Title: Birth on the threshold: childbirth and modernity in South India
Author: Van Hollen, Cecilia Coale
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Sociology | Gender Studies | Hinduism | South Asia | Asian Studies | South Asia | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Even childbirth is affected by globalization - and in India, as elsewhere, the trend is away from home births, assisted by midwives, toward hospital births with increasing reliance on new technologies. And yet, as this work of critical feminist ethnography clearly demonstrates, the global spread of biomedical models of childbirth has not brought forth one monolithic form of "modern birth." Focusing on the birth experiences of lower-class women in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Birth on the Threshold reveals the complex and unique ways in which modernity emerges in local contexts. Through vivid description and animated dialogue, this book conveys the birth stories of the women of Tamil Nadu in their own voices, emphasizing their critiques of and aspirations for modern births today. In light of these stories, author Cecilia Van Hollen explores larger questions about how the structures of colonialism and postcolonial international and national development have helped to shape the form and meaning of birth for Indian women today. Ultimately, her book poses the question: How is gender - especially maternity - reconfigured as birth is transformed?   [brief]
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Title: Childbirth and authoritative knowledge: cross-cultural perspectives
Author: Davis-Floyd, Robbie
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Women's Studies | Medicine
Publisher's Description: This benchmark collection of cross-cultural essays on reproduction and childbirth extends and enriches the work of Brigitte Jordan, who helped generate and define the field of the anthropology of birth. The authors' focus on authoritative knowledge - the knowledge that counts, on the basis of which decisions are made and actions taken - highlights the vast differences between birthing systems that give authority of knowing to women and their communities and those that invest it in experts and machines. Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge offers first-hand ethnographic research conducted by anthropologists in sixteen different societies and cultures and includes the interdisciplinary perspectives of a social psychologist, a sociologist, an epidemiologist, a staff member of the World Health Organization, and a community midwife. Exciting directions for further research as well as pressing needs for policy guidance emerge from these illuminating explorations of authoritative knowledge about birth. This book is certain to follow Jordan's Birth in Four Cultures as the definitive volume in a rapidly expanding field.   [brief]
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Title: Just doctoring: medical ethics in the liberal state 
Author: Brennan, Troyen A
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Philosophy | Ethics | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Just Doctoring draws the doctor-patient relationship out of the consulting room and into the middle of the legal and political arenas where it more and more frequently appears. Traditionally, medical ethics has focused on the isolated relationship of physician to patient in a setting that has left the physician virtually untouched by market constraints or government regulation. Arguing that changes in health care institutions and legal attention to patient rights have made conventional approaches obsolete, Troyen Brennan points the way to a new, more aware and engaged medical ethics.The medical profession is no longer isolated, even theoretically, from the liberal, market-dominated state. Old ideas of physician beneficence and altruism must make way for a justice-based medical ethics, assuming a relationship between equals more compatible with liberal political philosophy. Brennan offers clinical examples of many of today's most challenging medical problems - from informed consent to care rationing and the repercussions of the HIV epidemic - and gives his recommendation for a new ethical perspective. This lively and controversial plea for a rethinking of medical ethics goes right to the heart of medical care at the end of the twentieth century.   [brief]
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Title: Deeply into the bone: re-inventing rites of passage
Author: Grimes, Ronald L 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Religion | Anthropology | Social Science
Publisher's Description: Over the past two decades, North Americans have become increasingly interested in understanding and reclaiming the rites that mark significant life passages. In the absence of meaningful rites of passage, we speed through the dangerous intersections of life and often come to regret missing an opportunity to contemplate a child's birth, mark the arrival of maturity, or meditate on the loss of a loved one. Providing a highly personal, thoroughly informed, and cross-cultural perspective on rites of passage for general readers, this book illustrates the power of rites to help us navigate life's troublesome transitions. The work of a major scholar who has spent years writing and teaching about ritual, Deeply into the Bone instigates a conversation in which readers can fruitfully reflect on their own experiences of passage. Covering the significant life events of