Erica van der Sijpt

Erica van der Sijpt (1983) studied Cultural Anthropology at the Radboud University of Nijmegen and specialized in Medical Anthropology, the courses of which she took at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Her research interests cover issues related to gender, reproductive health, medical practices, demography, women’s body politics, kinship and religion. She conducted her graduate fieldwork in the east of Cameroon, where she studied ideas and practices surrounding pregnancy loss and abortion. Her thesis (Marginaal door kinderideaal: een antropologische studie naar percepties en ervaringen van vrouwen met zwangerschapsverlies in Kameroen) is a 150 pages covering exploration of local aetiologies of reproductive misfortunes and methods of healing, combined with demographic investigations on the subject. After (cum laude) graduation in august 2005, she was the first and only student in the Netherlands who participated in the Research Master’s program of African Studies at the University of Leiden. In the meanwhile, she worked as a supervisor of Bachelor-students writing their theses at the Radboud University of Nijmegen. In september 2006, she started her PhD-scholarship at the ASSR.

Her current PhD research, Ambiguous Ambitions: An Anthropological Study of Reproductive Ideas, Practices and Decisions in Cameroon, is building on her previous work in the East province of Cameroon. It focuses on the personal experiences, ideas and practices of women with regard to pregnancy loss in the region. In contrast to the generally assumed oppositions between wanted and unwanted pregnancies or unintended and intended losses, this project stresses the ambiguous dynamics of the prenatal period and the local conceptualizations and realizations of reproductive decisions in this field. By situating women’s reproductive decisions within their local socio-cultural contexts – notably those of gender, kinship and marriage – but also in the context of national population policies and international reproductive health debates, anonymous statistical data and general concepts which dominate the (inter)national health and development establishment are given local meanings.