Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West AfricaMost women in the West use contraceptives in order to avoid having children. But in rural Gambia and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, many women use contraceptives for the opposite reason—to have as many children as possible. Using ethnographic and demographic data from a three-year study in rural Gambia, Contingent Lives explains this seemingly counterintuitive fact by juxtaposing two very different understandings of the life course: one is a linear, Western model that equates aging and the ability to reproduce with the passage of time, the other a Gambian model that views aging as contingent on the cumulative physical, social, and spiritual hardships of personal history, especially obstetric trauma. Viewing each of these two models from the perspective of the other, Caroline Bledsoe produces fresh understandings of the classical anthropological subjects of reproduction, time, and aging as culturally shaped within women's conjugal lives. Her insights will be welcomed by scholars of anthropology and demography as well as by those working in public health, development studies, gerontology, and the history of medicine. |
Contents
1 Introduction | 1 |
2 Reproductive Tolls and Temporalities in Studies of Reproduction | 35 |
3 Setting Data and Methods | 62 |
Child Spacing | 91 |
Deconstructing Child Spacing | 129 |
6 Realizing a Reproductive Endowment in a Contingent Body | 162 |
7 TimeNeutral Reproduction TimeNeutral Aging | 216 |
Morality Retirement and Repletion | 250 |
Contingency and Linearity in Western Obstetric Observations | 285 |
10 Rethinking Fertility Time and Aging | 321 |
Appendixes | 335 |
Glossary | 355 |
357 | |
385 | |
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Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa Caroline H. Bledsoe Limited preview - 2010 |
Common terms and phrases
abstinence Africa anthropology baby Banjul bear become biological birth intervals Bledsoe bodily resources body breastfeeding bridewealth cesarean section chapter child spacing childbearing childbirth chronological age co-wife common sense compound conjugal contingency course cultural cumulative decline delivery demographic Depo Provera describe effects efforts Epi Info example experience fact family planning Farafenni fecundity fetus fetuses Fula Gambian women hapo high fertility husband implies infertility juju labor Lee’s linear live births logic man’s Mandinka marriage married maternal menopause miscarriage mishaps months moral mother muscles natural fertility nonlive births notion number of children obstetrics occur older pace parity patterns percent physical pills polygyny population possible postpartum potential preg pregnancy problems produce question relations reported repro rest risks rural Gambia sarifo senescence sexual Sierra Leone social stage stillbirth strength survey temporalities tion uterus weaned West Western contraceptives wife wives woman young