Table of Contents
Attachment ................................................................................................................................. 8
Cooper, P., Tomlinson, M., Swartz, L., Landman, M., Molteno, C., Stein, A., McPherson, K., and
L. Murray 2009 Improving quality of mother-infant relationship and infant attachment in
socioeconomically deprived community in South Africa: randomised controlled trial.
British Medical Journal 338: 974-82............................................................................................ 8
Faircloth C. 2011 ‘It feels right in my heart’: affective accountability in narratives of
attachment. The Sociological Review 59(2):283-302. ............................................................ 9
Tomlinson, M., Cooper, P., and L. Murray. 2005 Mother-infant relationship and infant
attachment in a South African peri-urban settlement. Child Development 76(5):10441054. ........................................................................................................................................................ 9
Baby ............................................................................................................................................ 10
Gottlieb, Alma 2000 Where have all the babies gone? Toward an anthropology of Infants
(and their caretakers). Anthropological Quarterly 73(3): 121-132. ............................ 10
Lupton, Deborah 2011 ‘The best thing for the baby’: Mothers’ concepts and experiences
related to promoting their infants’ health and development. Health, Risk and Society 13(78): 637-651. ........................................................................................................................................ 10
Remennick, Larissa 2006 The quest for the perfect baby: why do Israeli women seek
prenatal genetic testing? Sociology of Health and Illness 28 (1): 21-53. ..................... 11
Birth ............................................................................................................................................ 12
Davis-Floyd, R., and C. Sargent 1996 Introduction. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 10(2):
111-120. .............................................................................................................................................. 12
Greenhalgh, Susan 2003 Planned births, unplanned persons: “Population” in the making of
Chinese modernity. American Ethnologist 30(2):196-215 .............................................. 12
Lori, J., and J. Boyle 2011 Cultural childbirth practices, beliefs, and traditions in
postconflict Liberia. Health Care for Women International 32:454-473. ................... 12
Obermeyer, Carla 2000 Pluralism and pragmatism: Knowledge and practice of birth in
Morocco. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14(2):180-201.............................................. 13
Parry, Diana 2008 “We wanted a birth experience, not a medical experience”: Exploring
Canadian women’s use of midwifery. Health Care for Women International 29:784-806.
................................................................................................................................................................ 13
Breastfeeding .......................................................................................................................... 14
Avery, M., Duckett, L., and C, Frantzich. 2000 The experience of sexuality during
breastfeeding among primiparous women. Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health
45(3):227-236. .................................................................................................................................. 14
Avishai, Orit 2007 Managing the lactating body: The breast-feeding project and privileged
motherhood. Qualitative Sociology 30:135-152................................................................... 14
Baker, S., Choi, P., Henshaw, C., and J. Tree. 2005 ‘I felt as though I’d been in jail’: Women’s
experiences of maternity care during labour, delivery and the immediate postpartum.
Feminism and Psychology 15:315-342. ................................................................................... 15
Biehl, J., and A. Moran-Thomas 2009 Symptom: Subjectivity, social ills, technologies.
Annual review of Anthropology 38: 267-88. .......................................................................... 16
Bove, R., Valeggia, C., and P. Ellison 2002 Girl helpers and time allocation of nursing
women among the Toba of Argentina. Human Nature 13(4):457-472. ....................... 16
Chan, K., Brownridge, D., Tiwari, A., Fong, D., Leung, W., and P. Ho. 2011 Associating
Pregnancy with partner violence against Chinese women. Journal of Interpersonal
Violence 26(7):1478-1500. .......................................................................................................... 17
Crossley, Michele 2009 Breastfeeding as a moral imperative: An autoethnographic study.
Feminism and Psychology 19(1):71-87. .................................................................................. 17
Dykes, Fiona 2005 ‘Supply’ and ‘demand’: Breastfeeding as labour. Social Science and
Medicine 60:2283-2293. ................................................................................................................ 18
Dykes, F., and R. Flacking 2010 Encouraging breastfeeding: A relational perspective. Early
Human Development 86:733-736. .............................................................................................. 19
Faircloth, Charlotte 2009 Mothering as identity-work: Long-term breastfeeding and
intensive motherhood. Anthropology News: 15-17. ............................................................ 19
Galtry, Judith 2003 The impact of breastfeeding of labour market policy and practice in
Ireland, Sweden, and the USA. Social Science and Medicine 57:167-177. ..................... 20
Hausman, Bernice 2004 The feminist politics of breastfeeding. Australian Feminist Studies
19(45):273-285. ............................................................................................................................... 20
Kukla, Rebecca 2006 Ethics and ideology in breastfeeding advocacy campaigns. Hypatia
21(1):157-180 ................................................................................................................................... 20
Lupton, Deborah 2000 ‘A love/hate relationship’: the ideals and experiences of first-time
mothers. Journal of Sociology 36(1):50-63. ............................................................................ 21
Mahgoub, S., Bandeke, T., and M. Nnyepi 2002 Breastfeeding in Botswana: Practices,
attitudes, patterns, and the socio-cultural factors affecting them. Journal of Tropical
Pediatrics 48: 195-199 ................................................................................................................... 21
Abstract: .............................................................................................................................................. 22
Mahon-Daly, P. and G. Andrews. 2002 Liminality and breastfeeding: women negotiating
space and two bodies. Health and Place 8:61-76. ................................................................. 22
Marshall, J., Godfrey, M., and M. Renfrew 2007 Being a ‘good mother’: Managing
breastfeeding and merging identities. Social Science and Medicine 65:2147-2159. 23
Murphy, Elizabeth 1999 ‘Breast is best’: Infant feeding decisions and maternal deviance.
Sociology of Health and Illness 21(2):187-208. ..................................................................... 23
Murphy, Elizabeth 2003 Expertise and forms of knowledge in the government of families.
The Sociological Review:433-462. .............................................................................................. 24
Quinlan, R., Quinlan, M., and M. Flinn 2005 Local resource enhancement and sex-biased
breastfeeding in a Caribbean community. Current Anthropology 46(3):471-480. .. 24
Scavenius, M., Van Hulsel, L., Meijer, J., Wendte, H., and R. Gurgel. 2007 In practice, the
theory is different: A processual analysis of breastfeeding in northeast Brazil. Social
Science and Medicine 64:676-688............................................................................................... 25
Schmied, V. and D. Lupton 2001 Blurring the boundaries: breastfeeding and maternal
subjectivity. Sociology of Health and Illness 23(2):234-250. ............................................ 25
Shaw, Rhonda 2003 Theorizing breastfeeding: Body ethics, maternal generosity and the
gift. Body and Society 9(2):55-73. ............................................................................................... 26
Stearns, Cindy 1999 Breastfeeding and the good maternal body. Gender and Society
13(3):308-325. .................................................................................................................................. 26
Sutherland, Katherine 1999 Of milk and miracles: Nursing, the life drive, and subjectivity.
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 20(2):1-20. .............................................................. 26
Taylor, E. and L. Wallace 2012 For shame: Feminism, breastfeeding advocacy, and
maternal guilt. Hypatia 27(1):76-98. ........................................................................................ 26
Tomori, Cecilia 2011 The Moral Dilemmas of Nighttime Breastfeeding: Crafting Kinship,
Personhood and Capitalism in the U.S. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology,
University of Michigan. .................................................................................................................. 27
Van Esterik, Penny 2002 Contemporary trends in infant feeding research. Annual Review
of Anthropology 31:257-278. ....................................................................................................... 28
Wall, Glenda 2001 Moral construction of motherhood in breastfeeding discourse. Gender
and Society 15(4):592-610............................................................................................................ 28
Child ............................................................................................................................................ 29
Colls, R., and K. Horschelmann. 2009 Editorial: The geographies of children’s and young
people’s bodies. Children’s Geographies 7(1):1-6. .............................................................. 29
Gibbons, Ann 2008 The birth of childhood. Science 322:1040-1043. ........................... 29
Gupta, Akhil 2002 Reliving childhood? The temporality of childhood and narratives of
reincarnation. Ethnos 67(1):33-56. ........................................................................................... 29
Howell, Signe 2009 Adoption of the unrelated child: Some challenges to the
anthropological study of kinship. Annual Review of Anthropology 38:149-166. ...... 29
Lee, Nick 2008 Awake, asleep, adult, child: An a-humanist account of persons. Body and
Society 14(4):57-74. ........................................................................................................................ 30
Marx, G. and V. Steeves 2010 From the beginning: Children as subjects and agents of
surveillance. Surveillance and Society 7(3/4):192-230...................................................... 30
Murphy, Elizabeth N.d. Images of childhood in mothers’ accounts of contemporary
childrearing. Unpublished, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham
................................................................................................................................................................ 31
Uprichard, Emma 2008 Children as ‘being and becomings’: Children, childhood and
temporality. Children and Society 22:303-313. .................................................................... 31
Embryos and Genetics .......................................................................................................... 31
Arsdale, Adam 2013 A shifting theoretical framework for biological anthropology in 2012.
American Anthropologist 115(2):262-272. ........................................................................... 31
Bestard, Joan 2004 Kinship and the new genetics. The changing meaning of biogenetic
substance. Social Anthropology 12(3):253-263. .................................................................. 32
Finlay, Nyree 2013 Archaeologies of the beginnings of life. World Archaeology. .... 32
Franklin, Sarah 2006 Origin stories revisited: IVF as an anthropological project. Culture,
Medicine and Psychiatry 30:547-555. ...................................................................................... 32
Franklin, Sarah 2006 The cyborg embryo: Our path to transbiology. Theory Culture
Society 23(7-8):167-187. .............................................................................................................. 32
Franklin, Sarah 2003 Re-thinking nature-culture: Anthropology and the new genetics.
Anthropological Theory 3(1): 65-85......................................................................................... 32
Gettler, L. and J. McKenna 2010 Evolutionary perspectives on mother-infant sleep
proximity and breastfeeding in a laboratory setting. American Journal of Physical
Anthropology:1-9............................................................................................................................. 33
Hofer, Myron 2005 The psychobiology of early attachment. Clinical Neuroscience
Research:1-10 ................................................................................................................................... 33
Hofer, Myron 2006 Psychobiological roots of early attachment. Current Directions in
Psychological Science 15(2):84-88............................................................................................ 34
Hogle, Linda 2010 Characterizing human embryonic stem cells: biological and social
markers of identity. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 24(4):433-450. ....................... 34
Inhorn, Marcia 2007 Medical anthropology at the intersections. Medical Anthropology
Quarterly 21(3):249-255. ............................................................................................................. 35
Jablonka, E. and M. Lamb 2002 The changing concept of epigenetics. Annual New York
Academy of Sciences 981:82-96. ................................................................................................ 35
Kashmeri, Shireen 2008 Unraveling Surrogacy in Ontario, Canada. An Ethnographic
Inquiry on the Influence of Canada’s Assisted Human Reproductive Act (2004), Surrogacy
Contracts, Parentage Laws, and Gay Fatherhood. M.A. Thesis, Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, Concordia University. ....................................................................................... 36
Konrad, Monica 1998 Ova donation and symbols of substance: Some variations on the
theme of sex, gender and the partible body. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 4(4):643-667. .................................................................................................................. 36
Kuzawa, C. and Z. Thayer 2011 Timescales of human adaptation: the role of epigenetic
processes. Epigenomics 3(2):221-234. .................................................................................... 36
Levine, Nancy 2008 Alternative kinship, marriage and reproduction. Annual Review of
Anthropology 37:375-389. ........................................................................................................... 37
Maher, E. Afnan, M. and C. Barratt 2003 Epigenetic risks related to assisted reproductive
technologies: Epigenetics, imprinting, ART and icebergs. Human Reproduction
18(12):2508-2511. .......................................................................................................................... 37
McKenna, J., Ball, H., and L. Gettler 2007 Mother-infant cosleeping, breastfeeding and
sudden infant death syndrome: What biological anthropology has discovered about
normal infant sleep and pediatric sleep medicine. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology
50:133-161. ........................................................................................................................................ 38
Morgan, Lynn 2002 “Properly disposed of”: A history of embryo disposal and the changing
claims on fetal remains. Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and
Illness 21(3-4): 247-274................................................................................................................ 39
Niemitz, E. and A. Feinberg 2004 Epigenetics and assisted reproductive technology: A call
for investigation. American Journal of Human Genetics 74:599-609. .......................... 39
Orobitg, G. and C. Salazar 2005 The gift of motherhood: Egg donation in a Barcelona
infertility clinic. Ethnos 70(1): 31-52. ...................................................................................... 40
Parasidis, Efthimios The essence of being human. The Minnesora Journal of Law, Science
and Technology. 13(1). .................................................................................................................. 40
Roberts, Elizabeth 2011 Abandonment and accumulation: Embryonic futures in the United
States and Ecuador. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25(2):232-253......................... 40
Simpson, Bob 2000 Imagined genetic communities: ethnicity and essentialism in the
twenty-first century. Anthropology Today 16(3): 3-6........................................................ 41
Svendsen, Mette 2011 Articulating potentiality: Notes on the delineation of the bank figure
in human embryonic stem cell research. Cultural Anthropology 26(3):414-437. ... 41
White, Linda 2004 Reproductive rights: Technologies of reproduction. Anthropology
News: 15-18. ...................................................................................................................................... 41
Whitelaw, Emma 2006 Sins of the fathers, and their fathers. European Journal of Human
Genetics 14:131-132. ...................................................................................................................... 41
Ethics .......................................................................................................................................... 41
Beasley, C. and Bacchi, C. 2007 Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond
trust, care and generosity – towards an ethic of ‘social flesh’. Feminist Theory 8(3):279298. ....................................................................................................................................................... 41
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Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. ................................................................................................................... 42
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Work in Progress.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Dreyfus,
eds. Pp. 229–52. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ...................................................... 42
Einarsdottir, Johanna 2007 Research with children: Methodological and ethical
challenges. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 15(2):197-211.42
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Contemporary Ethnography 24(1):68-98. .............................................................................. 42
Eysenbach, G. and J. Till 2001 Ethical issues in qualitative research on internet
communities. British Medical Journal 323:1103-1105...................................................... 43
Flicker, S., Travers, R., Guta, A., McDonald, S. and A. Meagher 2007 Ethical dilemmas in
community-based participatory research: Recommendations for institutional review
boards. Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 84(4):478493. ....................................................................................................................................................... 43
Guillemin, M. and L. Gillam 2004 Ethics, reflexivity, and “ethically important moments” in
research. Qualitative Inquiry 10:261-280. ............................................................................. 44
Halse, C. and A. Honey 2005 Unraveling ethics: Illuminating the moral dilemmas of
research ethics. Signs 30(4):2141-2162. ................................................................................ 45
Kalvemark, S., Hoglund, A., Hansson, M., Westerholm, P., and B. Arnetz 2003 Living with
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Morrow, Virginia 2008 Ethical dilemmas in research with children and young people
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Muller, J. and B. Desmond 1992 Cross-cultural medicine a decade later: Ethical dilemmas
in a cross-cultural context – A Chinese example. West Journal of Medicine 157:323-327.
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Tronto, Joan 1999 Review of Care ethics: Moving forward caring. Gender Sensitive by Peta
Bowden; Care, Gender, and Justice by Piemut Bubeck; Moral voices, moral selves by Susan
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Sociology: Special Issue-Political Ethnography I 29:373-386. ........................................ 47
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Infant .......................................................................................................................................... 48
Brownlie, J. and V. Leith 2011 Social bundles: Thinking through the infant body. Childhood
18(2):196-210. .................................................................................................................................. 48
Cooper, P., Tomlinson, M., Swartz, L., Landman, M., Molteno, C., Stein, A., McPherson, K., and
L. Murray. 2009 Improving quality of mother-infant relationship and infant attachment in
socioeconomically deprived community in South Africa: Randomised controlled trial.
