although the Catholic Church claims that IVF takes reproduction out of God’s hands, threatens the sanctity of the heterosexual and dyadic marital bond, and murders innocent human life through the destruction of embryos (ratzinger 1987), Ecuadorian IVF practitioners, the vast majority of whom are Catholics, invoked God’s assistance and attributed their successes to his intervention. In a nation that most people, including IVF practitioners and patients, experienced as being in a state of perpetual failure, God’s patronage was considered essential to IVF success

such systems were incredibly expensive in Ecuador, but they prob-ably would have kept the embryos safe and the labs free of the invisible but per-nicious ash

While the premodern West attacked the Muslim world’s alleged sexual licen-tiousness, the modern West attacks its alleged repressionof sexual freedoms.Representations of the Arab world in the discourse of the Gay International,which includes the popular publication Spartacus, an “International Gay Guide,”range from the horrific to the splendid, the latter on account of the availability ofArab men willing to engage in insertive anal intercourse with Western (readwhite) gay men. In the context of an Arab anticolonial nationalism or the morerecent Islamism seeking Western technological modernization while preservingits version of cultural or religious authenticity, the Gay International is correctlyperceived as part of Western encroachment on Arab and Muslim cultures. Thefact that the Gay International relies on the same organizations (e.g., the U.S.State Department, the U.S. Congress, U.S.-based human rights organizations, theAmerican media), practices, and discourse that advance U.S. imperial interests iscertainly a cause for suspicion. This is an issue for not only the Arab world butalso many Muslim countries as well as other national and cultural contexts out-side of Europe and North America.47Faisal Alam, the Pakistani Americanfounder of the Al-Fatiha Foundation, a new U.S.-based organization for gay andlesbian Muslims, tells his Western audience that Islam is “200 years behindChristianity in terms of progress on gay issues.”48Alam, not surprisingly (likeRobert Bray, who was quoted above), is a field associate with the National Gayand Lesbian Task Force in Washington, D.C.

The line between progressives and right- wingers has blurred in this shared concern for Muslim women. Some conservatives accuse American feminists of failing to protest “glaring injus-tices,” including especially the “subjection of women in Muslim societies.”9 They accuse feminist scholars of being so consumed by a toxic anti- Americanism or so obsessed with a patriarchy that prevails everywhere (not to mention being wary of feminin-ity, antifamily, and hostile to traditional religion) that they don’t criticize “heinous practices beyond our shores.

And so, logics of capital as they expand globally exclude certain popula-tions from the therapeutic market but include them as experimental subjects in global pharmaceutical clinical trials (K. Sunder Rajan 2007). These are populations that are incorporated as labor in the process of biomedical value generation, but not as consumers. Hence, the very imagination of trial popu-lations in India is merely as risked experimental subjects, without the im-plicit social contract of therapeutic access at the end of the day. Layered onto these structural logics are the historical conditions that lead to the possibility of the configuration of such merely risked experimental subjectivities in the first place. I have described in earlier work how the kinds of subjects who get recruited into especially early stage clinical trials on healthy volunteers in India are often those who are victims of other kinds of prior dispossession (K. Sunder Rajan 2005, 2007). (Examples include mill workers in Bombay who have lost their jobs because of the evisceration of the textile industry, or, more recently, diamond workers in Surat who are following similar trajecto-ries of de-proletarianization leading to experimental subjectivity)

While this analytical approach isnot without its merits, our present political momentdemands that we don’t simply explain away contradic-tions or search for continuity in these ways—that weinstead explore the depths and reach of contradictionsand the ubiquity of inconsistenc

When she describedher“liberal”friends and neighbors her facial featuresmorphed from light and amicable to aggrieved and vin-dictive; I could see her disdain for these people’srigh-teousness in the stone-cold V that suddenly refiguredher brow

as Harding (1991) argues, the“us”and“them”frame-work for social inquiry fails to account for the diversityof actors whose politics can’t be neatly situated in a binaryspectrum of political ideology, can we abdicate this heu-ristic while also learning from those who don’tshareourpolitics

Hoberman’s fi ndings— that the literature has largely denied the possi-bility that physician racism may contribute to health disparities— hold true in the reports of racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality.

Th e patient was counseled that if she desired to intervene for the sake of twin B, that intervention should be via immediate cesarean delivery. If she did not desire to intervene for the sake of allowing twin A to have more time to grow in utero, that was an acceptable alternative, but that likely twin B would not survive until a time when twin A could safely deliver.”

Well, if I would have known this way before, I could have gave you the shot and you could have gotten rid of that one.

But, he quickly changed his tune and reassured her that he would be a presence in all of her children’s lives.

)ey don’t want to listen to you if you keep talking about tradi-tion and culture.

routinely uses his own clinical cases—or rather “clinical miracles”—to illustrate medical concepts and methods.

