“Well-Being for Melanesia”: Alternative Indicators, Local Expertise and Women’s Pregnancy Care in Vanuatu by Dr.Sandra Widmer

What forms of knowledge and care are mobilized that lives can be well-lived when it feels like the basis of social life is irrevocably changed? I explore two dimensions of how people in Vanuatu, a southwestern Pacific country, are living this question. They have created “Alternative Indicators of Well-being for Melanesia” as strategic quantified engagements with the global culture of indicators.Most pregnant women visit massage experts with intensely local forms of expertise of well-being and how it is achieved. These two scales of ni-Vanuatu knowledge of well-being demonstrate how well-being is tied to righting relationships with gendered implications.