing labor economies, new technologies of border control, and the effects of armed conflict. But attention to such broad questions often obscures a fundamental fact of migration: its effects on ordinary life. Affective Circuits brings together essays by an international group of well-known anthropologists to place the migrant family front and center. Moving between Africa and Europe, the book explores the many ways migrants sustain and rework family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad. It demonstrates how their quotidian efforts—on such a mass scale—contribute to a broader process of social regeneration. The contributors point to the intersecting streams of goods, people, ideas, and money as they circulate between African migrants and their kin who remain back home. They also show the complex ways that emotions become entangled in these exchanges. Examining how these circuits operate in domains of social life ranging from child fosterage to binational marriages, from coming-of-age to healing and religious rituals, the book also registers the tremendous impact of state officials, laws, and policies on migrant experience. Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.

Download or read book Petitioning for our Rights Fighting for our Nation The History of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women 1949 1960 written by Meredith Terretta and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2013 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thousands of Cameroonian women played an essential role in the radically anti-colonial nationalist movement led by the Union of the Populations of Cameroon (UPC): they were the women of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women (UDEFEC). Drawing on women nationalists' petitions to the United Nations, one of the largest collections of political documents written by African women during the decolonization era, as well as archival research and oral interviews, this work shows how UDEFEC transcended ethnic, class, education and social divides, and popularized nationalism in both urban and rural areas through the Trust Territories of the Cameroons under French and British administration. Foregrounding issues such as economic autonomy and biological and agricultural fertility, UDEFEC politics wove anti-imperial democracy and notions of universal human rights into locally rooted political cultures and histories. UDEFEC's history sheds light on the essential components of women's successful political mobilization in Africa, and contributes to the discussion of women's involvement in nationalist movements in formerly colonized territories.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History written by John Parker and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History represents an invaluable tool for historians and others in the field of African studies. This collection of essays, produced by some of the finest scholars currently working in the field, provides the latest insights into, and interpretations of, the history of Africa - a continent with a rich and complex past. An understanding of this past is essential to gain perspective on Africa's current challenges, and this accessible and comprehensive volume will allow readers to explore various aspects - political, economic, social, and cultural - of the continent's history over the last two hundred years. Since African history first emerged as a serious academic endeavour in the 1950s and 1960s, it has undergone numerous shifts in terms of emphasis and approach, changes brought about by political and economic exigencies and by ideological debates. This multi-faceted Handbook is essential reading for anyone with an interest in those debates, and in Africa and its peoples. While the focus is determinedly historical, anthropology, geography, literary criticism, political science and sociology are all employed in this ground-breaking study of Africa's past.

Download or read book Food Culture in Sub Saharan Africa written by Fran Osseo-Asare and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2005-06-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: East African, notably, Ethiopian, cuisine is perhaps the most well-known in the States. This volume illuminates West, southern, and Central African cuisine as well to give students and other readers a solid understanding of how the diverse African peoples grow, cook, and eat food and how they celebrate special occasions and ceremonies with special foods. Readers will also learn about African history, religions, and ways of life plus how African and American foodways are related. For example, cooking techniques such as deep frying and ingredients such as peanuts, chili peppers, okra, watermelon, and even cola were introduced to the United States by sub-Sahara Africans who were brought as slaves. Africa is often presented as a monolith, but this volume treats each region in turn with representative groups and foodways presented in manageable fashion, with a truer picture able to emerge. It is noted that the boundaries of many countries are imposed, so that food culture is more fluid in a region. Commonalities are also presented in the basic format of a meal, with a starch with a sauce or stew and vegetables and perhaps some protein, typically cooked over a fire in a pot supported by three stones. Representative recipes, a timeline, glossary, and evocative photos complete the narrative.