Considering the importance of metrics in current systems of global health accountability, this article analyses the dynamics behind a maternal health indicator. To achieve the target of Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG 5) and increase the proportion of births attended by 'skilled health personnel', some districts in Malawi in 2010 introduced information campaigns to promote births in hospitals and a fine to punish mothers who delivered outside of biomedical health institutions. The study is based on ethnographic research in one Malawian village. While many mothers described the ill treatment and bad conditions in maternity wards, most women still started to publicly sanction institutional births. This apparent contradiction can be understood by looking at the positions and motivations of the various actors who participated in the performance of MDG 5 in the village and how their projects became tied to the focus on improving the indicator. Rather than expressing a demand for the existing maternal health services as such, the ethnography suggests that the actors' practices expressed hopes and claims to wider material improvements in a context of inequality. The article highlights dynamics that are concealed if we restrict the analysis to one of biopower, and expands the purview of the study of metrics into the spaces which indicators are intended to represent.

This article focuses on workers in a South African township who enter into relationships of hierarchical dependence due to a lack of alternatives in the context of high unemployment and neoliberal fiscal restraint. The relationships are characterized by a double bind: workers seek relations of dependence in order to be recognized as persons, yet within these relations they are often denied such recognition, which reproduces experiences of infantilization, paternalism, and dehumanization associated with the past. The article explores how racialized and gendered meanings condition how men and women navigate relationships of hierarchical dependence, what they can expect to get from them and how these bonds can potentially be drawn on in efforts to escape them.

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Lotte Danielsen er doktorgradsstipendiat ved Sosialantropologisk Institutt på Universitetet i Oslo. Hun jobber for tiden med sin avhandling om identitetspolitikk i post-apartheid Sør-Afrika via en studie av konflikter omkring hundehold. Materialet i denne NAT-artikkelen bygger på hennes tidligere arbeid i Malawi. 1. Tusen takk til beboerne i Moni for hjelpen til prosjektet. Takk også til Benedikte Lindskog og Tone Sommerfelt for invitasjonen til å delta i dette temanummeret. Prosjektet SUMEDIC, og spesielt Sidsel Roalkvam, har bidratt med økonomisk støtte til feltarbeid i Malawi, skriveplass på SUM, og et fruktbart og stimulerende arbeidsmiljø-tusen takk!