Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin by Kimberly Theidon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin by Kimberly Theidon Diana Pardo Pedraza Theidon, Kimberly. Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2022. 114 pp. On February 21, 2022, the Colombian Constitutional Court decriminalized abortion within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. This ruling is part of a vital wave of activism for greater reproductive rights in Latin America. The Colombian case follows important victories for the right to decide in Mexico (in the state of Coahuila, to be specific) and in Argentina, where abortion has been legalized for up to 14 weeks of pregnancy. In contrast to this reality are the recent Supreme Court opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade—the 1973 Court landmark decision that made access to safe and legal abortion a constitutional right—and the latest measures toward a near-total abortion ban by more than a dozen U.S. states, including Idaho, Texas, and Tennessee. These recent legal decisions have reignited crucial debates on reproductive justice, defined as the right to bodily autonomy—to decide whether to have children and raise them in a healthy, safe, and sustainable environment. As feminist activists have reminded us, these measures have historically, widely, and disproportionately impacted poor women and women of color, who experience more significant economic and logistical complications in accessing abortion, even in spaces where it is legal or regulated. This is the landscape of reproductive rights in the Americas that informed my reading of Kimberly Theidon's latest book, Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin, in which the anthropologist considers the "multiple environments in which conception, pregnancy, and childbirth unfold" (7) in times of war and postwar. A feminist ethnography of post-conflict based on three decades of fieldwork in Peru and Colombia, two countries embroiled in long-running internal armed conflicts, the book [End Page 915] explores the silenced and neglected outcomes of rape and sexual violence, the so-called "children born of war," and what these challenging conceptions may reveal about intergenerational and more-than-human markers and impacts of warfare. Through intriguing conceptual images such as "living legacies," "violent conceptions," and "situated biologies," Theidon offers a vocabulary for thinking about the harm caused by forced gestations, imposed parenthood, and toxic reproductive environments, highlighting the need for a framework of justice that attends to the different experiences, memories, and reproductive desires of women and moves beyond human exceptionalism. Building on a growing literature on the material and symbolic consequences of armed conflict in anthropology, feminist studies, and environmental humanities, Legacies of War contributes to a gendered theory of harm and reparation (for other studies on these issues, see Sánchez Parra and Lo Iacono 2020; Sánchez Parra 2018). The book draws attention to the competing rights regimes for children conceived in rape and their mothers, the oppressive weight of hegemonic maternal scripts and patriarchal biological and legal systems, and how warfare shapes and marks our more-than-human kin. Theidon's feminist and posthumanist analysis of violent circumstances of conception and childbearing in (post)war draws on Michelle Murphy's (2013) concept of "distributed reproduction." While Murphy is concerned with the diffuse spatial and temporal pathways of industrial chemicals that alter the reproduction of human and more-than-human lives, Theidon considers the harm and toxicity (re)produced by armed conflict in bodies, kinship networks, and rural landscapes. This distributed approach to reproduction, Theidon asserts, could help reduce "the efforts to govern maternal bodies" (81), as it attunes us instead to "the structural forces that shape reproductive outcomes" (81). It also "opens up the possibility of a politics of accountability and coexistence that is not grounded in an anthropocentric rights framework" (94). Theidon's gendered analysis of the human and more-than-human impacts of war and postwar places her manuscript in conversation with contemporary scholarship in anthropology interested in thinking about 1) the role of the ordinary and practices of care in the maintenance and interruption of cycles and repertoires of violence (Berman-Arévalo and Ojeda 2020, Terry 2017, Wool 2015, Das 2007), 2) the participation of natural environments in social and armed conflicts (Gordillo 2018, Kim 2017, Guarasci 2015, de Le...