State Intimacies: Sterilization, Care and Reproductive Chronicity in Rural North India

by Eva Fiks

Overview

The public healthcare system in rural India is chronically under—resourced. It embodies and often perpetuates the wider politics of the Indian state towards its rural communities with provisions of care that are deeply entangled with violence and disgust. For rural women, such care deepens reproductive chronicity while providing temporary relief. Grounded in women’s everyday realities and experiences in sterilization camps and other healthcare settings in rural Rajasthan, State Intimacies examines the mundane workings, ambiguities and fragilities of care in post—colonial rural North India.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781805394648
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	04/01/2024
Series:	Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politics, Histories , #4
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Eva Fiks is a Lecturer in Medical Anthropology at Keele University, United Kingdom. Her work on reproduction, biomedicine, care and the state in North India has been published in Ethnos, Medical Anthropology, Anthropology & Medicine, Anthropology Today and Medical Anthropology Quarterly.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Transliteration
List of Abbreviations
List of Characters
Map

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Camp
Chapter 2. The Laparoscope
Chapter 3. The Motivators
Chapter 4. Jugad
Chapter 5. Reproductive Chronicity
Chapter 6. Hierarchy Work

Conclusion

Glossary
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

“This critical, compassionate, and sensitive ethnographic description of women’s reproductive lives in an area shaped by poverty and medico—political intervention is of relevance to medical and political anthropology scholars, as well as for scholars working on gender and reproduction and on South Asia at large. The author has successfully managed to condense data and insights based on her fieldwork from a previous decade into a convincing and relevant volume that also benefits from both hindsight and recent scholarly debates.” • Asian Ethnology

“Sterilization ‘camps’ have earned a bad press in India – and rightly so. Yet, as Eva Fiks demonstrates in her elegant intervention, coercion is entangled with care for village women contending with the reproductive chronicity that is integral to their daily lives.” • Patricia Jeffery, Professor Emerita, University of Edinburgh

“The book draws on detailed ethnographic research and is rich with empirical details that are framed within larger debates on women’s health, care, and state formation. The introduction immediately draws in the reader. It is a well—written and well—researched book.” • Lipika Kamra, Jindal Global University

From the Publisher