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"This deeply moving and path-breaking ethnography takes us to the social crossroads of global medicine in post-war Vietnam. Here struggles over belonging and value are part and parcel of haunting histories of loss and become the very fabric of visceral conceptual work.” —João Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
"In this beautifully crafted ethnography of intense pregnancy sonograms, Tine Gammeltoft reveals screen fetuses that stand at complex historical and cultural intersections. At once biological and cosmological, their haunting images are constructed where public health commitments, gendered and kinship decision-making, religious traditions, and the half-life of Agent Orange all meet. This is the first full-length study of sonography in a developing-nation context and a must-read for anyone who wants to know what lies beyond individual 'choice' in the use of a selective reproductive technology." —Rayna Rapp, Professor of Anthropology, New York University
"This is a luminous, compassionate book about complex moral dilemmas facing Vietnamese women and families who receive a diagnosis of fetal abnormality late in pregnancy. Reading this book was a powerful, humbling experience. Gammeltoft courageously shows us that there are other perspectives that must be considered, reminding us in this age of neoliberal subject-making that parents-to-be are also charged with fulfilling genealogical, spiritual, and national responsibilities. Belonging and longing are linked in this narrative, as people yearn for futures (and pasts) other than those they receive."—Lynn M. Morgan, Mount Holyoke College, author of Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos (University of California Press, 2009).
"Haunting Images focuses on difficult moral decisions, on questions of belonging and on what constitutes a human being. Gammeltoft brings us a nuanced understanding of the lived texture of life in Vietnam today. This ethnography is delicate, sensitive, loving, and complex, faithful to the tone of the people and the place and to the ambiguities of life. The issues raised in Vietnam confront us all."—Diane Fox, Senior Lecturer of Anthropology and Vietnamese Studies, College of the Holy Cross
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Haunting Decisions
Introduction: Choice as Belonging
1. Sonographic Imaging and Selective Reproduction in Hanoi
2. A Collectivizing Biopolitics
3. Precarious Maternal Belonging
4. “Like a Loving Mother”: Moral Engagements in Medical Worlds
5. “How Have We Lived?” Accounting for Reproductive Misfortune
6. Beyond Knowledge: Everyday Encounters with Disability
7. Questions of Conscience
Conclusion: Toward an Anthropology of Belonging
Appendix: Core Cases
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Tine M. Gammeltoft is Professor of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. She is on the Editorial Advisory Board for the journal Reproductive Health Matters.
Summary
Based on years of careful ethnographic fieldwork in Hanoi, this book offers an account of the moral quandaries that accompany innovations in biomedical technology. Arguing for more sustained anthropological attention to human quests for belonging, it addresses existential questions of love and loss that concern us all.
Additional text
"Beautifully written . . . a must read."
