ABSTRACT
This chapter interweaves two sites of ambiguity. On the one hand it describes tensions in the professional socialisation of midwives who begin their midwifery education as registered nurses. On the other hand it explores the ambivalences of fieldwork undertaken by a senior midwife who was simultaneously a novice ethnographer. The chapter addresses the perceptions of nurses as they become student midwives and begin their socialisation within a school of midwifery. It explores aspects of the folk culture which unfolded during the first eighteen weeks of a status passage from nurse to midwife. Training for midwifery in the United Kingdom is an unusual form of professional socialization. With few exceptions, novice trainees have already been socialized into a different, though similar, occupational culture — that of nursing. The official rhetoric of the occupation stresses that midwifery is a profession separate and distinct from nursing. It is indeed one response to the strains of status passage for the novice midwives.
