Care, Violence, and More-Than-Human Reproductive Ecologies in North India

Abstract

This paper explores therapeutic interventions for subfertility as a domain where meanings and boundaries of care and violence are constituted. It centres around a fragment of one Rajasthani woman’s reproductive journey contextualised within marriage migration, upward social mobility, and affinal/natal kin relations. Grounded in 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Rajasthan, India, and ongoing conversations with the family, this paper investigates therapeutic interventions undertaken by affinal and natal families—biomedical interventions alongside engagements with a Hindu goddess Kali—and examines how ambivalent care practices are situated within relations between people, technologies, and spirits who ‘meddle’ with human affairs. It argues that the meanings of care are constituted relationally within more-than-human reproductive ecologies.