Birth: The Beginning of Life

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Birth: The Beginning of Life

Birth: a definition

For all mammals (with platypuses being the exception), parturition is the beginning of life as we know it. More specifically, birth is the means by which non-human primates and human primates alike begin their experience of the world. I am interested in the significance of childbirth the method by which it is carried out, its implications for the birthing mother, and the way that the birthing process is viewed by different societies.

Both birth and the postpartum period involve a certain degree of danger for the birthing mother, her nascent child, and her entire family or community. Because childbirth is so dangerous (the average lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy related causes is about one in fifteen in some poor countries, MacCormack 1), most cultures have distinct patterns that determine how the birthing process will be carried out. The birthing process involves different birthing positions; different rules concerning who is allowed to be present during the time of birth; mechanisms for deciding where birth takes place; and different ways by which mother and child deal with labor, birth and postpartum. "As a life crisis event, birth is everywhere a candidate for consensual shaping and social regulation the particular pattern depending on local history, ecology, social structure, technological development, and the like" (Jordan 4). By exploring the original human condition of childbirth one is able to gain insight into the universal biosocial phenomenon known as the birthing process.

In addition, I am interested in studying childbirth because, as women's work, it is usually not given enough attention in the traditionally male-dominated field of anthropology. "Unt...

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... Peoples. London: J. Cape, 1971.

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. The Langurs of Abu: Female and Male Strategies of Reproduction. Cambridge, MA:, Harvard Univ. Press, 1997.

Jordan, Brigitte. Birth in Four Cultures: A Cross-cultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States. 4th ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1993.

Lawlor, Robert. Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Trad. Ltd., 1991.

MacCormack, Carol P., ed. Ethnography of Fertility and Birth. 2nd ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1994.

National Geographic Society. "Among the Wild Chimpanzees." National Geographic Video, 1984.

Pinker, Steven. "Why they kill their newborns" New York Times Magazine 11 Feb. 1997: 52-55.

Smuts et. al. eds. Primate societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

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