birth, initiation, marriage, and death, chapters include first-person stories told by individuals who have undergone rites of passage, accounts of practices from around the world, brief histories of selected ritual traditions, and critical reflections probing popular assumptions about ritual. The book also explores innovative rites for other important events such as beginning school, same-sex commitment ceremonies, abortion, serious illness, divorce, and retirement. Taking us confidently into the abyss separating the spiritual from the social scientific, the personal from the scholarly, and the narrative from the analytical, Grimes synthesizes an impressive amount of information to help us find more insightful ways of comprehending life's great transitions. As we face our increasingly complex society, Deeply into the Bone will help us reclaim the power of rites and understand their effect on our lives.   [brief]
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Title: Managing the medical arms race: public policy and medical device innovation 
Author: Foote, Susan Bartlett
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | Medicine | Public Policy | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: The allure of medical innovation is powerful - it holds out the promise of perfect health, the end of pain, the deferral of death. Our insatiable appetite for costly new technologies, fed by a profusion of innovations and the profits they generate, has led to what has been dubbed the medical arms race. During the last several decades government has been called upon to manage the escalation of this race.Foote has written the first comprehensive examination of the profound influence of government policies on medical innovation. She explains how these policies have proliferated to affect every stage of the innovative process in medical device technology - from the first research idea to the patient's bedside. Drawing on case studies of technologies as diverse as lasers, cardiac pacemakers, CT scanners, and IUDs, she traces the interaction between the industry and government institutions, including the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, and the Medicare and Medicaid programs.Public policies during the 1950s and 1960s, Foote discovers, tended to promote innovation, while the regulation and cost controls of the 1970s and 1980s began to inhibit it. For the 1990s and beyond she proposes incremental policy improvements that will rationalize and streamline government intervention. She cautions that we must recognize the limits of medical technology and public policy to cure all ills.Medical innovation is a crucial part of health care reform, a subject of increasing complexity and controversy. Written clearly and accessibly, Managing the Medical Arms Race is an invaluable source for medical, industry, and policy professionals, but it also has much to say to anybody concerned with how we as a society choose to take care of our health.   [brief]
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Title: A flourishing Yin: gender in China's medical history, 960-1665
Author: Furth, Charlotte
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Asian History | Asian Studies | Women's Studies | China | Medicine
Publisher's Description: This book brings the study of gender to Chinese medicine and in so doing contextualizes Chinese medicine in history. It examines the rich but neglected tradition of fuke , or medicine for women, over the seven hundred years between the Song and the end of the Ming dynasty. Using medical classics, popular handbooks, case histories, and belles lettres , it explores evolving understandings of fertility and menstruation, gestation and childbirth, sexuality, and gynecological disorders.Furth locates medical practice in the home, where knowledge was not the monopoly of the learned physician and male doctors had to negotiate the class and gender boundaries of everyday life. Women as healers and as patients both participated in the dominant medical culture and sheltered a female sphere of expertise centered on, but not limited to, gestation and birth. Ultimately, her analysis of the relationship of language, text, and practice reaches beyond her immediate subject to address theoretical problems that arise when we look at the epistemological foundations of our knowledge of the body and its history.   [brief]
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Title: What I learned in medical school: personal stories of young doctors
Author: Takakuwa, Kevin M
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Medicine | Sociology | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | Anthropology | Health Care
Publisher's Description: Like many an exclusive club, the medical profession subjects its prospective members to rigorous indoctrination: medical students are overloaded with work, deprived of sleep and normal human contact, drilled and tested and scheduled down to the last minute. Difficult as the regimen may be, for those who don't fit the traditional mold - white, male, middle-to-upper class, and heterosexual - medical school can be that much more harrowing. This riveting book tells the tales of a new generation of medical students - students whose varied backgrounds are far from traditional. Their stories will forever alter the way we see tomorrow's doctors. In these pages, a black teenage mother overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds, an observant Muslim dons the hijab during training, an alcoholic hides her addiction. We hear the stories of an Asian refugee, a Mexican immigrant, a closeted Christian, an oversized woman - these once unlikely students are among those who describe their medical school experiences with uncommon candor, giving a close-up look at the inflexible curriculum, the pervasive competitive culture, and the daunting obstacles that come with being "different" in medical school. Their tales of courage are by turns poignant, amusing, eye-opening - and altogether unforgettable.   [brief]
