Moral Figures

Making Reproduction Public in Vanuatu

Alexandra Widmer

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English

University of Toronto Press
01 March 2023

Anthropology; History of science; Human biology; Early man

Series: Anthropological Horizons

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 her examination of how reproduction is made public, Alexandra Widmer demonstrates how population sciences have naturalized a focus on women's fertility and privileged issues of wage labour over women's land access and 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.

By: Alexandra Widmer
Imprint: University of Toronto Press
Country of Publication: Canada
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 13mm
Weight: 370g
ISBN: 9781487543211
ISBN 10: 1487543212
Series: Anthropological Horizons
Pages: 262
Publication Date: 01 March 2023
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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

Reviews for Moral Figures: Making Reproduction Public in Vanuatu

In this incisive, original, and absorbing book, Alexandra Widmer explores the intersecting politics of demography, reproduction, biomedical knowledge, and Indigenous systems of healing in the south-western Pacific. This engaging and important contribution to medical anthropology is based on both fieldwork in Vanuatu, and a careful analysis of the imperial archive, resonating with wider debates about health care, citizenship, globalization, and the enduring legacies of colonialism, as they inform contemporary identities, policies, and practices within the Pacific and beyond. - Gregory Rawlings, Head of the Social Anthropology Programme, University of Otago With intricate care, Widmer accounts for the problematization of both population decline and growth in Vanuatu. This is the richest of studies on politics and socialities of reproduction, in colonial and postcolonial contexts. A major contribution. - Alison Bashford, author of Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth