Caring for life: A postdevelopment politics of infant hygiene By KellyDombroski, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2024. 224 pages. $36.50 (paperback). ISBN: 9781517901608

Caring for life demonstrates a nonlinear examination of how ordinary people shape social change in local spaces. It is also a story of social change through a micro approach to macro global issues. This book represents Kelly Dombroski's journey of caregiving and the evolution of ways to care for children and the environment. She speaks to this micro social transformation by rethinking hygiene practices. Throughout Dombroski's journey, she pays special attention to the topic of mothers and caregiving through Asia-Pacific hygiene practices. She partakes in ethnographic research and lives alongside caregivers in Qinghai, China, and learns about their infant toileting. Within her learning about this hygiene practice, she introduces the reader to the care concept of baniao, which is “holding out babies to urinate rather than leaving them to do so in the nappy” (p. 5). Throughout her research she traces both a historical trajectory of China's practice of baniao and a 21st-century approach. She completed ethnographic research about this practice in the Qinghai region and also in her home regions of Australia and New Zealand, where she became interested in how infant hygiene practice shaped spaces in China and how a more Western group of mothers and caregivers used the practice to form local communities in Western spaces. She concludes that caregivers in both regions were contributing to local and personal social and environmental change by practicing baniao. This practice eliminated the mass amount of disposable stuff that Western hygiene practices contribute. Dombroski approaches this ethnographic journey through interviews and conversations with women who care for small children. She also includes stories and pictures about her mothering experience and practice with baniao. For instance, she critically reflects on the way she practices infant hygiene with her own children while living in the city of Xining, in Qinghai province, China. She states that practicing baniao was an important way for her to embody the care practices of her research. She has beautifully connected her embodied experience of practicing baniao as a personal way that one can mitigate climate change at the local level. An overall theme in the book is that hygiene change is political. For example, she states, “a postdevelopment politics of hygiene is one that deconstructs the assumptions of development” (p. 16). She intentionally uses a postdevelopment approach for this study to demonstrate her praxis and learning from local people who come from different cultural practices than her own. Also, she applies J. K. Gibson-Graham's (2006) feminist economic geography scholarship on post capitalism to highlight how infant hygiene practices intersect with the topic of a feminist political economy. She states that Gibson-Graham “refer to this as a politics of possibilities: an uncertain hopeful, experimental post development agenda that challenges us to imagine and practice development and hygiene differently, to make other worlds possible” (p. 13). The book recognizes assemblages, which Dombroski defines as a way of mapping hygiene practices in the past and today. This mapping of assemblages organizes each of the six chapters. She is clear throughout these chapters that her study is a rethinking of hygiene practices and that this rethinking is necessary due to changing cultural norms influenced by neocolonial development structures. She clearly wants to get rid of labels such as “alternative methods,” “other,” “new ways,” and other terms that demonstrate the heroic salvation and colonial mentality that the Western world partakes in. Instead, she highlights how the infant hygiene practices in this study are not necessarily alternatives to Western hygiene practices, but truly another way to practice infant hygiene that is part of positive economic and environmental futures. Dombroski writes directly about her lived experience by including an interlude to several chapters. This interlude is a journal and serves as a form of autoethnographic inquiry, which she emphasizes as a feminist and decolonial method. Overall, Caring for life highlights a human experience of local social change. It is directly connected to feminist diverse economy and postdevelopment scholarship, and is a wonderful example of possibilities for environmental and social transformation. This book is a model and tool for other researchers who are passionate about using feminist and decolonial practices in ethnographic fieldwork. The book is ideal for scholars and activists who are looking for specific examples within feminist human geography. This book is also a significant resource for teaching postdevelopment as it provides examples that students can draw from and a framework for students who embark on research that is not invested in linear progress. She advocates for scholars to seriously begin to ask questions about “cultivating regenerative, transformative, and postdevelopment thinking for change” (p. 153). And she has clearly modeled this change through her own learning and practicing of infant hygiene.

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