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Title: From the fat of our souls: social change, political process, and medical pluralism in Bolivia
Author: Crandon-Malamud, Libbet
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Politics | Medical Anthropology | Medicine
Publisher's Description: From the Fat of Our Souls offers a revealing new perspective on medicine, and the reasons for choosing or combining indigenous and cosmopolitan medical systems, in the Andean highlands. Closely observing the dialogue that surrounds medicine and medical care among Indians and Mestizos, Catholics and Protestants, peasants and professionals in the rural town of Kachitu, Libbet Crandon-Malamud finds that medical choice is based not on medical efficacy but on political concerns. Through the primary resource of medicine, people have access to secondary resources, the principal one being social mobility. This investigation of medical pluralism is also a history of class formation and the fluidity of both medical theory and social identity in highland Bolivia, and it is told through the often heartrending, often hilarious stories of the people who live there.   [brief]
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Title: Life without disease: the pursuit of medical utopia 
Author: Schwartz, William B 1922-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Science | Medicine | Economics and Business | History and Philosophy of Science | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: The chaotic state of today's health care is the result of an explosion of effective medical technologies. Rising costs will continue to trouble U.S. health care in the coming decades, but new molecular strategies may eventually contain costs. As life expectancy is dramatically extended by molecular medicine, a growing population of the aged will bring new problems. In the next fifty years genetic intervention will shift the focus of medicine in the United States from repairing the ravages of disease to preventing the onset of disease. Understanding the role of genes in human health, says Dr. William B. Schwartz, is the driving force that will change the direction of medical care, and the age-old dream of life without disease may come close to realization by the middle of the next century. Medical care in 2050 will be vastly more effective, Schwartz maintains, and it may also be less expensive than the resource-intensive procedures such as coronary bypass surgery that medicine relies on today.Schwartz's alluring prospect of a medical utopia raises urgent questions, however. What are the scientific and public policy obstacles that must be overcome if such a goal is to become a reality? Restrictions on access imposed by managed care plans, the corporatization of charitable health care institutions, the increasing numbers of citizens without health insurance, the problems with malpractice insurance, and the threatened Medicare bankruptcy - all are the legacy of medicine's great progress in mastering the human body and society's inability to assimilate that mastery into existing economic, ethical, and legal structures. And if the average American life span is 130 years, a genuine possibility by 2050, what social and economic problems will result?Schwartz examines the forces that have brought us to the current health care state and shows how those same forces will exert themselves in the decades ahead. Focusing on the inextricable link between scientific progress and health policy, he encourages a careful examination of these two forces in order to determine the kind of medical utopia that awaits us. The decisions we make will affect not only our own care, but also the system of care we bequeath to our children.   [brief]
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Title: Paths to Asian medical knowledge
Author: Leslie, Charles M 1923-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Asian Studies
Publisher's Description: Like its classic predecessor, Asian Medical Systems , Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge significantly expands the study of Asian medicine. These essays ask how patients and practitioners know what they know - what evidence of disease or health they consider convincing and what cultural traditions and symbols guide their thinking. Whether discussing Japanese anatomy texts, Islamic humoralism, Ayurvedic clinical practice, or a variety of other subjects, the authors offer an exciting range of information and suggest new theoretical avenues for medical anthropology.   [brief]
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Title: Under the medical gaze: facts and fictions of chronic pain
Author: Greenhalgh, Susan
