wamena story in research

Baliem valley

Among the Baliem valley Dani of the central highlands of Irian Jaya, Indonesia, infants play a prominent role in social relations. Infant mortality rates among the Dani are above two hundred and fifty deaths per one thousand live births, and birth rates are low. To these patterns of infant survival and growth the Dani consistently ascribe complex meaning. Drawing from anthropological research conducted in 1994-1995 in the Baliem valley, this dissertation demonstrates that indigenous meanings about the infant body and assessments of infant health link the infant to political relations within polygynous families, to antagonistic gender relations, and to affiliations with powerful ancestor spirits. Gender relations play a prominent role in explanations about infants, particularly for infant death. A study of sex ratios during the first year of life and biased use of health services by gender of the infant suggest the Dani may generate and validate cultural patterns of gender difference during the earliest months of life.
Infants also play a prominent role in national politics. In Indonesia’s attempts to assimilate indigenous peoples into the country’s economic development agenda, the infant appears in health promotions as a member of a contrived ideal family. These national cultural models, grounded in a concern with population control, translate into an applied health agenda for infants that has little impact on the mortality rates of the very young in Dani society.
The infant is a powerful figure at the central of many social and political relations. The richness of meaning attributed to infants in the Baliem valley suggests that further research is needed to correct lacunae in anthropology about one of life’s key social figures.

