Stacy Leigh Pigg

Investing Social Categories Through Place: Social Representations and Development in Nepal

Nepal is a predominantly rural nation: Most people live in villages and make their living as subsistence farmers. The Nepalese government, assisted by international donor agencies, administers projects directed at improving the conditions of life for these rural people. Images of villages and village life accompany the promotion of development ideals. Radio Nepal has actors playing the part of villagers in didactic skits aimed at convincing rural people that they should consult doctors for their health problems or should feed oral rehydration solution to children suffering from diarrhea. Schoolbooks contain illustrations of village scenes and talk about village life as they inform children about development programs. When development policy makers plan programs, they discuss what villagers do, how they react, and what they think. Together, these images coalesce into a typical, generic village, turning all the villages of rural Nepal into the village.

Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective

Sex in Development examines how development projects around the world intended to promote population management, disease prevention, and maternal and child health intentionally and unintentionally shape ideas about what constitutes “normal” sexual practices and identities. From sex education in Uganda to aids prevention in India to family planning in Greece, various sites of development work related to sex, sexuality, and reproduction are examined in the rich, ethnographically grounded essays in this volume. These essays demonstrate that ideas related to morality are repeatedly enacted in ostensibly value-neutral efforts to put into practice a “global” agenda reflecting the latest medical science. Sex in Development combines the cultural analysis of sexuality, critiques of global development, and science and technology studies. Whether considering the resistance encountered by representatives of an American pharmaceutical company attempting to teach Russian doctors a “value free” way to offer patients birth control or the tension between Tibetan Buddhist ideas of fertility and the modernization schemes of the Chinese government, these essays show that attempts to make sex a universal moral object to be managed and controlled leave a host of moral ambiguities in their wake as they are engaged, resisted, and reinvented in different ways throughout the world. Contributors. Vincanne Adams, Leslie Butt, Lawrence Cohen, Heather Dell, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Shanti Parikh, Heather Paxson, Stacy Leigh Pigg, Michele Rivkin-Fish

Sexual and reproductive health rights and justice – tracking the relationship

As human rights frameworks increasingly pervade health development policy, planning and programmes globally, and most markedly in countries of the South, there is a growing sense that rights have arrived but justice has not followed. This swell of opinion has emerged from the ground up, challenging and interrogating the meanings, use and limits of rights by those who are ill, vulnerable and who seek and expect treatment, and from the health-workers and development actors who work to facilitate processes that promote reproductive and sexual health and well-being. At the level of social theory, the disconnect between rights and justice finds resonance in the work of social scientists highly critical of the moralising, neo-colonial and neo-liberal tendencies implicit in international human rights frameworks (see, for example, Brown 2004; Žižek 2005). These voices underscore the need to closely examine the relationship between rights and justice in sexual and reproductive health and its implications for healthcare practice and policy. While notions of justice have underpinned and moved rights forward in terms of a global health policy agenda – of which the concept of Reproductive Health formulated at the Cairo International conference on Population and Development in 1994 is a dramatic example – the need for a more comprehensive understanding of how to theorise structural injustices that underlie women and men’s sexual and reproductive lives is only now emerging (Aggleton and Parker 2010; Bailey 2011; Correa, Petchesky, and Parker 2008). Such work also begs the question of what the dominance of a rights-based approach entails for social and reproductive justice (Hodgson 2011) and what the alternative approaches to justice would be. We use the idea of reproductive justice, following Bailey (2011) and Correa, Petchesky, and Parker (2008), to signify contexts that are sufficiently enabled for women and men to make reproductive choices and health decisions that are meaningful and fully informed. Reproductive justice goes beyond a focus on marginalised populations because ‘examining the reproductive disciplining of some groups’ experience also highlights the reproductive privileging of others’ (Luna and Luker 2013, 328; also Unnithan 2013). Whereas rights are salient in a legal domain, justice more broadly engages individuals and community moralities in a wider sense, speaking to and challenging power inequalities. Reproductive justice is thus distinct from rights in its function as a ‘moral indicator’.

Medical Sciences and Technology in Socio-Cultural Context

The social study of science and technology is an emerging interdisciplinary field of research and theory that analyzes the production and dissemination of science and technology as a sociocultural endeavor. This body of work suggests that science is social and political in ways that cannot adequately be described as simple bias. It offers ways of looking at such phenomena as the establishment of research agendas, the dynamics of controversies and competing truth claims, the social consequences of new technologies, unintended discriminatory effects of science and technology, and the cultural assumptions embedded in the on-the-ground uses of medical technologies.

We Corner People: We Corner People. Film by Kesang Tseten; 2006. DVD, color, 50 mins., PAL and NTSC formats. Distributor: Kesang Tseten. c/o Hidden Treasure Tours. 509 Lincoln Blvd., Long Beach, NY 11561, USA; kesangtseten@yahoo.com. Tel: 516-670-9232; toll free: 877-761-7276; fax: 516-684-9797. Sale US

Near Nepal’s border with China a small village sits, island-like, on a tip of land formed by precipitous slopes cross-cut by tumbling Himalayan streams on three sides. The people who live there call this place ‘‘a corner.’’ A corner, however, is not a dead-end. It may not be a hub, but it can be a place where things turn around. This is the message of Kesang Tseten’s decidedly nonpreachy documentary about building a suspension bridge in this remote community. The film can be read as a tale of participatory development or as one of rural subsistence; in either case, it is the story of this village and these people. This subtle, multidimensional film tells the story of the bridge, not as a monumental or heroic achievement of development, but as an event that occurs within the local social history. The suspension bridge is an engineering technique that clearly solves well-articulated local problems: the rivers are dangerous, a woman has recently died in a flash flood, children can’t get to school, and access to the nearest small trading center requires an arduous all-day journey. In documenting both the building of the bridge and villagers’ reflections on their lives, Tseten eschews pat story lines. Instead, he uses a mix of interviews and on-scene action to reverse the Eurocentric charity tale of providing technology to the needy by showing how an opportunity for a bridge is seen through villagers’ eyes. The portrait is holistic, in the best anthropological sense, for it shows how deeply the building of the bridge is embedded in wider economic, political, ecological, domestic, and spiritual dimensions of everyday life of the villagers who will use the facility. The film is a story of ‘‘participatory development,’’ told entirely without romance, false egalitarianism, or teleological overtones. As the bridge is under construction, the seasons change. Work starts in the dry winter season of slack agricultural labor. An international nongovernmental organization (Helvetas) works in liaison with a bridge users’ committee representing the locals. (How this connection is set up, how Helvetas chose the site, or how someone at the site found Helvetas we are not told; nor do we learn at what stage of the engineering and budget planning did the villagers become involved.) Firewood is collected and hauled back home, corn is planted, wheat begins to ripen, the hills get greener—these things happen every year; yet this Visual Anthropology, 21: 273–275, 2008 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949460801986319