British Medical Journal 338: 974-982. ..................................................................................... 49
Lee, Ellie 2008 Living with risk in the age of ‘intensive motherhood’: Maternal identity and
infant feeding. Health, Risk and Society 10(5): 467-477. .................................................. 49
Lupton, Deborah 2012 Configuring maternal, preborn and infant embodiment: Sydney
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................................................................................................................................................................ 50
Lupton, Deborah N.d. Precious, pure, uncivilized, vulnerable: Infant embodiment in the
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University of Sydney. ...................................................................................................................... 51
Lupton, Deborah 2013 Infant embodiment and interembodiment: A review of
sociocultural perspectives. Childhood 20(1):37-50............................................................ 51
Miscellaneous .......................................................................................................................... 51
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Motherhood.............................................................................................................................. 53
AbuZahr, Carla 2003 Safe motherhood: A brief history of the global movement 1947-2002.
British Medical Bulletin 67:13-25. ............................................................................................ 53
Ketler, Suzanne 2000 Preparing for motherhood: Authoritative knowledge and the
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Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14(2):138-158. ................................................................ 54
Lee, Ellie 2008 Living with risk in the age of ‘intensive motherhood’: Maternal identity and
infant feeding. Health, Risk and Society 10(5):467-477. ................................................... 54
Obermeyer, Carla 2000 Risk, uncertainty and agency: Culture and safe motherhood in
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Prussing, Erica 2010 Review of Reconstructing motherhood and disability in the age of
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Newborn .................................................................................................................................... 55
Buchbinder, Mara 2011 Medical technologies and the dream of the perfect newborn.
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Pregnancy ................................................................................................................................. 56
Lahood, Greg 2007 Rumour of angels and heavenly midwives: Anthropology of
transpersonal events and childbirth. Women and Birth 20:3-10. ................................. 56
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Health and Illness 31(3): 196-212. ............................................................................................ 57
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resistance to prenatal norms. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 25:195-223. ......... 57
Van der Sijpt, E. and C. Notemans 2010 Perils to pregnancies: On social sorrows and
strategies surrounding pregnancy loss in Cameroon. Medical Anthropology Quarterly
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Prenatal ..................................................................................................................................... 58
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Rights .......................................................................................................................................... 59
Alderson, P., Hawthorne, J. and M. Killen 2005 Are Premature Babies Citizens with Rights?
Provision Rights and the Edges of Citizenship. Journal of Social Sciences Special Issue 9:
71-81. ................................................................................................................................................... 59
Cornock, M. and H. Montgomery 2011 Children’s rights in and out of the womb.
International Journal of Children’s Rights 19:3-19. ............................................................ 59
Attachment
Cooper, P., Tomlinson, M., Swartz, L., Landman, M., Molteno, C., Stein, A., McPherson,
K., and L. Murray 2009 Improving quality of mother-infant relationship and infant
attachment in socioeconomically deprived community in South Africa: randomised
controlled trial. British Medical Journal 338: 974-82.
Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2669116/pdf/bmj.b974.pdf
Abstract:
Objective: To assess the efficacy of an intervention designed to improve the
mother-infant relationship and security of infant attachment in a South African periurban settlement with marked adverse socioeconomic circumstances.
Design: Randomised controlled trial.
Setting: Khayelitsha, a peri-urban settlement in South Africa.
Participants: 449 pregnant women.
Interventions: The intervention was delivered from late pregnancy and for six
months postpartum. Women were visited in their homes by previously untrained
lay community workers who provided support and guidance in parenting. The
purpose of the intervention was to promote sensitive and responsive parenting and
secure infant attachment to the mother. Women in the control group received no
therapeutic input from the research team. Main outcome measures: Primary
outcomes: quality of mother-infant interactions at six and 12 months postpartum;
infant attachment security at 18 months. Secondary outcome: maternal depression
at six and 12 months. Results: The intervention was associated with significant
benefit to the mother-infant relationship. At both six and 12 months, compared with
control mothers, mothers in the intervention group were significantly more
sensitive (6 months: mean difference=0.77 (SD 0.37), t=2.10, P<0.05, d=0.24; 12
months: mean difference=0.42 (0.18), t=−2.04 , P<0.05, d=0.26) and less intrusive (6
months: mean difference=0.68 (0.36), t=2.28, P<0.05, d=0.26; 12 months: mean
difference=−1.76 (0.86), t=2.28 , P<0.05, d=0.24) in their interactions with their
infants. The intervention was also associated with a higher rate of secure infant
attachments at 18 months (116/156 (74%) v 102/162 (63%); Wald=4.74, odds
ratio=1.70, P<0.05). Although the prevalence of maternal depressive disorder was
not significantly reduced, the intervention had a benefit in terms of maternal
depressed mood at six months (z=2.05, P=0.04) on the Edinburgh postnatal
depression scale). Conclusions: The intervention, delivered by local lay women, had
a significant positive impact on the quality of the mother-infant relationship and on
security of infant attachment, factors known to predict favourable child
development. If these effects persist, and if they are replicated, this intervention
holds considerable promise for use in the developing world.
Faircloth C. 2011 ‘It feels right in my heart’: affective accountability in narratives of
attachment. The Sociological Review 59(2):283-302.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2011.02004.x/pdf
Abstract:
This article makes a contribution to discussions around ‘affect’ in the social sciences
(Clough and Halley, 2007; Connolly, 1999; Massumi, 2002). It emerges from a
research project involving a network of mothers – in London – who breastfeed their
children to ‘full term’. Typically, this would be up to the age of three or four, though
ranged, in this case, to between one and eight years old. For many women, the most
fundamental reasoning in their decision to breastfeed to ‘full term’ is that it simply
‘feels right.’ The article therefore explores anthropological approaches to the
‘feelings’ that embodied experiences generate, as revealed in the accounts and
practices of the people we work with (whether at the physiological, emotional or
moral levels). It considers various means of describing the feelings experienced by
women during of long-term breastfeeding – such as ‘hormones’, ‘instinct’ and
‘intuition’ – but ultimately argues for a theoretical framework of ‘affect’ to
incorporate best the combined physiological and moral aspects of ‘doing what feels
right in my heart,’ so critical to women’s perceptions of themselves as mothers.
Tomlinson, M., Cooper, P., and L. Murray. 2005 Mother-infant relationship and infant
attachment in a South African peri-urban settlement. Child Development 76(5):10441054.
Link: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3696614.pdf?acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true
Abstract:
A sample of 147 mother–infant dyads was recruited from a peri-urban settlement
outside Cape Town and seen at 2- and 18-months postpartum. At 18 months, 61.9%
of the infants were rated as securely attached (B); 4.1% as avoidant (A); 8.2% as
resistant (C); and 25.8% disorganized (D). Postpartum depression at 2 months, and
indices of poor parenting at both 2 and 18 months, were associated with insecure
infant attachment. The critical 2-month predictor variables for insecure infant
attachment were maternal intrusiveness and maternal remoteness, and early
maternal depression. When concurrent maternal sensitivity was considered, the
quality of the early mother–infant relationship remained important, but maternal
depression was no longer predictive. Cross- cultural differences and consistencies in
the development of attachment are discussed.
Baby
Gottlieb, Alma 2000 Where have all the babies gone? Toward an anthropology of
Infants (and their caretakers). Anthropological Quarterly 73(3): 121-132.
Link: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/anthropological_quarterly/v073/73.3gottlieb.pdf
Abstract:
In much anthropological literature infants are frequently neglected as outside the
scope of both the concept of culture and disciplinary methods. This article proposes
six reasons for this exclusion of infants from anthropological discussion. These
include the fieldworker's own memories and parental status, the problematic
question of agency in infants and their presumed dependence on others, their
routine attachment to women, their seeming inability to communicate, their
inconvenient propensity to leak from a variety of orifices, and their apparently low
quotient of rationality. Yet investigation of how infants are conceived of beyond the
industrialized West can lead us to envision them far differently from how they are
conceived in the West(including by anthropologists). Confronting such comparative
data suggests the desirability of considering infants as both relevant and beneficial
to the anthropological endeavor [babies/infants, childhood/youth,
structure/agency, social theory, West Africa].
Lupton, Deborah 2011 ‘The best thing for the baby’: Mothers’ concepts and
experiences related to promoting their infants’ health and development. Health, Risk
and Society 13(7-8): 637-651.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13698575.2011.624179
Abstract:
Mothers and pregnant women in contemporary western societies are at the centre
of a web of expert and lay discourses concerning the ways they should promote and
protect the health and development of their foetuses and infants. This article reports
the findings from an Australian study involving interviews with 60 mothers. The
findings explore in detail four topics discussed in the interviews related to
pregnancy and caring for young infants: disciplining the pregnant body; promoting
infants’ health; immunisation; and promoting infants’ development. It is concluded
that the mothers were highly aware of their responsibilities in protecting their
foetuses and infants from harm and promoting their health and development. They
conceptualised the infant body as highly vulnerable and requiring protection from
contamination. They therefore generally supported the idea of vaccination as a way
of protecting their babies’ immature immune systems, but were also often
ambivalent about it. The mothers were aware of the judgemental attitudes of others,
including other mothers, towards their caring efforts and attempted to conform to
the ideal of the ‘good mother’. The emotional dimensions of caring for infants and
protecting their health are discussed in relation to the voluntary participation of
mothers in conforming to societal expectations.
Remennick, Larissa 2006 The quest for the perfect baby: why do Israeli women seek
prenatal genetic testing? Sociology of Health and Illness 28 (1): 21-53.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2006.00481.x/pdf
Abstract:
Since the mid-1990s, the Israeli medical scene has witnessed a real boom in elective
prenatal testing for inherited diseases that has spread beyond risk groups to the
general Jewish population, especially of Ashkenazi (European) origin. This study
tried to identify key social influences involved in the growing range and prevalence
of prenatal genetic tests as they emerged from women’s own perspective. Twentyseven women having blood tests for genetic mutations were interviewed at two
types of genetic clinics, and re-interviewed after getting test results. The names of
23 women who chose not to have elective tests were obtained from testers, and
these non-testers were interviewed for comparison. Women’s accounts suggest that
elective genetic testing is more acceptable, if not normative, among educated middle
class Ashkenazi women, and is more often questioned and refused by lower class
Mizrahi women, as well as religious women of any ethnic origin. The key forces that
drive women’s choice of prenatal genetic diagnosis include the fear of having a sick
and/or socially unfit child in an unsupportive environment; strong endorsement of
testing by gynaecologists; popular and professional discourse on the common
Ashkenazi mutations causing genetic anxiety in this ethnic group (i.e. apprehension
of multiple known and unknown dangers hidden in its genetic makeup); and the
emerging social pressure for comprehensive prenatal screening as an indispensable
part of good motherhood. Many women described the experience of testing as
frustrating because of the long wait for results and difficulty of their interpretation
and subsequent decision-making. Women who rejected elective tests explained
their decision by moral/religious objections to abortion and/or eugenic aspects of
prenatal screening, as well as by prohibitive costs and poor understanding of the
tests’ meaning and implications. Yet, few informants voiced objections to the
excessive medicalisation of pregnancy as such; ethno-national motives of
reproductive decisions were also uncommon in this group. More critical reflection is
clearly needed from both providers and users of elective genetic screening before
the more widespread uptake of this practice.
Birth
Davis-Floyd, R., and C. Sargent 1996 Introduction. Medical Anthropology Quarterly
10(2): 111-120.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/maq.1996.10.2.02a00010/pdf
Greenhalgh, Susan 2003 Planned births, unplanned persons: “Population” in the
making of Chinese modernity. American Ethnologist 30(2):196-215
Link: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~smgreenh/bio/Greenhalgh-planned.pdf
Abstract:
In this article I suggest that "population” operates as a capacious domain of modern
power, with its own imaginaries, discourses, bureaucratic apparatuses, and social
effects. Taking China, home to the world's largest population, as my ethnographic
case, I examine the role of "birth planning," China's distinctive Marxist-LeninistMaoist approach to population control, in the construction of "Chinese socialist
modernity. "I trace the historical, political, and bureaucratic process by which the
state's planned birth project, designed to create a modern, planned population,
produced not only a large group of planned persons but also a huge outcast group of
unplanned, "black" persons who, as legal nonpersons, exist on the margins of
society, lacking citizenship rights and state benefits. With its gargantuan population
and fearsome birth planning program, China offers striking evidence of the social
power of governmental projects of population control- to create new classifications
of social life, new types of personhood, and new forms of social and political
exclusion.
Lori, J., and J. Boyle 2011 Cultural childbirth practices, beliefs, and traditions in
postconflict Liberia. Health Care for Women International 32:454-473.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07399332.2011.555831
Abstract:
In this qualitative study we used an interpretive, critical ethnographic approach to
provide an understanding of childbirth and maternal illness and death in Liberia
through the lens of women, families, and communities. We identified three major
themes from the data: (a) secrecy surrounding pregnancy and childbirth; (b) power
and authority; and (c) distrust of the health care system. The interpretive theory,
Behind the House, generated from data analysis provides an understanding of the
larger social and cultural context of childbirth in Liberia. Our findings provide a
more complete understanding of the contextual factors that impact on the
intractable problem of maternal mortality.
Obermeyer, Carla 2000 Pluralism and pragmatism: Knowledge and practice of birth in
Morocco. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14(2):180-201.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/maq.2000.14.2.180/pdf
Abstract:
This article examines knowledge and practice surrounding birth in Morocco, using
women's narratives of their recent birth experiences, observations of medical
encounters, and statements about prescribed behaviors during pregnancy and birth,
as well as the vocabulary used to refer to physiological processes, disease conditions,
and social relationships. The analysis shows that the three major themes that define
the traditional Moroccan ethnophysiology of birth-conceptions of hot and cold, the
symbolism of blood, and the metaphors of openness and obstruction-are not
inconsistent with the precepts of biomedicine and public health and do not in
themselves constitute obstacles either to safe home births or the use of formal health
services. Women integrate biomedical and local knowledge and practices and
simultaneously seek care from "traditional" and "modern" practitioners, creatively
combining elements in accordance with their situations and the means at their
disposal. Birth narratives show the eclecticism and flexibility that characterize
women's attitudes and behaviors regarding pregnancy and birth. Women's decisions
are shaped by two overriding considerations: incertitude about what can happen
during the last phase of a pregnancy and ambivalence toward the available
alternatives for care, both of which reflect a realistic assessment of their situations. By
showing how women make decisions in response to these considerations, this article
seeks to clarify some of the links between beliefs and practices and to contribute to
ongoing discussions regarding the relevance of local knowledge for patterns of health
care.
Parry, Diana 2008 “We wanted a birth experience, not a medical experience”:
Exploring Canadian women’s use of midwifery. Health Care for Women International
29:784-806.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07399330802269451
Abstract:
In this study I explore Canadian women’s use of midwifery to examine whether their
choice represents a resistance to the medicalization of pregnancy/childbirth.
Through my analysis of the data I identified eight ways the women’s deliberate
decision to pursue midwifery care represented resistance to medicalization. In so
doing, I demonstrate how women actively assert their agency over reproduction
thus shaping their own reproductive health experiences. The outcome of their
resistance and resultant use of midwifery was empowerment. Theoretically the
research contributes to understanding the intentionality of resistance and a
continuum of resistant behavior.
