Planning Families In Nepal

Based on almost a decade of research in the Kathmandu Valley, Planning Families in Nepal offers a compelling account of Hindu Nepali women as they face conflicting global and local ideals regarding family planning. By examining family life as it unfolds over time, Jan Brunson delivers a fresh perspective on discussions of contraception, son preference, the joint family, and the inability of the concept "planning" to accurately describe conception and reproduction in a patrilocal family system.

Based on almost a decade of research in the Kathmandu Valley, Planning Families in Nepal offers a compelling account of Hindu Nepali women as they face conflicting global and local ideals regarding family planning. Promoting a two-child norm, global family planning programs have disseminated the slogan, “A small family is a happy family,” throughout the global South. Jan Brunson examines how two generations of Hindu Nepali women negotiate this global message of a two-child family and a more local need to produce a son. Brunson explains that while women did not prefer sons to daughters, they recognized that in the dominant patrilocal family system, their daughters would eventually marry and be lost to other households. As a result, despite recent increases in educational and career opportunities for daughters, mothers still hoped for a son who would bring a daughter-in-law into the family and care for his aging parents. Mothers worried about whether their modern, rebellious sons would fulfill their filial duties, but ultimately those sons demonstrated an enduring commitment to living with their aging parents. In the context of rapid social change related to national politics as well as globalization—a constant influx of new music, clothes, gadgets, and even governments—the sons viewed the multigenerational family as a refuge. Throughout Planning Families in Nepal, Brunson raises important questions about the notion of “planning” when applied to family formation, arguing that reproduction is better understood as a set of local and global ideals that involve actors with desires and actions with constraints, wrought with delays, stalling, and improvisation.

This book explores the experiential and affective dimensions of structural transformation in South Asia through contemporary and historical accounts of life, ageing, illness, and death. The contributions to this book include analyses from various regions in South Asia, and topics discussed uncover how people’s experiences of life, ageing, illness, and death are entangled with the technology of governance, biomedicine, neoliberal restructuring and other national/international policies. Structured in three parts – governance, technology, and citizenship; well-being and restructuring of the social; waiting, hesitation, and hope as attitudes in facing the precariousness and fundamental uncertainty of life – the book brings to light the ways in which people face and continue to engage with their own and others’ lives cautiously, waveringly, but with a sense of hope. A novel contribution to the study of how people struggle or navigate their lives through the conditions of inequity and precariousness in South Asia, this book will be of interest to researchers studying anthropology, sociology, history, medical and development studies of South Asia, as well as to those interested in cultural and social theory.

The striking upsurge in population growth rates in developing countries at the close of World War II gained force during the next decade. From the 1950s to the 1970s, scholars and advocacy groups publicized the trend and drew troubling conclusions about its economic and ecological implications. Private educational and philanthropic organizations, government, and international organizations joined in the struggle to reduce fertility. Three decades later this movement has seen changes beyond anyone's most optimistic dreams, and global demographic stabilization is expected in this century. The Global Family Planning Revolution preserves the remarkable record of this success. Its editors and authors offer more than a historical record. They disccuss important lessons for current and future initiatives of the international community. Some programs succeeded while others initially failed, and the analyses provide valuable guidance for emerging health-related policy objectives and responses to global challenges.