This is a book about the dai, or traditional birth practitioner, and her place in the emerging therapeutic domain in colonial and contemporary India. The book employs a caste-informed feminist reading of the colonial archive against the grain and explores papers by Englishwomen physicians, texts of indigenous medicine and practitioner accounts, administrative documents, public commentaries, and legislative assembly debates from the 19th and early 20th centuries. It also examines contemporary healthcare policy discourse. Using these methodologies, the author traces the production of the dai as an unsanitary, unskilled indigenous figure in colonial and nationalist accounts. The book goes on to examine the workings of gender and caste in the setting up of this figure, at first for containment and then for removal from institutionalized healthcare – an exercise that is more or less completed in the present. The author argues that this exercise is part of the refashioning of the indigenous, and of indigenous medicine, throughout this period, into a highly codified domain that centres caste privilege and is supported by global capital networks. In such a refashioning, the dai figure is rendered remote not only from the centre of the healthcare apparatus but also from the centre of the contemporary nation. This genealogical tracing of indigenous medicine in Indian contexts, rather than separate histories, is also useful to understand better what is termed the healthcare assemblage today, and this book provides a ground on which this can be done.

"Engaged, nuanced, and accessible--this untold story of Paraguay's indigenous peoples constitutes an important addition to the English-language literature on this understudied country."--John Charles Chasteen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill "Provides original insights into the makings of indigenous policy during Paraguay's Stroessner era and the democratic opening after 1989 . . . shows how state policies were buffeted by external actors but also how indigenous peoples fought back. A must-read for those interested in indigenous policy in Latin America."-- Erick D. Langer, Georgetown University "A significant contribution to the field . . . It develops a rich understanding of continuities and change in Paraguayan history, including the role of religious missions in indigenous assimilation and/or cultural preservation."--Virginia Garrard Burnett, University of Texas, Austin Native groups have played an important historical role in Paraguay, the most homogenous and the only officially bilingual country in Latin America. This book analyzes their complex relationship with the corrupt Alfredo Stroessner regime (1954-89), which framed its policies as inclusive but excluded Paraguay's indigenous people from the benefits of national development and the most basic human rights. However, this is not a history of oppression and victimhood but rather a study in manipulation. Horst argues that while native people struggled daily to secure food and work under Stroessner's often contradictory and heavy-handed policies, they refused to disappear anonymously into the larger peasant population. As savvy actors who manipulated difficult circumstances to foil exclusionary policies, they succeeded in publicly embarrassing the regime as often as possible through exposures of state corruption. Working in close cooperation with the Catholic Church, indigenous peoples capitalized on Catholic legal advocacy in their struggles to defend their territories and resources. The church became the strongest defender of native land claims, drawing international attention to the plight of indigenous peoples as well as abuses of human rights. While indigenous resistance weakened support for the Stroessner regime, it also drove native leaders and peoples into closer interaction with and dependency upon the very national institutions they opposed. Contributing their own vision of a multiethnic state, the native people of Paraguay created multiple alliances with regime opponents, found ways to draw attention to human rights, and by demanding tolerance of ethnic plurality helped lead the nation toward greater democracy in 1992. Horst's study--the only history to focus on recent social policies and national political strategies for indigenous populations in modern Paraguay-- provides an important narrative for historians of Paraguay and other parts of Latin America, as well as for anthropologists and others interested in the intersection of identity politics and human rights. René Harder Horst is associate professor of history at Appalachian State University.

Mexican presidents Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) and Luis Echeverría (1970–1976) used populist politics in an effort to obtain broad-based popular support for their presidential goals. In spite of differences in administrative plans, both aimed to close political divisions within society, extend government programs to those on the margins of national life, and prevent foreign ideologies and practices from disrupting domestic politics. As different as they were in political style, both relied on appealing to the public through mass media, clothing styles, and music. This volume brings together twelve original essays that explore the concept of populism in twentieth century Mexico. Contributors analyze the presidencies of two of the century’s most clearly populist figures, evaluating them against each other and in light of other Latin American and Mexican populist leaders. In order to examine both positive and negative effects of populist political styles, contributors also show how groups as diverse as wild yam pickers in 1970s Oaxaca and intellectuals in 1930s Mexico City had access to and affected government projects. The chapters on the Echeverría presidency are written by contributors at the forefront of emerging scholarship on this topic and demonstrate new approaches to this critical period in Mexican history. Through comparisons to Echeverría, contributors also shed new light on the Cárdenas presidency, suggesting fresh areas of investigation into the work of Mexico’s quintessentially populist leader. Ranging in approach from environmental history to labor history, the essays in this volume present a complex picture of twentieth century populism in Mexico.

The Handbook of Global Technology Policy presents and compares nonideological resolutions to environmental pollution and toxic waste, urbanization and transportation, homelessness, health-care policies around the world. It provides an evaluation of industrial interventions and energy sources, explores flow control and corporate growth, privatization and liberalization, health data networks, and electronic innovation and governance. Other topics include pharmaceutical policies, the state of science and technology in Africa, the reemergence of tuberculosis, wind energy technology development and diffusion in Inner Mongolia, and major problems of policy implementation in India