Situating the Political Infant: Body, Society, Nation

Infants are social beings. If they are to survive in low technology societies, infants must be involved in some form of interaction with people from the moment of their birth. This simple fact of life places infants squarely in the center of concerns about kin, reproduction, and other social and political relations. At the same time, their diminutive size, their development potential, and their inherent humanness make babies potentially “good to think” with, both for anthropologists and for people in the societies anthropologists study. The infant embodies the capacity to condense meaning, especially meaning associated with life and the regeneration of perceived ideas about the social order. The infant’s material presence as the smallest, weakest, and most dependent person in a society makes her a potent arena for constructing images and symbols that simultaneously intersect with the sociopolitical world in which she1 lives. The social life of the infant and the political implications of her pivotal role are the topics of this dissertation.
Infants have received little attention from anthropologists. And yet, infants are fascinating because they are both shaped by culture and bounded by biological regularities of growth. As Malinowski (1930) noted, the introduction of an infant into a social space after birth is a universal social phenomenon. Yet, while the act of copulation that leads to birth by no means elicits universal responses, the birth itself is also an event mediated by cultural processes. Not every woman embraces a man; not every woman, nor every man, has a child. Not every person who wants to can have a child. Not every
1When describing infants, I use the female and male pronoun alternately throughout the discussion.
woman survives childbirth, and many children do not live to walk and talk. Not every woman who has a child chooses to nurture her. Abortion, infanticide, adoption, kidnapping, abandonment, and selective neglect are all acts that people can engage in to sever relations between infant and caregiver. The child that survives does not necessarily grow or thrive in consistent ways. Thus, coitus and its outcomes are shaped by a myriad of cultural, environmental, physiological, and political factors.
Life-cycle moments that precede and follow infancy have been well-studied. Fast becoming a truism within anthropological thought is the notion that reproduction matters to those who seek to control power. Controlling reproduction allows elders, kin, mothers, fathers, politicians, and policy makers to attempt to regulate and normalize a highly variable process (Ginsburg & Rapp 1995; Bledsoe 1990, 1995; Yanagisako & Collier 1987). Anthropologists have examined issues of power and knowledge in the arena of reproduction (Ginsburg and Rapp 1991, 1995; Greenhalgh 1995; Handwerker 1990; Anagnost 1995) and during childhood (Bledsoe 1993, 1990; Toren 1993; Stephens 1995). I posit that similar issues pervade the arena of infancy as well. The variability within the act of producing a child thus offers a space of potentially contested meanings wherein the material child, beliefs about her provenance, her social role, and her relations to others are components of a locally negotiated and debated process. By recognizing the importance of variation in infant life–as opposed to the seeming biological similarities of birth, growth, and development–infants can begin to be understood not merely as beings needing nurturing who fit into preexisting familial structures but as persons with power, although not necessarily power of the kind associated with social actors.
This dissertation takes as a central point of departure the relations of power and knowledge during the “transitional period” between birth and childhood (Mead & Newton cited in Ginsburg and Rapp 1991). I argue that infants are vitally important people, and the way we can know this is to observe the myriad of ways in which adults–caretakers, parents, kin, political leaders–seek to control meanings about them. In the
central body of this thesis, I document how cultural constructions of physiology, gender, and strength refract through the infant in ways that increase the legitimacy and power of those who surround her. This dissertation explores two broad aspects of social relations during the “transitional period” of infancy–from birth to the 18 month-old walking, talking child. First, I explore ways that people attribute qualities onto an infant. By this I mean the search for corporeal regularities onto which people ascribe social meaning–the presence of the umbilical cord, the eyes that look just like her father’s, and the presence of all five fingers and toes. Second, I scrutinize in detail relations that are ongoing around the infant, and ways that people use the infant for purposes only tangentially related to the child, ascribing meaning and legitimating political realities through the baby. Among the Dani of Irian Jaya, for example, the father delights in his new boy child partly because of the leadership potential this new child offers him; kin bring food so that the child will thrive and help strengthen the lineage; and a sick child is interpreted as conveying a message from angry clan ancestors. Caregivers and kin make use of the infant for purposes only tangentially related to her. In both arenas, the body of the infant plays a central role in interpretations.
Knowledge about the infant cannot be divorced from the body of the infant, and the body of the infant cannot be understood free of cultural interpretations. Infants are part of the life cycle and growth is central to their role in it. However, large variations exist in whether and how infants grow across cultures. To understand meanings that social groups might hold about their offspring we need to look to local patterns of survival and growth, to what Lock terms the “local biologies” of infancy (Lock 1993b; 1993c). Meanings and practices shape these “local biologies”; however, it is vital to look at the intricate, innumerable, and often indivisible ways that the two intersect. In particular, this dissertation discusses ways in which the infant body shapes and is shaped by cultural constructions of personhood, gender, and relations of inequality.
A place ideally suited to explore the richness of infant social life is one where, first, infants command a great deal of attention; second, where people look to the body as a key symbolic and social resource; and third, where people have a sophisticated understanding of political relations. The Baliem valley in the central highlands region of Irian Jaya, Indonesia is one such place. Dani are the indigenous inhabitants of the large, fertile valley, and they, as well as the complex political world they live in, are the object of this study. First, the Dani have a focused and sophisticated interest in their young infants because women have low total fertility rates of less than two live children per woman (Peters & Aso-Lokobal 1991). Women also have children only once every five to seven years, and they suffer very high infant mortality rates of approximately 280 deaths per 1,000 live births. Thus, the combination of low fertility and high mortality makes infants an object of almost obsessive, analytical attention by Dani adults (Poole 1985; Knauft 1993, 1985). Second, the Dani are classified by most anthropologists as Melanesian,2 and particularly in south and central New Guinea, Melanesian cultural groups display some of the most complicated, symbolic, violent, and sophisticated sets of bodily practices recorded in the world (e.g. Knauft 1989; Meigs 1984; Gillison 1993; Herdt 1984a). Third, the Dani have a long and complex history of warfare among themselves, fighting for retribution, for theft of women, for theft of pigs, and for control over territory. Men are exceedingly ambitious; they once had to earn status formerly through displays of warrior prowess and even now must earn it through intelligence in exchange, tact, and diplomacy (Heider 1970; Widjojo 1995). The Baliem valley Dani have also become members of the Indonesian nation-state and have since the 1960s engaged in sporadic overt and covert battles with Indonesian military and administrative officials (Gietzelt 1989; Osborne 1985). Ethnic and economic differences sustain
2Melanesia is a culture area term used by anthropologists to describe peoples of similar racial features that lie between the island of New Guinea to the west, and New Caledonia and Fiji to the east. The term is problematic, as are the boundaries of inclusion or exclusion (see Thomas 1989).
antagonisms in the present day despite formal pacification in 1977, and the Dani must engage their considerable political skills to retain a tangible cultural presence in the valley. Thus I examine details of each of the spheres listed above as well as their interconnections to show that the infant holds a prominent social role in the Baliem valley and is, at every moment, a key member of society in a complex field of political relations.
The Place
Irian Jaya is the easternmost province of Indonesia, and the Baliem valley is the largest flat valley space in the centre of the mountain range that runs the length of the island of New Guinea (see Figure 1). Portrayed as “the last place on earth” by journalists and immortalized in first year anthropology textbooks through the work of Karl Heider (1988) and through Gardner’s film Dead Birds (1964), the Baliem valley is accessible only by air or by arduous foot journey and remains exceptionally isolated from modernist ideologies and commodity markets. About one million indigenous inhabitants live in the province in mostly arduous living conditions–in dense jungle, on top of 300 kilometer-wide swamps, and on the side of jagged limestone mountains. People build gardens and cultivate taro, sago, and sweet potato. But Irian Jaya is also part of Indonesia, and Indonesians have been relocating to the province, through transmigration programmes and through individual initiative, with such alacrity that the indigenous population has recently become a minority on the land. Several medium-sized towns lie on the coast, and Freeport-McMoran operates one of the world’s largest gold mines in Tembagapura, in the middle of the province. However, roads cover only minute sections of the coastline of the province, and, in the mountainous region in the center of the province, population density remains about 3 persons per square kilometre (see Figure 1). The only administrative center of any note in these central highlands and the relocation choice of “newcomer” Indonesians [pendatang] is the Baliem valley, the field site for my dissertation research.
The most memorable airplane ride I took during my fieldwork in Irian Jaya, from July 1994 to July 1995, was not the mission plane ride to a remote post, where the missionary pilot had to maneuver the plane around jagged-tooth limestone mountains, and then nose dive through a pass so as to land on the only piece of flat land visible for miles. No, the most memorable trip was the hour-long flight I took from Jayapura, the capital on the north coast, to the Baliem valley in the middle of the island, some 350 miles away. The Fokker plane, operated by a commercial line, flies to Wamena twice a day only when the weather is good and in the rainy season often does not fly at all. Thus there are always more people who want to board than there are seats. Tourists and travelers usually get first pick whether they hold reservations or not, and indigenous people get to wait. On this particular flight, the third of the day, the tourists and Indonesians had all been accommodated on previous flights, and only indigenous Irianese and I remained to board the twin otter. The weather was good when we lifted off, but as we crossed the vast swampy jungle that covers about fifty miles of flat land outside of Jayapura on our way south, fellow passengers and I noticed that we were flying lower than normal. As the mountains of the central range can often disappear in clouds and reappear quite suddenly, we fretted amongst ourselves that the pilot might not get high enough to wind through the twists and turns of Pass valley, the only route into the Baliem valley that does not exceed the 10,000 foot ceiling imposed on small aircraft. We snaked through Pass valley, seeing the trees disconcertingly close below. As the plane lurched from side to side, everyone around me began to move their lips, either in prayer or in more general supplications. We all knew that the lip of the valley lay just ahead and even in larger airplanes the rocky pass was always too close for comfort because the plane had to pass over an arc of rock bordered on both sides by jagged peaks. That day, we literally scraped through the opening and sailed in over the Baliem valley which, as usual, was obscured by clouds.
The descent was equally frightening, as the pilot jerkily began to reduce altitude as soon as he passed through the narrow alleyway of rocks. As we grew closer we could see the terraced gardens below, symmetrical rectangles that follow the curve of the rivers, broken up here and there by forest and groves of banana trees that protected Dani homesteads. As we approached the town of Wamena and crossed the smooth, wide Baliem river we also saw the grid of right-angle roads, the tin roofs, the army barracks, the hospital, the homes of the wealthy, and the shacks of indigenous migrants that makes up Wamena. Every one of us thought we would not pull down on to the runway in time as we seemed to be going much too fast, and, since the mountains loom fast at the other end of the runway, we wondered whether we would get a second chance at landing. Fatal airplane accidents are part of the lore of Irian Jaya–was it to be our turn? All of a sudden the pilot jerked the plane downward, aimed for the runway, pulled up the nose just in time and landed much too fast, bounced to a slow stop, much too far past the end of the runway. We all took a deep breath and started to laugh at each other nervously as the co-pilot screamed in rage, reached across his seat, and gave the pilot a large, noisy smack in the face. We had been the guinea pigs, the second-rate passengers of the “indigenous flight” and suitable cargo for the training of first-time airline pilots!
The valley is long enough, at about 55 kilometers, although just barely, to accommodate a runway for full-sized Fokker airplanes as well as the Indonesian military transport plane, the Hercules. The mission air service, Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) also operates a large base out of Wamena for its many Cessnas. All of these planes have been bringing in cargo from Jayapura regularly since the 1970s, including cars, motorcycles, and satellite dishes as well as plastic pails, cooking pots, cigarettes, and jeans. Cement has been brought in to build two high schools, a nursing school, a hospital, homes, and offices. A dozen large yellow noisy dump trucks carried in by the military airplane careen about the small town, carrying rocks from river beds for building foundations or crushed gravel and sand for fixing roads continually washed out by
landslide. The mission planes carry in pigs, cargo, and the occasional hospital-bound patient from other parts of the highlands. Mostly, however, the planes bring in people: Indonesians who have moved to Wamena from other parts of the country, administrators assigned to the valley, tourists, and Indonesian military staff and police to occupy the Wamena barracks and to patrol all the small posts that dot the mountainside. A small crowd always waits at the airport: women wearing traditional netbags on their heads and modern cotton skirts purchased at the market, waiting perhaps for a brother who left for Jayapura weeks ago; immaculately clean and well-dressed Indonesians waiting for their provincial supervisor to show up, or for their family to join them for several months; and young Dani boys driving decrepit three-wheeled buggies, baggage carriers, and guides, all waiting in hopes of helping out a tourist for a small wage. In almost the dead center of the valley, the once microscopic Dutch colonial post of Wamena has grown into the administrative center for the kabupaten of Jayawijaya (Jayawijaya mayoralty district) and has become a town that, at approximately 15,000 residents, has the dubious status of being the largest urban centre in the world that is accessible only by air.
People of the Valley
The Baliem valley Dani are the indigenous inhabitants of the Baliem valley3. They were called Lani or Dani by a neighbouring clan, the Western Dani, meaning to them people of the valley. The Dani say “people of the Baliem” when speaking of themselves as a group, and they use their alliance name when speaking of themselves as individuals. Following current bureaucratic and scholarly trends, I use the name Dani or
3The valley is called the “Balim” or the “Baliem” depending on the source and the speaker. In the 1950s, indigenous people used the term “Balim” and many still do so; however, many also use the term “Baliem” as I do which is both official and the term most commonly used.
Baliem valley Dani to describe the linguistically distinct group of some 54,500 people that inhabit the fertile Baliem valley.4
The Dani identify themselves through their clans, but clans always affiliate with other clans in small or large alliances which serve primarily political purposes. According to Peters (1975), each clan contains several patrilineages, where people trace their lineage to a single ancestor in a shallow genealogy. Clans are grouped into moieties, and marriage takes place between the two moieties, called Weta and Waya. Exogamous moieties means that a man who seeks a wife cannot consider fully half the female population as a potential partner, a formidable restriction.
Like all New Guinea highland groups that inhabit fertile valley zones, the Dani are skilled horticulturists and grow mostly sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) in symmetrical, terraced, raised garden beds on land either inherited or cleared. The Dani also raise pigs, and these domesticated animals serve key roles in virtually every Dani ritual ceremony or public event. Despite the influence of the Catholic church on the valley floor and Protestant proselytizing in the surrounding hills, the majority of Dani men and women support polygyny although not all are in a position to be able to practice it. In the past, warfare played a key role in social organization and continues to shape symbolic understandings of social life (Heider 1970; Widjojo 1995; Aso-Lokobal n.d.b). Today, sets of smooth oblong stones about 30 cm long are used in rituals as a direct symbolic substitute for dead warriors, and men assiduously follow patterns of rituals involving ancestors, pigs, and extensive ceremonies in order to ensure that deceased ancestors do not wreak havoc in everyday lives.
Men trade pigs, sweet potatoes, and women in efforts to create complex political alliances that will enhance their power and prestige. Men who attain prominent status, through achievement rather than ascription, have been labeled Big Men in the
4 This number culls estimates from a range of sources. Unfortunately, no means to calculate tribal identity through official means exists, as censuses do not collect data on ethnicity (see Chapter 8 for a full treatment of this issue).

