Moral Figures: Making Reproduction Public in Vanuatu

"With intricate care, Widmer accounts for the problematization of both population decline and growth in Vanuatu. This is the richest of studies on politics and socialities of reproduction, in colonial and postcolonial contexts. A major contribution."

Alison Bashford, author of Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth

"In this incisive, original, and absorbing book, Alexandra Widmer explores the intersecting politics of demography, reproduction, biomedical knowledge, and Indigenous systems of healing in the south-western Pacific. This engaging and important contribution to medical anthropology is based on both fieldwork in Vanuatu, and a careful analysis of the imperial archive, resonating with wider debates about health care, citizenship, globalization, and the enduring legacies of colonialism, as they inform contemporary identities, policies, and practices within the Pacific and beyond."

Gregory Rawlings, Head of the Social Anthropology Programme, University of Otago

"Moral Figures is innovative both in its thematic focus and its methods. Its central aim is to reveal how ‘reproduction’ was made public in Vanuatu – and in so doing, it challenges Eurocentric binary presumptions about public and domestic domains and the importation of models based in advanced capitalist formations to Vanuatu, a Pacific country which is situated on a ‘capitalist frontier’ and where Indigenous forms of relationality and non-commodified life are sustained and celebrated. It is path-breaking in the way that it tells a compelling story that traverses a historical arc between c. 1910 and 2020, and between the scales of an archipelago wide ‘national’ narrative and of a specific place: Pango village on the outskirts of the capital Port Vila, Efate. The author’s central concept of ‘moral figures’ is original and persuasive. More than wordplay on the dual meaning of ‘figures,’ it explores how quantitative ‘figures’ about population (censuses, metrics, indicators) conjugate with ‘figures’ exemplifying particular types of people or situations (an imbalanced sex ratio, nurse-midwives, subsistence, young mothers, well-being). So seemingly ‘raw’ numbers are manufactured and imbued with moral meanings and discursive power."

Margaret Jolly, Professor Emerita, Australian National University