A tendrel logic Growing humans otherwise during the golden 1000 days in Bhutan

Global health and development experts in the global North increasingly target maternal and child bodies during The First 1000 Days – the period from conception until a child’s second birthday – with nutrition interventions designed to improve child growth. They respond to policymaker’s concerns about epigenetic implications of stunting for future health and human capital. This anthropological study follows frictions that emerge as dietary devices associated with this agenda considered universally valid – micronutrient powders, metrics of infant height, and malnutrition causal models – travel across the uneven, changing socioecological contexts of Bhutan.
What logics of growth do these technologies enact in practice? What feeding tensions arise when they are translated in a setting never directly colonized? How are they redesigned – with what implications for universal theories of human growth? Drawing upon multiscalar, multimodal ethnography, critical discourse analysis, and psychoanalytic interviews conducted with co-researchers across five sites between 2019-2023, the dissertation demonstrates how health workers, mothers, and infants engage in partial refusals of targeted interventions. Their sciences-from-below emphasize care for context and human longevity, not only height – nutritional sufficiency over accumulation – sacred seeds, not only speed – and collective liberation of humans, multiple species, and more-than-human beings, rather than health alone.
By following the logic of tendrel (interdependent origination in Dzongkha) through feeding practices, the dissertation articulates an alternative to the bioeconomic logic of growth ascendent in global health. Tendrel interventions, infrastructures, and humans delink desire from the accumulation imperative that contributes to ecologically harmful relations. A tendrel logic thus invites anthropological scholarship to reimagine human growth in the Anthropocene. The dissertation also offers policy implications for land relations in global health and sustainable development, advocating a multiversal approach to postgrowth and wellbeing in light of climate emergency.