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Medical Anthropology | Physical Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Medicine | Gender Studies | Sociology | Social Problems | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: This compelling account of the author's experience with a chronic pain disorder and subsequent interaction with the American health care system goes to the heart of the workings of power and culture in the biomedical domain. It is a medical whodunit full of mysterious misdiagnosis, subtle power plays, and shrewd detective work. Setting a new standard for the practice of autoethnography, Susan Greenhalgh presents a case study of her intense encounter with an enthusiastic young specialist who, through creative interpretation of the diagnostic criteria for a newly emerging chronic disease, became convinced she had a painful, essentially untreatable, lifelong muscle condition called fibromyalgia. Greenhalgh traces the ruinous effects of this diagnosis on her inner world, bodily health, and overall well-being. Under the Medical Gaze serves as a powerful illustration of medicine's power to create and inflict suffering, to define disease and the self, and to manage relationships and lives. Greenhalgh ultimately learns that she had been misdiagnosed and begins the long process of undoing the physical and emotional damage brought about by her nearly catastrophic treatment. In considering how things could go so awry, she embarks on a cogent and powerful analysis of the sociopolitical sources of pain through feminist, cultural, and political understandings of the nature of medical discourse and practice in the United States. She develops fresh arguments about the power of medicine to medicalize our selves and lives, the seductions of medical science, and the deep, psychologically rooted difficulties women patients face in interactions with male physicians. In the end, Under the Medical Gaze goes beyond the critique of biomedicine to probe the social roots of chronic pain and therapeutic alternatives that rely on neither the body-cure of conventional medicine nor the mind-cure of some alternative medicines, but rather a broader set of strategies that address the sociopolitical sources of pain.   [brief]
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Title: American medicine: the quest for competence
Author: Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Medicine | Science | Medical Anthropology | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: What does it mean to be a good doctor in America today? How do such challenges as new biotechnologies, the threat of malpractice suits, and proposed health-care reform affect physicians' ability to provide quality care?These and many other crucial questions are examined in this book, the first to fully explore the meaning and politics of competence in modern American medicine. Based on Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good's recent ethnographic studies of three distinct medical communities - physicians in rural California, academics and students involved in Harvard Medical School's innovative "New Pathway" curriculum, and oncologists working on breast cancer treatment - the book demonstrates the centrality of the issue of competence throughout the medical world. Competence, it shows, provides the framework for discussing the power struggles between rural general practitioners and specialists, organizational changes in medical education, and the clinical narratives of high-technology oncologists. In their own words, practitioners, students, and academics describe what competence means to them and reveal their frustration with medical-legal institutions, malpractice, and the limitations of peer review and medical training.Timely and provocative, this study is essential reading for medical professionals, academics, anthropologists, and sociologists, as well as health-care policymakers.   [brief]
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Title: Mind games: American culture and the birth of psychotherapy 
Author: Caplan, Eric 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | United States History | American Studies | Science | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: Eric Caplan's fascinating exploration of Victorian culture in the United States shatters the myth of Freud's seminal role in the creation of American psychotherapy. Resurrecting the long-buried "prehistory" of American mental therapeutics, Mind Games tells the remarkable story of how a widely assorted group of actors - none of them hailing from Vienna or from any other European city - compelled a reluctant medical profession to accept a new role for the mind in medicine. By the time Freud first set foot on American soil in 1909, as Caplan demonstrates, psychotherapy was already integrally woven into the fabric of American culture and medicine.What came to be known as psychotherapy emerged in the face of considerable opposition, much - indeed most - of which was generated by the medical profession itself. Caplan examines the contentious interplay within the American medical community, as well as between American physicians and their lay rivals, who included faith-healers, mind-curists, Christian Scientists, and Protestant ministers. These early practitioners of alternative medicine ultimately laid the groundwork for a distinctive and much heralded American type of psychotherapy. Its grudging acceptance by both medical elites and rank and file physicians signified their understanding that reliance on physical therapies to treat nervous and mental symptoms compromised their capacity to treat - and compete - effectively in a rapidly expanding mental-medical marketplace. Mind Games shows how psychotherapy came to occupy its central position in mainstream American culture.   [brief]
