Research that matters

Delivering Health: Midwifery and Development in Mexico takes a consciously focused approach at examining how in a state of “entrenched social inequalities, structural failures, and legacies of misogyny and colonialism”, (Dixon 2020: 25) midwives take diverse yet interconnected approaches at addressing nation’s maternal healthcare. The opening juxtaposition of the older, biomedically supplied Juana and the younger, herbal remedy expert Elena can both simultaneously be traditional midwives in the same village despite their diversity in practices. Moreover, this tactifully illustrates the liminal and varied positionality of both traditional  and professional midwives (in all their contextual definition) in Mexico, lending to Dixon’s overarching argument on how Mexican midwives must “simultaneously act with and push back against the Mexican state and global development initiatives as they push forward their own agendas” (2020: 7). Thus, in her conscious decision to focus on the role of midwives and their schools rather than extend her ethnographic research (and therefore, interviews, IRB reviews, informed consent, etc.) to patients and families, Dixon creates a very clear, well-defined methodological approach. Despite the availability and possibility of extending her interviews and fieldwork to include different perspectives, voices, and narratives, Dixon sticks to her initial agenda to shape her research. What are some of the potential advantages and/or disadvantages of this decision? More specifically, what considerations must be made when making a decision of who and what to exclude in your fieldwork, especially when the opportunities present themselves but they may deviate from your primary objectives or initial methodological plans?

Furthermore, in Chapter 3 “Maternal Conditions”, Dixon (2020) uses the publicly documented story of Irma López Aurelio’s lawn birth to illustrate  and far-too-common brutality, marginalization, and abandonment of economically impoverished, rural, and Indigenous women deeply rooted in Mexico’s colonial, racist, classist, and misogynist history. This further sets the stage for her discourse on infrastructural violence. Thus, as anthropologists, what strategies and techniques can we use to provide contemporary and historical contexts that inform our data, theoretical frameworks, and arguments (particularly in the context of published ethnographies)? How does Dixon do this and is it effectively executed for a general audience?

Irma’s story serves as a stark reminder of the intersectional oppression and systemic violence that profoundly impact women’s reproductive healthcare, especially those in marginalized rural areas. The narrative powerfully captures the intricate web of social, historical, and infrastructural factors that shape women’s experiences during pregnancy and childbirth in Mexico. She really does a great job of underscoring the urgent need to address these underlying issues. I’m really interested in reading more on Dixon’s work, it’s leading me to understand on a deeper level the need for addressing the systemic challenges and inequalities that continue to affect maternal health in Mexico and other developing countries.

Something that really caught my eye in Dixon’s piece was the slippage between “professional” and “traditional” as it relates to midwifery practices. From the very get-go, Dixon presents what seems to lean towards a generational divide: “if you want traditional plant remedies, see the younger midwife; if you want drugs, see the elder” (2). Rather than continuing this seemingly binary opposition between younger and older practitioners, Dixon moves us into seeing the messiness present within biomedical vs. herbal remedies and midwifery practices before bringing us to think through global health as something that is similarly refusing a clear delineation. Global health is both a particular and a universal, a local practice and an international set of standards. Similarly, global health is not seen in Juana’s Pitocin and self-proclaimed “traditional” title, but perhaps the simplicity of anti-hemorrhaging shots and basic training are what bring in international funding to practitioners like Juana.

Returning once more to the “traditional” and “professional” slippage, the initial story in Chapter 3 about Irma’s birthing experience outside of a clinic speaks to the ways we privilege ideals of “global health” in ways that often miss the particularities and underlying inequalities and inequities within each local context. Dixon uses this to present the professionalization of midwifery that is in emergent stages in Mexico and follows Julieta, a midwife that underwent professional training yet used non-biomedical practices and thus earned the respect of her fellow midwives in training. In this chapter, Dixon does not bring back this slippage of traditional and professional, but I think it reflects Juana’s use of pitocin and self-identifier of traditional. Here, I want to ask the question: How can we think about traditional practices as able to be professionalized, and in what ways does self-identifying as traditional or professional, regardless of training, speak to the larger systems of global health as discussed by Dixon?

I was struck by the forced duality of midwifery in Mexico between working with the state and against it and its abusive practices. As demonstrated in the introduction and more particularly in chapter 3, this position places them in a delicate in-betweenness: people mistrust them when they actually do understand the plight rural indigenous women may have gone through at state hospitals and are trying to fight for a better management of systemic inequalities that victimize some women more than others. My follow-up question then would be how could midwives use social media to maybe surf their way into the global movement in favour of women’s health, to not only gain more legitimacy that way but also shed light on other women’s communities affected by systemic intersectional oppression and therefore be able to claim “doing global health”?

The academy’s shift from “Black Lives Matter” to “#OurLivesMatter” reflects a broader cultural tendency to generalize difficulties, overshadowing focus on the specific injustices faced by Black communities. This immediately made me understand that the stark mismatch between the academy’s punishing methods and its social justice ethos raises concerns about the genuine beneficiaries of progressive change. This brings me to my only question question: Can progressive reforms under inherently oppressive systems truly achieve liberation, or do they merely perpetuate existing inequalities under a guise of progress?