Breastfeeding
Avery, M., Duckett, L., and C, Frantzich. 2000 The experience of sexuality during
breastfeeding among primiparous women. Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health
45(3):227-236.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1016/S1526-9523(00)00020-9/pdf
Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to describe various aspects of sexuality for
primiparous breastfeeding women. The conceptual framework used for the study
was Bernhard’s theory of women’s integrated sexuality which describes female
sexuality as a multidimensional, biopsychosocial phenomenon. The investigators
used a descriptive design, analyzing data from the 576 primiparous breastfeeding
women who, as part of a larger study, completed the Breastfeeding and Sexuality
Tool at the time of complete weaning. The women were from a large, private
hospital in urban Minnesota. Subjects completed initial questionnaires during the
postpartum hospitalization. Follow-up data were collected by phone at 1, 3, 6, and
12 months postpartum. Those who had not weaned by 12 months were followed
every 3 months until complete weaning was reported. Overall, women perceived
that breastfeeding had a slightly negative impact on the physiologic aspects of
sexuality, but did not greatly affect the woman’s sexual relationship with her
partner. In addition, breastfeeding mothers perceived their partners’ attitudes
towards breastfeeding and sexuality as slightly positive, and did not worry that
sexual activity would harm their milk supply or their ability to nurse. Overall,
breastfeeding had a slightly negative impact on sexuality. However, a wide range of
responses were reported by the women. Health care providers should be familiar
with the whole range of possible responses to sexuality while breast- feeding in
order to appropriately counsel women about what is normal and what to expect
during this time.
Avishai, Orit 2007 Managing the lactating body: The breast-feeding project and
privileged motherhood. Qualitative Sociology 30:135-152.
Link: http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/867/art%253A10.1007%252Fs11133006-9054-5.pdf?auth66=1411558246_4899653f9c095c593e7d42923cc60842&ext=.pdf
Abstract:
Drawing on interviews with twenty-five mostly white, educated, work-force
experienced and class-privileged mothers, this paper explores how these women
construct the lactating body as a carefully managed site and breast-feeding as a
project—a task to be researched, planned, implemented, and assessed, with reliance
on expert knowledge, professional advice, and consumption. The framing of breastfeeding as a project contrasts with the emphases on pleasure, embodied subjectivity,
relationality, and empowerment that characterizes much of the recent breastfeeding literature across the humanities and social sciences. I argue that the project
frame sheds light on the amount of work and self-discipline involved in compliance
with broader middle-class mothering standards set in the consumerist,
technological, medicalized, and professionalized contexts that shape parenting in
late capitalist America.
Baker, S., Choi, P., Henshaw, C., and J. Tree. 2005 ‘I felt as though I’d been in jail’:
Women’s experiences of maternity care during labour, delivery and the immediate
postpartum. Feminism and Psychology 15:315-342.
Link: http://fap.sagepub.com/content/15/3/315.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
It has been widely recognized, both in the UK and internationally, that there is a
need for a multidimensional or holistic approach to maternity care, which
incorporates psycho- logical as well as physical aspects, in order to optimize
women’s experiences both in the intra- and postpartum period. Central to such an
approach is the relationship between women and maternity care staff. The aim of
this study was to explore the impact of maternity care staff on women’s experiences,
and feelings associated with the childbirth process. Semi-structured interviews
were conducted with 24 primiparous and multiparous women, and transcripts
analysed using open and axial coding with triangulation. Three main themes
emerged from women’s accounts: perceptions of control, staff attitudes and
behaviours, and resource issues. Each of these themes was evident throughout the
various stages of the childbirth process, in the delivery suite, on the maternity ward,
and specifically in relation to breastfeeding. In the women’s accounts, feelings of
little control were related to inadequate information provision, poor
communication, and no opportunity to influence decision making. These, together
with the negative attitudes and behaviours of maternity staff, and issues of underresourcing, were often linked to negative feelings such as fear, anger,
disappointment, distress, guilt, and inadequacy. These findings illustrate the
importance of maternity care staff recognizing women’s psychological and
emotional needs during the childbirth process, and the impact that they themselves
may have on women’s experiences. These issues are discussed with reference to the
wider debate on authority and power within the medical relationship, from a
feminist viewpoint.
Biehl, J., and A. Moran-Thomas 2009 Symptom: Subjectivity, social ills, technologies.
Annual review of Anthropology 38: 267-88.
Link: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-anthro-091908-164420
Abstract:
In the domain of health, not only are the raw effects of economic, social, and medical
inequalities continually devastating, but novel processes of reconfiguring illness
experience, subjectivity, and control are also underway. Human relationships to
medical technology are increasingly constituted outside the clinical encounter. In
this article we explore how the domestic encroachment of medical commodities
affects social bonds in both affluent and resource-poor contexts, as well as how
these commodities become interwoven in the very fabric of symptoms and
identities. Symptoms are more than contingent matters; they are, at times, a
necessary condition for the afflicted to articulate a new relationship to the world
and to others. In exploring how people conceptualize technological self-care, we are
specifically concerned with disciplinary modes of evidence-making and ask the
following: what are the possibilities and limitations of theoretical frameworks (such
as structural violence, biopower, social suffering, and psychoanalysis) through
which these conceptions are being analyzed in contemporary anthropological
scholarship? What can the unique capacities of ethnography add to the task of
capturing the active embroilment of reason, life, and ethics as human conditions are
shaped and lost? The intellectual survival of anthropological theory, we argue, might
well be connected to people’s own resilience and bodily struggles for realities to
come.
Bove, R., Valeggia, C., and P. Ellison 2002 Girl helpers and time allocation of nursing
women among the Toba of Argentina. Human Nature 13(4):457-472.
Link: http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/359/art%253A10.1007%252Fs12110002-1003-8.pdf?auth66=1411558611_8f34bc04b7c36ab499ba12fc62c360b2&ext=.pdf
Abstract:
In this paper we outline the activities of young girls in a Toba community of
northern Argentina and examine the effect of girl helpers on time allocation of
nursing women. Activity budgets were obtained for 41 girls aged 3 to 15 using spot
observations. Girls spent substantial portions of observations engaged in helping
behaviors. Individual values varied with age, anthropometric characteristics, and
birth order. Activity budgets of 21 nursing women were obtained through focal
observation sessions. Women living in households with girls aged 7 to 15 allocated
17% less time to domestic work and 9% more time to socializing during afternoon
observation sessions. For nursing women in this community, direct childcare
(provided by the infant’s own mother) seemed to be a priority. Living with a girl
helper did not have any measurable effect on the frequency or duration of nursing,
or on the time that women spent caring for their infants. Based on these findings,
hypotheses are outlined for future work on the effect of girl helpers on women’s
fertility.
Chan, K., Brownridge, D., Tiwari, A., Fong, D., Leung, W., and P. Ho. 2011 Associating
Pregnancy with partner violence against Chinese women. Journal of Interpersonal
Violence 26(7):1478-1500.
Link: http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/26/7/1478.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
The present study discusses if pregnancy is a risk factor for intimate partner
violence using a large, representative sample containing detailed information on
partner violence including physical and sexual abuse as well as perpetrator-related
risk factors. Data from a representative sample of 2,225 men were analyzed. The
self-reported prevalence of men’s violence against their female partners was
computed and compared in terms of demographic, behavioral, and relationship
characteristics. The preceding- year prevalence of physical assault, sexual violence,
and “any violence or injury” among the group whose partners were pregnant was
11.9%, 9.1%, and 18.8%, respectively. This is significantly higher than the
nonpregnant group. Pregnancy was significantly associated with increased odds of
violence, including physical assault, sexual violence, and “any violence or injury”
(ORs = 2.42, 2.42, and 2.60, respectively). Having controlled for relationship
characteristics including social desirability, social support, in- law conflict,
dominance, and jealousy of male perpetrators, pregnancy was significantly
associated with “any violence or injury.” Demographic and behavioral variables
accounted for pregnant women’s significantly higher odds of having been abused in
the year preceding the data collection. This study provides preliminary findings on
the association between pregnancy and partner violence. Our findings underscore
the need to screen for violence among pregnant women in clinical health care
settings as well as in communities. Perpetrator-related risk factors should be
included in the assessment of risk for partner violence against pregnant women. For
the prevention of intimate partner violence, family-based intervention is needed to
work with victims as well as perpetrators.
Crossley, Michele 2009 Breastfeeding as a moral imperative: An autoethnographic
study. Feminism and Psychology 19(1):71-87.
Link: http://fap.sagepub.com/content/19/1/71.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
In recent years, breastfeeding has been heavily promoted in the UK. This has been
partly premised on the health benefits for women and infants, but there has also
been a strong rhetoric of ‘the natural’ that has surrounded childbirth practices more
generally. Some feminist thought has been influential in promoting breastfeeding as
a way of ‘resisting’ the medicalization of childbirth and motherhood, associating it
with women’s personal agency and empowerment. Despite the strong cultural
pressure to breastfeed, however, many women ‘fail’ to do so, with only 25 percent of
women in the UK breastfeeding exclusively when the infant is four months old.
Recent research has begun to look at the negative psychological and emotional
effects experienced by women in the light of this ‘failure’. Exploring these issues
further, this article uses an autoethnographic approach and utilizes sociological
concepts such as the ‘body-project’ to illustrate how the act of breastfeeding can be
fraught with tension as contradictory pressures in contemporary society pull
women in various ways. The article concludes that, far from being an ‘empowering’
act, breastfeeding may have become more of a ‘normalized’ moral imperative that
many women experience as anything but liberational. Accordingly, an uncritical
appropriation of the idea that ‘breast is best’ may not only be disempowering for
women, but also problematic for babies.
Dykes, Fiona 2005 ‘Supply’ and ‘demand’: Breastfeeding as labour. Social Science and
Medicine 60:2283-2293.
Link: http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0277953604005088/1-s2.0-S0277953604005088main.pdf?_tid=60b273d6-424d-11e4-bf3e00000aacb35e&acdnat=1411386263_87460683ecb94339e87e57c29910fe73
Abstract:
This paper presents findings from a recent critical ethnographic study conducted in
two maternity units in England, UK. The study explored the influences upon 61
women’s experiences of breastfeeding within the postnatal ward setting. Participant
observations of 97 encounters between midwives and postnatal women, 106
focused interviews with postnatal women and 37-guided conversations with
midwives were conducted. Basic, organising and global themes were constructed
utilising thematic networks analysis. The metaphor of the production line, with its
notions of demand and efficient supply, illustrated the experiences of breastfeeding
women. They conceptualised breastfeeding as a ‘productive’ project, yet expressed
deep mistrust in the efficacy of their bodies. Their emphasis centred upon breast
milk as nutrition rather than relationality and breastfeeding. Women referred to the
demanding and unpredictable ways in which their baby breached their temporal
and spatial boundaries. They sought strategies to cope with the uncertainty of this
embodied experience in combination with their concerns regarding returning to a
‘normal’ and ‘productive’ life. The hospital setting and health worker practices
played a contributing and reinforcing role. The paper discusses ways of reestablishing trust in women’s bodies and breastfeeding, while respecting difference
and diversity. It argues for embracing the concepts of embodiment and relationality
whilst avoiding a return to essentialism. This requires collective efforts to erode
deeply embedded cultural understandings of women’s bodies centring upon
disembodied and efficient production.
Dykes, F., and R. Flacking 2010 Encouraging breastfeeding: A relational perspective.
Early Human Development 86:733-736.
Link: http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0378378210002069/1-s2.0-S0378378210002069main.pdf?_tid=80f47676-424d-11e4-993600000aab0f01&acdnat=1411386317_737493b36ee4b38f9a22a50aaa55670a
Abstract:
Despite the WHO recommendations that babies should be breastfed exclusively for
six months and thereafter for up to two years and beyond this pattern of feeding is
far from the global norm. Although breastfeeding is triggered through biological
mechanisms which have not changed with time, the perception of breastfeeding as a
phenomenon is variable, as it not only reflects cultural values of motherhood but is
also negotiable from the perspective of the individual. This paper argues that
relationships are central to encouraging breastfeeding at an organisational, family
and staff–parent level. This shifts our conceptualisations away from the primary
focus of breastfeeding as nutrition which, in turn, removes the notion of
breastfeeding as a productive process, prone to problems and failure.
Faircloth, Charlotte 2009 Mothering as identity-work: Long-term breastfeeding and
intensive motherhood. Anthropology News: 15-17.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1556-3502.2009.50215.x/pdf
Abstract:
This article argues for an anthropological engagement with parenting as “identitywork” in a bid to extend parenting studies beyond the more traditional focus on
kinship, and also expand what “kinship” might mean to anthropologists. That is, it
proposes a deeper exploration of how relatedness is enacted in conjunction with
constructions of the self. Attention to identity-work—in this case the narrative
processes of self-making that parents engage in as they raise their children—is
borne of an argument that for a certain strata of parents in the UK, the word
“parent” has shifted from a noun denoting a relationship with a child (something
you are), to a verb (something you do). As Hays notes in The Cultural Contradictions
of Motherhood (1996), “ideal” parenting is financially, physically and emotionally
intensive, and parents are encouraged to spend a large amount of time, energy and
money in raising their children. Further, as Lee and Bristow argue in the
forthcoming volume Individual Freedom, Autonomy and the State, parenting is now
an occupation in which adults (most typically, mothers) are expected to be
emotionally absorbed and become personally fulfilled.
Galtry, Judith 2003 The impact of breastfeeding of labour market policy and practice in
Ireland, Sweden, and the USA. Social Science and Medicine 57:167-177.
Link: http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0277953602003726/1-s2.0-S0277953602003726main.pdf?_tid=bbe31198-424d-11e4-aafb00000aab0f27&acdnat=1411386416_b39589a21a25c4284ca0b4def8eb3ba5
Abstract:
In recent decades there has been a marked rise in the labour market
participation of women with infants in many countries. Partly in response to this
trend, there are calls for greater emphasis on infant and child health in research and
policy development on parental leave and other work–family balancing measures. Yet
achieving high rates of breastfeeding as a health objective has thus far received
relatively little attention in this context.
Biomedical literature outlines the important health benefits conferred by
breastfeeding, including upon infants and young children among middle class
populations in developed countries. International recommendations now advise
exclusive breastfeeding for 6 months. However, research indicates that the timing of
the mother’s resumption of employment is a key factor influencing the duration of
exclusive breastfeeding. There would thus appear to be considerable potential for
labour policy and practice, particularly maternity/parental leave provisions, to
positively influence breastfeeding practice.
Taking the case studies of Ireland, Sweden, and the United States, this paper
explores the implications of labour market and early childhood policy for
breastfeeding practice. The equity tensions posed by the breastfeeding–maternal
employment intersection are also examined. The paper concludes that both sociocultural support and labour market/ health/early childhood policy are important if
high rates of both breastfeeding and women’s employment are to be achieved in
industrialised countries.
Hausman, Bernice 2004 The feminist politics of breastfeeding. Australian Feminist
Studies 19(45):273-285.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0816464042000278963
Kukla, Rebecca 2006 Ethics and ideology in breastfeeding advocacy campaigns.
Hypatia 21(1):157-180
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2006.tb00970.x/pdf
Abstract:
Mothers serve as an important layer of the health-care system, with special
responsibilities to care for the health of families and nations. In our social discourse
we tend to treat maternal "choices" as though they were morally and causally selfcontained units of influence with primary control over children 'health’. In this essay,
I use infant feeding as a lens for examining the ethical contours of mothers’ care
taking practices and responsibilities, as they are situated within cultural meanings
and institutional pressures. I give a close critical reading of the content and strategy
of the new breast- feeding advocacy campaign sponsored by the United States
Department of Health and Human Services. I argue that the campaign is unlikely to
substantially increase breastfeeding rates, unresponsive and even hostile to many
women's actual concerns about breastfeeding, and well positioned to produce shame
and compromise agency among the women it targets.
Lupton, Deborah 2000 ‘A love/hate relationship’: the ideals and experiences of firsttime mothers. Journal of Sociology 36(1):50-63.
Link: http://jos.sagepub.com/content/36/1/50.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
Motherhood in western societies at the end of the twentieth century is a site of
cultural and social contradictions and tensions. Over the past quarter-century,
women with children have been encouraged to construct their subjectivities
increasingly through activities in the ’public’ domain, including through paid labour.
Yet they are still also expected to conform to ideals of ’good motherhood’. This
article reports on some preliminary findings of a longitudinal study researching
first-time parenthood in the 1990s. Drawing on a series of interviews conducted
with 25 women just before the birth and over the first six months of their infants’
lives, the article focuses on the discourses articulated by the women when
describing their ideals of the ’good mother’ and their own experiences of mothering.