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Title: Writing at the margin: discourse between anthropology and medicine
Author: Kleinman, Arthur
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Sociology | Medicine | Asian Studies | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate. Writing at the Margin explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems - for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain - are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it, the social institutions relating to it, and the way it is configured in medical ethics.Previously published in various journals, these essays have been revised, updated, and brought together with an introduction, an essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.   [brief]
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Title: Healing the masses: Cuban health politics at home and abroad
Author: Feinsilver, Julie Margot
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Politics | Medicine | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: How has Cuba, a small, developing country, achieved its stunning medical breakthroughs? Hampered by scarce resources and a long-standing U.S. embargo, Cuba nevertheless has managed to provide universal access to health care, comprehensive health education, and advanced technology, even amid desperate economic conditions. Moreover, Cuba has sent disaster relief, donations of medical supplies and technology, and cadres of volunteer doctors throughout the world, emerging, in Castro's phrase, as a "world medical power."In her significant and timely study, Julie Feinsilver explores the Cuban medical phenomenon, examining how a governmental obsession with health has reaped medical and political benefits at home and abroad. As a result of Cuba's forward strides in health care, infant mortality rates are low even by First World standards. Cuba has successfully dealt with the AIDS epidemic in a manner that has aroused controversy and that some claim has infringed on individual liberties - issues that Feinsilver succinctly evaluates.Feinsilver's research and travel in Cuba over many years give her a unique perspective on the challenges Cuba faces in this time of unprecedented economic and political uncertainty. Her book is a must-read for everyone concerned with health policy, international relations, and Third World societies.   [brief]
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Title: Stories in the time of cholera: racial profiling during a medical nightmare
Author: Briggs, Charles L 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Disease | Medical Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Cholera, although it can kill an adult through dehydration in half a day, is easily treated. Yet in 1992-93, some five hundred people died from cholera in the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela. In some communities, a third of the adults died in a single night, as anthropologist Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, reveal in their frontline report. Why, they ask in this moving and thought-provoking account, did so many die near the end of the twentieth century from a bacterial infection associated with the premodern past? It was evident that the number of deaths resulted not only from inadequacies in medical services but also from the failure of public health officials to inform residents that cholera was likely to arrive. Less evident were the ways that scientists, officials, and politicians connected representations of infectious diseases with images of social inequality. In Venezuela, cholera was racialized as officials used anthropological notions of "culture" in deflecting blame away from their institutions and onto the victims themselves. The disease, the space of the Orinoco Delta, and the "indigenous ethnic group" who suffered cholera all came to seem somehow synonymous. One of the major threats to people's health worldwide is this deadly cycle of passing the blame. Carefully documenting how stigma, stories, and statistics circulate across borders, this first-rate ethnography demonstrates that the process undermines all the efforts of physicians and public health officials and at the same time contributes catastrophically to epidemics not only of cholera but also of tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS, and other killers. The authors have harnessed their own outrage over what took place during the epidemic and its aftermath in order to make clear the political and human stakes involved in the circulation of narratives, resources, and germs.   [brief]
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Title: Huang Di nei jing su wen: nature, knowledge, imagery in an ancient Chinese medical text, with an appendix, The doctrine of the five periods and six qi in the Huang Di nei jing su wen
Author: Unschuld, Paul U. (Paul Ulrich) 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | Medical Anthropology | China | History of Medicine
