Not Found in Tibetan Society : Culture, Childbirth, and a Politics of Life on the Roof of the World

This article explores the work of culture and politics in the context of health-development interventions. Specifically, I discuss a maternal-child health project that was conceived and executed in the Tibet Autonomous Region, China, and the place of engaged medical anthropology therein. This work takes inspiration from Pigg\u27s (1997) insights about the ways health-development programs can adopt specific interpretive lenses that create categories of being and experience such as Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs). This article illustrates the ways such categories circulate to serve the needs of governmental and non-governmental organizations, and, in the process, how they run the risk of essentializing culture or eliding the complex realities in which people live. Yet this article also argues that such elision is neither a given nor one-sided. Rather, such programs are enmeshed within a realpolitik in places such as Tibet where the trope of “culture” is both problematic and deeply influential, and where demographics (including maternal and infant mortality statistics) are politicized in particular ways. The article argues that far from being “anti-political,” (Ferguson 1994) such health development efforts are domains in which a “politics of life” (Fassin 2007) inheres. Even so, such efforts can be successful, and can help to nuance and ground the ephemeral yet powerful concepts of structural violence and social suffering

It Takes More than a Village: Building a Network of Safety in Nepal's Mountain Communities.

Purpose This report from the field details the ways that one small maternal child health NGO, which began its work in Tibet and now works in the mountain communities of Nepal, has established a model for integrated healthcare delivery and support it calls the "network of safety." Description It discusses some of the challenges faced both by the NGO and by the rural mountain communities with whom it partners, as well as with the government of Nepal. Conclusion This report describes and analyzes successful efforts to reduce maternal and infant mortality in a culturally astute, durable, and integrated way, as well as examples of innovation and success experienced by enacting the network of safety model