I propose to conduct research on the innovative resources, networks, and strategies that patients, state-sponsored biomedical practitioners, non-governmental organizations, and healers alike have developed over the past four decades in order to negotiate the changing meanings and material conditions of health and health care in the Fatick region of Senegal. To examine the ways in which these networks and their efforts articulate the history and reproduction of the region's foundational place in the Senegalese nation-state, I will make maternal and child health my focus. Focusing on current health issues and responses to them, I will show how colonial concerns about indigenous reproductive practices have been transformed into contemporary neo- or post-colonial concerns about maternal and child health. Given the links between individual, social, and political bodies that may be attended to in medical setting, I will ultimately focus on how the medical practices of maternal and child health efforts in Senegal-as carried out by government health providers, non-governmental development organizations, and indigenous healers-produce ethnic and national forms of community that displace other nascent and challenging forms of community while also depoliticizing local health realities.