Extracting Vitalities: Indigenous Women and Reproductive Health
In this presentation, I aim to address and demonstrate how territorial devastation and reproductive injustices are imbricated. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic studies carried out among Indigenous women from lowland South America, I take seriously the understanding of some interlocutors that their bodies are their territories, and their territories are their bodies. I then argue that the Anthropocene is embodied in Indigenous women’s lives through an extractivism of vitalities. Non-consensual episiotomies, caesarian sections and forced sterilisation are, in some way, among the consequences of territorial damage that for centuries has made Indigenous technologies of care — such as knowledge of plants and relationships with spirits and other-than-humans — difficult, even impossible, for some collectives. Therefore, an increased medicalisation of women’s life cycles has been accompanied by the extractivism, devastation and pollution of the Earth’s flesh. I put into conversation what happens across scales: on the one hand, mining activities, deforestation, and water contamination; on the other, bodily compositions that are sometimes made stronger and sometimes weakened by biomedical colonial practices. The weak/strong and hot/cold pairs play an important role in Indigenous cosmopolitics and will drive the conceptualisation of the extracting and composing vitalities framework.
Date: 16 February 2024, 15:15
Venue: 64 Banbury Road, 64 Banbury Road OX2 6PN
Speaker: Maria Laura Prates (University of Oxford)
Organising department: School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography
Part of: Anthropology Departmental Seminar Series: Trinity 2024
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Kate Atherton