Out of the mouths of babies: growing tendrel humans through partial refusal of metrics and micronutrients during the Golden 1000 Days in Bhutan

Abstract (English)

Global health and development practitioners have scaled up nutrition interventions like micronutrient powders and growth charts targeting human height during the first 1000 days of life to maximize future health and human capital. Their techniques and materials enact a violent bioeconomic logic of growthism. But how do universalizing technologies do in practice across the uneven political, ecological, and cosmological terrain of the Anthropocene in the eastern Himalayas? Through multimodal, multiscalar ethnography with co-researchers across five sites in Bhutan in 2023, this paper demonstrates partial refusal of metrics and micronutrients by some policymakers, healthcare workers, mothers, and infants. Their feeding practices enact a tendrel (interdependent) logic of human growth situated in schismogenic histories and sacred land relations that do not grow taller humans in the image of Man. Thus rather than targeting interventions by feeding more nutrients into an individual body, delinking from ecological relations generating lenchak (karmic debt) suggest feminist anti-colonial approaches to sustainable health, human subjectivity, and liberation in a climate emergency.