Midwives in Mexico

Midwives in Mexico PDF Author: Hanna Laako
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000353176
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book presents the contemporary history and dynamics of Mexican midwifery - professional, (post)modern or autonomous, traditional and Indigenous - as profoundly political and embedded in differing societal stratifications. By situated politics, the authors refer to various networks, spaces and territories, which are also constructed by the midwives. By politically situated, the authors refer to various intersections, unsettled relations and contexts in which Mexican midwives are positioned. Examining Mexican midwiferies in depth, the volume sharpens the focus on the worlds in which midwives are profoundly immersed as agents in generating and participating in movements, alliances, health professions, communities, homes, territories and knowledges. The chapters provide a complex panorama of midwives in Mexico with an array of insights into their professional and political autonomy, (post)coloniality, body-territoriality, the challenges of defining midwifery, and above all, into the ways in which contemporary Mexican midwiferies relate to a complex set of human rights. The book will be of interest to a range of scholars from anthropology, sociology, politics, global health, gender studies, development studies, and Latin American studies, as well as to midwives and other professionals involved in childbirth policy and practice.

Midwives in Mexico

Midwives in Mexico PDF Author: Hanna Laako
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000353176
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book presents the contemporary history and dynamics of Mexican midwifery - professional, (post)modern or autonomous, traditional and Indigenous - as profoundly political and embedded in differing societal stratifications. By situated politics, the authors refer to various networks, spaces and territories, which are also constructed by the midwives. By politically situated, the authors refer to various intersections, unsettled relations and contexts in which Mexican midwives are positioned. Examining Mexican midwiferies in depth, the volume sharpens the focus on the worlds in which midwives are profoundly immersed as agents in generating and participating in movements, alliances, health professions, communities, homes, territories and knowledges. The chapters provide a complex panorama of midwives in Mexico with an array of insights into their professional and political autonomy, (post)coloniality, body-territoriality, the challenges of defining midwifery, and above all, into the ways in which contemporary Mexican midwiferies relate to a complex set of human rights. The book will be of interest to a range of scholars from anthropology, sociology, politics, global health, gender studies, development studies, and Latin American studies, as well as to midwives and other professionals involved in childbirth policy and practice.

Touching Bellies, Touching Lives

Touching Bellies, Touching Lives PDF Author: Judy Gabriel
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478629754
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book Here

Book Description
When I got there, I found the girl lying on the floor, naked and screaming, with the baby’s foot sticking out. Judy Gabriel gives humble, authentic voice to the personal experiences and practices of scores of traditional midwives in rural Mexico. The midwives talk about their childhoods, marriages, losses, rituals, and techniques. The rich narratives describe childbirth before modern medicine redefined it. Intended to engage, enrich, and inspire, Gabriel’s work tells of the women who received generations of babies into their hands when knowledge about childbirth came from women’s bodies, from instinct, from dreams, and from other women. The stories unfold in the context of high-intervention obstetrics and soaring Cesarean rates, a world that often degrades women and violates the sanctity of birth. An ideal supplemental text for courses in cultures of Mesoamerica; the anthropology of reproduction, midwifery, and birth; medical or biological anthropology; and midwifery practice in historical and cross-cultural context. Additions

Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico

Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico PDF Author: Nora E. Jaffary
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469629410
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this history of childbirth and contraception in Mexico, Nora E. Jaffary chronicles colonial and nineteenth-century beliefs and practices surrounding conception, pregnancy and its prevention, and birth. Tracking Mexico's transition from colony to nation, Jaffary demonstrates the central role of reproduction in ideas about female sexuality and virtue, the development of modern Mexico, and the growth of modern medicine in the Latin American context. The story encompasses networks of people in all parts of society, from state and medical authorities to mothers and midwives, husbands and lovers, employers and neighbors. Jaffary focuses on key topics including virginity, conception, contraception and abortion, infanticide, "monstrous" births, and obstetrical medicine. Her approach yields surprising insights into the emergence of modernity in Mexico. Over the course of the nineteenth century, for example, expectations of idealized womanhood and female sexual virtue gained rather than lost importance. In addition, rather than being obliterated by European medical practice, features of pre-Columbian obstetrical knowledge, especially of abortifacients, circulated among the Mexican public throughout the period under study. Jaffary details how, across time, localized contexts shaped the changing history of reproduction, contraception, and maternity.

