Africa at Noon: STORIES OF EMBODIMENT: CONSIDERING CASE NARRATIVES ABOUT MATERNAL DEATH IN MALAW

Claire Wendland

Professor, UW- Madison

Roughly one in twenty Malawian women can expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication. In the absence of a generally accepted explanation, stories of causality proliferate among a range of practitioners: traditional birth attendants, doctors, herbalists, nurse-midwives. These experts’ stories circulate through hospitals and villages. My book in progress, Partial Stories: Maternal Death in a Changing African World draws on extended fieldwork to retrieve these explanatory narratives. Such stories disappear from the aggregate data of epidemiology but do powerful work in communities. Attention to them illuminates the dilemmas of reproductive choices and medical care in a context of scarcity, and raises questions about key dogmas of global public health. The chapter to be discussed draws on case reports to describe bodies as biosocial phenomena shaped from before birth by history and social inequality. Vulnerability and resilience manifest at socio-spatial scales from the molecular to the global, with cells and organs, neighborhoods and nations in between. The close investigation of a single death reveals these scales, and the power and limitations of medical ways of understanding them.