In the Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh, an agricultural region with high rates of infant mortality, maternal health services are poor while family planning efforts are intensive. By following the daily lives of women in this setting, the author considers the women's own experiences of birth and infant death, their ways of making-do...
The book explores the experiences of childbirth and loss in rural India, drawing on ethnographic research. It highlights the cultural practices surrounding birth, the challenges faced by women, and the impact of social and economic factors on maternal health. Through personal narratives and detailed observations, it provides insight into the complexities of pregnancy and the significance of midwifery in these communities. Pinto's work emphasizes the need for understanding local contexts in addressing maternal health issues.
Exploring the integration of Indigenous histories into Melbourne's urban landscape, the book examines how official commemorations have emerged since 2000. It highlights the transformation of public spaces through monuments, memorials, and artworks that acknowledge the city's settler-colonial past while challenging the silence surrounding its Indigenous heritage. By analyzing these historical markers in everyday locations, the narrative reveals their impact on public memory and the evolving understanding of reconciliation in contemporary society.
Offering a richly layered narrative, the book combines rigor with delightful surprises, making it an engaging read for a diverse audience. Its multifaceted approach invites readers to explore various themes and perspectives, ensuring that there’s something for everyone to enjoy.
In her role as devoted wife, the Hindu goddess Parvati is the divine embodiment of viraha , the agony of separation from one's beloved, a form of love that is also intense suffering. These contradictory emotions reflect the overlapping dissolutions of love, family, and mental health explored by Sarah Pinto in this visceral ethnography.Daughters of Parvati centers on the lives of women in different settings of psychiatric care in northern India, particularly the contrasting environments of a private mental health clinic and a wing of a government hospital. Through an anthropological consideration of modern medicine in a nonwestern setting, Pinto challenges the dominant framework for addressing crises such as long-term involuntary commitment, poor treatment in homes, scarcity of licensed practitioners, heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and the ways psychiatry may reproduce constraining social conditions. Inflected by the author's own experience of separation and single motherhood during her fieldwork, Daughters of Parvati urges us to think about the ways women bear the consequences of the vulnerabilities of love and family in their minds, bodies, and social worlds.
This book brings together researchers from different fields, traditions and perspectives to examine the ways in which place and space might (be) unsettle(d). Researchers from across the humanities and social sciences have been drawn to the study of place and space since the 1970s, and the term ‘unsettled’ has been an occasional but recurring presence in this body of scholarship. Though it has been used to invoke a range of meanings, from the dangerous to the liberating, the term itself has rarely been at the centre of sustained examination. This collection highlights the idea of the unsettled in the scholarly investigation of place and space. The respective chapters offer a dialogue between a diverse and eclectic group of researchers, crossing significant disciplinary and interdisciplinary boundaries in the process. The purpose of the collection is to juxtapose a range of different approaches to, and perspectives on, the unsettling of place and space. In doing so, Interdisciplinary Unsettlings of Place and Space makes an important contribution and offers new insights into how scholarship and research into different fields and practices may help us re-envision place and space.