ABSTRACT
An important dimension of socio-economic change in the lives of rural Iban women in Sarawak is their connection with the biomedically based state health-care system by virtue of their role as childbearers and mothers. The way these medical services are experienced, utilised and critiqued by women seems significantly determined by other dimensions of their lives relating to government approaches to the development of rural longhouse communities. These processes of modernity also produce transformations in the ways Iban women come to perceive themselves in relation to Iban women of the past, and Iban men and women of other ethnicities. This chapter examines the relationship between these domains of experience for rural Iban women, focusing on transformations in childbirth and post-partum practices.
