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AbstractWorld‐wide, diabetes is taking on epidemic proportions. This is a debilitating disease that damages and destroys bodily systems unless blood sugar levels are kept close to normal, and patients are therefore urged to practise attentive self‐management. Among people with type II diabetes in Vietnam, such everyday attentiveness seems to far exceed clinical recommendations, suffusing daily lives in pervasive and yet elusive ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northern Vietnam, this article aims to depict the lifeworlds in which diabetes attentiveness unfolds. Seeking to capture the inchoate ways in which diabetes alters everyday lives, the article develops literary displacement as an experimental mode of writing‐cum‐inquiry that combines standard ethnography with ethnographic fiction. Taking diabetes in Vietnam as its case, the article shows how literary displacement can contribute to cultivating ethnographic as well as analytical sensibilities, strengthening the capacity of anthropology to capture subtle and subdued layers of life.

This article explores the roles played by parents living in Hanoi, Vietnam, in shaping the subjectivities of children who are categorized as physically or intellectually impaired. In an effort to comprehend disability in terms of an active and embodied engagement with the world, I employ a phenomenologically inspired 'intercorporeal' perspective as a conceptual alternative to 'medical' and 'social' models of disability. Through this approach I show how, in northern Vietnam, disability in children brings into question the moral integrity of their parents and how this compels parents to define their children's subjectivities in ways that diminish their personhood. The analysis identifies Buddhist notions of karma, everyday ethics of reciprocity, and party‐state discourses of productivity as particularly important forces structuring such social responses to human impairment.RésuméL'article explore le rôle joué par des parents vivants à Hanoï, au Vietnam, dans la formation de la subjectivité d'enfants considérés comme handicapés physiques ou mentaux. En s'efforçant d'appréhender le handicap en termes d'engagement actif et incarné dans le monde, l'auteure adopte un point de vue « intercorporel », d'inspiration phénoménologique, pouvant constituer une alternative conceptuelle aux modèles « médicaux » et « sociaux » du handicap. Par cette approche, elle montre comment, dans le Nord du Vietnam, le handicap des enfants remet en question l'intégrité morale de leurs parents, et comment il oblige ceux‐ci à définir la subjectivité de leurs enfants d'une manière qui diminue leur valeur en tant que personne. L'analyse identifie les notions bouddhistes de karma, l'éthique quotidienne de la réciprocité et les discours relatifs à la productivité tenus par l'État‐parti comme des forces particulièrement importantes à l'œuvre dans la structuration de ces réponses sociales au handicap humain.

Across the world, routine pregnancy care is expanding to include ultrasound imaging and other prenatal diagnostic technologies. Yet, despite their global proliferation, hardly any anthropological research has examined how such technologies are employed outside Euro‐America. In this article, I investigate how pregnant women in Vietnam's capital, Hanoi, handle the hard choices that ultrasonographies confront them with when a fetal anomaly is detected and a decision must be made to either maintain or terminate the pregnancy. Whereas research conducted in North America, in consonance with the emphasis on individualism in advanced liberal societies, frames prenatal diagnosis in terms of individual "moral pioneering," I show how Vietnamese women turn the choices they have to make into issues of collectivity, kinship, social belonging, and shared responsibility. The general argument advanced is that a comprehensive understanding of individual reproductive actions and intentions necessarily involves close consideration of local configurations of power, subjectivity, and citizenship.

Foreword: The Egg Imaginary -- Preface -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- 1: Introduction: Kinds of Children -- From 'Helping Hand' to 'Guiding Hand' -- Gametes, Embryos, Foetuses -- Tracking Routes of Routinization -- Tracking the Economic and Political Forces Underpinning Routinization -- Conclusion: Ethnographies of SRTs -- Notes -- References -- Sources for Table 1.1 -- Part I: Sex Selection -- 2: Coping with Sex-Selective Abortions in Vietnam: An Ethnographic Study of Selective Reproduction as Emotional Experience -- Sex-Selective Abortion: Women's Emotional Reactions -- The Context of Sex Selection in Vietnam -- Deciding for a Sex-Selective Abortion: Emotional Ambivalence -- Undergoing the Abortion: Physical and Emotional Suffering -- After the Abortion: Silence, Suffering and Spiritual Relief -- Conclusions -- Notes -- References -- 3: The Development of Sex-Selective Reproductive Technologies Within Fertility, Inc. and the Anticipation of Lifestyle Sex Selection -- The Agriculture Industry: The Seedbed of Sex-­Selective Reproductive Technologies -- "A powerful approach to disease prevention": The Transfer to Human Medicine -- Anticipating Lifestyle Sex Selection -- Conclusion -- Notes -- References -- Part II: Preventing Disease and Disability -- 4: Moral Adherers: Pregnant Women Undergoing Routine Prenatal Screening in Denmark -- Prenatal Screening and Selective Abortion in a Danish Context -- Moral Adherers -- When you have the offer, you take it: Collectivized Responsibility of Selection -- Social Imaginaries -- Negotiating Wantedness -- Negotiating Fetal Living -- Conclusion: Structural Directiveness in Danish Antenatal Care -- Notes -- References -- 5: Moral Bearing: The Paradox of Choice, Anxiety and Responsibility in Taiwan

From a historical perspective, selective reproduction is nothing new. Infanticide, abandonment, and selective neglect of children have a long history, and the widespread deployment of sterilization and forced abortion in the twentieth century has been well documented. Yet in recent decades selective reproduction has been placed under the aegis of science and expertise in novel ways. New laboratory and clinical techniques allow for the selective fertilization of gametes, implantation of embryos, or abortion of fetuses. Although they will often overlap with assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), what we term selective reproductive technologies (SRTs) are of a more specific nature: Rather than aiming to overcome infertility, they are used to prevent or allow the birth of certain kinds of children. This review highlights anthropological research into SRTs in different parts of the world, discussing how selective reproduction engages with issues of long-standing theoretical concern in anthropology, such as politics, kinship, gender, religion, globalization, and inequality.

The issue of abortion forces a confrontation with the effects of poverty and economic inequalities, local moral worlds, and the cultural and social perceptions of the female body, gender, and reproduction. Based on extensive original field research, this provocative collection presents case studies from Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and India. It includes powerful insight into the conditions and hard choices faced by women and the circumstances surrounding unplanned pregnancies. It explores the connections among poverty, violence, barriers to access, and the politics and strategies involved in abortion law reform. The contributors analyze these issues within the broader conflicts surrounding women's status, gender roles, religion, nationalism and modernity, as well as the global politics of reproductive health