| This is an ethnographic exploration of care in Uganda, from everyday tending, to bio-bureaucracies, to inter-personal relationships. I focus on traditional birth attendants (TBA's), who are local medical experts carrying significant cultural capital, in order to understand civic care and its entanglements. And I study birthing events and the dynamics of risky responsibility in order to speak to care-based obligations. The practice of the TBA was recently outlawed by government mandate, leaving significant uncertainty for the fate of emergency obstetrics in Ugandan villages, and threatening the authority of local providers. TBA's have been the bridge for health development projects to rural villages and have been a voice for women and a link to global discourse. I investigate health policy and the genealogies of health intercessions in order to translate lived implications of the ban, and I look at the ways in which this ban highlights relational politics of care in Uganda.;I argue that the TBA contributes to informed policy that considers all manner of women's lives and that her practice is based in advocacy. I consider how women's health is compounded by social factors in Uganda, namely through reproductive consequences, and I ask how the TBA's participation in politics can be a form of dispossession for women. I explore women's emotion-rich experiences and I campaign for intimate, relational, and embodied understandings. I platform a humanistic approach and contend that medicine should be interpersonal. I further offer that care is a feminist endeavor that dismantles the supremacy of super-structures of medicine that have instated women's oppression. Through everyday scenes and private spaces, I witness care's mutuality and make the case for harnessing these sentiments in health policy. I consider the implications of connective care in public health as well as ethnography and I champion the idea that international health discourse should obsess with care because it is through care in our considerations of the world that we arrive at reliable interpretations, creative approaches, and nuanced praxes. |