Many women, at least in the early stage of motherhood, found their ideals difficult to
achieve. They talked about an ambivalent ’love/hate’ relationship with their infants.
This ambivalence appeared to emerge from the difficulties they experienced in
maintaining an autonomous subjectivity in a socio-cultural context in which they
were charged with the primary responsibility for the care of their infants.
Mahgoub, S., Bandeke, T., and M. Nnyepi 2002 Breastfeeding in Botswana: Practices,
attitudes, patterns, and the socio-cultural factors affecting them. Journal of Tropical
Pediatrics 48: 195-199
Link: http://tropej.oxfordjournals.org/content/48/4/195.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted in four randomly selected
districts of Botswana. Two study sites were chosen in each district. Four hundred
household with children under 3 years old were enrolled into the study. A
structured questionnaire was administered to mothers of eligible children in 50
households in each of the eight sites. About half the families and monthly incomes
below 400 Pula (1 US$=4.6 Pula). The majority of families had only one child under
3 years of age. A total of 76.4 per cent of the mothers were single and a high
proportion of them and primary or secondary education. Over half, 59.3 per cent, of
the mothers and a high level of information about breastfeeding mainly obtained
before conception; 94.4 per cent of the mothers believed that breastfeeding was
better than bottle-feeding. Ninety-five per cent of the mothers had breastfed their
children, and they started breastfeeding immediately or a few hours after delivery.
More than 85 per cent of the mothers were planning to continue breastfeeding for
18 months or more. The majority obtained advice about breastfeeding from health
workers. The main reason for stopping breastfeeding was that the mother was at
work or school. Although 58.2 per cent of mothers had little or no support for
breastfeeding from the community it had a positive effect on their decision to
breastfeed. The majority of mothers indicated their confidence about breastfeeding
when they were pregnant. Over three-quarters (79.6 per cent) of the mothers
delivered in government hospitals, and nearly all were roomed with their babies
after delivery.
Mahon-Daly, P. and G. Andrews. 2002 Liminality and breastfeeding: women
negotiating space and two bodies. Health and Place 8:61-76.
Link:
http://ac.els-cdn.com/S1353829201000260/1-s2.0-S1353829201000260main.pdf?_tid=7855e8be-424e-11e4-816000000aab0f6b&acdnat=1411386732_82e20047243a85502f2138916b1193ea
Abstract:
It is almost universally accepted that breastfeeding infants is nutritionally superior
to bottle-feeding. However, despite this medical advice, in many countries
breastfeeding rates remain low and in the UK, rates are relatively static. The
literature on breastfeeding has discussed international rates and the broad socioeconomic factors influencing these rates. Through an observational study of a group
of breastfeeding and non-breastfeeding women in the United Kingdom, this
research utilises contemporary theoretical perspectives on the body, space and rites
of passage, and investigates the reasons why some breastfeeding mothers may be in
a liminal period, and the breastfeeding event itself, at times, a liminal and
marginalised act. The paper argues that, for the group studied, breastfeeding is
sometimes discouraged by its medicalisation, and that breastmilk and breastfeeding
are often considered by mothers to be embarrassing. Many of the women studied
regarded certain public and private places to be unacceptable places to breastfeed
and claimed to modify their behaviour accordingly. The paper demonstrates the
value of conducting locally based qualitative research into breastfeeding
experiences, and of using theoretical perspectives from post-medical geography to
interpret women’s experiences.
Marshall, J., Godfrey, M., and M. Renfrew 2007 Being a ‘good mother’: Managing
breastfeeding and merging identities. Social Science and Medicine 65:2147-2159.
Link: http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0277953607003590/1-s2.0-S0277953607003590main.pdf?_tid=96fcbf90-424e-11e4-9c7d00000aacb361&acdnat=1411386783_fea8355a76ccce6f024029191d924ffe
Abstract:
Breastfeeding is not simply a technical or practical task but is part of the transition
to motherhood, the relationship between mother and baby and the everyday
experience of living with a new baby. Discussion of breastfeeding must therefore
include the individual’s personal and social context. This paper explores how
women in England who have chosen to breastfeed their baby accomplish this task
during the early stages of motherhood and the relative weight attached to different
factors, which impinge on decision-making. Our findings, based on observing 158
interactions between breastfeeding women and midwives or health visitors from
one Primary Care Trust in the north of England, UK, and in- depth interviews with a
sample of 22 of these women, illustrate the dynamic between breastfeeding,
becoming and being a ‘good mother’ and merging multiple identities as they
embrace motherhood. In this context, the value attached to breastfeeding as
synonymous with being a ‘good mother’ is questioned. In managing the balance
between ensuring a healthy, contented baby and the reality of their daily lives,
women negotiate the moral minefield that defines ‘good mothering’ and the diverse
conceptions and influences that shape it—including health professionals, their
social networks and the wider social and structural context of their lives. The
implications for policy and practice are discussed.
Murphy, Elizabeth 1999 ‘Breast is best’: Infant feeding decisions and maternal
deviance. Sociology of Health and Illness 21(2):187-208.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9566.00149/pdf
Abstract:
The insistence that breast feeding confers unique and significant benefits upon
children underpins both health policy and professional practice and is part of the
context in which women decide how to feed their babies and, in turn, how they
display and defend their decisions. This paper applies a framework, drawn from the
sociology of deviance, to the accounts which women give of their infant feeding
intentions. It draws upon data from a longitudinal qualitative interview study of the
food choices made by mothers on behalf of their infants and young children, to show
how such choices are irreducibly moral and that the ways in which women can be
judged, or indeed judge themselves, to be deviant are legion. However mothers
decide to feed their babies, infant feeding is a highly accountable matter. Whether
they intend to breast feed or formula feed, women face considerable interactional
challenges as they seek to establish that they are not only good mothers but also
good partners and good women.
Murphy, Elizabeth 2003 Expertise and forms of knowledge in the government of
families. The Sociological Review:433-462.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2003.00430.x/pdf
Abstract:
This paper examines the relationship between the state and the individual in
relation to an aspect of mundane family life – the feeding of babies and young
children. The nutritional status of children has long been a matter of national
concern and infant feeding is an aspect of family life that has been subjected to
substantial state intervention. It exemplifies the imposition upon women the
‘biologico-moral responsibility’ for the welfare of children (Foucault, 1991b).
The state’s attempts to influence mothers’ feeding practices operate largely through
education and persuasion. Through an elaborate state-sponsored apparatus, a
strongly medicalised expert discourse is disseminated to mothers. This discourse
warns mothers of the risks of certain feeding practices and the benefits of others. It
constrains mothers through a series of ‘quiet coercions’ (Foucault, 1991c) which
seek to render them self-regulating subjects. Using data from a longitudinal
interview study, this paper explores how mothers who are made responsible in
these medical discourses around child nutrition, engage with, resist and refuse
expert advice. It examines, in particular, the rhetorical strategies which mothers use
to defend themselves against the charges of maternal irresponsibility that arise
when their practices do not conform to expert medical recommendations.
Quinlan, R., Quinlan, M., and M. Flinn 2005 Local resource enhancement and sexbiased breastfeeding in a Caribbean community. Current Anthropology 46(3):471-480.
Link:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/430017.pdf?&acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=
true
Scavenius, M., Van Hulsel, L., Meijer, J., Wendte, H., and R. Gurgel. 2007 In practice,
the theory is different: A processual analysis of breastfeeding in northeast Brazil.
Social Science and Medicine 64:676-688.
Link: http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0277953606004680/1-s2.0-S0277953606004680main.pdf?_tid=1f3f05e8-424f-11e4-b4fa00000aab0f02&acdnat=1411387012_724391a8962a956225c000bb9bd368c0
Abstract:
‘Na pra ́ tica, a teoria e` outra’ (in practice, the theory is different) is an old
Brazilian saying. This phrase summarizes well the general practice of breastfeeding
in Brazil: ‘Breast is best’ is central in the pregnant women’s future oriented ‘theory’
of how their infant should be fed. In the subsequent weeks after delivery, however,
in the daily practicalities of feeding their infant, this theory is, to a large extent,
abandoned.
The present study is based on a sample of 300 mothers in the city of Aracaju
in the Northeast of Brazil. Through interviews, the differences and similarities
between knowledge and practice with respect to infant feeding were established. An
explanation of these differences is developed on the basis of a processual analysis of
the qualitative and quantitative results of the interview data.
Nearly all mothers were knowledgeable of the need to breastfeed, and nearly
all mothers had initiated breastfeeding. However, only a minority was exclusively
breastfeeding at the time of the interview. A distinction is made between a
breastfeeding process and a de-breastfeeding process. The data suggest that
mothers, in general, start the de-breastfeeding process with the positive intention of
ameliorating the infant’s situation without realizing the negative processual
consequences that most likely ends in a cessation of breastfeeding.
The study supports the view that health policy should underline the
processual character of both breastfeeding and de- breastfeeding when promoting
the importance of exclusive breastfeeding.
Schmied, V. and D. Lupton 2001 Blurring the boundaries: breastfeeding and maternal
subjectivity. Sociology of Health and Illness 23(2):234-250.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9566.00249/pdf
Abstract:
Contemporary medical and public health discourses represent breastfeeding as vital
to infant development and the mother-infant bond. Little research from a medical or
sociological perspective has sought to investigate the qualitative range of feminist
perspective on the body and subjectivity, together with empirical data from a series
of interviews with 25 Australian first-time mothers, to theorise the experience of
breastfeeding. These women’s accounts revealed that, although nearly all of them
subscribed vehemently to the dominant discourse of ‘breast is best’, the experience
of breastfeeding differed markedly among them. Some of the women experienced
breastfeeding as a connected, harmonious and intimate relationship between
themselves and their baby. For others, however, the breastfeeding relationship
between mother and infant was difficult to reconcile with notions of identity that
value autonomy, independence and control. We use insights from feminist
philosophy on subjectivity and embodiment to explain why the latter response
predominated among our interviewees.
Shaw, Rhonda 2003 Theorizing breastfeeding: Body ethics, maternal generosity and
the gift. Body and Society 9(2):55-73.
Link: http://bod.sagepub.com/content/9/2/55.full.pdf+html
Stearns, Cindy 1999 Breastfeeding and the good maternal body. Gender and Society
13(3):308-325.
Link: http://gas.sagepub.com/content/13/3/308.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
Breastfeeding remains an understudied topic in research and theorizing about
reproductive experience and women's bodies. This article reports on women's
experiences of breastfeeding in public as revealed through in-depth interviews with
51 women. The current construction of the good maternal body requires women to
carefully manage the performance of breastfeeding in specific ways and with
particular attention to the dominant notion of a sexualized rather than nurturing
breast. Women accommodate to, and resist, the perceived boundaries of the good
maternal body through their breastfeeding behaviors.
Sutherland, Katherine 1999 Of milk and miracles: Nursing, the life drive, and
subjectivity. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 20(2):1-20.
Link:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3347006.pdf?&acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true
Taylor, E. and L. Wallace 2012 For shame: Feminism, breastfeeding advocacy, and
maternal guilt. Hypatia 27(1):76-98.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01238.x/pdf
Abstract:
In this paper, we provide a new framework for understanding infant-feeding-related
maternal guilt and shame, placing these in the context of feminist theoretical and
psychological accounts of the emotions of self-assessment. Whereas breastfeeding
advocacy has been critiqued for its perceived role in inducing maternal guilt, we
argue that the emotion women often feel surrounding infant feeding may be better
conceptualized as shame in its tendency to involve a negative self-assessment—a
failure to achieve an idealized notion of good motherhood. Further, we suggest, both
formula-feeding and breastfeeding mothers experience shame: the former report
feeling that they fail to live up to ideals of womanhood and motherhood, and the
latter transgress cultural expectations regarding feminine modesty. The problem,
then, is the degree to which mothers are vulnerable to shame generally, regardless
of infant feeding practices. As an emotion that is less adaptive and potentially more
damaging than guilt, shame ought to be the focus of resistance for both feminists
and breastfeeding advocates, who need to work in conjunction with women to
oppose this shame by assisting them in constructing their own ideals of good
motherhood that incorporate a sense of self-concern.
Tomori, Cecilia 2011 The Moral Dilemmas of Nighttime Breastfeeding: Crafting
Kinship, Personhood and Capitalism in the U.S. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of
Anthropology, University of Michigan.
Abstract:
This dissertation addresses the cultural construction and negotiation of moral dilemmas
that arise from the embodied practices of breastfeeding and sleep in the U.S. I argue that
the heated debates that surround both breastfeeding and infant sleep arrangements originate
from the intertwined social histories of biomedicine and capitalism that have
simultaneously led to a valuation of the properties of breastmilk for health and the erosion
and stigmatization of breastfeeding’s intercorporeal praxis. I investigate the consequences
of these conflicting cultural trends through a two-year ethnographic study of middle class
parents committed to breastfeeding. In particular, I focus on the embodied moral dilemmas
that stem from cultural concerns about personhood and the intercorporeal aspects of
nighttime breastfeeding in parent-child kin relations that are amplified by contradictory
medical guidelines for breastfeeding and infant sleep. First, I address the role of childbirth
education courses for mediating these biomedical stances by situating them within different
moral frames for kinship, personhood, and capitalism that parents consume and negotiate.
Next, I explore the gendered embodied effects of stigma arising from the cultural
contradictions of breastfeeding and infant sleep on mothers, and men’s role in mitigating
these effects through their “kin work.” Finally, I examine how participants reckon with
these moral dilemmas in their nighttime practices within the context of cultural
expectations for kin relations, personhood and capitalism embodied in space and time.
Using the ethnographic study of lived experiences of my participants as the core of my
analysis, I illuminate how breastfeeding and sleep arrangements simultaneously participate
in producing kin relations, persons, and embodied inequalities through their engagement
with local-global political economic relations. Yet within these constraints, I argue that the
moral ambivalence engendered by the embodied practices of nighttime breastfeeding also
produces emergent moralities that foster modes of engagement in kinship and personhood
that subtly renegotiate the divisive effects of capitalism in everyday life. This is the first
book-length ethnography of breastfeeding in the United States and will make significant
contributions to the anthropology of reproduction and kinship studies, women’s and gender
studies, family studies, and studies of health, morality and capitalism.
Van Esterik, Penny 2002 Contemporary trends in infant feeding research. Annual
Review of Anthropology 31:257-278.
Link:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4132880.pdf?&acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true
Abstract:
This review examines current research in the subfields of anthropology and related
disciplines on the biocultural process of breastfeeding and broader questions of
infant and young-child feeding. The themes of sexuality, reproduction, embodiment,
and subjective experience are then linked to the problems women who breastfeed
face in bottle-feeding cultures. Anthropologists have contributed to policy-relevant
debates concerning women's work and scheduling in relation to infant care and
exclusive breastfeeding. The extensive ethnographic work on children's transition
to consuming household foods demonstrates the need to integrate research on
breast-feeding with research on complementary feeding. Current debates around
HIV and chemical residues in breast milk call for a critical examination of the effects
of globalization and corporate control on infant feeding practices. The literature
shows how the narrow specialty of infant feeding has broad implications for the
discipline.
Wall, Glenda 2001 Moral construction of motherhood in breastfeeding discourse.
Gender and Society 15(4):592-610.
Link: http://gas.sagepub.com/content/15/4/592.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
Some of the ways in which the experience of mothering is shaped by the moral and
cultural constructions surrounding breastfeeding discourse are examined using a
critical deconstruction of recent Canadian health education material. Connections
between the understanding surrounding breastfeeding and cultural constructions of
nature and sexuality are raised, as is the overlap between breastfeeding discourse
and a number of other social discourses including those surrounding child-centered
parenting expertise, the remoralization of pregnancy, and the neoliberal
preoccupation with individual responsibility and the cost of social programs. Some
of the implications that this understanding poses for mothers are examined.