Delivering Health

Delivering Health PDF Author: Lydia Z. Dixon
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826501168
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book Here

Book Description
Honorable Mention for the Association for Feminist Anthropology's Rosaldo Book Prize, 2021 Maternal health outcomes are a key focus of global health initiatives. In Delivering Health, author Lydia Z. Dixon uncovers the ways such outcomes have been shaped by broader historical, political, and social factors in Mexico, through the perspectives of those who are at the front lines fighting for change: midwives. Midwives have long been marginalized in Mexico as remnants of the country's precolonial past, yet Dixon shows how they are now strategically positioning themselves as agents of modernity and development. Midwifery education programs have popped up across Mexico, each with their own critique of the health care system and vision for how midwifery can help. Delivering Health ethnographically examines three such schools with very different educational approaches and professional goals. From San Miguel de Allende to Oaxaca to Michoacán and points between, Dixon takes us into the classrooms, clinics, and conferences where questions of what it means to provide good reproductive health care are being taught, challenged, and implemented. Through interviews, observational data, and even student artwork, we are shown how underlying inequality manifests in poor care for many Mexican women. The midwives in this book argue that they can improve care while also addressing this inequality. Ultimately, Delivering Health asks us to consider the possibility that marginalized actors like midwives may hold the solution to widespread concerns in health.

No Alternative

No Alternative PDF Author: Rosalynn A. Vega
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477316760
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
Recent anthropological scholarship on “new midwifery” centers on how professional midwives in various countries are helping women reconnect with “nature,” teaching them to trust in their bodies, respecting women’s “choices,” and fighting for women’s right to birth as naturally as possible. In No Alternative, Rosalynn A. Vega uses ethnographic accounts of natural birth practices in Mexico to complicate these narratives about new midwifery and illuminate larger questions of female empowerment, citizenship, and the commodification of indigenous culture, by showing how alternative birth actually reinscribes traditional racial and gender hierarchies. Vega contrasts the vastly different birthing experiences of upper-class and indigenous Mexican women. Upper-class women often travel to birthing centers to be delivered by professional midwives whose methods are adopted from and represented as indigenous culture, while indigenous women from those same cultures are often forced by lack of resources to use government hospitals regardless of their preferred birthing method. Vega demonstrates that women’s empowerment, having a “choice,” is a privilege of those capable of paying for private medical services—albeit a dubious privilege, as it puts the burden of correctly producing future members of society on women’s shoulders. Vega’s research thus also reveals the limits of citizenship in a neoliberal world, as indigeneity becomes an object of consumption within a transnational racialized economy.

Mesoamerican Healers

Mesoamerican Healers PDF Author: Brad R. Huber
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 029277964X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Get Book Here

Book Description
Healing practices in Mesoamerica span a wide range, from traditional folk medicine with roots reaching back into the prehispanic era to westernized biomedicine. These sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing practices have attracted attention from researchers and the public alike, as interest in alternative medicine and holistic healing continues to grow. Responding to this interest, the essays in this book offer a comprehensive, state-of-the-art survey of Mesoamerican healers and medical practices in Mexico and Guatemala. The first two essays describe the work of prehispanic and colonial healers and show how their roles changed over time. The remaining essays look at contemporary healers, including bonesetters, curers, midwives, nurses, physicians, social workers, and spiritualists. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, the authors examine such topics as the intersection of gender and curing, the recruitment of healers and their training, healers' compensation and workload, types of illnesses treated and recommended treatments, conceptual models used in diagnosis and treatment, and the relationships among healers and between indigenous healers and medical and political authorities.

