Christine McCourt - Childbirth, Midwifery and Concepts of Time

Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality

GENERAL EDITORS:

David Parkin, The Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford.

Soraya Tremayne, Co-ordinating Director of the Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group and Research Associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, and a Vice-President of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Marcia C. Inhorn, William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, and Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies, Yale University.

Volume 1
Managing Reproductive Life: Cross-Cultural Themes in Fertility and Sexuality
Edited by Soraya Tremayne

Volume 2
Modern Babylon? Prostituting Children in Thailand
Heather Montgomery

Volume 3
Reproductive Agency, Medicine and the State: Cultural Transformations in Childbearing
Edited by Maya Unnithan-Kumar

Volume 4
A New Look at Thai AIDS: Perspectives from the Margin
Graham Fordham

Volume 5
Breast Feeding and Sexuality: Behaviour, Beliefs and Taboos among The Gogo Mothers in Tanzania
Mara Mabilia

Volume 6
Ageing Without Children: European and Asian Perspectives on Elderly Access to Support Networks
Philip Kreager and Elisabeth Schrder-Butterfill

Volume 7
Nameless Relations: Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchange between British Ova Donors and Recipients
Monica Konrad

Volume 8
Fertility and Reproduction in Melanesia
Edited by Stanley J. Ulijaszek

Volume 9
Conceiving Kinship: Procreation, Family and Assisted Conception in South Europe
Monica Bonaccorso

Volume 10
Where There is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India
Sarah Pinto

Volume 11
Reproductive Disruptions: Gender, Technology and Biopolitics In the New Millenium
Marcia C. Inhorn

Volume 12
Reconceiving the Second Sex: Men, Masculinity, and Reproduction
Edited by Marcia C. Inhorn, Tine Tjrnhj-Thomsen, Helene Goldberg and Maruska la Cour Mosegaard

Volume 13
Transgressive Sex: Subversion and Control in Erotic Encounters
Edited by Hastings Donnan and Fiona Magowan

Volume 14
European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology
Edited by Jeanette Edwards and Carles Salazar

Volume 15
Kinship and Beyond: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered
Edited by Sandra Bamford and James Leach

Volume 16
Islam and New Kinship: Reproductive Technology and the Shari'ah in Lebanon
Morgan Clarke

Volume 17
Childbirth, Midwifery and Concepts of Time
Edited by Christine McCourt

Volume 18
Assisting Reproduction, Testing Genes: Global Encounters with the New Biotechnologies
Edited by Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli and Marcia C. Inhorn

Childbirth, Midwifery and
Concepts of Time

Edited by

Christine McCourt

Published in 2009 by

Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com

2009, 2010 Christine McCourt
First paperback edition published in 2010
First ebook edition published in 2013

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

/ edited by Christine McCourt.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9781845455866 (hbk) -- ISBN 9781845452940 (pbk) -- ISBN 9780857455420 (ebk)

1. Childbirth. 2. Midwifery. 3. Public health. 4. Time -- Sociological aspects. I. McCourt, Christine.

GN482.1 .C55 2009

618.4--dc22

2009032994

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781-84545-586-6 (hardback)
ISBN: 9781-84545-294-0 (paperback)
ISBN 9780-85745-542-0 (ebook)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

W e would like to thank all those who contributed to the studies on which this book is based, without whom it could not have been written. We hope it does justice to their experience. We would also like to thank the friends, colleagues, families and partners who supported us during the work and the writing, who are too many to name. Thanks also to Berghahn for their excellent support and to the critical reviewers who contributed their thoughts. Finally, thanks to Ronnie Frankenberg, for his inspiration and for taking the time to read and provide a foreword to this book.

FOREWORD

Ronald Frankenberg

Philosophers have endlessly written about death, about living towards death, about life after death and about finitude and fortitude as experienced in the face of death. However there were very few philosophers prior to the feminist philosophers who took birth into account in the analysis that they offered of freedom, self-identity, virtue or the good life. Reading many philosophers we might, indeed, suppose that man experienced himself always first in isolation from others; that he never had to learn where the boundaries of his own self, his will and his freedom lie; and that he (or rather she) does not carry within himself (or rather herself) the gradual capacity to become two selves. We are lacking models that explain how identity might be retained whilst impregnated with otherness, and whilst other selves are generated from within the embodied self. This lack of theorization of birth as if birth was just natural, something that happened before man is might be most evident in some continental philosophers (in Heidegger, for example, whose theorization starts with an existent who is simply thrown into the world).

Battersby (1998: 1718)

T he introduction to this book reveals how ethnographers have, in their study of very diverse and scattered societies gone about showing the importance of time in the construction and analysis of childbirth behaviour and experience in different societies and groups across the world. My aim in this foreword, therefore, is to encourage readers to see this work in a more general and more theoretical context of how people involved in many diverse societies throughout history have successfully constructed and interpreted their reproductive experience and, especially, the extent to which different actors and genders in the process were sometimes in, but more often out of, control of their own bodily experiences in terms of both their duration in time and of their temporary and permanent outcomes. This leads me to open some discussion of creative imaginative literature alongside philosophical theories and the warring perceptions of lay men and women, doctors, nurses and male and female midwives; and to open speculation about what part all this might play in still unresolved gender and professional conflicts about time in pregnancy and the practices surrounding it.