Child
Colls, R., and K. Horschelmann. 2009 Editorial: The geographies of children’s and
young people’s bodies. Children’s Geographies 7(1):1-6.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14733280802630882
Gibbons, Ann 2008 The birth of childhood. Science 322:1040-1043.
Gupta, Akhil 2002 Reliving childhood? The temporality of childhood and narratives of
reincarnation. Ethnos 67(1):33-56.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00141840220122959
Abstract:
Although less well known than the Tibetan search for high lamas, cases of
reincarnation reported from other parts of the world frequently involve very young
children. What does this imply for our understanding of childhood? Reincarnated
children are inhabited by their (adult) thoughts and gestures, and clearly have to be
conceptualized as more complex beings than is allowed by the standard narrative of
childhood which posits a new being who slowly finds his or her way in the world.
This paper raises questions about the challenges posed by reincarnation to
dominant conceptions of childhood in the West, surveying subjects such as the
separation of children into age grades and of 'life' into stages, the relatively recent
historical trend of recasting childhood into a nostalgic mold, the investment of a life
trajectory with an historicity, and the equating of children with savages, as peoples
who antecede the 'adult' civilizations of the West.
Howell, Signe 2009 Adoption of the unrelated child: Some challenges to the
anthropological study of kinship. Annual Review of Anthropology 38:149-166.
Link:
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.anthro.37.081407.085115
Abstract:
Adoption of children born by others is practiced in some form or another in all
known societies. Although ethnographic monographs from all over the world have
made numerous brief references to local adoption and/or fostering practices, very
little sustained interpretative interest has, until recently, been directed at this social
phenomenon. With the sudden and rapid increase in transnational adoption—
people in Western Europe and North America adopt children from countries in the
south and the former Soviet empire—a new-found anthropological interest in
adoption has been observed. This review places adoption firmly within the tradition
of theoretical kinship and explores the values attached to a perceived relationship
between biological and social relatedness in a number of different social settings in
which adoption is being practiced.
Lee, Nick 2008 Awake, asleep, adult, child: An a-humanist account of persons. Body
and Society 14(4):57-74.
Link: http://bod.sagepub.com/content/14/4/57.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
Sleeping persons do not seem to be agents, to express identity or to give voice. On
one view this means that social research on sleep would do best to focus on the
social context of sleep rather than sleep ‘itself’. If the only analytic vocabulary at our
disposal consists of abstractions that assume the existence of self-conscious, selfpresent individuals, this conclusion is probably correct. This article, however, builds
on the work of some contemporary childhood researchers to offer an account of the
‘person’ as an emergent property of distributed interactions between
heterogeneous elements. The account is built through a discussion of ‘transitional
objects’ and ‘affects’. It is argued that this version of the ‘person’ could help social
research to make sense of both sides of the awake/asleep threshold. The potential
contribution of this approach to the emerging bio-politics of childhood and states of
un/consciousness is discussed.
Marx, G. and V. Steeves 2010 From the beginning: Children as subjects and agents of
surveillance. Surveillance and Society 7(3/4):192-230.
Link: D:/4152-7249-1-PB.pdf
Abstract:
This article examines the claims made by surveillance entrepreneurs selling
surveillance to parents and government agencies responsible for children.
Technologies examined include pre-natal testing, baby monitors and nanny cams,
RFID-enabled clothing, GPS tracking devices, cell phones, home drug and semen
tests, and surveillance toys. We argue that governments, both in the contest of
health care and education, use surveillance to identify and “manage” genetic or
behavioural deviations from the norm. Parents, on the other hand, are encouraged
to buy surveillance technologies to keep the child “safe”. Although there is a
secondary emphasis on parental convenience and freedom, surveillance is
predominately offered as a necessary tool of responsible and loving parenting.
Entrepreneurs also claim that parents cannot trust their children to behave in prosocial ways, and must resort to spying to overcome children’s tendency to lie and
hide their bad behaviour. We conclude by offering some ideas to rein in the variety
and complexity of the issues raised and to help order controversies in this domain.
Murphy, Elizabeth N.d. Images of childhood in mothers’ accounts of contemporary
childrearing. Unpublished, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of
Nottingham
Abstract:
This article examines how a sample of first-time mothers in the UK constitute
childhood in general, and their own children in particular, in and through their talk
about the mundane practices of child-care. The data analysed are drawn from a
longitudinal qualitative interview study which followed a sample of mothers from
late pregnancy until their babies were two years old. The analysis explores links
between mothers’ representations of childhood and the actualities of their childrearing practices. The extent to which both the representations of childhood and the
practices of individual mothers are consistent or contradictory, and change or
remain constant over time, is also examined.
Uprichard, Emma 2008 Children as ‘being and becomings’: Children, childhood and
temporality. Children and Society 22:303-313.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2007.00110.x/pdf
Abstract:
Notions of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ are intrinsic to childhood research. Whilst the
‘being’ child is seen as a social actor actively constructing ‘childhood’, the ‘becoming’
child is seen as an ‘adult in the making’, lacking competencies of the ‘adult’ that he or
she will ‘become’. However, I argue that both approaches are in themselves
problematic. Instead, theorising children as ‘being and becomings’ not only
addresses the temporality of childhood that children themselves voice, but presents
a conceptually realistic construction suitable to both childhood researchers and
practitioners.
Embryos and Genetics
Arsdale, Adam 2013 A shifting theoretical framework for biological anthropology in
2012. American Anthropologist 115(2):262-272.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aman.12008/pdf
Abstract:
The research produced in biological anthropology over the past year spans a
dizzying array of topics, methodologies, and perspectives on human evolution and
variation. In this essay, I attempt to encapsulate a slice of that research into a
broader discussion of the discipline. In this view, what stands out most notably in
the past year’s research is the way in which new observations, the product of new
technologies and new interactions across disciplinary and subdisciplinary
boundaries, have dramatically shifted understandings of long-studied
anthropological questions. The origin of modern humans, the evolution of human
birth, and the locomotion of our hominin ancestors are just three topics that
exemplify such changes in perspective over the past year. An additional shift within
the discipline is the increasing importance of open access and online forums for the
research process.
Bestard, Joan 2004 Kinship and the new genetics. The changing meaning of biogenetic
substance. Social Anthropology 12(3):253-263.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2004.tb00107.x/pdf
Finlay, Nyree 2013 Archaeologies of the beginnings of life. World Archaeology.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00438243.2013.822321
Franklin, Sarah 2006 Origin stories revisited: IVF as an anthropological project. Culture,
Medicine and Psychiatry 30:547-555.
Link: http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/766/art%253A10.1007%252Fs11013006-9036-9.pdf?auth66=1411561325_d4c29946ba525e306c6fe6499e391604&ext=.pdf
Franklin, Sarah 2006 The cyborg embryo: Our path to transbiology. Theory Culture
Society 23(7-8):167-187.
Link: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/23/7-8/167.full.pdf+html
Franklin, Sarah 2003 Re-thinking nature-culture: Anthropology and the new genetics.
Anthropological Theory 3(1): 65-85.
Link: http://ant.sagepub.com/content/3/1/65.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
This article explores the implications of ‘the new genetics’ for anthropology as
questions of articulation, connection, and relation – or as the production of
difference. Using Marilyn Strathern’s model of merographic connection, and
drawing on recent ethnographic work on the new genetics, including my own, the
question of what kinds of connections and relations are being forged through
emergent forms of genetic information is critically explored both empirically and
theoretically. In particular, the theme of a genetic ‘gap’, between ‘objective’ genetic
facts and socially- forged identities and categorizations, provides the occasion to
contrast different ethnographic and theoretical models of the social meaning of
DNA. I argue that the ways in which genetic information is always partial – in both
senses, of being already invested with presumptions and always incomplete – have
consequences for how genetic connections are formed, and genetic relationships are
understood. The desire to extract ‘clear’ biological messages from genes conflicts
with the desire to instruct, and alter, them, recapitulating a familiar hybridity at the
heart of English kinship thinking – that our biology is both made and bred.
Gettler, L. and J. McKenna 2010 Evolutionary perspectives on mother-infant sleep
proximity and breastfeeding in a laboratory setting. American Journal of Physical
Anthropology:1-9
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.21426/pdf
Abstract:
Human maternal and infant biology likely coevolved in a context of close physical
contact and some approximation of frequent, ‘‘infant-initiated’’ breastfeeding. Still,
mothers and infants commonly sleep apart from one another in many western
societies, indicating a possible ‘‘mismatch’’ between cultural norms and infant
biology. Here we present data from a 3-night laboratory-based study that examines
differences in mother–infant sleep physiology and behavior when mothers and
infants sleep together on the same surface (bedsharing) and apart in separate
rooms (solitary). We analyze breastfeeding frequency and interval data from the
first laboratory night (FN) for 52 complementary breastfeeding mothers and infants
(26 total mother– infant pairs), of which 12 pairs were routine bedsharers (RB) and
14 were routine solitary sleepers (RS). RB infants were 12.0 6 2.7 (SD) weeks old;
RS infants were 13.0 6 2.4 weeks old. On the FN, RB mother–infant pairs (while
bedsharing) engaged in a greater number of feeds per night compared to RS (while
sleeping alone) (P < 0.001). RB also showed lower intervals (min) between feeds
relative to RS (P < 0.05). When we evaluated data from all three laboratory nights (n
5 36), post hoc, RB breastfed significantly more often (P < 0.01) and showed a trend
towards lower intervals between feeds (P < 0.10). Given the widely known risks
associated with little or no breastfeeding, the demonstrated mutually regulatory
relationship between bed- sharing and breastfeeding should be considered in future
studies evaluating determinants of breastfeeding outcomes.
Hofer, Myron 2005 The psychobiology of early attachment. Clinical Neuroscience
Research:1-10
Link: http://ac.els-cdn.com/S1566277205000095/1-s2.0-S1566277205000095main.pdf?_tid=c0f451aa-4253-11e4-91a800000aacb35d&acdnat=1411389001_065fee7583aeb3d55e62506e3086344c
Abstract:
New laboratory research has begun to reveal a network of simple behavioral,
physiological and neural processes that underlie the psychological constructs of
attachment theory. It has become apparent that the unique features of early infant
attachment reflect certain unique features of early infant sensory and motor
integration, early learning, communication, motivation and the regulation of
biobehavioral systems by the mother–infant interaction. This chapter will
undertake to answer three major questions that have remained unsettled in our
understanding of early human attachment: How does the infant find its own mother
and stay close to her? Why does separation of the infant from its mother produce
such severe physiologic and behavioral responses? How can individual differences
in adult offspring and especially in their maternal behavior toward their own infants
be related to the patterns of early life with their parents? In each of these cases, I
will review the recent research that has given us new answers to these questions at
the level of early behavioral, affective and cognitive processes and their
neurobiological substrates. Attachment remains useful as a concept, like hunger,
that describes the operation of subprocesses that work together within the frame of
a vital biological function.
Hofer, Myron 2006 Psychobiological roots of early attachment. Current Directions in
Psychological Science 15(2):84-88.
Link: http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/15/2/84.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
New laboratory research has revealed a net- work of simple behavioral,
physiological, and neural processes that underlie the psychological constructs of
attachment theory. It has become apparent that the unique features of early infant
attachment reflect certain unique features of early infant sensory and motor
integration, learning, communication, and motivation, as well as the regulation of
biobehavioral systems by the mother–infant interaction. In this article, I will use this
new knowledge to answer three major questions that have remained unsettled in
our understanding of early human attachment: What creates an attachment bond?
Why is early maternal separation stressful? How can early relationships have lasting
effects? I will discuss the implications of these new answers for human infants and
for the development of mental processes. Attachment remains useful as a concept
that, like hunger, describes the operation of subprocesses that work together within
the frame of a vital biological function.
Hogle, Linda 2010 Characterizing human embryonic stem cells: biological and social
markers of identity. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 24(4):433-450.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1387.2010.01117.x/pdf
Abstract:
Human embryonic stem cells are elusive, recalcitrant entities that resist
characterization and standardization. Without agreements about what the cells are
and how best to systematize cell culture and testing, data cannot be extracted
meaningfully, the nascent field will be slow to stabilize, and significantly, there may
be safety risks for patients. I discuss efforts to characterize cells definitively and
standardize practices across uniquely derived lines, labs, and researchers. I argue
that such efforts are made more complicated by layered identities imposed on them
by classification conventions, interactions with researchers and laboratory
environments, and inheritances from genetic ancestry. The need to understand and
possibly capitalize on such distinct, cumulative identities is in tension with the
desire to stabilize the field under conditions of political and scientific uncertainty.
The article links STS work on standardization with anthropological perspectives on
identity and material culture in science.
Inhorn, Marcia 2007 Medical anthropology at the intersections. Medical Anthropology
Quarterly 21(3):249-255.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/maq.2007.21.3.249/pdf
Jablonka, E. and M. Lamb 2002 The changing concept of epigenetics. Annual New York
Academy of Sciences 981:82-96.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2002.tb04913.x/pdf
Abstract:
We discuss the changing use of epigenetics, a term coined by Conrad Waddington in
the 1940s, and how the epigenetic approach to development differs from the genetic
approach. Originally, epigenetics referred to the study of the way genes and their
products bring the phenotype into being. Today, it is primarily concerned with the
mechanisms through which cells become committed to a particular form or function
and through which that functional or structural state is then transmitted in cell
lineages. We argue that modern epigenetics is important not only because it has
practical significance for medicine, agriculture, and species conservation, but also
because it has implications for the way in which we should view heredity and
evolution. In particular, recognizing that there are epigenetic inheritance systems
through which non-DNA variations can be transmitted in cell and organismal
lineages broadens the concept of heredity and challenges the widely accepted genecentered neo- Darwinian version of Darwinism.
Kashmeri, Shireen 2008 Unraveling Surrogacy in Ontario, Canada. An Ethnographic
Inquiry on the Influence of Canada’s Assisted Human Reproductive Act (2004),
Surrogacy Contracts, Parentage Laws, and Gay Fatherhood. M.A. Thesis, Department
of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University.
Link: http://claradoc.gpa.free.fr/doc/100.pdf
Abstract:
This thesis examines the influence of a variety of legal and social factors in
surrogacy. I examine the scope and influence of the Canadian federal law known as
the Assisted Human Reproduction Act (2004) on assisted human reproduction,
which elide commonly held views on commodification and surrogacy. Next I turn to
narratives of formal and informal contractual exchanges in surrogacy. I also look at
the influence of legal kinship practices on surrogacy alongside multiple conceptions
of parentage. Finally, I discuss two cases of gay surrogacy that conform and contest
gendered assumptions of parenthood. “Unraveling Surrogacy” is a small-scale and
qualitative ethnographic study spotlighting the narratives of six core participants,
and based on a range of data sources that include governmental witness testimony,
federal reports on assisted human reproduction and legal cases of parentage.
Konrad, Monica 1998 Ova donation and symbols of substance: Some variations on the
theme of sex, gender and the partible body. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 4(4):643-667.
Link:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3034826.pdf?&acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true
Abstract:
This article considers the value of female reproductive substance as exteriorized
and extracorporeal body parts. Women's accounts of donating their ova to infertile
recipients are explored within the context of contemporary bio-medical discourse
on assisted conception in Britain. Contrary to predominant assumptions of the
Western model of the autonomous and bounded individual, it is argued that donors,
as procreative agents, enact forms of relatedness as the sociality of anonymity.
Kuzawa, C. and Z. Thayer 2011 Timescales of human adaptation: the role of epigenetic
processes. Epigenomics 3(2):221-234.
