Vietnam. Haunting images: A cultural account of selective reproduction in Vietnam By Tine M. Gammeltoft Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Pp. 336. Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Haunting images: A cultural account of selective reproduction in Vietnam By TINE M. GAMMELTOFT Berkeley; University of California Press, 2014. Pp. 336. Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000782 What do prospective parents in greater Hanoi experience when they encounter the image of a foetus on the screen of an ultrasound scanning machine? What if the sonographer tells them that the foetus has an anomaly? This powerful, heart-wrenching, and beautifully written ethnography shows how images of a foetal anomaly force prospective parents to confront a series of existential and ethical questions about humanity, social belonging, and the nature of life itself: What, they must decide, constitutes a full and complete human being? Who has the capacity to make decisions about whether or not life should be denied to this potential child? In addition to offering new views of a foetus, ultrasonography and prenatal screening in Vietnam also raise unexpected moral quandaries. As one of the fathers in the book put it, 'it is a question of conscience' (p. 8). As one of the mothers put it, 'I think my child would have suffered. He would not have been able to enjoy the beauty of life. To be human means to be able to experience life, to love and to hate' (p. 166). Life, love, humanity, beauty, death, conscience, science, medicine and belonging--this book offers many things for many different readers. It is an invitation to ruminate on what it means to be human; it offers a window into the history and context of ultrasound scanning in Vietnam; it speaks to issues of state-society relations; it raises difficult and morally ambiguous issues about attitudes towards disability; it engages the legacy of Agent Orange; and it is an extraordinary contribution to medical anthropology. In this last respect, as anthropology, the book is also a fine example of the ethnographer's craft. Its arguments build carefully from vividly presented ethnographic details to show how human beings interface with medical technology and how patients interact with doctors and other experts in the course of making health-care decisions. The book shows how every decision about selective reproduction made in Vietnam is impacted by the larger social context of family, kin-networks, social expectations, and state policies. All of these levels of social interaction, furthermore, are carefully shown to be connected to the legacy of the Vietnam War, the lingering effects of Agent Orange, Vietnamese state commitments to population quality, the economic difficulties of raising children with disabilities in a country with limited infrastructure, as well as cultural understanding of intersubjective obligations, filial duties, and moral responsibility. The book succeeds in weaving together all of these complex threads by focusing on thirty core cases in which there was a diagnosis of a deformed foetus. Although the research team conducted hundreds of interviews and carried out other surveys and extensive documentary research to support their findings, the great strength of the book lies in the way it makes its arguments through the fine-grained stories of select individuals. The ethnography, based on three years of collaborative fieldwork with Vietnamese colleagues beginning in 2003 and sustained over most of the decade to follow, is rich and convincing. …