ABSTRACT
Over the past twenty years, the biomedical treatment of childbirth has been broadly critiqued by both feminists and anthropologists because it operates as a field of power through which gendered and colonial/postcolonial interests can be maintained. 2 While many Western women feel alienated from a medical system which fails to give them autonomy and respect for their own decision making, such alienation is frequently intensified and multiplied in rural communities of developing nations, where Western medical practice founders, confronted with beliefs and practices that make no sense when the focus is on the physical body divorced from the wider socio-political and cosmological matrices (O'Neill and Kauffert 1993, 1995; Laderman 1983). At another level, the institutions of biomedicine introduce new hierarchies into local communities, displacing mystical knowledge and the power this brings to the people who wield it. Along with their clients, those who are displaced from their positions within their communities are often not free to resist openly as, in developing nations such as Indonesia, biomedical institutions are supported by the state and are enmeshed in ideologies of development and modernity. Local knowledges and practices, by contrast, are recast as traditional, superstitious and backward.
