Risk, Reproduction and Narratives of Experience

Product description Review "An easy and pleasurable read from beginning to end."--Global Public Health From the Inside Flap Vivid ethnographies of reproductive risk and responsibility that speak to the conflicts between pregnant women and mothers and state-sanctioned biomedicine From the Back Cover Vivid ethnographies of reproductive risk and responsibility that speak to the conflicts between pregnant women and mothers and state-sanctioned biomedicine About the Author Amínata Maraesa, a medical anthropologist, is co-editor of Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of Experience (also published by Vanderbilt) and director of the documentary film Woman to Woman: Doula Assisted Childbirth.Lauren Fordyce is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bucknell University. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of ExperienceBy Lauren Fordyce, Aminata MaraesaVanderbilt University PressCopyright © 2012 Vanderbilt University PressAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8265-1819-4ContentsForeword Carole H. Browner, ix, Acknowledgments, xiii, Introduction: The Development of Discourses Surrounding Reproductive Risks Lauren Fordyce and Aminata Maraesa, 1, Part I Complications in Measuring and Defining Risk, 1 Conceiving Risk in K'iche' Maya Reproduction Matthew R. Dudgeon, 17, 2 Failing to See the Danger: Conceptions of Pregnancy and Care Practices among Mexican Immigrant Women in New York City Alyshia Galvez, 37, 3 The Vital Conjuncture of Methamphetamine-Involved Pregnancy: Objective Risks and Subjective Realities Alison B. Hamilton, 59, Part II Biopolitical Narratives of Risk and Responsibility, 4 Birth and Blame: Guatemalan Midwives and Reproductive Risk Sheila Cosminsky, 81, 5 "They Don't Know Anything": How Medical Authority Constructs Perceptions of Reproductive Risk among Low-Income Mothers in Mexico Vania Smith-Oka, 103, 6 Local Contours of Reproductive Risk and Responsibility in Rural Oaxaca Rebecca Howes-Mischel, 123, 7 New Countryside, New Family: The Discourses of Reproductive Risk in Postsocialist Rural China Qingyan Ma, 141, Part III Struggles over the Embodiment of Reproductive Risk, 8 Negotiating Risk and the Politics of Responsibility: Mothers and Young Child Health among Datoga Pastoralists in Northern Tanzania Alyson G. Young, 157, 9 Shifting Maternal Responsibilities and the Trajectory of Blame in Northern Ghana Aaron R. Denham, 173, 10 Imaging Maternal Responsibility: Prenatal Diagnosis and Ultrasound among Haitians in South Florida Lauren Fordyce, 191, 11 A Competition over Reproductive Authority: Prenatal Risk Assessment in Southern Belize Aminata Maraesa, 211, Afterword Rayna Rapp, 231, Contributors, 235, Index, 237, CHAPTER 1Conceiving Risk in K'iche' Maya ReproductionMatthew R. DudgeonIn the department of Quetzaltenango in Guatemala's western highlands, different meanings of risk attach to pregnancy and its management for three distinct groups of health care providers: local physicians, regional workers for an international NGO working to improve health quality in maternal and infant health services, and K'iche' Maya traditional birth attendants (TBAs)—midwives, or, in Spanish, comadronas. Moreover, theories of risk that focus on the state as a source of power and the administration of risk may be inadequate for conceptualizing local TBAs' meanings of reproductive risks. Many TBAs work with a multilayered discourse of risk within which they rate their clients' pregnancies, as well as evaluate each other's worthiness of the title comadrona. Indeed, midwives in rural Guatemala perceive their relationship to the supernatural as a mitigating force against the risks associated with pregnancy. Midwives who purportedly strike a pact with the devil may find themselves outside the parameters of local definitions of what makes a good midwife.Background to Experiences of Reproduction in Cantel, GuatemalaFor most of the twentieth century, the government of Guatemala interacted with its rural population as a sovereign power. State administration of that population was achieved primarily through force rather than infrastructure or social services, and it has differed according to locally recognized ethic distinctions between indigenous Maya and ladino groups of Spanish ancestry. Such regulation of the rural population has helped exclude indigenous groups from state politics, maintained a semi-feudal concentration of land and resources in the hands of a small minority, and supported some of the highest levels of inequality between the richest and poorest in the Latin American region (Suarez-Berenguela 2001). Throughout Guatemala's postcolonial history, national political debate has focused less on the inclusion of indigenous communities and more on the degree to which sovereign versus disciplinary and regulatory power should be exercised by elites in the administration of those communities; strategies have included privatiz