What Color Is the Sacred? By Michael Taussig 2009. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press ISBN-13: 978-0-226-79006-0. To approach this book as if it is simply about colour, a final word on the history of colour, or even the colour of history would be amiss. Rather, one should go in with the understanding that, at its core, Taussig's project is a critique of experience. It is an in-depth, provocative exploration of life in colour (and colour in life) that begins in the seventh century AD and culminates in the present day. Indeed, the title could easily be figured as a rhetorical question and rewritten to read, 'what is sacred about colour?' This, after all, is the question that Taussig attempts to answer by way of a genealogical account and quasi-ethnography of colour itself. In a mix and mingle of prose, poetry and aphorism, he blends first-hand accounts, second-hand interpretations, and a first-rate rhetorical invention that borrows insights from Walter Benjamin, William S. Burroughs, Marcel Proust and Friedrich Nietzsche. He begins by establishing a myriad of anecdotal accounts of colour that reappear throughout the book. Taking then as a given Goethe's notion that, in a natural state, uncivilized persons have an innate affinity for colour, Taussig recounts Western civilisation's proscription of colourlessness as a sign of refinement. Draped on bodies as clothing and upon the material world as decor, colour in the West, he contends, has become a matter of taste, a concord of experience and intellect, as well as a cause for "chromophobia. Recognising the contradictions, Taussig argues that this represents colour's core ambiguity, its oscillation between deceit and authenticity. Here he builds off his earlier work on light and heat in My Cocaine Museum to found a link between calor (heat) and colour, which eventually leads him to connect both with global warming. Prior to this, however, Taussig charts the colonisation of colour from the ethnographic work of Bronislaw Makinowski, who ostensibly formulated the standard Western notions of subjectivity. Specifically, he positions colonial authority as white and clothed, and indigenous Others as dark, naked and obscene. Yet a look at Makinowski's diaries reveals, Taussig claims, the contrivance of relational colourings. They also expose Makinowski as a parody of himself, a studious subject that was simultaneously an object of study. Underscored by Benjamin's notion of the 'mimetic faculty,' Taussig lauds such blurrings of self and otherness, colour and ritual, body and landscape as means for recapturing experience. He advances this further by interrogating the relationship of colour to slavery. Particularly, he shows how the purchase of slaves with coloured clothing during the African slave trade is a luminous shell that blinds the eye from a dark underbelly- the underbelly, Taussig posits, is the history of indigo. …

