The Politics of Potential

Global Health and Gendered Futures in South Africa

By Michelle Pentecost

SERIES: Medical Anthropology

Rutgers University Press

The first one thousand days of human life, or the period between conception and age two, is one of the most pivotal periods of human development. Optimizing nutrition during this time not only prevents childhood malnutrition but also determines future health and potential. The Politics of Potential examines early life interventions in the first one thousand days of life in South Africa, drawing on fieldwork from international conferences, government offices, health-care facilities, and the everyday lives of fifteen women and their families in Cape Town. Michelle Pentecost explores various aspects of a politics of potential, a term that underlines the first one thousand days concept and its effects on clinical care and the lives of childbearing women in South Africa. Why was the First One Thousand Days project so readily adopted by South Africa and many other countries? Pentecost not only explores this question but also discusses the science of intergenerational transmissions of health, disease, and human capital and how this constitutes new forms of intergenerational responsibility. The women who are the target of first one thousdand days interventions are cast as both vulnerable and responsible for the health of future generations, such that, despite its history, intergenerational responsibility in South Africa remains entrenched in powerfully gendered and racialized ways.

The Politics of Potential examines a powerful new intervention that seeks to alter the future by tinkering with the present conditions of the unborn. Pentecost provides a riveting and at times dystopian account of how epigenetic interventions layer on to other global health interventions in disadvantaged communities in post-apartheid South Africa. From this laboratory of poverty, will it indeed be possible to finally break the cycle of violence and deprivation into which such communities seem locked?'
Vinh-Kim Nguyen, author of The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS

This nuanced ethnography of South Africa’s First 1000 Days program offers brilliant insights about how global health’s long-standing obsession with maternal-child health is being reinvented under new scientific demands for epigenetic modeling and their temporal gymnastics in a place with a particularly fraught history of social injustice. Pentecost troubles the simplistic assessment of intervention success and failure by reminding readers of how recognition of a responsibility toward historic injury unveils the individualizing, situated, and justice-effacing effects of such programs.'
Vincanne Adams, editor of Metrics: What Counts in Global Health

MICHELLE PENTECOST is a physician-anthropologist and senior lecturer in global health and social medicine at King's College London.

Foreword by Lenore Manderson
Introduction
1   The First 1000 Days: Origin Stories
2   Situated Biologies: The View from Khayelitsha
3   The Traveling Technology of Mother and Child
4   Life Between Protocols
5   Intergenerational Transmissions: The Work of Time
6   Ambivalent Kin: On Gender and Violence
Conclusion: The Politics of Potential
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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