Birth in Eight Cultures

Birth in Eight Cultures PDF Author: Robbie Davis-Floyd
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478638982
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
This stunning sequel to Brigitte Jordan’s landmark Birth in Four Cultures brings together the work of fifteen reproductive anthropologists to address core cultural values and knowledge systems as revealed in contemporary birth practices in Brazil, Greece, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Tanzania, and the United States. Six ethnographic chapters form the heart of the book, three of which are set up as dyads that compare two countries; each demonstrates the power of anthropology’s cross-cultural comparative method. An additional chapter with ethnographic vignettes gives readers a feel for what fieldwork is really like on the ground. The eminently readable, theoretically rich chapters are enhanced by absorbing stories, photos, quotes, thought questions, and film suggestions that nudge the reader toward eureka flashes of understanding and render the book suitable for undergraduate and graduate audiences alike.

Maternal Death and Pregnancy-Related Morbidity Among Indigenous Women of Mexico and Central America

Maternal Death and Pregnancy-Related Morbidity Among Indigenous Women of Mexico and Central America PDF Author: David A. Schwartz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9783030100704
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This ambitious sourcebook surveys both the traditional basis for and the present state of indigenous women’s reproductive health in Mexico and Central America. Noted practitioners, specialists, and researchers take an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the multiple barriers for access and care to indigenous women that had been complicated by longstanding gender inequities, poverty, stigmatization, lack of education, war, obstetrical violence, and differences in language and customs, all of which contribute to unnecessary maternal morbidity and mortality. Emphasis is placed on indigenous cultures and folkways—from traditional midwives and birth attendants to indigenous botanical medication and traditional healing and spiritual practices—and how they may effectively coexist with modern biomedical care. Throughout these chapters, the main theme is clear: the rights of indigenous women to culturally respective reproductive health care and a successful pregnancy leading to the birth of healthy children. A sampling of the topics: Motherhood and modernization in a Yucatec village Maternal morbidity and mortality in Honduran Miskito communities Solitary birth and maternal mortality among the Rarámuri of Northern Mexico Maternal morbidity and mortality in the rural Trifino region of Guatemala The traditional Ngäbe-Buglé midwives of Panama Characterizations of maternal death among Mayan women in Yucatan, Mexico Unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion, and unmet need in Guatemala Maternal Death and Pregnancy-Related Morbidity Among Indigenous Women of Mexico and Central America is designed for anthropologists and other social scientists, physicians, nurses and midwives, public health specialists, epidemiologists, global health workers, international aid organizations and NGOs, governmental agencies, administrators, policy-makers, and others involved in the planning and implementation of maternal and reproductive health care of indigenous women in Mexico and Central America, and possibly other geographical areas.

Ways of Knowing about Birth

Ways of Knowing about Birth PDF Author: Robbie Davis-Floyd
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478636491
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 461

Get Book Here

Book Description
There is no other living scholar with Davis-Floyd’s solid roots, activism, and scholarly achievements on the combined subjects of childbirth, midwifery, obstetrics, and medicine. Ways of Knowing about Birth brings together an astounding array of her most popular and essential works, all updated for this volume, spanning over three decades of research and writing from the perspectives of cultural, medical, and symbolic anthropology. The 16 essays capture Robbie Davis-Floyd’s unique voice, which brims with wisdom, compassion, and deep understanding. Intentionally cast as stand-alone pieces, the chapters offer the ultimate in classroom flexibility and include discussion questions and recommended films.

Mexico in the Time of Cholera

Mexico in the Time of Cholera PDF Author: Donald Fithian Stevens
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826360564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
This captivating study tells Mexico’s best untold stories. The book takes the devastating 1833 cholera epidemic as its dramatic center and expands beyond this episode to explore love, lust, lies, and midwives. Parish archives and other sources tell us human stories about the intimate decisions, hopes, aspirations, and religious commitments of Mexican men and women as they made their way through the transition from the Viceroyalty of New Spain to an independent republic. In this volume Stevens shows how Mexico assumed a new place in Atlantic history as a nation coming to grips with modernization and colonial heritage, helping us to understand the paradox of a country with a reputation for fervent Catholicism that moved so quickly to disestablish the Church.