What Color Is the Sacred

In Sudan’s Islamist state, abortion is politicized through its association with illegal pregnancy. Fornication is a crime against God punishable with 100 lashes, and pregnancy outside a marriage contract constitutes sufficient evidence of a woman’s immorality. This enables a strong link between the crime of fornication and the crime of illegal abortion, to the extent that our interviewees often conflate the two in the term “illegal pregnancy.” While abortion does not appear in the domestic political debate on women’s reproductive and maternal health and is not on the agenda of the national women’s movement, it has become politicized in the implementation of the law. A number of bureaucratic barriers, in addition to a strong police presence outside maternity wards in public hospitals, make it difficult for unmarried women to access emergency care after complications of an illegal abortion. These women put themselves at risk of arrest for fornication and illegal abortion. However, many doctors, honoring the Hippocratic oath, disobey state policy and refrain from reporting such crimes to the police to protect unmarried and vulnerable women from prosecution. Liv Tønnessen is Research Director at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway. Samia al-Nagar is an independent researcher based in Sudan. Please address correspondence to Liv Tønnessen Email: liv.tonnessen@cmi.no. Competing interests: None declared. Copyright © 2019 Tønnessen and al-Nagar. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. l. tønnessen and s. al-nagar / Abortion in the Middle East and North Africa, 7-19 8 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 9 V O L U M E 2 1 N U M B E R 2 Health and Human Rights Journal Introduction Unsafe abortion is one of the leading causes of maternal mortality, and abortion-related maternal deaths are generally higher in countries that restrict women’s access to induced abortion.1 In the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region, only Tunisia and Turkey have legalized abortion on demand during the first trimester.2 Most abortion laws in the region are punitive, and legal services are restricted.3 In Sudan’s Islamist state, induced abortion is a crime except when performed to save the pregnant woman’s life, if the fetus has died in the woman’s womb, and in cases of rape.4 In this article, we explore the political dynamics driving the criminalization of abortion in Sudan and its effects on women’s access to abortion-related care in Khartoum. The criminalization of abortion forms an important part of the Islamist government’s restrictive ideological stance on women’s sexual and reproductive rights generally. Sudan has not ratified any international or regional conventions protecting women’s human rights. Abortion is a particularly sensitive area within maternal health and reproductive rights because it is mediated through the crime of zina (sexual intercourse before and outside of marriage). Sudan is unique in the MENA region, for pregnancy among unmarried women is considered sufficient evidence for the crime of zina as outlined in the 1991 Criminal Code.5 This enables a strong link between the crime of fornication and the crime of illegal abortion, which shapes politicization in peculiar ways. The prevailing sentiment among Sudan’s Islamist officials is that the primary purpose of women is to marry and to produce children—and as long as reproduction takes place within marriage, there is no need for abortion except under special circumstances. According to this view, only unmarried women who get pregnant illegally would seek abortion in order to “hide” the evidence of fornication.6 The scarce available research on abortion in Sudan suggests that the high rate of unintended pregnancy, combined with the country’s restrictive abortion law and social stigma, forces women to seek illegal and unsafe abortion, often in secrecy from their families.7 While women who can afford it are able to access safe illegal abortions in the private market (where they may purchase misoprostol), women with lower socioeconomic status must resort to unsafe illegal abortions, which can often lead to complications and the need to seek emergency care at public hospitals.8 Based on original data collected through fieldwork between 2011 and 2019, we have found that although abortion does not appear in the domestic political debate on women’s reproductive and maternal health and is not on the agenda of the Sudanese women’s movement, it is politicized in the implementation of the law. We understand politicization as the politically contested implementation of a law. Our findings indicate that bureaucratic barriers and policies prevent and deter illegal abortion, which is politically and socially viewed as intrinsically linked to illegal pregnancy. These barriers, which contravene women’s human rights to health, dignity, and security, are found primarily in public hospitals, where there is an increased police presence outside maternity and emergency wards. Thus, unmarried women in search of lifesaving treatment find themselves under surveillance the minute they enter a hospital building unaccompanied by a male guardian. The women who seek emergency medical care because of complications after an illegal abortion are at the mercy of doctors in terms of whether they will be reported to the police. We coined the term “Hippocratic disobedience” to capture the subtle and often hidden ways in which Sudanese doctors disobey state policies to protect a vulnerable group of unmarried women from prosecution. They do so at great personal risk, and often against their own personal beliefs that abortion is haram (forbidden) in Islam and that fornication is morally wrong. Data collection and methods We conducted a qualitative interview-based study in Sudan’s capital. In total, we conducted 37 semi-structured interviews with a variety of stakeholders in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018, and 2019. We l. tønnessen and s. al-nagar / Abortion in the Middle East and North Africa, 7-19 D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 9 V O L U M E 2 1 N U M B E R 2 Health and Human Rights Journal 9 selected the initial groups of interviewees based on their stake in sexual and reproductive health and rights. From there, we carefully snowballed by using central gatekeepers with whom we have gained trust. We interviewed international donors, medical doctors and midwives in public and private hospitals and medical universities, women’s rights activists, politicians, family and child protection units, journalists, and religious scholars. Thirty-three of the interviews were conducted in person in Khartoum, and four were conducted by email. Twenty-eight of these interviews were conducted in English, and five were conducted in Arabic and later translated into English. We personally conducted all interviews. The interviews varied from half an hour to one and a half hours. Because of the sensitivity of the topic, we did not record the interviews, instead taking elaborate notes. All interviewees gave their oral consent to be interviewed. All interviewees remain anonymous. The majority of those interviewed are medical doctors who are currently working or have recently worked in public hospitals. The sample of medical doctors is somewhat skewed, as we have been unable to reach the outliers, whether those who perform abortions illegally or those who are adamant about reporting illegal pregnancies to the police. Most of the data collected for this article was gathered in 2018 and 2019 as part of the project “Political Determinants of Sexual and Reproductive Health: Criminalization, Health Impacts and Game Changers.” The project investigates the health effects of criminalizing sexual and reproductive behavior and health services, and analyzes the political dynamics that drive, hamper, and shape the uses of such criminal law in nine African countries, including predominantly Christian sub-Saharan countries (Uganda, Malawi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa) and North African Muslim countries (Sudan and Tunisia). Ethical approval for this research was obtained from the Norwegian Center for Research Data (approval number 60055). All interviews were conducted before the fall of President Omar alBashir in April 2019. A peaceful popular uprising, which started in December 2018 with doctors and other professionals going on strike, ousted Bashir, who had ruled Sudan since a military coup d’etat in 1989. Some of his key supporters within the military remain in central positions as Sudan now navigates a transition to civilian government. The study relies heavily on interview data, but we also triangulate our analysis with other data sources, such as legal texts, government health plans and policies, and media reports. Women’s reproductive rights and policy in Sudan There has been an intensified focus by Sudan’s Islamist government on reducing the country’s maternal mortality rate, which is currently estimated at 295 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.9 However, huge urban-rural disparities exist. The emergency obstetric and neonatal care needed to save lives is weak, and the Sudanese health system is persistently underfunded.10 Sudan experienced a significant reduction in its maternal mortality rate in 2011, when South Sudan separated from the north and became the country with the world’s highest maternal mortality rate. Direct obstetric causes contribute to 60% of maternal deaths in Sudan. This high prevalence is associated with many risk factors, including female genital mutilation/ cutting (FGM/C), early childbearing, high fertility, and barriers to accessing maternal health services.11 In recent years, women’s reproductive health and rights have received height

