Wasted Wombs: Navigating Reproductive Interruptions in Cameroon - Softcover

Van Der Sijpt, Erica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826521703 ISBN 13: 9780826521705

Verlag: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Central to this book are Gbigbil women's experiences with different "reproductive interruptions": miscarriages, stillbirths, child deaths, induced abortions, and infertility. Rather than consider these events as inherently dissimilar as women do in Western countries, the Gbigbil women of eastern Cameroon see them all as instances of "wasted wombs" that leave their reproductive trajectories hanging in the balance. The women must navigate this uncertainty while negotiating their social positions, aspirations for the future, and the current workings of their bodies.

Providing an intimate look into these processes, Wasted Wombs shows how Gbigbil women constantly shift their interpretations of when a pregnancy starts, what it contains, and what is lost in case of a reproductive interruption, in contrast to Western conceptions of fertility and loss. Depending on the context and on their life aspirations--be it marriage and motherhood, or an educational trajectory and employment, or profitable sexual affairs with so-called "big fish"--women negotiate and manipulate the meanings and effects of reproductive interruptions. Paradoxically, they often do so while portraying themselves as powerless. Wasted Wombs carefully analyzes such tactics in relation to the various social predicaments that emerge around reproductive interruptions, as well as the capricious workings of women's physical bodies.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Erica van der Sijpt is a medical anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Wasted Wombs

Navigating Reproductive Interruptions in Cameroon

By Erica Van Der Sijpt

Vanderbilt University Press

Copyright © 2018 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8265-2170-5

Contents

Introduction, 1, 
1. Terrains in Transformation, 23, 
2. Pregnancies in Practice, 49, 
3. Rural Respect, 78, 
4. Urban Horizons, 104, 
5. Discourses of Decision-Making, 139, 
Conclusion, 181, 
Appendixes, 195, 
Notes, 213, 
Bibliography, 245, 
Index, 271, 

CHAPTER 1

Terrains in Transformation

Just a few days after my first arrival in Cameroon, I find myself sitting in a rather defective car grumbling about the high speed at which it is being driven through the rain forest. I join Filbert, his older brother, and a priest on their way to their natal village in the East Province, which is also going to be my fieldwork site for the next few months. Having lived and worked in urban areas for years now, the three men seem almost as eager to arrive in Asung as I am. They fill the one-hour trip with animated stories and recommendations about rural life, which seem to gain in liveliness as the volume of the upbeat religious music increases. The noisy joyfulness inside the car contrasts with what I see outside: extended areas of natural beauty and silent forest, with here and there some groups of mud huts. After the sudden fall of the night, only the cooking fires still reveal the presence of human settlements from time to time.

Unexpectedly, in the midst of the darkness and loud music, the three men simultaneously announce that "we have entered the village now." Noticing my surprised look and my searching for cooking fires or other signs of human presence, Filbert laughingly clarifies, "At least this is our terrain. Land is not lacking here. It is our wealth. All you see around us belongs to the Gbigbil people. They have their fields here on which some even sleep or reside." His brother relates how people used to live like that: scattered through the forest. Their current habitation in a village constructed alongside a road is actually the result of governmental pressure, he informs me. The priest comments that, thanks to the abundance of land, people have no problem obeying God's command to "go and multiply themselves" and make this new village grow. Only with a large offspring can they fully occupy and exploit this extended area.

Listening to these lively discussions I notice how, after what seemed a never-ending trip through the vast and dark "terrain," wood fires surround us again and announce to us our arrival in the inhabited part of village. We come to a halt in front of my new home, the local health center. The illuminated brick building stands in shrill contrast to the dark houses that surround it. The light bulb at the entrance illuminates some shabby posters promoting family planning and a lonely goat that has installed itself on the empty benches. The air of desertion that surrounds the place makes room for a vibe of excitement, however, once I enter the patients' ward where I will take residence. The many children of the doctor gather curiously around me, while the baby on his wife's back immediately starts to cry at my sight. Some relatives of sick patients come to greet me. With the help of Filbert, his brother, and the priest, I settle down in the village that I will continue to visit long afterward.

While Filbert's car brought me into the village of Asung, the first part of this book will continue the journey through the local terrains — not only the vast, physical terrain about which my three friends spoke so proudly, but also the metaphorical "terrain" of the village. In its figurative sense, a "terrain" connotes a sociopolitical environment that is "nontransparent and in motion rather than transparent, solid and stable" (Vigh 2006: 12). More than, for example, the notion of "field" (Bourdieu 1977, 1989), a terrain captures the constant shifts of structural organizations that people create, attempt to make sense of, and navigate. This chapter will show that the terrains in which I did research and in which Gbigbil women experience and manage "wasted wombs" are highly unstable and unpredictable. Over time, political fragilities, economic insecurities, deteriorating sanitary conditions, social transformations, and contradictory discourses have come to pervade all domains of life. Such dynamics have affected people's immediate praxis and their imagined worldviews — which, in turn, direct the navigation of the reproductive conjunctures that are central to this book. Mapping the contexts of Gbigbil daily life practice, then, this chapter lays the basis for a deeper understanding of that navigation.

Movements over Time

Asung is a Gbigbil village in the rain forest area of East Cameroon that looks like many other settlements in the region, though it might be a bit larger than surrounding villages; it includes one thousand of the approximately six thousand people belonging to the Gbigbil ethnic group. Their terrain stretches over many square kilometers of green hills, and even the "center" of the village covers almost four kilometers of thatch-roofed mud huts and iron-roofed brick houses, regularly spread along the paved road. Every house is surrounded by one or more kitchens and a hangar (an open, thatch-roofed shed) in which people rest, cook on fire, eat, or discuss. Pigs, chickens, goats, and dogs roam around freely, lie down on the reddish earth, or rapidly disperse when traffic passes on the road — most of the time with a speed that is amazingly high considering its overload. The street is often full of people, too. Children run to and from school with books on their heads or try to sell some rôti (humps of bush meat) prepared by their mothers; women walk to and from their fields with huge basins on their heads and with their babies attached to their backs; and men go out for hunting or wait at the roadside with their self-brewed matango wine for a rare occasion of transportation toward a nearby market. The air is full of greetings exchanged between people in the hangars and those passing on the street. The atmosphere is peaceful but lively.

While most of contemporary life in Asung seems to revolve around this one paved road, the Gbigbil people were much more itinerant in the past. Until the end of the nineteenth century, inhabitants of this region did not establish themselves for a long time in sedentary settlements but led a seminomadic existence in the sparsely populated rain forest. Many of the groups that roamed through the woods would have been driven into the area during various wars with northern Fulani groups from the sixteenth century onward (Billard 1961; Johnson-Hanks 2006; Laburthe-Tolra 1981; Nelson et al. 1974). Processes of movement and migration have been endemic ever since. The Gbigbil people, however, would have been relatively autochthonous to the area (Dugast 1949). While some villagers claimed to have originated in Congo and others tended to locate their roots around the capital of Yaoundé, all agreed that their presence in the southeastern part of Cameroon spanned several centuries.

Throughout this period, the Gbigbil hardly formed a unified group. Social life was built on "segmentary" kinship principles: to become an adult and respected man was to separate oneself from the group, create an autonomous settlement, and become the chief of a new family unit. Power and respect depended on the number of followers (such as family members, wives,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Vanderbilt University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0826521703
• ISBN 13: 9780826521705
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 271
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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