Link: http://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/pdf/10.2217/epi.11.11
Abstract:
Human biology includes multiple adaptive mechanisms that allow adjustment to
varying timescales of environmental change. Sensitive or critical periods in early
development allow for the transfer of environmental information between
generations, which helps an organism track gradual environmental change. There is
growing evidence that offspring biology is responsive to experiences encoded in
maternal biology and her epigenome as signaled through the transfer of nutrients
and hormones across the placenta and via breast milk. Principles of evolutionary
and comparative biology lead to the expectation that transient fluctuations in early
experience should have greater long-term impacts in small, short-lived species
compared with large, long-lived species such as humans. This implies greater
buffering of the negative effects of early-life stress in humans, but also a reduced
sensitivity to short-term interventions that aim to improve long-term health
outcomes. Taking the timescales of adaptation seriously will allow the design of
interventions that emulate long-term environmental change and thereby coax the
developing human body into committing to a changed long-term strategy, yielding
lasting improvements in human health and wellbeing.
Levine, Nancy 2008 Alternative kinship, marriage and reproduction. Annual Review of
Anthropology 37:375-389.
Link:
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.anthro.37.081407.085120
Abstract:
This review examines the implications of new kinship practices for anthropological
theory, with a special focus on recent research in gay and lesbian kinship and
assisted reproduction. The article begins with an account of the theoretical contexts
in which kinship studies have been conducted and a brief survey of some of the
older literature on alter- native systems of marriage and family formation in
preindustrial and modern societies. The emphasis then turns to current discussions
of how gay men and lesbian women are creating meaningful networks of kin and
families and the ways in which these practices both follow and challenge traditional
expectations for family life. The final section surveys the ways in which the new
reproductive technologies have been utilized in Euro-American societies and how
cultural ideas and values concerning kin relationships have shaped the transfer of
these technologies to and their utilization in other societies.
Maher, E. Afnan, M. and C. Barratt 2003 Epigenetic risks related to assisted
reproductive technologies: Epigenetics, imprinting, ART and icebergs. Human
Reproduction 18(12):2508-2511.
Link: http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/12/2508.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
Recently, a series of case reports and small studies has suggested that births
involving assisted reproductive technology (ART) may have an increased risk of
imprinting disorders such as Beckwith±Wiedemann syndrome and Angelman
syndrome. Herein, the significance and implications of these findings are discussed.
It is speculated that, although such imprinting disorders may be shown to be only
rare complications of ART, epigenetic errors might account for a much wider
spectrum of ART-related complications than is recognized currently. Addressing
these questions should be a priority for research on cohorts of ART children.
McKenna, J., Ball, H., and L. Gettler 2007 Mother-infant cosleeping, breastfeeding and
sudden infant death syndrome: What biological anthropology has discovered about
normal infant sleep and pediatric sleep medicine. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology
50:133-161.
Link: http://cosleeping.nd.edu/assets/31969/mckenna_et_al_2007.pdf
Abstract:
Twenty years ago a new area of inquiry was launched when anthropologists
proposed that an evolutionary perspective on infancy could contribute to our
understanding of unexplained infant deaths. Here we review two decades of
research examining parent–infant sleep practices and the variability of maternal
and infant sleep physiology and behavior in social and solitary sleeping
environments. The results challenge clinical wisdom regarding ‘‘normal’’ infant
sleep, and over the past two decades the perspective of evolutionary pediatrics has
challenged the supremacy of pediatric sleep medicine in defining what are
appropriate sleep environments and behaviors for healthy human infants. In this
review, we employ a biocultural approach that integrates diverse lines of evidence
in order to illustrate the limitations of pediatric sleep medicine in adopting a view of
infants that prioritizes recent western social values over the human infant’s
biological heritage. We review what is known regarding infant sleeping
arrangements among nonhuman primates and briefly explore the possible
paleoecological context within which early human sleep patterns and parent–infant
sleeping arrangements might have evolved. The first challenges made by
anthropologists to the pediatric and SIDS research communities are traced, and two
decades of studies into the behavior and physiology of mothers and infants sleeping
together are presented up to the present. Laboratory, hospital and home studies are
used to assess the biological functions of shared mother–infant sleep, especially
with regard to breastfeeding promotion and SIDS reduction. Finally, we encourage
other anthropologists to participate in pediatric sleep research using the unique
skills and insights anthropological data provide. By employing comparative,
evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives an anthropological approach
stimulates new research insights that influence the traditional medical paradigm
and help to make it more inclusive. That this review will potentially stimulate
similar research by other anthropologists is one obvious goal. That this article might
do so makes it ever more possible that anthropologically inspired work on infant
sleep will ultimately lead to infant sleep scientists, pediatricians, and parents
becoming more informed about the consequences of caring for human infants in
ways that are not congruent with their evolutionary biology.
Morgan, Lynn 2002 “Properly disposed of”: A history of embryo disposal and the
changing claims on fetal remains. Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in
Health and Illness 21(3-4): 247-274.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01459740214079
Abstract:
This paper explores recent controversies concerning the disposal of embryonic and
fetal remains in order to ask how such remains came to be classified as ``medical
waste.'' Based on archival research into the social history of human embryo
collecting in Baltimore, Maryland, in the early 20th century, I argue that the
classification of embryos and fetal remains as medical waste can be traced to a
pragmatic alliance between embryologists and state functionaries. Embryologists
relied on the state to assist them in acquiring thousands of human embryo remains
for scientific study, while state authorities relied on embryologists to provide
authoritative knowledge that could be used to facilitate state control over nascent
citizens. This alliance contributed to the development of an ``embryological
worldview,'' in which human embryos were cast as objective biological ``specimens''
of use only to embryologists. This exclusive view of the social value of embryos and
fetal tissue is now being challenged as other constituencies claim jurisdiction over
the remains in order to advance diverse social agendas.
Niemitz, E. and A. Feinberg 2004 Epigenetics and assisted reproductive technology: A
call for investigation. American Journal of Human Genetics 74:599-609.
Link: http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0002929707618874/1-s2.0-S0002929707618874main.pdf?_tid=6fd4fb92-4255-11e4-8ccd00000aacb35e&acdnat=1411389724_31c16f8d91de94f4fa00cdcd45e0e698
Abstract:
A surprising set of recent observations suggests a link between assisted
reproductive technology (ART) and epigenetic errors—that is, errors involving
information other than DNA sequence that is heritable during cell division. An
apparent association with ART was found in registries of children with BeckwithWiedemann syndrome, Angelman syndrome, and retinoblastoma. Here, we review
the epidemiology and molecular biology behind these studies and those of relevant
model systems, and we highlight the need for investigation of two major questions:
(1) large-scale case-control studies of ART outcomes, including long-term
assessment of the incidence of birth defects and cancer, and (2) investigation of the
relationship between epigenetic errors in both offspring and parents, the specific
methods of ART used, and the underlying infertility diagnoses. In addition, the
components of proprietary commercial media used in ART procedures must be fully
and publicly disclosed, so that factors such as methionine content can be assessed,
given the relationship in animal studies between methionine exposure and
epigenetic changes.
Orobitg, G. and C. Salazar 2005 The gift of motherhood: Egg donation in a Barcelona
infertility clinic. Ethnos 70(1): 31-52.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00141840500048532
Abstract:
In this paper we analyse the ways in which egg donors from a private infertility
clinic in Barcelona try to render their new experience meaningful. Donors are
striving to see their action as a contribution to the creation of a particular kinship
bond – motherhood in another woman – by means of the abrogation of a bond that
also looks very much like kinship, which links them to the individuals that will be
born thanks to their eggs. The specific meaning that egg donation has for each donor
varies according to her particular circumstances, but the language constructed in
order to convey this meaning emerges from the creative expression of several
cultural paradoxes and dichotomies that constitute, in themselves, an original and
highly significant cultural grammar.
Parasidis, Efthimios The essence of being human. The Minnesora Journal of Law,
Science and Technology. 13(1).
Roberts, Elizabeth 2011 Abandonment and accumulation: Embryonic futures in the
United States and Ecuador. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25(2):232-253.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1387.2011.01151.x/pdf
Abstract:
When frozen embryos are publically debated in the United States, they are most
often positioned as having two possible future trajectories: (1) as individual humans
and (2) as contributors to stem cell research. Long-term embryo accumulation
threatens both of these futures. An accumulated embryo is stuck in a clinic, held
back from having an individual future or from contributing to science. There are
other kinds of futures, though. For some patients in the United States and Ecuador,
where I conducted ethnographic research, future reckoning involves a vision of
responsibility toward embryos embedded within a specific family. For these
patients, frozen embryo donation to another family or to science constitutes
abandonment. The future at stake is not that of an individual embryo’s life, but a
group’s future who would abandon one of its own. These patients would rather
destroy embryos than freeze them for a future away from their relations.
Simpson, Bob 2000 Imagined genetic communities: ethnicity and essentialism in the
twenty-first century. Anthropology Today 16(3): 3-6.
Link:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2678166.pdf?&acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=true
Svendsen, Mette 2011 Articulating potentiality: Notes on the delineation of the bank
figure in human embryonic stem cell research. Cultural Anthropology 26(3):414-437.
White, Linda 2004 Reproductive rights: Technologies of reproduction. Anthropology
News: 15-18.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/an.2004.45.9.15.1/pdf
Whitelaw, Emma 2006 Sins of the fathers, and their fathers. European Journal of
Human Genetics 14:131-132.
Ethics
Beasley, C. and Bacchi, C. 2007 Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond
trust, care and generosity – towards an ethic of ‘social flesh’. Feminist Theory
8(3):279-298.
Link: http://fty.sagepub.com/content/8/3/279.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
In times like these, a new ethico-political ideal is required to contest the adequacy of
dominant understandings of social interaction as matters of choice and rational
decision-making and in contesting these understandings encourage us to imagine
social alternatives. We wish to make a contribution to this project of expanding the
universe of political discourse as a means to invigorating ethico-political debate. A
range of existing vocabularies – the languages of trust (and relatedly respect), care
and associated concepts, including corporeal generosity – are currently put forward
as the means to contest the dominance of neo-liberal premises about ‘atomistic
individualism’. While many of these accounts focus on nation-states, others attend
to an emerging global community. Nevertheless, we have some reservations about
these languages and their premises. In our view they tend frequently to locate the
‘problem’ in the character of citizens. We also make the case that such languages and
their associated political agendas reinstate aspects of social hierarchy that mimic
neo-liberal conceptions of autonomous individualism. Central to our critique is the
claim that the problematic aspects of these existing languages of (inter)connection
are due to an attenuated understanding of embodiment and an inadequate dialogue
between the socio-political and embodiment. It is this inadequate dialogue we wish
to redress. In this paper we offer a new ethical ideal called ‘social flesh’ to ground an
alternative politics for reconfiguring exploitative social relations. As an ethicopolitical starting point, ‘social flesh’ highlights human embodied interdependence
and in the process configures a new, more transformative political vision. It draws
attention to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people across the globe
on social space, infrastructure and resources. Insistence upon this shared reliance
underpins a profoundly levelling perspective, a radical politics.
Chistianson, S. A., Ed. 1992 The handbook of emotion and memory: Research and
theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Link:
http://books.google.co.za/books?hl=en&lr=&id=eObJAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=+Th
e+handbook+of+emotion+and+memory:+Research+and+theory.+&ots=LnEwiv__UX&sig=U
YzNTZFx0r4w7NiyedbwXpXXsgs#v=onepage&q=The%20handbook%20of%20emotion%2
0and%20memory%3A%20Research%20and%20theory.&f=false
Dreyfus, Hubert, and Paul Rabinow. 1982. “On the Geneology of Ethics: An Overview
of Work in Progress.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,
Dreyfus, eds. Pp. 229–52. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Einarsdottir, Johanna 2007 Research with children: Methodological and ethical
challenges. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 15(2):197-211.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13502930701321477
Abstract:
Methodological and ethical challenges that researchers face when they conduct
research with children are the focus of this article. The discussion is based on a
study conducted with 2–6-year-old children in Iceland, where the purpose was to
shed light on children’s perspectives on their early childhood settings. The study is
built on the conviction that children, just like adults, are citizens who hold their own
views and perspectives, they have competencies and the right to be heard, and they
are able to speak for themselves if the appropriate methods are used. The article
reflects on methodological dilemmas and challenges as well as ethical issues related
to informed consent, confidentiality, protection and interactions.
Ellis, Carolyn 1995 Emotional and ethical quagmires in returning to the field. Journal of
Contemporary Ethnography 24(1):68-98.
Link (only abstract): http://jce.sagepub.com/content/24/1/68.short
Abstract:
When returning to the site of prior research, ethnographers may find themselves
embroiled in emotional and ethical quandaries with the people about whom they
have written. This article details the conversations and emotional conflicts that
erupted suddenly when I returned to a community about which I had published a
previous ethnographic account. Writing the story game me an opportunity to
examine orthodox ethnographic research practices, such as omitting the
autobiographical self and emotional responses from ethnographic texts. The return
visit helped clarify connections between my personal life and the way I conducted
fieldwork in this community, and it led me to recommend that ethnographic
practices include an examination of how our experiences connect us with those we
study rather than emphasize only how they set us apart.
Eysenbach, G. and J. Till 2001 Ethical issues in qualitative research on internet
communities. British Medical Journal 323:1103-1105.
Link: http://www.bmj.com/content/323/7321/1103.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
The Internet is the most comprehensive electronic archive of written material
representing our world and peoples’ opinions, concerns, and desires. Physicians
who surf the internet for the first time are often stunned by what they learn on
websites set up by lay people or patient self support communities. Material on these
venues can be a rich source for researchers interested in understanding the
experiences and views of people and patients. Qualitative analysis of material
published and communicated on the internet can serve to systematise and codify
needs, values, concerns, and preferences of consumers and professionals relevant to
health and health care. While the internet makes people’s interactions uniquely
accessible for researchers and erases boundaries of time and distance, such
research raises new issues in research ethics, particularly concerning informed
consent and privacy of research subjects, as the borders between public and private
spaces are sometimes blurred.
Flicker, S., Travers, R., Guta, A., McDonald, S. and A. Meagher 2007 Ethical dilemmas
in community-based participatory research: Recommendations for institutional review
boards. Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine
84(4):478-493.
Link: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11524-007-9165-7/fulltext.html
Abstract:
National and international codes of research conduct have been established in most
industrialized nations to ensure greater adherence to ethical research practices.
Despite these safeguards, however, traditional research approaches often continue
to stigmatize marginalized and vulnerable communities. Community-based
participatory research (CBPR) has evolved as an effective new research paradigm
that attempts to make research a more inclusive and democratic process by
fostering the development of partnerships between communities and academics to
address community-relevant research priorities. As such, it attempts to redress
ethical concerns that have emerged out of more traditional paradigms. Nevertheless,
new and emerging ethical dilemmas are commonly associated with CBPR and are
rarely addressed in traditional ethical reviews. We conducted a content analysis of
forms and guidelines commonly used by institutional review boards (IRBs) in the
USA and research ethics boards (REBs) in Canada. Our intent was to see if the forms
used by boards reflected common CBPR experience. We drew our sample from
affiliated members of the US-based Association of Schools of Public Health and from
Canadian universities that offered graduate public health training. This convenience
sample (n = 30) was garnered from programs where application forms were
available online for download between July and August, 2004. Results show that
ethical review forms and guidelines overwhelmingly operate within a biomedical
framework that rarely takes into account common CBPR experience. They are
primarily focused on the principle of assessing risk to individuals and not to
communities and continue to perpetuate the notion that the domain of “knowledge
production” is the sole right of academic researchers. Consequently, IRBs and REBs
may be unintentionally placing communities at risk by continuing to use procedures
inappropriate or unsuitable for CBPR. IRB/REB procedures require a new
framework more suitable for CBPR, and we propose alternative questions and
procedures that may be utilized when assessing the ethical appropriateness of
CBPR.
Guillemin, M. and L. Gillam 2004 Ethics, reflexivity, and “ethically important
moments” in research. Qualitative Inquiry 10:261-280.