anthropological literature, although this term and its application to the Dani case recently have been questioned (Godelier and Strathern 1991; Ploeg 1994, 1996)5. The system of bridewealth in the Baliem valley, in which a man pays out several pigs in exchange for a woman, is intricately linked to other rituals designed to strengthen the Dani and their alliances.
Women’s status, on the other hand, derives from her garden work, her lineage, her marriage partner, her children, and the extent to which she conforms to expectations of a “good wife” (see chapter 3). Women may not act or feel subservient, but they do not hold political power and thus their achievements are limited by local beliefs and practices about gender (Strathern 1972; O’Brien 1969a). About 60% of men are polygynous, and of those the majority have two or three wives although in each region and in each alliance, men of prominence sometimes have more than a dozen wives. Relations among women in the households that men set up for their wives can be fractious, and women do not always conform to the passive role that men, engaged in their rituals of marriage exchange, might seek in a wife. Notably, women run away from marriages if they are unhappy. If they have children or if the brideprice has already been paid, the politics of repayment can become very complicated (Glasse and Meggitt 1969).
As this brief summary suggests, themes of war, exchange, gender relations, and production are prominent features of social life that have arisen in descriptions of the Dani, most of which were produced from data gathered in the 1960s. One anthropologist (Heider 1970, 1988), a film maker and a novelist (Gardner 1964 and Mathiessen 1962),
5 Over the past 30 years, Sahlins’ formulation of “big man” societies has held considerable weight as a way of describing patterns of Melanesian and more specifically Highlands leadership (for the Dani see Heider 1970; Peters 1975; Shankman 1991; Knauft 1992; Widjojo et al. 1993). “Big man” societies, according to Sahlins’ formulation, operate on relations of non-equivalence and competitive exchange: that is, a bride is exchanged for bridewealth, and a war death can be compensated for with the payment of blood money (Sahlins 1963). This applies to the Dani in the most general sense. However, Godelier (1986; Godelier and Strathern 1991) has proposed a modification of this formula to accommodate a different form of leader in the Highlands, “great man” societies. “Great man” societies operate on relations of equivalence: a bride for a bride, a death for a death. Public life turns on male initiation rather than ceremonial exchange. Ploeg (1996) has shown how both terms apply to Western and Baliem valley Dani leadership, and his critique suggests the analytic utility of these terms is limited.
two indigenous students (Wetapo 1981; Aso-Lokobal 1992, n.d.), and three missionaries (Peters 1975; Hayward 1980; Hitt 1962) have filmed or described the Baliem valley Dani, and there is merit in recognizing the consistency and constancy of certain features of social life. However, there is also danger in oversimplifying these patterns, and in allowing them to dominate vision and understanding when numerous exceptions to every one of the above statements can be made, exceptions that provide nuance and texture to cultural practice. In an example explored in detail in this dissertation, these scholars explored male dominance of politics and leadership without considering in any detail either aspects of women’s lives that play into power relations or the complexity of women’s strategies and actions which impact on men’s symbolic practice.
The bias in research that looks at Dani men’s worlds rather than women’s can be extended to the child’s world as well: the very young are aligned with women and essentially left out of descriptive data.6 Yet, all research indicates that reproduction is a key component of Dani social life. The opportunity to reproduce and to participate in sexual activities engage the interests of Dani adults (van der Pavert 1986; pace Heider 1992, 1976). Without exception, however, the results of reproduction have been relegated to a small slot alongside women, to the “cookhouse,” the space for women and their babies, and to rote rituals of socialization–boys playing at war, girls playing at childrearing (Heider 1970; Gardner & Heider 1968).
In some sense, acknowledging the Indonesian presence in the valley brings the infant to the fore because national policies on reproduction have been developed that shape everyday experience. National political events and objectives have dictated a strong emphasis in contemporary Indonesia on controlling reproduction. The relationship between Indonesia and Irianese began in 1962. The Dutch were forced to relinquish Irian Jaya (called West Irian at the time), their last colonial holding to the Indonesians who
6But see Gillison 1993 or Jorgensen 1983a for an example of the way children can be written into ethnographic studies of highlands Papua New Guinea.
fully expected to inherit it (Anderson 1987). For the indigenous Irianese, the decade-long transition from colony to Indonesian province was problematic for many leaders, particularly those on the coast who had been coached by the Dutch to expect self-government (Osborne 1985). Attempts to obtain self-rule have dominated the politics of Irian Jaya since then, and the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM or Free Papua Movement) has warred consistently with Indonesian military using guerrilla tactics that continue today (see Osborne 1985; May 1978; Tapol 1996). Although estimates of the fallout of the war between the OPM and the Indonesian military vary widely, one author argues that as many as 150,000 Irianese may have been killed in skirmishes from the 1960s to the mid 1980s (Gault-Williams 1987).
Wamena had been a Dutch administrative post and the Baliem valley remained the highlands administrative center after Irian Jaya formally became part of Indonesia in 1969. In the Baliem valley, several small fights broke out between the Dani and the military in the early 1970s, resulting in an unknown number of deaths. According to valley elders and to journalistic accounts, an airdrop of Indonesian soldiers in 1977 devastated former patterns of conflict and warfare among tribes (Osborne 1985). Ostensibly sent to the Baliem valley to stop a skirmish between the Dani and their neighbours, the paratroopers killed some 3,000 Dani and finally, effectively, pacified the north and central valley.7 The Dani describe their history as “before and after 1977″ in which 1977, according to one elder, was “the time we realized we had to learn how to be developed.”
One means to promote unity in the present-day ethnic mosaic that makes up Indonesia’s 200 million people is to downplay cultural difference in favour of standardized goals that can unite the nation. Thus, even though communication across much of Irian Jaya is extraordinarily difficult due to dense bush, mud slides, and wall-
7Pacification in the southern portion of the valley remains tenuous. A tentative deal was struck in 1994 which may hold, but personal animosities remain high.
like mountainsides, there are a basic set of services that each official village is entitled to receive. These include a primary school, puskesmas (health centres), a village office staffed with four people, village representatives elected to voting positions on village-level decisions, immunization and weigh clinics for infants, kader (volunteer health workers), and, most recently, trained midwives (S. Guggenheim personal communication). Currently, health care for infants in Wamena operates under nation-wide policies. Health services offer immunizations, infant weighing, nutrition and breast-feeding promotion, and birth control at weigh clinics (posyandu) in precisely the same way as in other parts of the country (Yahya & Roesin 1990).
Despite the contemporary trappings of citizenship, indigenous people have not been involved in the market economy in the Baliem valley. Only relocated Indonesians own businesses, shops, and kiosks; head development projects; drive rickety taxis; buy the rice that Dani grow under a development scheme; teach classes; train health workers; and, perhaps most importantly, hold key government administrative posts. In this same town, it is almost impossible for a Dani man to get a job. No Dani owns a car. Only a dozen or so of the most important leaders have been able to translate local status for economic gain. The Dani live on the margins of Indonesian society, putatively the most tribal and primitive of all ethnic minorities in what is perhaps the most ethnically diverse country in the world.
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In contrast, in the villages of the Baliem valley just a few kilometers from Wamena, life goes on; here the world of infants and the practice of infant care appear seamlessly linked among people who seem unchanged by the Indonesianization of the province. In the morning, once the fog lifts and the warm sun strikes the ground, most women in Dani villages in the Baliem valley sling empty netbags onto their heads and head out with their shovel and digging stick to work in the sweet potato gardens (see Figures 2 and 3). If a woman has to bring her baby with her, she will try and feed the child as much as possible during the morning before leaving so that the child has a full belly and is inclined to sleep. The mother, or elder daughter, places the child inside a large netbag on top of an old piece of cloth or a baby blanket purchased in town and then covers the child up with another piece of cloth, wraps a rag or two around the baby’s genitals and then in one swift, sweeping motion lifts the netbag up by its narrow end and swings it around her back, placing the narrow band on top of her head, with the baby now sitting in a cradled position against his mother’s lower back (See Figure 4). The woman then bends over and picks up a handful of netbags, ranging from two to twelve depending on the baby’s size and how cold it is outside, and places them on top of her head so that they cover the infant inside his netbag and darken the baby’s resting space. Invariably the mother taps the bottom of the bag a bit when she has finished and chants a low tuneless song that all Dani women sing to all babies: “oweyo – oweyo – oweyo.” She then slings bags for bringing home sweet potatoes over top of her portable cradle, secrets her cigarettes somewhere, and is ready to go.
If the child wakes and cries while the mother weeds or plants her sweet potato gardens, the mother has to stop and look after him. If the child can sit up and play outside of the netbag the mother will put the child in a spot nearby and try and work as she watches him out of the corner of her eye. It helps if kin and co-wives can give a hand. They can sing the same song to put him back to sleep, rock their bodies gently in the same way, and pat the bottom of the netbag in the same gentle tapping motion. The longer the child sleeps–the more lulled he is by the darkness of the netbags and by the repetitive sounds and rocking–the easier it is for the mother to harvest enough food for dinner and make progress on garden preparation, weeding, or thinning sweet potato plants.
When it is late afternoon, everyone makes their way home slowly, women loaded down with netbags full of food and men and boys with firewood or empty-handed, but usually full of news. During the late afternoon, in the cookhouse, men may hold their

