"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 Lexicon"will interest specialists in anthropology, African
history, obstetrics and gynecology, medical history, religion, and
women's and cultural studies.
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