Colonial regimes used social
sciences, like anthropology, to ‘identify’ native ‘mentalities’ and use this
knowledge to improve the design of civilizing missions and development schemes.
This idea of a monolithic
African-ness only got stronger in the newly independent Senegal as Western
technology, coupled with an ‘intrinsic socialist character,’ was used to ‘modernize’
the country. Kusiak shows that in the postcolonial context la radio is ‘mysterious’ and also decidedly not socialist.
Erikson documents the
ideological production of social practices and attitudes surrounding ultrasound
technologies. The global popularity of ultrasound technology isn’t evidence of some
innate human desire to look inside the uterus. It testifies to the success of
colonial projects in spreading Western forms of knowledge practices. Erikson looks
at Germany, which has the highest rates of prenatal ultrasound use in the
world, to show how developments in science, technology, and medicine since the
16th century reconfigured the way people understood and interacted
with the body. Although recent feminist critics of ultrasounds argue that the
technology reduces women to “unskilled reproductive workers” (as discussed in
Taylor), it was really the epistemic shift in the 16th century
birthing arts from “touch as knowing” to “seeing as knowledge” that fundamentally
changed the patient-doctor relationship. The ultrasound is merely an iteration
of the speculum in that it enables the doctor to bypass a pregnant woman’s felt
experiences in accessing a visual representation of the fetus.
“Seeing as knowledge” doesn’t
suffice in Vietnam, where the German story of the ideological production of the
ultrasound technology doesn’t seamlessly map on to indigenous ideologies of
knowledge production. Even though the visual is privileged in Hanoian women’s
relationship to the fetus, it is tempered by nonvisual representations which
circulate in day to day conversations through anecdotes. A fundamentally
different conception of the body as one that is always in flux also renders the
sonographic image provisional. Stability is a dimension to knowledge that we
haven’t discussed yet. The women interviewed by Gammeltoft described the fetus
as being in the process of “becoming,” which contrasts with the images included
in Erikson.
Taylor wants us to think of
pregnant women as ‘consumers’ rather than ‘producers,’ a view that allows for the
pleasures of reproduction to be factored into analysis of pregnancy. The kinds
of consumption discussed make it a US-specific analysis. Practically every
aspect of pregnancy corresponds to a kind of consumption, and this proves to be
a really useful framework for systematically exposing how pregnancy is
experienced through race and class. Ultrasounds both “commoditize” and “singularize”
the fetus in ways that communicate to certain women that their children are
less valued as commodities and less fully human. This obviously requires a
human agent to filter their own prejudices through the ultrasound technology,
which brings us back to the question of who has access to forms of knowledge production.
No comments:
Post a Comment