UCSF

Through an ethnographic study of the practices surrounding pediatric health in post-Cold War Lat-via, a unique site at the intersection between Russia and the European Union, this dissertation argues that Latvians measure the moral rectitude of their nation by the straightness of their children’s spines. By attending to parents and medical professionals who are actively shaping young children’s bodies to collective standards and, at the same time, engaging in individualized haptic early childhood care, the dissertation draws connections between medicine, parenting and nationhood. This study explores the health practices enacted by a fringe group of parents involved in body-intensive parenting, as I refer to it, and implemented through a state-mandated physical exam for young athletes. I pay particular attention to the corporeal aspect of caring for young children, or “managed corporeality,” which is aimed at transforming them into healthy adults.

The dissertation traces Latvia’s larger healthcare goals for children in the context of a mass fainting event during the 2015 Youth Song and Dance Festival and ensuing perceptions that the fragile na-ture of Latvian children threatens the future of the nation. I further highlight the specific attention to musculoskeletal issues in the public health sector and among parents. In particular, I describe how fears of physiological asymmetry influence early childhood care in the case of a condition referred to as a “baby tonuss” and learning the proper way of caring for an infant, known as “hendlings.” I trace the origins of these practices to the Soviet period, but demonstrate how despite parenting attitudes that seek to counter the Soviet past outright, concerns regarding bodily straightness are widely incorporated into the way body-intensive parents raise their children. This is significant because in other areas of pediatric health, the Soviet legacy is seen as an obstacle to be overcome. Nursing newborns in Latvia, for example, can be viewed in the context of “intergenera-tional lactation trauma,” while Latvian women’s resistance to liberal feminism is rooted in the Soviet period, which deprived the previous generation of intimacy with their children. The unique geopolitical location and history of Latvia allows for the exploration of a particularly Latvian morality and aesthetics that I refer to as “straight-back morality” or the physiological and metaphorical value of the “straight-spine,” allowing the dissertation to contribute to conceptualizing global fascination with moral straightness, normativity and nationalism.