babies for a short while because the danger of lurking spirits is less at sundown and when a lot of people are clustered inside the cookhouse. Women try to get their child to sleep so they can make new netbags. A needle made of a sliver of wood holds brightly coloured string–red, yellow, white and blue are favorites–that women thread into a loop, through a second loop and back through the original one, pulling the string tight, repeating the same motion over and over until the bag is done. Women smoke as they weave, and the light of the fire offers just enough to see by as daylight fades through the thin board walls of the cookhouse. Women reach around every once in a while to tap the baby who lies sleeping in the netbag, hung on a hook on the wall; to unhook the netbag and feed her if she cries; or, if she is awake and old enough, to pass her around and let everyone play with her, rub her skin, and bounce her gently. Everyone handles the baby gently. The baby never touches the floor, and no one wants to startle her for in these ways spirits can enter the body.
The point is not to stimulate the child, but to sedate through darkness, quiet, routine, breastfeeding on demand, and through providing stimulation only when the child comes to demand it, as when at ten months a child who was accustomed to me reached over and grabbed a pencil from my hand and stuck it in her mouth. The photograph in Figure 5 shows what most Dani women would not do to a child, which is expose her to light, wind, and the gaze of others. A tranquil baby gets big fast and this is a locally acknowledged goal: “We keep him quiet so he’ll get big fast,” and “if others carry the baby around too much he can’t get big. These old women want to grab my baby here, grab him there–she’ll never grow that way. Sleeping inside the netbag is the best thing for the baby.”
In much previous anthropological work on infants it has been considered sufficient to provide descriptions such as this of culturally specific ways of caring for children for the purposes of comparison. For example, there have been studies of symbolic beliefs, particularly around procreation (e.g. Biersack 1983; Jordan 1978;
Jorgensen 1983; Poole 1985); studies on the care and feeding of infants (Marshall 1985; Schieffelin 1985; Shaw 1986; Van Esterik 1989; ); and a vast amount of research on the early childhood development and socialization of children past the age of infancy (e.g. LeVine et al. 1994; Schieffelin 1990; Toren 1993, 1988; Whiting 1963; Whiting and Whiting 1975; Whiting & Edwards 1988). However, this dissertation asserts that such descriptive outlining of details about childrearing in “the way of our ancestors” obscures complex sets of ideologies8 in precisely the way that “the way of our ancestors” is meant to do (Ortner 1984). Ortner (1984) has suggested that power that underlies tacit or taken-for-granted assumptions about the way things are and were and, in particular, the local, historically grounded ideas about gender, politics, and power all find expression in the seemingly ideology-free ways people understand their children, care for them, protect them, and make policies about them. By choosing not to explore the multiple relations and meanings that ground action, by accepting the way of the ancestors as “good enough”, and by bowing to Euroamerican assumptions that babies are not interesting or important people, we may miss that which lies at the heart of social relations and throw the baby out with the bath water.
The Problem: Infant Bodies and Power
This dissertation asserts the central importance of infants in anthropological studies of power. This project forms part of two broad trends in anthropology: to analyze the politics of reproduction (Ginsburg and Rapp 1991; 1995; Wee 1995; Anagnost 1995); and to acknowledge the politics in constructions of children and childhood (Stephens 1995; Shiraishi 1995; James & Prout 1990; see also Ariès 1962). Anthropologists have studied ways state power has depended directly and indirectly on defining normative
8I define ideology as “the ways in which meaning serves to sustain relations of domination” (Eagleton 1991:5). I recognize that it is important to distinguish between more and less central instances of domination; however, in the broad sense used here I am arguing merely that childrearing is not void of relations of domination.