Link: http://qix.sagepub.com/content/10/2/261.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
Ethical tensions are part of the everyday practice of doing research—all kinds of
research. How do researchers deal with ethical problems that arise in the practice of
their research, and are there conceptual frameworks that they can draw on to assist
them? This article examines the relationship between reflexivity and research
ethics. It focuses on what constitutes ethical research practice in qualitative
research and how researchers achieve ethical research practice. As a framework for
thinking through these issues, the authors distinguish two different dimensions of
ethics in research, which they term procedural ethics and “ethics in practice.” The
relationship between them and the impact that each has on the actual doing of
research are examined. The article then draws on the notion of reflexivity as a
helpful way of understanding both the nature of ethics in qualitative research and
how ethical practice in research can be achieved.
Halse, C. and A. Honey 2005 Unraveling ethics: Illuminating the moral dilemmas of
research ethics. Signs 30(4):2141-2162.
Link:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/428419.pdf?&acceptTC=true&jpdConfirm=
true
Kalvemark, S., Hoglund, A., Hansson, M., Westerholm, P., and B. Arnetz 2003 Living
with conflicts-ethical dilemmas and moral distress in the health care system. Social
Science and Medicine 58:1075-1084.
Link: http://ac.els-cdn.com/S027795360300279X/1-s2.0-S027795360300279Xmain.pdf?_tid=6b90ba56-4257-11e4-a6d000000aacb35f&acdnat=1411390576_7be2072bfc1616ccbe6532bdfd240ba4
Abstract:
During the last decade, the Swedish health care system has undergone
fundamental changes. The changes have made health care more complex and ethics
has increasingly become a required component of clinical practice. Considering this,
it is not surprising that many health care professionals suffer from stress-related
disorders. Stress due to ethical dilemmas is usually referred to as ‘‘moral distress’’.
The present article derives from Andrew Jameton’s development of the concept of
moral distress and presents the results of a study that, using focus group method,
identifies situations of ethical dilemmas and moral distress among health care
providers of different categories. The study includes both hospital clinics and
pharmacies.
The results show that all categories of staff interviewed express experiences
of moral distress; prior research has mostly focused on moral distress experienced
by nurses. Second, it was made clear that moral distress does not occur only as a
consequence of institutional constraints preventing the health care giver from
acting on his/her moral considerations, which is the traditional definition of moral
distress. There are situations when the staff members do follow their moral
decisions, but in doing so they clash with, e.g. legal regulations. In these cases too,
moral distress occurs. Hitherto research on moral distress has focused on the
individual health care provider and her subjective moral convictions. Our results
show that the study of moral distress must focus more on the context of the ethical
dilemmas.
Finally, the conclusion of the study is that the work organization must
provide better support resources and structures to decrease moral distress. The
results point to the need for further education in ethics and a forum for discussing
ethically troubling situations experienced in the daily care practice for both hospital
and pharmacy staff.
Kelman, Herbert 1982 Ethical issues in different social science methods. In Ethical
Issues in Social Science Research. T. L. Beauchamp, R.R. Faden, R.J. Wallace and L.
Walters, Eds. Pp. 40-98. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Link: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/hckelman/files/Ethical_issues_1982.pdf
Morrow, Virginia 2008 Ethical dilemmas in research with children and young people
about their social environments. Children’s Geographies 6(1):49-61.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14733280701791918
Abstract:
There has been a very welcome recent growth in research directly with and by
children and young people, with a wide range of reporting children’s own views and
experiences. Research ethics has also recently been receiving a great deal of
attention, and there are debates about the extent to which research with children
differs from research with other groups. This paper draws on the author’s
experiences of empirical sociological research with 12-15 year olds conducted in a
deprived town in SE England in the late 1990s that explored children and young
people’s social networks and neighbourhoods, and the implications for their health
and well-being (social capital). The paper focuses on some ethical dilemmas raised
during the research, and concludes with a discussion of broader issues related to
dissemination and the policy implications of research.
Muller, J. and B. Desmond 1992 Cross-cultural medicine a decade later: Ethical
dilemmas in a cross-cultural context – A Chinese example. West Journal of Medicine
157:323-327.
Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1011287/pdf/westjmed000850113.pdf
Abstract:
Considerable attention is now being given to ethical conflicts raised by such issues
as the disclosure of diagnosis and prognosis, the role of the family in making
medical decisions, and the withholding or withdrawing of treatment of terminally ill
patients. Already complicated, these issues take on added complexity in contexts
where medical professionals and patients have differing cultural beliefs and
practices. Ethical dilemmas that develop in multicultural settings have been largely
unaddressed. Through the analysis of a case involving the hospital admission and
death of a Chinese woman with metastatic lung cancer, we examine some of these
dilemmas and their effect on the patient, family, and physicians. Many issues were
raised by this case regarding the relationships among ethnic background, bioethics,
and medical care.
Pope, K. and V. Vetter Ethical dilemmas encountered by members of the American
Psychological Association: A national survey.
Link (only the abstract): http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/47/3/397/
Abstract:
A random sample of 1,319 members of the American Psychological Association (APA)
were asked to describe incidents that they found ethically challenging or troubling.
Responses from 679 psychologists described 703 incidents in 23 categories. This process
of gathering critical incidents from the general membership, pioneered by those who
developed APA's original code of ethics, may be useful in considering possible revisions
of the code and preserving APA's unique approach to identifying ethical principles that
address realistically the emerging dilemmas that the diverse membership confronts in the
day-to-day work of psychology.
Tronto, Joan 1999 Review of Care ethics: Moving forward caring. Gender Sensitive by
Peta Bowden; Care, Gender, and Justice by Piemut Bubeck; Moral voices, moral selves
by Susan Hekman. In Hypatia 14(1):112-119.
Wood, Elizabeth 2006 The ethical challenges of field research in conflict zones.
Qualitative Sociology: Special Issue-Political Ethnography I 29:373-386.
Link: http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/354/art%253A10.1007%252Fs11133006-9027-8.pdf?auth66=1411563497_5ec1508e00b0305b86d38defb81f5e32&ext=.pdf
Abstract:
Drawing on 26 months of field research in El Salvador during the civil war, I analyze
some ethical challenges that confront field researchers working in conflict zones.
After briefly summarizing the purpose and general methodology of my research, I
discuss in detail the research procedures I followed to implement the “do no harm”
ethic of empirical research. I first analyze the particular conditions of the Salvadoran
civil war during the period of research. I then discuss the procedures meant to
ensure that my interviews with people took place with their fully informed
consent—what I understood that to mean and how I implemented it. I then turn to
the procedures whereby the anonymity of those interviewed and the confidentiality
of the data gathered were ensured to the extent possible. Throughout I discuss
particular ethical dilemmas that I confronted, including issues of self-presentation
and mistaken identity, the emotional challenges of field work in highly polarized
settings (which if not well understood may lead to lapse in judgment), and my
evolving questions concerning the researcher role and its limitations. I also discuss
the dilemmas that arise in the dissemination of research findings and the
repatriation of data.
Zigon, Jarrett 2007 Moral breakdown and the ethical demand: A theoretical
framework for an anthropology of moralities. Anthropological Theory 7(2):131-150.
Link: http://ant.sagepub.com/content/7/2/131.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
Recently social scientists in general and anthropologists in particular have invoked
the concept of morality in their studies. The use of this concept is seen by many as a
way to bypass the complexities and contradictions of such traditional social
scientific concepts as culture, society and power. Nevertheless, it is becoming
increasingly evident that in many of these studies morality is used in a way that may
be more reminiscent of the moral understanding of the social scientist than that of
their subjects. Therefore, a well-founded anthropology of moralities must break
from this assumption and rethink the ways in which the moral can be explicitly
studied. By engaging in a dialogue with 20th-century continental philosophies of
sociality and ethics, this article articulates a theory and model by which an explicit
anthropology of moralities becomes possible. Two ethnographic examples, utilizing
very different methodological techniques and focusing on two very different
societies, are used to illustrate the strength of this theory as a framework for a
proper anthropological study of local moralities.
Infant
Brownlie, J. and V. Leith 2011 Social bundles: Thinking through the infant body.
Childhood 18(2):196-210.
Link: http://chd.sagepub.com/content/18/2/196.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
Drawing on a UK research study on immunization, this article investigates parents’
understandings of the relationship between themselves, their infants, other bodies,
the state, and cultural practices – material and symbolic.The article argues that
infant bodies are best thought of as always social bundles, rather than as biobundles
made social through state intervention; and concludes that, while the
natural/cultural divide may now be widely accepted as artificial within the social
sciences, we need to scrutinize how people in their everyday lives work out, and
invest in, the distinction between the two.
Cooper, P., Tomlinson, M., Swartz, L., Landman, M., Molteno, C., Stein, A., McPherson,
K., and L. Murray. 2009 Improving quality of mother-infant relationship and infant
attachment in socioeconomically deprived community in South Africa: Randomised
controlled trial. British Medical Journal 338: 974-982.
Link: http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/338/bmj.b974.full.pdf
Abstract:
Objective: To assess the efficacy of an intervention designed to improve the motherinfant relationship and security of infant attachment in a South African peri-urban
settlement with marked adverse socioeconomic circumstances.
Design: Randomised controlled trial.
Setting: Khayelitsha, a peri-urban settlement in South Africa.
Participants: 449 pregnant women.
Interventions: The intervention was delivered from late pregnancy and for six
months postpartum. Women were visited in their homes by previously untrained
lay community workers who provided support and guidance in parenting. The
purpose of the intervention was to promote sensitive and responsive parenting and
secure infant attachment to the mother. Women in the control group received no
therapeutic input from the research team. Main outcome measures Primary
outcomes: quality of mother-infant interactions at six and 12 months postpartum;
infant attachment security at 18 months. Secondary outcome: maternal depression
at six and 12 months.
Results: The intervention was associated with significant benefit to the motherinfant relationship. At both six and 12 months, compared with control mothers,
mothers in the intervention group were significantly more sensitive (6 months:
mean difference=0.77 (SD 0.37), t=2.10, P<0.05, d=0.24; 12 months: mean
difference=0.42 (0.18), t=−2.04 , P<0.05, d=0.26) and less intrusive (6 months: mean
difference=0.68 (0.36), t=2.28, P<0.05, d=0.26; 12 months: mean difference=−1.76
(0.86), t=2.28 , P<0.05, d=0.24) in their interactions with their infants. The
intervention was also associated with a higher rate of secure infant attachments at
18 months (116/156 (74%) v 102/162 (63%); Wald=4.74, odds ratio=1.70,
P<0.05). Although the prevalence of maternal depressive disorder was not
significantly reduced, the intervention had a benefit in terms of maternal depressed
mood at six months (z=2.05, P=0.04) on the Edinburgh postnatal depression scale).
Conclusions: The intervention, delivered by local lay women, had a significant
positive impact on the quality of the mother-infant relationship and on security of
infant attachment, factors known to predict favourable child development. If these
effects persist, and if they are replicated, this intervention holds considerable
promise for use in the developing world.
Lee, Ellie 2008 Living with risk in the age of ‘intensive motherhood’: Maternal identity
and infant feeding. Health, Risk and Society 10(5): 467-477.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13698570802383432
Abstract:
Socio-cultural studies have suggested that, even in societies where it is a
commonplace practice, infant feeding with formula milk can compromise women’s
identity as ‘good mothers.’ This proposition is explored in this paper. We first
provide a brief review of literature that has considered the broad socio-cultural
context for infant feeding, that of ‘intensive motherhood.’ Attention is drawn to the
idea that this context is one in which feeding babies formula milk is constructed as
risky, for physical health but also for the mother–child relationship. Drawing on
data from a study of mothers living in the UK, the paper then explores how mothers
actually experience infant feeding with formula milk and how they live with a
context that deems their actions risky. Maternal experience is found to include
variously moral collapse, feelings of confidence, expressions of defiance and
defensiveness, and opting to go it alone in response to ‘information overload.’
Despite these variations in how mothers live with risk, the conclusion is drawn that
the current cultural context does appear to be one overall in which mothers who
formula feed often have to struggle hard to maintain a positive sense of themselves
as mothers.
Lupton, Deborah 2012 Configuring maternal, preborn and infant embodiment: Sydney
health and society group working paper no. 2. Sydney: Sydney Health and Society
Group.
Link (only the abstract): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2273416
Abstract:
A growing literature on the biopolitics of contemporary maternity and on risk
society, individualisation and parenting has demonstrated the increasing emphasis
that has been placed upon pregnant women and mothers to take responsibility for
the health and welfare of their children. The ideal female ‘reproductive citizen’ is
expected to place her children’s health and wellbeing above her own needs and
desires. Here the subject positions of the ‘good mother’ and the ‘responsible citizen’
as they are produced through the discourses and practices of neoliberalism
intertwine. This paper looks at the convergence of various influential discourses,
images, practices and technologies in configuring maternal, preborn and infant
bodies in certain ways in the context of neoliberalism. These include such factors as
the growing importance of the concept of risk in relation to preborn and infant
wellbeing, the extension of infant identity back into preborn bodies, the emergence
of the concepts of the foetal and embryonic (and even the preconceived embryonic)
citizen, the precious child and intensive parenting and the symbolic concepts of
permeability, purity and danger and Self and Other as they relate to maternal, infant
and preborn embodiment.
Lupton, Deborah N.d. Precious, pure, uncivilized, vulnerable: Infant embodiment in
the popular media. Media, Culture and Society. Department of Sociology and Social
Policy, University of Sydney.
Abstract:
Despite recent interest in researching and theorising the sociocultural dimensions
of human embodiment, the cultural representation of young children’s bodies, and
particularly infants’ bodies, has received little academic attention. This article
analyses some exemplary popular media texts and identifies four main discourses
on infant embodiment: precious, pure, uncivilised and vulnerable. The discussion
looks at intersections between these discourses, and in particular how concepts of
‘nature’ (both ‘good nature’ and ‘bad nature’), civility and Self and Otherness
underpin them. The implications for how adults think about and treat infants,
including the spaces and places which are deemed appropriate for infants to inhabit,
are discussed. While, on the one hand, infants are positioned as the most valuable,
important, pure and affectively appealing of humans, on the other hand they are
represented as animalistic, uncontrolled, uncivil and overly demanding: indeed, as
less than human. Infant bodies are viewed as appropriately inhabiting certain
defined spaces: specifically the domestic sphere of the home. They represented as
barely tolerated or even as excluded in the public sphere, positioned as it is as the
space of ‘civilised’ adults.
Lupton, Deborah 2013 Infant embodiment and interembodiment: A review of
sociocultural perspectives. Childhood 20(1):37-50.
Link: http://chd.sagepub.com/content/20/1/37.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
This article brings together a range of research and scholarship from various
disciplines which have investigated and theorized social and cultural aspects of
infants’ bodies within the context of contemporary western societies. It begins with
a theoretical overview of dominant concepts of infants’ bodies, including discussion
of the concepts of the unfinished body, civility and the Self/ Other binary opposition
as well as that of interembodiment, drawn from the work of Merleau- Ponty. Then
follows discussion of the pleasures and challenging aspects of interembodiment in
relation to caregivers’ interactions with infants’ bodies, purity, danger and infant
embodiment and lastly practices of surveilling the vulnerable, ‘at risk’ infant body.
Miscellaneous
Das, V. and R. Das 2006 Pharmaceuticals in Urban Ecologies: The register of the local.
In Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices. Petryna, Lakoff, Kleinman, eds.
Pp. 171- 206. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kaufman, S. and L. Morgan 2005 The anthropology of the beginnings and ends of life.
Annual Review of Anthropology 34:317-341.
Link:
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.anthro.34.081804.120452
Abstract:
This essay reviews recent anthropological attention to the “beginnings” and
“endings” of life. A large literature since the 1990’s highlights the analytic trends
and innovations that characterize anthropological attention to the cultural
production of persons, the naturalization of life, and the emergence of new life
forms. Part I of this essay outlines the coming-into-being, completion and
attenuation of personhood and how life and death are attributed, contested, and
enacted. Dominant themes include how connections are forged or severed between
the living and the dead and the socio-politics of dead, dying and decaying bodies.
