ABSTRACT
In the past decade or so, a number of publications have brought together ethnographic accounts of birth and reproduction. Brigitte Jordan's work (1978) is one of the first comprehensive comparative studies, written relatively recently, that draws attention to the diverse ways of managing birth and nurturing the new mother in different social and cultural settings — Yucatan, Sweden, the United States and the Netherlands. Subsequent anthologies by Kay (1982), MacCormack (1982) and Michaelson (1988), among others, highlight women's experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, the postpartum and the days of early mothering, and draw attention to the degree to which these events of reproduction are cultural and social as much as they are biological. They highlight too the extraordinary variability across cultures of the roles played by others — kinswomen, husbands, children, traditional birth attendants — in the management and care of the new mother and the unborn/newborn child.