families and on controlling populations. Interventions into family organization in low-technology societies so as to modify the outcomes of reproduction and to manipulate the lives of children has been analyzed as a central strategy of colonial and contemporary state powers (Hartmann 1987; Donzelot 1979; Stoler 1995; Stephens 1995). In developed countries, anthropologists have scrutinized coercive political realities, but they have also examined conceptions of life and death, changing kin relations, the impact of technology on reproduction, and ideas of the body that ground reproductive practice (e.g. Franklin 1995a; Strathern 1995a, 1995b; Lock 1995b). This dissertation explores the active and contested arenas of life and death, kinship, technology, and ideas of the body in the specific arena of infant care, at the specific level of everyday practices, and in the specific social milieu of the Baliem valley, whether that be at a clinic, in the gardens, or inside the dark and secluded space of the netbag.
Through a study of the social relations of the Dani and intersections with the Indonesian nation-state, in particular the application of health policy in the Baliem valley, this dissertation argues that the infant body is the analytic core. If symbolic understandings of the body are key to cultural analysis (Comaroff 1985), then caregivers, family, community, and policy makers will draw meaning, make assessments, and ground action in locally-relevant interpretations of the infant’s body. Any cultural understanding of infancy needs to recognize the slippery nature of the body and its meanings. In the following review of key ideas, discussion begins first with a summary and critique of anthropological studies of the body. What is meant by the infant body? I draw on key insights by Lock, Bourdieu, and Foucault to argue for a theoretical positioning that recognizes the need to ground analysis in a recognition of physiological processes–”the” Dani infant, as it were–and in a simultaneous recognition of the depth and intensity of local meanings as they give shape and understanding to this symbolically compelling moment in the life cycle. I then show how the study of infants among the

