Humanizing Big Numbers: Representational Strategies in Institutional Films about Global Maternal Mortality

Abstract

Maternal mortality is simultaneously a global epidemiological phenomenon and an individually contextualized tragedy. This article analyzes how films promoting the Millennium Development Goals’ campaign to reduce maternal mortality rely on particular visual and narrative tropes to align the affective tug of a single case and the global import of an aggregated statistic. Their reliance on particular stories to embody figures of global development constitutes an affective pedagogy that raises familiar questions for anthropologists: how to represent global suffering, who represents global suffering, and at whom such representations are aimed. I argue that reliance on the weight of visually absent, yet symbolically present, dead maternal bodies directs the films’ representational strategies about structural violence toward a reinforcement of a long‐standing narrative and image of witnessing from a distance.