Liberal academic institutions frequently employ terms such as people of color (POC) in an attempt to acknowledge the structural racism, violence, and oppression towards racialized, ethnicized, and minoritized non-white populations. Yet, such terms and discourse dilutes the innately anti-black racism and oppression engraved in American social institutions. Themes such as “carceral progressivism” and the titular “progressive dystopia” capture the paradoxical reality of the anti-black realities in multiracial and multiethnic social justice education and movements. I found Shange’s positionality as a queer black body in the afterlife of slavery who worked six years at Robeson a particularly compelling case for the ethnographer as both the research instrument and the research subject. As insider ethnography, auto-ethnography, and reflexive feminist frameworks and methodologies continue to gain recognition in the discipline, how can we begin to use such frameworks effectively and responsibly? What considerations must we make when engaging with communities we also form a part of or at some level feel identified with. Might this become the new norm in the future? If so, is that an exclusively positive thing?

As I read the introductory chapter, I am drawn to the emphasis on the idea of ‘winning.’ Specifically, when Shange explains how the idea of winning is the ‘dominant logic of social justice work,’ as she provides the context of Robeson, a school that exists as a representation of the ‘fruits of collective, multiracial struggle,’ I found myself working through the question of ‘what is considered a win?’ Through the examination within chapter 3 of how the educational system plays such a large role in the reinforcement or challenge of historical oppression, I cannot help but to think about how the idea of success can be measured, and who is in charge of measuring it. Additionally, in the context of social justice, when, how, and who determines when work should stop being put into these issues?

In the introductory chapter, the author distinguishes between performativity and having an actual progressive narrative. This was introduced in a school context (high school named Robeson Justice Academy). Although this academy’s mission is to achieve racial equity in the school system, the author points out that some of their actions are not lining up with this mission. The school authorities are still punishing racial minorities at disproportional rate. This also reminds me of another school that I learned about in another class that was punishing elementary-level disabled students at much higher rates than non-disabled students. Although they claimed that they provided enough support for disabled students, their actions were not showing this. In addition, the disabled students that were the most punished were black students. This clearly shows that these kids were not getting the support they needed from the school staff. I thought this was really interesting and the problem is occurring in many different places. But in chapter 3, the teacher of the Spanish class was able to do things that enhanced inclusivity in the classroom despite possible challenges and differences between the students. I wonder what other approaches the academic institutions can take to improve inclusivity in the classroom, including disabilities.

“While the #OurLivesMatter photo that opens this chapter issues from the same impulse to preserve Black life, it redirects the rage of young people to the realm of the doable… Progressive Dystopia maps the tension between these two tenses of victory, and amplifies the lessons Frisco fugitives have for us as we dream an impossible world in which their lives do, in fact, matter” (21)

Shange’s introductory chapter strikes a remarkable balance between what is and what could be, weaving in and out of dyads (Afropessissimism and Afrofuturism, dystopia and utopia, visionary fictions and lived realities). I was particularly struck by Shange’s encouragement to look to speculative (science) fiction(s) to imagine our own futurity. In part, I was simply surprised at their willingness to talk about “the inherently utopian nature of the reformist endeavor” (12). I have always thought that to advocate and work towards a better future, one must make it sound realistic; to think about reform as utopian is, to an extent, to frame abolition as an impossibility, one that places truly emancipatory futures only within the imagined realms of speculative fiction. But perhaps Shange is right to call upon Trouillot’s notion of nonevents as the truly revolutionary sites. Perhaps a truly liberatory futurity is hidden behind a nonevent for us, tied to a utopia that is veiled by our dystopian present…. excited to talk more about this with y’all on Tuesday!!

I was particularly struck by the author’s conceptualization of Blackness as a “place” that can be geographically defined but also situated in time. On page 14 she writes that “Blackness is perpetually out of place and constantly running out of time.” She very poetically describes Blackness as a site of non-identity, not because of a certain lack of content but because of a struggle to even be born into existence. In her words, Blackness is not a “double-consciousness” in the way Du Bois meant it, but the locus of  the ineffable, “the fantastic nowhere of blackness”. Blackness seems to be an interface, to float at the border between racist state violence and push towards progress. It makes it a paradox, a “progressive dystopia” where the actual condition of Blackness is brutally framed in the harsh reality of the present but is pushing towards a better future, not knowing if they will ever attain it.

In “Exceptional Violence”, Deborah Thomas describes how colonialism and slavery play part in the current violence against Jamaican people. What these 2 chapters reminded me of is also the violence against indigenous people. Indigenous people also had very unfortunate history involving colonialism. After so much time, indigenous people are still targeted and so much violence is targeted towards them. Another similarity I noticed is that Jamaican women are often exploited especially because of their ability to give birth and thus provide more labor. For indigenous community, this is true also. Indigenous women are one of the most targeted and exploited groups in the world. At the same time, their bodies are most valuable and able to provide the most but also most mocked. I am wondering what other global patterns we can observe when we think about marginalized groups.