The culture of medicine is examined for its role in organizing and naming life and
death. Part II is organized by the turn to biopolitical analysis stimulated by the work
of Foucault. It encompasses the ways in which the biosceinces and biotechnologies,
along with state practices, govern forms of living and dying and new forms of life
such as the stem cell, embryo, comatose, and brain dead, and it emphasizes the
production of value. Much of this scholarship is informed by concepts of liminality (a
period and state of being between social statuses) and subjectification (in which
notions of self, citizenship, life and its management are linked to the production of
knowledge and political forms of regulation).
Nystrom, K. and K. Ohrling 2004 Parenthood experiences during the child’s first year:
Literature review. Journal of Advanced Nursing 46(3):319-330.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2004.02991.x/pdf
Abstract:
Background. Raising a child is probably the most challenging responsibility faced by
a new parent. The first year is the basis of the child’s development and is significant
for growth and development. Knowledge and understanding of parents’ experiences
are especially important for child health nurses, whose role is to support parents in
their parenthood.
Aim. The aim of this review was to describe mothers’ and fathers’ experiences of
parenthood during the child’s first year.
Method. A literature search covering 1992–2002 was carried out using the terms
parenthood, parenting, first year, infancy and experience. Of the 88 articles
retrieved, 33 articles (both qualitative and quantitative) met the inclusion criteria
and corresponded to the aim of this review. The data were analysed by thematic
content analysis.
Findings. Being a parent during the child’s first year was experienced as overwhelming. The findings were described from two perspectives, namely mothers’ and
fathers’ perspectives, since all the included studies considered mothers’ and fathers’
experiences separately. The following categories were identified concerning
mothers: being satisfied and confident as a mother, being primarily responsible for
the child is overwhelming and causes strain, struggling with the limited time
available for oneself, and being fatigued and drained. The following categories were
found for fathers: being confident as a father and as a partner, living up to the new
demands causes strain, being prevented from achieving closeness to the child is
hurtful, and being the protector and the provider of the family. The unifying theme
for these categories was ‘living in a new and over- whelming world’.
Conclusion. There is a need for nurse interventions aimed at minimizing parents’
experiences of strain. A suggested intervention is to find a method whereby child
health nurses’ support would lead to parents becoming empowered in their
parenthood.
Anderson, Thor 2013 Review of The jaguar and the priest: An ethnography of Tzeltal
souls. American Anthropologist 115 (1): 145-152.
Motherhood
AbuZahr, Carla 2003 Safe motherhood: A brief history of the global movement 19472002. British Medical Bulletin 67:13-25.
Link: http://bmb.oxfordjournals.org/content/67/1/13.full.pdf+html
Abstract:
The health of mothers has long been acknowledged to be a cornerstone of public
health and attention to unacceptably high level of maternal mortality has been a
feature of global health and development discussions since the 1980s. However,
although a few countries have made remarkable progress in recent years, the reality
has not generally followed the rhetoric. Health and development partners have
failed to invest seriously in safe motherhood and examples of large-scale and
sustained programmes are rare. Safe motherhood has tended to be seen as a subset
of other programmes such as child survival or reproductive health and is often
perceived to be too complex or costly for under-resourced and overstretched health
care systems that have limited capacity. Despite this, a consensus has emerged
about the interventions needed to reduce maternal mortality and there are good
examples (historical and contemporary) of what can be achieved within a relatively
short time period. The activities of both grassroots organizations and international
health and development agencies have helped to build political will and momentum.
Further progress in improving maternal health will require outspoken and
determined champions from within the health system and the medical community,
particularly the obstetricians and gynaecologists, and from among decision-makers
and politicians. But in addition, substantial and long-term funding—by governments
and by donor agencies—is an essential and still missing component.
Ketler, Suzanne 2000 Preparing for motherhood: Authoritative knowledge and the
undercurrents of shared experience in two childbirth education courses in Cagliari,
Italy. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14(2):138-158.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/maq.2000.14.2.138/pdf
Abstract:
This article compares the social settings and teaching organization of two differently
structured childbirth education courses in Cagliari, Italy, in
order to understand how social processes and contexts work to negotiate
authoritative knowledge. Although the explicit goal of both courses was to transmit
biomedical knowledge, knowledge based in women's experience none the less
dominated some course sessions. Thus, I examine the social processes and
interactions that enabled women's experiential knowledge to dominate discussion
sand subsequently share in the authority of biomedical knowledge in some
situations. Because few existing studies do so, this article also addresses a gap in our
current understanding by exploring not only how experiential knowledge comes to
share authority with biomedical knowledge, but also, why it is important that it
does. Focusing on the efficacy of differently structured courses, this article informs
the planning of future childbirth education courses in similar settings.
Lee, Ellie 2008 Living with risk in the age of ‘intensive motherhood’: Maternal identity
and infant feeding. Health, Risk and Society 10(5):467-477.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13698570802383432
Abstract:
Socio-cultural studies have suggested that, even in societies where it is a
commonplace practice, infant feeding with formula milk can compromise women’s
identity as ‘good mothers.’ This proposition is explored in this paper. We first
provide a brief review of literature that has considered the broad socio-cultural
context for infant feeding, that of ‘intensive motherhood.’ Attention is drawn to the
idea that this context is one in which feeding babies formula milk is constructed as
risky, for physical health but also for the mother–child relationship. Drawing on
data from a study of mothers living in the UK, the paper then explores how mothers
actually experience infant feeding with formula milk and how they live with a
context that deems their actions risky. Maternal experience is found to include
variously moral collapse, feelings of confidence, expressions of defiance and
defensiveness, and opting to go it alone in response to ‘information overload.’
Despite these variations in how mothers live with risk, the conclusion is drawn that
the current cultural context does appear to be one overall in which mothers who
formula feed often have to struggle hard to maintain a positive sense of themselves
as mothers.
Obermeyer, Carla 2000 Risk, uncertainty and agency: Culture and safe motherhood in
Morocco. Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness
19(2):173-201.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01459740.2000.9966175
Abstract:
This article critically examines the notion that Moroccan women's infrequent use of
health facilities during pregnancy and birth results from their lack of awareness of
the risks of childbirth. It argues that while ethnographic data appear at first to lend
support to this hypothesis, a closer examination of the customs surrounding birth
shows that ideas about risk are found in local constructions of childbirth. The
choices women make regarding birth and the flexibility that characterizes their
decisions reflect the uncertain circumstances of labor and problems in the
accessibility and quality of health services. Differences in the notions of risk that
women hold and express are a function, not of an inability to conceive of risks, but
rather of the real alternatives they have for controlling these risks.
Prussing, Erica 2010 Review of Reconstructing motherhood and disability in the age of
“perfect” babies. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 24(3): 422-424.
Newborn
Buchbinder, Mara 2011 Medical technologies and the dream of the perfect newborn.
Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 30(1):56-80.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01459740.2010.531065
Abstract:
Feminist and disability scholars have critiqued the role of prenatal testing
technologies in fostering parental expectations to give birth to ‘‘perfect’’ children.
However, in the case of postnatal screening for genetic disorders, identifying large
numbers of asymptomatic infants brings previously hidden imperfections into
critical relief. Consequently, newborn screening technologies have altered the day-
to-day landscape of early childrearing and development for many families. Drawing
on ethnographic fieldwork in a California pediatric genetics clinic, we describe how
newborn screening creates ambiguous forms of biogenetic abnormality,
foreshadowing a life of incipient disorder for children, families, and health care
providers and so destabilizing parents’ hopes of having a healthy child. By
demonstrating key points of convergence and divergence between the social
consequences of prenatal and postnatal screening, we expand the analytic gaze on
reproductive technologies and establish newborn screening as a vibrant locus of
inquiry for the anthropology of reproduction.
Pregnancy
Lahood, Greg 2007 Rumour of angels and heavenly midwives: Anthropology of
transpersonal events and childbirth. Women and Birth 20:3-10.
Link: http://ac.els-cdn.com/S1871519206000928/1-s2.0-S1871519206000928main.pdf?_tid=06020ebc-425a-11e4-aafd00000aab0f27&acdnat=1411391694_986f87e44ebe237b3a81ab602e12a760
Abstract:
Some contemporary women can experience non-ordinary states of consciousness
when childbearing. The purpose of this paper is to bring a ‘transpersonal’ frame to
these non- ordinary states of consciousness (hereafter: NOSC). Transpersonal
psychology is an interdisciplinary movement in Western science that studies
‘religious’, ‘peak’ or ‘healing’ experiences in different cultures and social contexts.
Between 2001 and 2006 in Auckland, New Zealand, while engaged in
anthropological fieldwork, I collected stories from mothers, fathers, and midwives
who had participated in transpersonal events during childbirth.
I will compare the local women’s NOSC with ethnographic accounts of spiritpossession and its relationship to indigenous midwifery then revisit and reconstruct
the witch-hunts of Medieval Europe from this perspective. Midwives are encouraged
to learn to identify and support women’s NOSC during labour and birth as many
women find strength and wisdom by passing through these states in labour. The
subject is also critical to men, whether they are present with women and birth as
fathers or health professionals. The hoped for result of this inquiry is to revalorise
NOSC among birth-giving mothers, and to educate birth attendants in this field.
Morrissey, Suzanne 2010 Metaphors of relief: High risk pregnancy in a context of
health policy for the “undeserving” poor. Human Organization 69 (4):352-361.
Link: http://sfaa.metapress.com/content/k4214265434g8p72/fulltext.pdf
Abstract:
This paper explores an enrollment problem in the Special Supplemental Nutrition
Program for Women, Infants and Child (WIC) in one American city, and how varying
perceptions of the program held by clients and providers can be mined for problem
sources and solutions. My work began in the late 1990s and continued into 2000 as
local health department administrators were growing increasingly concerned about
heightened and steady rates of infant death, and had harnessed themselves to
statistical data suggesting that prenatal enrollment in certain public health
programs would lower these rates. Among low income women who lived in the city
and who were at risk for poor birth outcomes, participation in the program was
inconsistent and less than expected when compared to other regional and national
WIC programs, suggesting that institutional adjustments of the mid-1990s were
more effective in some places than others. Described are different frames of
reference held by WIC providers and potential clients to explain why there is
discord between what WIC providers aim to accomplish with their clients and what
clients expect from the program. In turn, I ask the question, how can frames of
reference be used to reveal important problems in service delivery?
Muller-Rockstroh, Babette 2012 Appropriate and appropriated technology: Lessons
learned from ultrasound in Tanzania. Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in
Health and Illness 31(3): 196-212.
Link: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01459740.2011.639105
Abstract:
In ‘‘the North’’ ultrasound has become a standard procedure in reproductive health
services. In Sub-Saharan Africa where diagnostic imaging technology is increasingly
transferred to, ultrasound is still quite a new technology. Its promotion as
‘‘appropriate’’ technology by international donors, however, overlooks the fact that
ultrasound such as any technology when transferred is not automatically doing
what it is intended to do. Rather, ultrasound may be used very differently. Hence,
what ultrasound will actually do remains an empirical matter. This article offers an
insight into the multiple constructions of ultrasound that exist in one hospital in
Northwest Tanzania as the technology is appropriated by nurse-midwives, doctors,
students, local healers, and pregnant women. If these emerging situated ultrasounds
are made explicit, the question of whether a technology is appropriate becomes
more complex than the ubiquitous term suggests.
Root, R. and C. Browner 2001 Practices of the pregnant self: Compliance with and
resistance to prenatal norms. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 25:195-223.
Link:
http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/66/art%253A10.1023%252FA%253A1010665
726205.pdf?auth66=1411564451_ed86832d5e94cccc744c5e65038b3ad3&ext=.pdf
Abstract:
A major challenge of medical anthropology is to assess how biomedicine, as a
vaguely-defined set of diverse texts, technologies, and practitioners, shapes the
experience of self and body. Through narrative analyses of in-depth, semistructured interviews with 158 pregnant women in southern California, this paper
explores how the culture of biomedicine, encountered formally at prenatal care
check-ups and informally through diverse media, influences pregnant women’s
perceptions of appropriate prenatal behavior. In the spirit of recent social scientific
work that draws on and challenges Foucauldian insights to explore social relations
in medicine, we posit a spectrum of compliance and resistance to biomedical norms
upon which individual prenatal practices are assessed. We suggest that pregnancy
is, above all, characterized by a split subjectivity in which women straddle the
authoritative and the subjugated, the objective and the subjective, and the haptic as
well as the optic, in telling and often strategic ways. In so doing, we identify the
intersection between the disciplinary practices of biomedicine and the practices of
pregnant women as a means of furnishing more fruitful insights into the oft-used
term “power” and its roles in constituting social relations in medicine.
Van der Sijpt, E. and C. Notemans 2010 Perils to pregnancies: On social sorrows and
strategies surrounding pregnancy loss in Cameroon. Medical Anthropology Quarterly
24(3):381-398.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1387.2010.01110.x/pdf
Abstract:
This article explores the local perceptions and practices surrounding pregnancy loss
in Cameroon—a topic that has long been neglected in international reproductive
health debates. Based on extended periods of anthropological fieldwork in an urban
and a rural setting in the East province of the country, it shows the inherent
ambiguities that underlie pregnancies and their perceived dangers. By situating
meanings of pregnancy loss within the complex dynamics of marriage and kinship,
pregnant bodies are argued to be social bodies—the actions and interpretations of
which shift along with social situations. This approach not only forms an alternative
to the cur- rent focus on the body politic in global discourses on fertility risks but
also shows how conventional assumptions such as the rigid distinction between
voluntary and involuntary pregnancy loss distort ambiguous daily life realities for
Cameroonian women whose pregnancies are not being carried to term.
Prenatal
Press, N. and C. Browner 1996 The production of authoritative knowledge in American
prenatal care. Medical Anthropology Quarterly New Series 10(2):141-156.
Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/maq.1996.10.2.02a00030/pdf
Abstract:
Using Jordan's concept of authoritative knowledge, this article describes some of the
ways that the prenatal care practices of a group of U.S. women help to consolidate
biomedical hegemony. We analyze the considerations that the women took into
account when deciding whether or not to accept specific prenatal care
recommendations as authoritative, focusing on when and how they used their own
"embodied" knowledge and experience as a standard against which to assess the
validity of clinical recommendations. The data provide insight into medicalization
processes and the role patients themselves play in furthering biomedical hegemony.
Rights
Alderson, P., Hawthorne, J. and M. Killen 2005 Are Premature Babies Citizens with
Rights? Provision Rights and the Edges of Citizenship. Journal of Social Sciences Special
Issue 9: 71-81.
Link: http://www.krepublishers.com/06-Special%20Volume-Journal/JSS-00Special%20Volumes/JSS-SI-09-Children-Citizenship-Web/JSS-SI-09-07-071-081-AldersonP/JSS-SI-09-07-071-081-Alderson-P-Text.pdf
Cornock, M. and H. Montgomery 2011 Children’s rights in and out of the womb.
International Journal of Children’s Rights 19:3-19.
Link:
http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/intjchrb19&div=5&g_sent=1&colle
ction=journals#5
Abstract:
This article looks at the extent to which children’s rights are applicable to the
unborn. It focuses on England and Wales but also uses law and practice in other
countries for comparative purposes. From the dual perspectives of the law and the
anthropology/sociology of childhood, the authors examine how the unborn are
constructed in law and culture and what this says about the boundaries between life
and non-life, child and foetus, person and non-person. They also discuss the
reluctance that many who work in childhood studies, and on children’s rights, have
shown in dis- cussing the controversial question of when childhood begins. The
article then examines differing ideas about when children are granted social and
legal personhood and the various and often- contradictory positions taken by the
law, parents, health care professionals and in more general debates.