This paper deals with the simultaneous mainstreaming and diversification of ni-Vanuatu social categories associated with the ways in which population growth is understood as a possible crisis in both demographic knowledge and everyday ni-Vanuatu knowledge. The author is interested in understanding the downplaying but primarily the amplification of difference with respect to place, generation and gender identities. The relationship between reproduction, social reproduction and the multiple meanings of modernity is at issue. In the expert knowledge of demography that proffers advice for the ni-Vanuatu state, it is the lack of modern development - in the form of adequate biomedical birth control, western education, and the equality of women - that is the implicit cause of population growth. Yet, many ni-Vanuatu see population growth as tied to the troubles that arise from the dilution of traditional social forms: there is too much modernity. In both demographic and ni-Vanuatu everyday narrations of the potential population crisis, diversification and mainstreaming take place and vulnerabilities are produced.
While governing the New Hebrides from 1906 to 1980, a British-French Condominium hired Pacific Islanders who had been trained in Fiji as Native Medical Practitioners (NMPs), to deliver primary health care and to offer public health education to the declining indigenous population. The NMPs’ medical work was also expected to expand colonial governance in a culturally diverse archipelago with no prior centralized state. Focusing on the 1920s through the1940s, I suggest that the NMPs’ attempts to inculcate a sense of responsibility for individual health and civic involvement in their patients, as well as demands made by the NMPs themselves for civic entitlements, were forms of nascent biomedical citizenship. I propose that the practices of nascent biomedical citizenship, significant as they were, also had the potential to be exclusionary because they presumed the creation of a civic subject oriented toward a particular kind of future and a selective recuperation of the past
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