In Exceptional Violence, Thomas actively confronts and advocates for the relevance of culture to “to demonstrate that violence generally is not a cultural phenomenon but an effect of class formation, a process that is immanently racialized and gendered” (2011: 4). Moreover, employing “repatriation” as a framework for thinking, Thomas explores violence as forming directly from the legacy of British colonialism and plantation-based extraction, thereby resituating postcolonial discourse within a wider and more nuanced historical context (and not simply a recent “clash of civilizations” with North American culture and resentment towards “outside” influence). This concept of “palimpsestic time” is reminiscent of Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge and other postmodernists’ rejection of progress, but seeks to explicitly contextualize the present as standing on the metaphorical layers of the past. In theory, this sounds like a really interesting form of exploring the relationship between the past and present and challenging incomplete and biased popular beliefs (e.g. North American stereotypes of Jamaican as inherently and a-historically violent or Jamaican resentment towards US neo-imperialism and violent media).

Additionally taking from Foucauldian thought, Thomas explores how black bodies and families, and space, are interconnected to and shape neoliberal economics, state formation, diaspora, and transnationalism, especially through narratives, representations, spectacles, and performance of violence (“discipline and punishment”). To do so in a framework of repatriation and palimpsestic time, Thomas expands the methodological toolkit of ethnography to encompass archives, literary criticisms, national cultural policy, popular music and myth, and the display of material artifacts among other things. I’d love to explore more how Thomas and other sociocultural anthropologists explore these additional methodologies in their ethnographic work and how we could develop similar frameworks in our own projects.

Similarly to Mandy, I found Thomas’s use of “reparations” as a “framework for thinking” to be particularly interesting. I don’t know if it’s more that I expect quantitative data/research mindsets more (perhaps because of my computer science background) but when I first read that statement my mind jumped towards the “activist reparation politics” idea of there being a quantifiable way to use the concept of reparations in investigating Jamaica. Of course, like a page later, Thomas goes on to explain that she is also using this reparations framework to contrast the “liberal human rights” framework we normally use. Admittedly, this kind of confused me because I didn’t really know what she meant and thus had to reread that paragraph a few times to sort of understand the sort of “rights” vs “reparations” argument she was presenting.

I guess my question comes from the very end of this explanation, when she says that “using reparations as a framework for thinking makes available a political project that other models of state formation and political transformation in the Caribbean and beyond—such as Marxist proletarian revolution—have not” (page 7).  How exactly does a reparations framework help us to identify various “political projects” that the common human rights one might not? Or am I just misunderstanding her meaning?

This reading and discussion about reparations bring to mind a dialogue I had in a course with Dr. McKinson. We delved into how young Jamaican men engage in lottery scamming as a form of self-styled reparations in response to poverty. This discussion, I believe, resonates closely with Thomas’s framework, which emphasizes both historical contextualization and transnational as well as international perspectives. I’m still navigating through this text, but one concept particularly resonates with me: Thomas’s recognition that the consequences of slavery and colonialism transcend national borders, having global impacts. Specifically the way her framework posits that truly comprehending and addressing these issues necessitates collaboration and mutual understanding that cross international boundaries, acknowledging the interwoven nature of historical legacies and the current realities across various nations in the Americas and beyond which I believe needs to exist alongside the conversation surrounding wealth redistribution

I was absolutely struck by Thomas’ use of reparations as a framework for thinking through the social conditions that she witnesses. I had to read the paragraph that introduced it a few times, as I initially struggled to conceive of how reparations could be operationalized as a way to think through anything. It led me to think through Tuck’s and Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”… if we use reparations as a theoretical tool, do we risk undermining the legitimacy of the real need for wealth redistribution? However, Thomas’ further explanation on page 6 brought the framework of reparations to connect with ideas of citizenship and sovereignty. The notion of a transnational, international movement towards reparations is striking, but that isn’t quite where Thomas took us. I appreciate the sentiment that the reparations framework would help us think through the centrality of slavery across the Americas, but I still hesitate in thinking about our adoption of calls for action into an abstracted way of thinking about contemporary social forces… interested to hear how y’all grappled with this.

I was very much surprised at the playfulness and diversity of Bernard’s exercises, although I do have to say maths aren’t my strongest suit. I particularly enjoyed his explanation of what cultural domain analysis is, and the example he uses. I had already heard of such phenomenon such as the Inuits having more than a dozen different words to describe snow when the English (and most of Western languages) only have one. This and the example of “grue” demonstrate the influence of one’s environment on one’s perception. It also reminded me of Franz Boas’ dissertation on sea colour and how the colour of the sea can be perceived differently according to one’s culture. One can observe such variation in the Free Listing exercise particularly, which Bernard describes as a “prelude to cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling.” He explains that according to where one is from, they won’t be listing the same types of tree, of animals or family members. One could explore this activity according to the gender of the participants but also their age, their class and many more different criteria.