Abstract
As someone who grew up in a baniao culture (where, instead of using nappies, caregivers hold out infants to urinate) and who lived with her first few years of menstruation wearing handmade cotton pads from old sheets, I read Kelly Dombroski’s book Caring for Life: A Postdevelopment Politics of Infant Hygiene with curiosity and a sense of nostalgia. Dombroski focuses on nappy-free infant hygiene practices in Xining, China as well as Australia and New Zealand. Nappy-free infant hygiene practice, known as baniao in China or elimination communication (EC) among Australian and New Zealand parents, means holding out babies to urinate or defecate from the time they are born, and toilet training based on the baby’s signals and cues for eliminations rather than waiting until the age of verbal communication to begin the process. Based on ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with caregivers (i.e., mothers and grandparents) in Xining between 2006 and 2009, and the analysis of posts collected from OzNappyfree, an online group hosted by Yahoo! Groups in 2010, Dombroski regards this infant care as a specific hygiene assemblage whose materialities, socialities, and spatialities are gathered in particular places and at particular times. Inspired by Bruno Latour’s assemblage theory as well as postdevelopment scholarship, Dombroski argues that nappy-free infant hygiene is a specific way of weisheng (guarding life) that goes beyond infant care and takes into consideration environmental sustainability and the human–nature relationship.
In Chapter Two, “Holding Out,” Dombroski goes in depth into baniao practices and culture. The practice includes three infant development stages, including: (1) the first ritual month of lying-in; (2) holding out babies when they respond to and give different cues, signs, and signals for elimination; and (3) expecting that toilet independence will be achieved when small children can walk and squat. Parents and grandparents mostly use niaobu—sanitized, soft, 100 percent cotton cut from old sheets and pillowcases— instead of disposable diapers, with an understanding that babies’ bottoms are very delicate and the use of (plastic) disposable diapers triggers damp heat and increases health problems.
In Chapter Four, “Traveling Practice,” Dombroski switches to the EC practices and the culture of the OzNappyfree platform. EC practitioners are parents who are well educated and favor a child-centered or attachment parenting approach in western countries. During the newborn and in-arms stage, these parents feel embarrassed of their nappy-free infant hygiene practices and some of them even hide them from family members and medical professionals for fear of scorn because it is still only practiced by a very small minority group of parents. But the OzNappyfree platform provides a space where parents can share experiences and offer each other emotional support until their youngsters graduate from toilet learning to toilet independence. Here, baniao is imagined as a global majority practice by western parents who reject the idea that disposable nappy use is more modern and hygienic.
What I found really interesting in this book was the discussion of “awkward bodies” and their connection to weisheng (guarding life) or hygienic modernity (Ruth Rogaski). People experience awkward bodies while participating in awkward engagements “where universals rubbed up against each other rather than sliding past each other” (p. 83). In Chapter Three, “Shifting Assemblages,” heavily influenced by scholars such as Rogaski and Sean Hsiang-Lin Lei, Dombroski traces the encounter of hygiene knowledge between western biomedicine and traditional medicine in the early days of China, from which the current version of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) emerged as a hybrid body of knowledge that allows Chinese to experience two distinct ontological bodies and assemble wisdom from both western biomedicine and traditional medicine. Dombroski sees awkward bodies as a node where new knowledge and changes can take root and flourish. The resistance of the baniao culture under the pressure of the sweeping commercial forces of heavily marketed disposable nappy products in China serves as a testimony to that possibility. Similarly, in Chapter Five, “Reassembling Hygiene,” she discusses the EC practices of western parents that allow them to have a space to discuss non-shampoo hair wash and other knowledge that is environmentally sustainable and derives from the social practice of care.
Dombroski argues that “this book is the beginning of a postdevelopment politics of hygiene where good change is not something dished out from the developed world to the development world (or the modern to the backward)” (p. 11). Her data collection journey and the analytical framework honor the epistemological standpoint where people living in the most wasteful and environmentally disconnected societies of the world can be affected by the knowledge and practices of hygiene from developing countries so that they can shift their assemblages with collective efforts. Dombroski acknowledges several times in the book that the use of disposable diapers is going up and the practice of baniao is not as common as it was when she was in Xining almost 15 years ago. I am wondering how this book can be woven into emerging mixed trends. In addition, the invisible maternal labor and countless efforts involved in baniao as well as EC practice contribute to the already heightened burden experienced by mothers and other female caregivers. I was personally reminded by my parents how many niaobu they had to wash manually and then, due to their small domestic space, dry in the heating room of the textile factory where they used to work. I am curious what Dombroski thinks about the balance between maternal burden and environmental sustainability in contemporary social structure, though I truly believe that the urgency and significance of the latter outweigh the former. Overall, this book is a fantastic read for those who are teaching or interested in public health, Latour’s assemblage theory, or motherhood.