A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo

by Nancy Rose Hunt

Overview

A Colonial Lexicon is the first historical investigation of how childbirth became medicalized in Africa. Rejecting the "colonial encounter" paradigm pervasive in current studies, Nancy Rose Hunt elegantly weaves together stories about autopsies and bicycles, obstetric surgery and male initiation, to reveal how concerns about strange new objects and procedures fashioned the hybrid social world of colonialism and its aftermath in Mobutu's Zaire.
Relying on archival research in England and Belgium, as well as fieldwork in the Congo, Hunt reconstructs an ethnographic history of a remote British Baptist mission struggling to survive under the successive regimes of King Leopold II's Congo Free State, the hyper-hygienic, pronatalist Belgian Congo, and Mobutu's Zaire. After exploring the roots of social reproduction in rituals of manhood, she shows how the arrival of the fast and modern ushered in novel productions of gender, seen equally in the forced labor of road construction and the medicalization of childbirth. Hunt focuses on a specifically interwar modernity, where the speed of airplanes and bicycles correlated with a new, mobile medicine aimed at curbing epidemics and enumerating colonial subjects. Fascinating stories about imperial masculinities, Christmas rituals, evangelical humor, colonial terror, and European cannibalism demonstrate that everyday life in the mission, on plantations, and under a strongly Catholic colonial state was never quite what it seemed. In a world where everyone was living in translation, privileged access to new objects and technologies allowed a class of "colonial middle figures"-particularly teachers, nurses, and midwives-to mediate the evolving hybridity of Congolese society. Successfully blurring conventional distinctions between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial situations, Hunt moves on to discuss the unexpected presence of colonial fragments in the vibrant world of today's postcolonial Africa.
With its close attention to semiotics as well as sociology, A Colonial Lexiconwill interest specialists in anthropology, African history, obstetrics and gynecology, medical history, religion, and women's and cultural studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822323662
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/15/1999
Series:	Body, Commodity, Text Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	498
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.00(d)
Lexile:	1380L (what's this?)

About the Author

Nancy Rose Hunt is Assistant Professor of History and Obstetrics/Gynecology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a coeditor of Gendered Colonialisms in African History.

Table of Contents

Illustrations

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Crocodiles and Wealth

2 Doctors and Airplanes

3 Dining and Surgery

4 Nurses and Bicycles

5 Babies and Forceps

6 Colonial Maternities

7 Debris

Departures

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

" 'Birth' is more than the begetting of children and Nancy Rose Hunt's 'colonial lexicon' is much more than a history of medicalized childbearing in the formerly Belgian Congo in colonial and post-colonial times. . . . With erudition and wit Hunt challenges conventional models--be they feminist, obstetric, colonial, missionary, or health-bureaucratic--about what it means to medicalize childbearing."--Barbara Duden, Universität Hannover

"A highly original study. This book links medical work with maternity work in the context of arguments about gender relations and about feminist perspectives on writing history."--Gillian Feeley-Harnik, author of A Green Estate: Restoring Independence in Madagascar

From the Publisher