Description
Book SynopsisBarbara M. Cooper sets out to understand childbirth in Niger, a country with the world's highest fertility rate and an alarmingly high rate of maternal and infant mortality.
Trade ReviewCountless Blessings shows how women in Niger and in West Africa have long navigated the various states of social value, personhood, spirituality, and childbirth, and it paints a remarkable picture of how contested and embodied the social and material concerns of childbirth remain for women today.
-- Ampson Hagan, Univeristy of North Carolina-Chapel Hill * IJAHS *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Glossary of ethnonyms, acronyms and foreign terms
Introduction
1. Environment, Seduction and Fertility
2. Tensions in the Wake of Conquest: Gender and Reproduction after Abolition
3. Personhood, Socialization and Shame
4. Colonial Accounting
5. Perils of Pregnancy and Childbirth
6. Producing Healthy Babies and Healthy Laborers
7. Feminists, Islamists and Demographers
8. Let's talk about Bastards
9. Contemporary Sexuality and Childbirth
Conclusion: Traveling Companions and Entrustments in Contemporary Niger
Works Cited
Index