Dani sheds light on issues of social inequality, in particular the historical, political and cultural specificity within which these relations occur and which help form them.
The Body
We cannot understand infants without understanding the infant body. While studies of the human body in context are vast in scope and broad in intent, few focus on infants. Until recently, within the field of anthropology definitions of the body have tended to remain unexamined and thus tended to reflect anthropology’s dominant Euroamerican heritage (Scheper-Hughes & Lock 1987). Although Mauss had exhorted the study of “techniques of the body” and of the self as early as 1938, social and cultural anthropologists who took up the call, in the main, confined themselves to the study of material bodily practice–headdresses, tattoos, mutilations–as extraneous to the structural and functionalist theoretical concerns of the day. Even work such as Mead’s (1930) on infant care in New Guinea reflects a dominant view of the body as an entity separate from the mind, as universal in its processes and, by extension, seen as such by her Melanesian informants. It took evolving concerns in a number of sub-disciplines of anthropology–notably psychological and symbolic studies–to bring the body closer to the center of the research agenda, although the centrality it occupies in human life is still nowhere near reflected in research interests. Nonetheless, as Lock (1993a) argues, developments since the 1970s have helped to unmask the assumptions of a universal body through the study of representations, epistemologies, and power relations.
Although some theorists had placed the body at the center of their research agenda before the 1970s (e.g. Needham 1973; Douglas 1970), the end of that decade saw seminal texts on the body appear that located the body as a political, historical, sexual, and symbolic artifact with varying meanings contingent on space, society, culture, and time (Turner 1984; Armstrong 1983; Comaroff 1985; O’Hanlon 1989; Meigs 1984). In a flagship article, Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) assembled salient earlier contributions

within a system for categorizing and analyzing research about the body that has proven useful beyond the medical anthropology audience for whom the prolegomenon was written. They divide the study of the body into three realms: First, the “individual” body represents the problematics of a person’s individual lived experience with cultural variations in concepts of selfhood and with ethnoanatomical constructs. In addition to ethnographic works, the study of phenomenology; “human consciousness in its lived immediacy” (Jackson 1996:2)–has influenced this sphere of research. Second, the “social” body describes how the body “works” as a natural symbol to confirm what are taken to be social realities, to define boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, and how, through the body, society reproduces itself (Douglas 1970; Bourdieu 1977). Third, the “political body” describes systems of social control and ways to regulate social boundaries including bodily decorations and distortions, in essence, following Foucault, “the regulation, surveillance, and control of bodies (individual and collective) in reproduction and sexuality, work and leisure” (Scheper-Hughes & Lock 1987: 6-7; Foucault 1977, 1980). Overall, Scheper-Hughes and Lock’s summary serves as a potent reminder that assumptions about the body are grounded in social realities and that these are inextricably entwined with constructs of the self and the political context in which bodies, and persons, come to be defined.
In a recent review, Lock (1993a) emphasizes that the inter-linkages between the “three bodies” matter more than the distinctions. She stresses the fluid, real-world reality of “having and being a body,” with attendant focus on subjectivities, on epistemologies, and on relations of power (Lock 1993a:136). In an example relevant to the Melanesian case, Lock shows how “embodiment”–the giving of concrete bodily form to subjective experiences through practice and through self-awareness–ties the individual to the social world. For example, initiation, more than merely inscribing social worlds onto a boy’s body, also strengthens core ideas of personhood, the initiate’s as much as his community’s, and solidifies sexual roles and identities, through all of which emotions

weave. In another realm, studies that focus on emotions or politics to explain variations in constructions of the “self” span realms from the phenomenological to the international (Battaglia 1995a). Throughout her review, Lock weaves together previously disparate levels of analysis but invariably grounds herself in the slippery truth that the body is material but indefinably so, always meaningful but never categorically so, an object that invariably “refuses to hold still” (Lock 1993a:148).
Within this theoretical richness, very few studies focus specifically on the infant (as opposed to the fetus or the young child) and her body in a social context. A possible reason for the paucity of studies on this particular life cycle moment may lie in broad Euroamerican notions of the infant. In particular, although most contemporary theorists acknowledge the importance of the human body in shaping social life, the truism that everyone both has and is a body has not filtered down to studies of infants and children (Turner 1984). It is as if, overall, the infant is everywhere the same, and culture is responsible for inscribing difference onto an undifferentiated body. Even though such ideas have been reevaluated provocatively for other moments in the life cycle, the infant continues to be understood primarily as an “asocial blank slate” (Conklin & Morgan 1996:659). The infant in social theory, for all intents and purposes, is only a body. In other words, cultural knowledge about infants obscures analytic vision and demeans alternate knowledge forms, and the predominant Euroamerican “ethnophysiology of relatively autonomous asocial bodies” does little to redress the intellectual bias (Conklin & Morgan 1996:687).9 Until such time as scholars divest themselves of “the Euroamerican view of the infant as a passive recipient of culture” (Ginsburg and Rapp 1991:324) and “the fantasy of children as flawless commodities” (ibid: 324), situating theoretical formulations from the space of infant social life will be difficult.
9See ethological studies by Trevarthen (1979, 1988) and Murray & Trevarthen (1985) arguing that the infant is highly social and imitative in interaction style (cf. Super 1981).

All bodies are good to think with: in the infant’s case, however, there is little else to go on. Infants, as Conklin and Morgan (1996:685-686) elegantly summarize, require facing the
messier physicality out of which an infant is fashioned into a fully socialized being over the course of a number of years. Everyone involved in hands-on child care is well aware of how much it revolves around body-to-body contact and the production, elimination, and control of body products – breast milk, urine, feces, spit-up, drool, blood, and tears.
Universally, infants have certain features in common–upon birth, they are unable to care for themselves, to talk, to walk, or to assert themselves in a socially learned manner. In addition, babies demand and usually receive routine, consistent nurturing contact with others; “human children share prolonged physical fragility and therefore prolonged dependence on adults for their safety and well-being” (Ruddick 1989:18). Finally, child care involves making decisions: to care for the infant; to speak for the infant; and to act on behalf of her (Ruddick 1989). Consequently, while the study of babies profits from the rich legacy of work on the very real importance of the human body in social relations, analysis is made difficult because of the nature of the infant’s body, of the ongoing difficulty of trying to talk about infants in a way that does not end up speaking for them.
This dissertation argues that the body of the infant, one of the most potent “natural tools” available to humans, is a powerful and essential site of both action and interpretation (Mauss 1968; Lock 1993a). For example, cultural concepts of personhood are inextricably grounded in understandings of the human body. Contrary to Euroamerican models that differentiate between fetus and newborn, people in many societies do not make pronounced distinctions between the child before birth and after (Biersack 1983; Conklin & Morgan 1996; Jorgensen 1983; Marshall 1985; Morgan 1996; Strathern 1988). In many Melanesian societies, such as the Dani, infants are seen as an immature but complete person who was formed inside a woman (Meigs 1984; Poole 1985; Strathern 1991). They are “partial persons” (Poole 1985), according to local ideologies, made complete by the social, ritual, and nurturing actions of others. Pushing

