THE POLITICS OF POTENTIAL, global health and gendered futures in South Africa

190pp., illus., paperback, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2024

ISBN: 9781978837478

Michelle Pentecost examines early life interventions in the first one thousand days of life in South Africa, drawing on fieldwork from international conferences, government offices, health-care facilities, and the everyday lives of fifteen women and their families in Cape Town.

She explores why the First One Thousand Days project was readily adopted by South Africa and many other countries, and discusses the science of intergenerational transmissions of health, disease, and human capital and how this constitutes new forms of intergenerational responsibility. 

"The Politics of Potential examines a powerful new intervention that seeks to alter the future by tinkering with the present conditions of the unborn. Pentecost provides a riveting and at times dystopian account of how epigenetic interventions layer on to other global health interventions in disadvantaged communities in post-apartheid South Africa. From this laboratory of poverty, will it indeed be possible to finally break the cycle of violence and deprivation into which such communities seem locked?" Vinh-Kim Nguyen, author of The Republic of Therapy: Triage and sovereignty in West Africa’s time of AIDS

"This nuanced ethnography of South Africa’s First 1000 Days program offers brilliant insights about how global health’s long-standing obsession with maternal-child health is being reinvented under new scientific demands for epigenetic modeling and their temporal gymnastics in a place with a particularly fraught history of social injustice. Pentecost troubles the simplistic assessment of intervention success and failure by reminding readers of how recognition of a responsibility toward historic injury unveils the individualizing, situated, and justice-effacing effects of such programs." Vincanne Adams, editor of Metrics: What counts in global health

Michelle Pentecost is a physician-anthropologist and senior lecturer in global health and social medicine at King's College London.