To his horror, however, instead of the herbal tea and acupunc-ture needles that he had expected he was given antibiotics through intra-venous injection.)us the various con(gurations of the marginality of traditional Chi-nese medicine suggest that as scientism mediates the professionalization and transformation of Chinese medicine into a sensational, transnational phenomenon, it also rede(nes and even reduces the repertoire of tradi-tional Chinese therapies.

He was able to help many patients who would have otherwise given up. He did so much to build the Chinese medicine community in San Francisco and to educate the general public! Dr. Zhao was very special.”

ey want to maximize prescriptions byex-panding the market of those at risk, defining clinical trials as broadly as possible, and persuading us that all risks are, in fact, conditions that must be treated now with drugs

At the time I could not believe myears. I was astonished at howeasily he pronounced these phrases, how natural he found it that clinical trials could seriously suggest that everyadult be put on lifelong statins.17 Each part of his comment assumed a world in which biomedical facts in the form of trials set thresholds forasymptomatic biomarkers like choles-terol oreven age that obligated preventive pharmaceutical treatment. This meant that almost all of these average Americans would not feel ill orexperience any symptoms, and most of them would not even suffer a heart attack.They would knowonly that they were ill orat risk when they were tested and found out they had a score below the threshold for health as defined by the clinical trial.Or they would find out that being over thirty meant they were nowat high risk. And why thirty? I’m over thirty, why wasn’t I on a statin? Shouldn’t I know mycholesterol score at least?When I speak of this encounter with otherdoctors, I am told overand over that this is how things are. But even theyare a bit disturbed when we start to work out the implications of this view of facts.First, illness is not felt, and there are no symptoms that drive a per-son to the doctor. Instead, as we’ll see in the next chapter, some sort of screening test determines whetheror not that person has crossed a line and needs to be treated.The line measures not a state of illness or ill health, but a state of risk as well as a treatment that would ideally re-duce that risk. It is ambiguous whether the person who should be on the cholesterol- lowering drug is ill, but it is clear that it would be healthier to be on the drug because it would reduce the risk of getting heart disease in the future.The historian Robert Aronowitz called this the preventive revolution: if a health risk can be reduced, it should be.18 Health is thus not exactlya state one is in but a relative category: you would be healthier if you were on the drug, especially if you are over thirty.

or that a food we like is nowcarcinogenic

our health is so insecure, whyare such jokes like the ones men-tioned above funny

icture of health” but yet warn, “You might look and feel fine, but you need to get the inside story” (fig. 1).

One specific instance that I treat in the following pages, the relations of shantytown women toward some of their small babies, is troubling. It disturbs. One wonders, following Martin Buber, whether there are extraor­dinary situations that not only signal a kind of moral collapse but that actually warrant a "suspension of the ethical" (1952: 147-156)

Meanwhile, Va ldimar slowly and patiently dug outside, and on hitting a rock, he stopped to call out, "Is it here yet?" The old women, in a semicircle around the fire and bent over a faintly squawking chicken, laughed and called back, "Stop digging, Valdimar. She's only a small woman, you know."

Mothers are sometimes portrayed as larger than life, as all-powerful, and sometimes as all-destructive. Or mothers are represented as power­less, helplessly dependent, and angelic. Historians, anthropologists, philoso­phers, and the "public" at large are influenced by old cultural myths and stereotypes about childhood innocence and maternal affection as well as their opposites. The "terrible" power attributed to mothers is based on the perception that the infant cannot survive for very long without considerable nurturing love and care, and normally that has been the responsibility of mothers. The infant's life is a vulnerable thing and depends to a great extent on the mother's good will. Sara Ruddick (1989: 34-38) has captured the contradictions well in noting that mothers, while so totally in control of the lives and well-being of their infants and small babies, are themselves under the dominion and control of others, usually of men. Simultaneously power­ful and powerless, it is no wonder that artists, scholars, and psychoanalysts can never seem to agree whether "mother" was the primary agent or the primary victim of various domestic tragedies. And so myths of a savagely protective "maternal instinct" compete at various times and places with the myth of the equally powerful, devouring, "infanticidal" mother.

The subject of my study is love and death on the Alto do Cruzeiro, specifically mother love and child death. It is about the meanings and effects of deprivation, loss, and abandonment on the ability to love, nurture, trust, and have and keep faith in the broadest senses of these terms.

The guiding philosophy of modern anthropology is cultural relativism—the idea that we should seek to understand another person’s beliefs and behaviors from the perspective of their culture rather than our own. Anthropologists do not judge other cultures based on their values nor view other cultural ways of doing things as inferior. Instead, anthropologists seek to understand people’s beliefs within the system they have for explaining things. Cultural relativism is an important methodological consideration when conducting research. In the field, anthropologists must temporarily suspend their own value, moral, and esthetic judgments and seek to understand and respect the values, morals, and esthetics of the other culture on their terms. This can be a challenging task, particularly when a culture is significantly different from the one in which they were raised.