this point further, Strathern (1988) shows that persons in Melanesia exist in realms that far exceed the corporeal limits of the skin. Children, like adults, do not reduce to their material bodies but “are the outcomes of interactions of multiple others” (Strathern 1988:316).
The term “sociality” has been used to describe the multiple influences and contributions that make up a person. In Melanesia, sociality is the foundation of notions of self and of group: “there is no indigenous supposition of a society that lies over or above or is inclusive of individual acts and unique events” (Strathern 1988:102). Thus people, places, and things go in the making of persons and societies. Among the Baliem valley Dani, for example, infants are made much of. As humans-in-the-making, babies are acutely scrutinized for what they can tell parents and relatives about the interaction of the many processes that make up the infant: coital frequency, ancestor spirits, food taboos, sorcerers, netbags, and sweet potatoes. As a tool with which to describe some facets of infancy, the term sociality is effective in describing the multiple interdependencies that make up persons in Melanesia.
However, sociality tells only a partial story. Studies grounded in sociality tend to suggest that a cultural group, the so-and-so, collectively build an unproblematic person, understood by everyone within that group as such (e.g. Turner 1995; c.f. Strathern 1988; Josephides 1991). These studies, noteworthy for the contribution they make to undoing Euroamerican assumptions about how bodies and persons come to be built nevertheless tend to assume a cultural group with an undifferentiated acceptance of ideas. The term sociality unfortunately can reinforce the illusion of unity within a cultural group. In recent critiques, Conklin and Morgan (1996) and Battaglia (1995a) cogently suggest that a more effective approach to understanding persons is to recognize that notions of personhood can be contested, and that dissent can surface in bodily metaphors and models of ethnophysiology. I question whether any ascriptions of personhood can remain free of contestation.

This dissertation posits that a study of political relations provides a more focused means to describe the social life of infants than do studies of personhood. If, in Melanesia, people go into the making of other people, then their animosities, clan alliances, and personalities all go into making the infant as well. The work of Bledsoe (1993, 1995) in Sierra Leone on child fosterage and on the politics of having children in polygynous families has demonstrated that reproduction is an ongoing social and political construction that may begin long before and continue long after the biological fact of parturition. If the local social negotiations over reproduction are inherently political, then in a society that does not distinguish categorically between unborn and born children, we might expect such power relations to extend to the post-birth period as well. Thus when the Dani spend an inordinate amount of time observing, cataloguing, protecting, thinking about and analyzing their babies, they do so because a baby’s body, at birth, is already imbued with a whole set of local political realities.
The arena of political relations that involves infants has been little studied. Adoption has been a topic of anthropological interest, but scholars shied away from considering the power and politics inherent in the act of adoption (Brady 1975; Carroll 1970). The space where people engage in power relations through the infant has been intimated in other studies, as when Conklin and Morgan (1996) related how families in Brazil argue over whether or not to participate in infanticide, or when Godelier (1986:43) tells us the last line of initiation rites for Baruya women is to “not kill your child when you give birth to it. Men are more inclined to become attached when they have children.” Barlow (1984) tells of women and men who so want to adopt an infant among the Murik that they entice him with extra food so he will come to see them as primary caregivers. I expand on the social relations glimpsed in these ethnographic moments in a detailed assessment of the infant’s roles in political negotiations. The data stress that the inherent variability of infant physiology offers a zone of acute and sustained political negotiations.

In other words, the ever-changing infant matters because he provides a means through which political realities can be built and contested.
Politics and Power
Political worlds are not solely those of the state and of institutions but are also of the everyday transaction, the family and the home. Politics–the stability, conformity, opposition, strength and fragility of the dominant social order and value system that characterizes it–pervades the everyday (Dirks et al. 1994:4; Bourdieu 1977). Following the key insights of Foucault and feminist scholars, theorists have recognized that “all the relations of everyday life bear a certain stamp of power” (Dirks et al. 1994:4). Being a parent, child, woman, or man involves negotiating questions of “power, authority, and the control of the definitions of reality” (ibid: 4). This day-to-day struggle pervades the life of the young. Cross-culturally, in a seemingly universal fashion, infants are “brought up” by other persons in a social world within which they learn to operate (LeVine et al. 1994; Whiting and Edwards 1988). Thus, infants and adults equally live in political worlds, and thus politics are manifest in every step of the process of conceiving, birthing, and raising a child.
When a woman tucks her child away in a netbag and covers her up with a set of a dozen bags to block out light and noise, how do these seemingly apolitical events shed light on political system? Child care, at first glance, appears to fall outside the realm of politics. Bourdieu partially dissolves this distinction by charting the process by which disjunctures and inequalities in the social order are made natural, where coercion is unseen, and seemingly unnecessary in the taken-for-granted traditions employed to raise a child. Bourdieu terms this process habitus: “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu 1990:53). These acquired dispositions are learned, transmitted, and reinforced through childrearing, education, and other forms of practice that operate at a level of apparent naturalness. For example, it is an unquestioned custom for Dani women to stay in the hut where the infant was born for the first week or so after birth. One root of that custom lies in fears that post-partum vaginal bleeding will pollute pathways and gardens. Another is the chance that ancestor spirits or malevolent wood spirits will attack and enter the body of the baby. Thus the mother loads down her head with a dozen bags, saying this is to “keep out the sun,” and she hides her child from light to keep out the spirits also. These values are not neutral. On the contrary, they are embodiments of gender relations and political hierarchies between humans and ancestors among others and are transmitted to succeeding generations in a myriad of ways.
Bourdieu tags embodiment as key to how acquired dispositions of inequality are transmitted to the younger generation:
Bodily hexis is political mythology realized, embodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking …Treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e., mnemonic form, the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture. (Bourdieu 1977:93-94)
Bourdieu pinpoints formal and informal education and the acquisition of work and language skills to children from the age of five on as key moments in cultural learning. While data from the Baliem valley support the broad outlines of Bourdieu’s argument, I dispute two points: first, that the rote, durable techniques of learning become important only after the approximate age of five (Bourdieu 1977). On the contrary, I show that children under the age of two in the Baliem valley can distinguish between people on the basis of gender, and can address them using gendered speech, lauk to salute women and nayak for men10. A verbal 18-month old baby knows well the bodily adornment, physical bearing, verbal manners, and objects that distinguish men from women, and he reacts to them accordingly in both physical actions and verbal communication. Thus, the types of
10Dani men, in particular, were insistent that my child Malcolm be able to use the right word when addressing a man or a woman. Malcolm was able to say a much-modified “Lauk,” and he used it to greet every indigenous person we met from the age of 14 months onwards. Men often grew agitated and pointed to their chests and said “Nayak” every time Malcolm got it wrong.