The Limits of the Law: Abortion in the Middle East and North Africa.

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Why Do People Give? The Role of Identity in Giving

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£40.00 Free open access versions available from www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press Eited by Niels Brgger & Rlph Scoeder ‘No other work as cohesively, clearly, forcefully and successfully argues for the Web’s centrality in contemporary society and social science. While scholars of new media tend to turn their attention to the newest and latest new media phenomena, the Web is and will continue to be crucial to understanding online phenomena generally and, just as critically, providing a record of online discourse and events.’ – Steve Jones, UIC Distinguished Professor of Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago

The web as history

This article considers the role of the Australian anti-abortion movement in the discursive practices of the worldwide pro-life franchise. It is based on in-depth interviews with key members of the moment located in four similar organizations. It examines the ways in which they perceive their cause and the ways in which they might influence both public conversations about abortion and individual pregnant women. It specifically focuses on the ways in which new medical imaging technologies are drawn upon to facilitate a renewed view of the separateness of a foetus, explores the participants' views of motherhood and mothering, and the ways in which the abortion rate is seen as indicative of the fragmentation of contemporary society.

When discourse defies belief: anti-abortionists in contemporary Australia

There has been enormous growth over the last 10 years in breast cancer culture (BCC), a culture that uses unique discourses about gender, consumerism and the disease itself. This article explores the concomitant commodification of BCC where products are branded and sold with ‘breast cancer’ signage of various kinds – in particular, the colour pink. Unlike other cancers, breast cancer appears to have been utilised by both corporations and campaigns for profit, using an array of methods. The article discusses the ways in which this has been achieved using an analysis of imagery connoting femininity since 1950 and connecting this to contemporary theories about marketing and consumer choice. It finds that multinational corporations have been uniquely successful in building market share through the use of colour and imagery associated with BCC, and that consumers are equally interested in associating themselves with the cause through acts of ‘prosociality’ (buying products) that signify philanthropy. These lin...

Donna Wyatt

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When discourse defies belief: anti-abortionists in contemporary Australia

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Victoria University Student Attrition Report: Comprehensive Analysis and Recommendations