Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of Experience

by Fordyce, Lauren; Maraesa, Aminata; Browner, Carole H.; Rapp, Rayna (AFT)

• ISBN13: 9780826518200
• ISBN10: 0826518206
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-05-28
• Publisher: Vanderbilt Univ Pr

Summary

As Carole Browner explains in her foreword: "These chapters compellingly reveal that although we anthropologists tend to speak of biomedicine in hegemonic terms, in fact its penetration is quite variable and often ambivalently met. . . . Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of Experiencesheds new light on a troubling core aspect of medicalization processes, which simultaneously render pregnant women more docile subjects even as they are impelled to actively engage with biomedicalized prenatal care regimes. . . . We also see that a consummate means by which states seek to consolidate power in the reproductive realm is through expansion of the biomedical concept of risk. This critical observation emerges repeatedly in this collection."

Author Biography

Lauren Fordyce is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bucknell University. Amnata Maraesa is Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College of the City University of New York and the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction: The Development of Discourses Surrounding Reproductive Risks	p. 1
Complications in Measuring and Defining Risk
Conceiving Risk in K'iche' Maya Reproduction	p. 17
Failing to See the Danger: Conceptions of Pregnancy and Care Practices among Mexican Immigrant Women in New York City	p. 37
The Vital Conjuncture of Methamphetamine-Involved Pregnancy: Objective Risks and Subjective Realities	p. 59
Biopolitical Narratives of Risk and Responsibility
Birth and Blame: Guatemalan Midwives and Reproductive Risk	p. 81
"They Don't Know Anything": How Medical Authority Constructs Perceptions of Reproductive Risk among Low-Income Mothers in Mexico	p. 103
Local Contours of Reproductive Risk and Responsibility in Rural Oaxaca	p. 123
New Countryside, New Family: The Discourses of Reproductive Risk in Postsocialist Rural China	p. 141
Struggles over the Embodiment of Reproductive Risk
Negotiating Risk and the Politics of Responsibility: Mothers and Young Child Health among Datoga Pastoralists in Northern Tanzania	p. 157
Shifting Maternal Responsibilities and the Trajectory of Blame in Northern Ghana	p. 173
Imaging Maternal Responsibility: Prenatal Diagnosis and Ultrasound among Haitians in South Florida	p. 191
A Competition over Reproductive Authority: Prenatal Risk Assessment in Southern Belize	p. 211
Afterword	p. 231
Contributors	p. 235
Index	p. 237
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