dominance written into body language have found their way into infant interaction; Bourdieu may have limited his analysis by considering relations of dominance as relevant only when the child attains some linguistic mastery.
The second concern with Bourdieu’s formulation lies in the notion that infancy is not of theoretical interest because it is merely a site wherein habitus is reproduced unproblematically. While this might be the case in some cultural settings, women in the Baliem valley, who average only 1.5 live children per woman and who traditionally wait up to six years between births, experience birth and the early life of their child as a crucial time of concern for the outcome of childbirth. Thus childrearing may be mundane, routine, and taken-for-granted, but it is also acutely scrutinized and analyzed because the outcome will have a profound impact on social relations. In other words, infants are sites of prolonged and powerful political struggles, couched in the quiet, patterned nurturing that babies demand.
The issue becomes not whether or not relations of power are part of childrearing but to what extent, if at all, power is separable from the social space of childrearing. Foucault employed the term power to mean a “relation of force” that reproduces itself through seemingly seamless control. Exploring the breadth of power was a key part of Foucault’s explorations of how subjects are constituted. Power is not a thing, an abstract mallet that pounds people into shape; on the contrary, it is everywhere, “not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (Foucault 1978:93).
A number of historians and philosophers have used Foucault’s definition of power to explain how institutions are made up of and reinforced through the use of power as a coercive tool or a “strategic relation” with which to constrain and control people, notably through control of their bodies (Feldman 1991; Stoler 1995; Armstrong 1983). Foucault and followers show how discourses, seemingly natural or normal, hold structures of thought and practice (epistemes) over seemingly free and autonomous individuals. Foucault breaks with analysts who vest power only in the hands of the state and argues
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instead for starting analysis with the infinitesimal mechanisms of power so as to see how these powers have been “invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended, etc. by ever more general mechanisms and by forms of global domination” (Foucault 1980:99).
In a challenging application of Foucault’s ideas to New Guinea pre-contact societies, Knauft (1996, 1994) shows that indeed “status divisions could be totalizing, dominating and internalized down to the deepest core, and they could be inscribed in bodies in a profound and sometimes pernicious way” (Knauft 1996:159). Knauft (1994) and Keesing (1982) both show that power and surveillance often operate through the privileged knowledge of senior men. What is most intriguing about these particular claims to the importance of elders and ancestors, however, is that in highland Melanesia the status of these men and their links to ghosts depend in part on their ability to control the outcome of reproduction. Among the classless Etoro for example, Kelly (1993) argues that reproduction is the focus of male political leaders and the cosmologies containing moral evaluations that are produced and maintained by them11. These cosmologies have local merit only inasmuch as they claim to sustain life: “the means and relations of the production and allocation of prestige and moral superiority are…linked to the perpetuation of life across generations” (Kelly 1993:11).
Those with power in highland Melanesia look to infants to validate their claims. They do so, I argue, at least in part because local patterns of morbidity and mortality allow an enormous degree of political power to anyone who claims to control reproduction outcomes. Thus in this dissertation I argue that power is appropriated mostly by men and feeds on the vitally important cycle of human reproduction:
The Etoro cosmological system that comprehends reproduction, the spiritual constitution of persons, and life-cycle transformations, is the central locus for the
11In contrast, class-based societies appear to require a more multi-stranded analysis. See Rousseau (1991) for analysis of residence patterns, relations of production, sexual differentiation and political status among stratified communities in Central Borneo (see also Peletz 1995 for summary).
production of inequality because it constitutes the source of morally evaluated social differentiation. (Kelly 1993:511-512)
Drawing from Kelly, I argue that infants among the Dani play a key role in constructing and validating inequalities because infants are the outcome of reproduction; they are a space where personhood is constituted; and they are a key moment in life cycle transformations. Men and women position themselves differently with regard to infants, however, and a central theme of this dissertation is gender inequality and its intersection between the infant body, cultural constructions of gender, and relations of power. I thus address issues of marriage relations, relations of production, and patterns of gender inequality as complements to the discussion of cosmologies.
In the Baliem valley, the local world of face-to-face interaction changes every day and increasingly reflects the symbols and ideologies of the Indonesian nation-state.12 I thus complement the study of the microcontexts of everyday relations with a scrutiny of prominent attempts by the nation-state to intervene in family organization, to alter infant health outcomes, and to improve infant “quality” (Government of Indonesia 1992). It is becoming a truism to acknowledge that states intervene in reproduction (Ginsburg & Rapp 1995; Stephens 1995), but the impact of efforts to manipulate indigenous families and their reproductive outcomes has not been well-documented in Indonesia. This dissertation explores the stark contrasts between national images of a plump, prospering “normal” infant as the eager recipient of pembangunan or government sanctioned economic development and indigenous representations and imaginings of the child. Used in media to promote family planning and the two-child family, the infant as youngest member of the family connotes an innocence and a pliability that the nation-state manipulates to maximize control over the quality of the next generation: “the regulation
12I use the term nation-state rather than state because of the close association in Indonesia between state operations and boundaries of the nation; political society is too often indistinguishable from civil society and coercive relations pervade both realms (Van Langenberg 1991). Hegemonic relations, values, and practices are protected by an armour of coercion that spans the length of the country and is inseparable from the constitution and maintenance of the nation.
of procreation through state activity asserts control over not only the definition of social being, but also the physical preconditions of social being” (Foster cited in Stephens 1995:29). By denying the political status of the infant and by enhancing the child’s physiological passivity and dependence, the Indonesian nation-state asserts a right to determine under what conditions a child can be born.
Health care policies and practice can be instrumental in efforts to create situations.