Publisher's Description: The Huang Di nei jing su wen, known familiarly as the Su wen, is a seminal text of ancient Chinese medicine, yet until now there has been no comprehensive, detailed analysis of its development and contents. At last Paul U. Unschuld offers entry into this still-vital artifact of China's cultural and intellectual past. Unschuld traces the history of the Su wen to its origins in the final centuries B.C.E., when numerous authors wrote short medical essays to explain the foundations of human health and illness on the basis of the newly developed vessel theory. He examines the meaning of the title and the way the work has been received throughout Chinese medical history, both before and after the eleventh century when the text as it is known today emerged. Unschuld's survey of the contents includes illuminating discussions of the yin-yang and five-agents doctrines, the perception of the human body and its organs, qi and blood, pathogenic agents, concepts of disease and diagnosis, and a variety of therapies, including the new technique of acupuncture. An extensive appendix, furthermore, offers a detailed introduction to the complicated climatological theories of Wu yun liu qi ("five periods and six qi"), which were added to the Su wen by Wang Bing in the Tang era. In an epilogue, Unschuld writes about the break with tradition and innovative style of thought represented by the Su wen. For the first time, health care took the form of "medicine," in that it focused on environmental conditions, climatic agents, and behavior as causal in the emergence of disease and on the importance of natural laws in explaining illness. Unschuld points out that much of what we surmise about the human organism is simply a projection, reflecting dominant values and social goals, and he constructs a hypothesis to explain the formation and acceptance of basic notions of health and disease in a given society. Reading the Su wen, he says, not only offers a better understanding of the roots of Chinese medicine as an integrated aspect of Chinese civilization; it also provides a much needed starting point for discussions of the differences and parallels between European and Chinese ways of dealing with illness and the risk of early death.   [brief]
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Title: The making of rehabilitation: a political economy of medical specialization, 1890-1980
Author: Gritzer, Glenn
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Focusing on the history of one medical field - rehabilitation medicine - this book provides the first systematic analysis of the underlying forces that shape medical specialization, challenging traditional explanations of occupational specialization.
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Title: Marketing the menacing fetus in Japan
Author: Hardacre, Helen 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Religion | Anthropology | Women's Studies | Asian Studies
Publisher's Description: Helen Hardacre provides new insights into the spiritual and cultural dimensions of abortion debates around the world in this careful examination of mizuko kuyo - a Japanese religious ritual for aborted fetuses. Popularized during the 1970s, when religious entrepreneurs published frightening accounts of fetal wrath and spirit attacks, mizuko kuyo offers ritual atonement for women who, sometimes decades previously, chose to have abortions. As she explores the complex issues that surround this practice, Hardacre takes into account the history of Japanese attitudes toward abortion, the development of abortion rituals, the marketing of religion, and the nature of power relations in intercourse, contraception, and abortion.Although abortion in Japan is accepted and legal and was commonly used as birth control in the early postwar period, entrepreneurs used images from fetal photography to mount a surprisingly successful tabloid campaign to promote mizuko kuyo . Enthusiastically adopted by some religionists as an economic strategy, it was soundly rejected by others on doctrinal, humanistic, and feminist grounds.In four field studies in different parts of the country, Helen Hardacre observed contemporary examples of mizuko kuyo as it is practiced in Buddhism, Shinto, and the new religions. She also analyzed historical texts and contemporary personal accounts of abortion by women and their male partners and conducted interviews with practitioners to explore how a commercialized ritual form like mizuko kuyo can be marketed through popular culture and manipulated by the same forces at work in the selling of any commodity. Her conclusions reflect upon the deep current of misogyny and sexism running through these rites and through feto-centric discourse in general.   [brief]
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Title: Reproducing empire: race, sex, science, and U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico
Author: Briggs, Laura 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Ethnic Studies | Medicine | United States History | Women's Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization. Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine colonialism and globalization because for the past century it has been where the United States has expressed and fine-tuned its attitudes toward its own expansionism. Puerto Rico's history holds no simple lessons for present-day debate over globalization but does unearth some of its history. Reproducing Empire suggests that interventionist discourses of rescue, family, and sexuality fueled U.S. imperial projects and organized American colonialism. Through the politics, biology, and medicine of eugenics, prostitution, and birth control, the United States has justified its presence in the territory's politics and society. Briggs makes an innovative contribution to Puerto Rican and U.S. history, effectively arguing that gender has been crucial to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and more broadly, to U.S. expansion elsewhere.   [brief]
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