Breastfeeding

Breastfeeding
Author: Cecília Tomori
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2017-12-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351383604

Breastfeeding: New Anthropological Approaches unites sociocultural, biological, and archaeological anthropological scholarship to spark new conversations and research about breastfeeding. While breastfeeding has become the subject of intense debate in many settings, anthropological perspectives have played a limited role in these conversations. The present volume seeks to broaden discussions around breastfeeding by showcasing fresh insights gleaned from an array of theoretical and methodological approaches, which are grounded in the close study of people across the globe. Drawing on case studies and analyses of key issues in the field, the book highlights the power of anthropological research to illuminate the evolutionary, historical, biological, and sociocultural context of the complex, lived experience of breastfeeding. By bringing together researchers across three anthropological subfields, the volume seeks to produce transformative knowledge about human lactation, breastfeeding, and human milk. This book is a key resource for scholars of medical and biological anthropology, evolutionary biology, bioarchaeology, sociocultural anthropology, and human development. Lactation professionals and peer supporters, midwives, and others who support infant feeding will find the book an essential read.

Ethnographies of Breastfeeding

Ethnographies of Breastfeeding
Author: Tanya Cassidy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2020-05-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000183092

Breastfeeding is an intimate and deeply rooted bodily practice, as well as a highly controversial sociocultural process which invokes strong reactions from advocates and opponents. Touching on a wide range of issues such as reproduction, sexuality, power and resources, and maternal and infant health, the controversies and cultural complexities underlying breastfeeding are immense.Ethnographies of Breastfeeding features the latest research on the topic. Some of the leading scholars in the field explore variations in breastfeeding practices from around the world. Based on empirical work in areas such as Brazil, West Africa, Darfur, Ireland, Italy, France, the UK and the US, they examine the cross-cultural challenges facing mothers feeding their infants.Reframing the traditional nature/culture debate, the book moves beyond existing approaches to consider themes such as surrogacy, the risk of milk banks, mother-to-mother sharing networks facilitated by social media, and the increasing bio-medicalization of breast milk, which is leading its transformation from process to product. A highly important contribution to global debates on breast milk and breastfeeding.

White Gold

White Gold
Author: Susan Falls
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2017-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0803277210

Women have shared breast milk for eons, but in White Gold, Susan Falls shows how the meanings of capitalism, technology, motherhood, and risk can be understood against the backdrop of an emerging practice in which donors and recipients of breast milk are connected through social media in the southern United States. Drawing on her own experience as a participant, Falls describes the sharing community. She also presents narratives from donors, doulas, medical professionals, and recipients to provide a holistic ethnographic account. Situating her subject within cross-cultural comparisons of historically shifting attitudes about breast milk, Falls shows how sharing “white gold”—seen as a scarce, valuable, even mysterious substance—is a mode of enacting parenthood, gender, and political values. Though breast milk is increasingly being commodified, Falls argues that sharing is a powerful and empowering practice. Far from uniform, participants may be like-minded about parenting but not other issues, so their acquaintanceships add new textures to the body politic. In this interdisciplinary account, White Gold shows how sharing simultaneously reproduces the capitalist values that it disrupts while encouraging community-making between strangers.

Breastfeeding

Breastfeeding
Author: Patricia Stuart-Macadam
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2017-09-29
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1351530739

Breastfeeding is a biocultural phenomenon: not only is it a biological process, but it is also a culturally determined behavior. As such, it has important implications for understanding the past, present, and future condition of our species. In general, scholars have emphasized either the biological or the cultural aspects of breastfeeding, but not both. As biological anthropologists the editors of this volume feel that an evolutionary approach combining both aspects is essential. One of the goals of their book is to incorporate data from diverse fields to present a more holistic view of breastfeeding, through the inclusion of research from a number of different disciplines, including biological and social/cultural anthropology, nutrition, and medicine. The resulting book, presenting the complexity of the issues surrounding very basic decisions about infant nutrition, will fill a void in the existing literature on breastfeeding.

Dancing Skeletons

Dancing Skeletons
Author: Katherine A. Dettwyler
Publisher: Waveland Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2013-09-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478611588

One of the most widely used ethnographies published in the last twenty years, this Margaret Mead Award winner has been used as required reading at more than 600 colleges and universities. This personal account by a biocultural anthropologist illuminates not-soon-forgotten messages involving the sobering aspects of fieldwork among malnourished children in West Africa. With nutritional anthropology at its core, Dancing Skeletons presents informal, engaging, and oftentimes dramatic stories that relate the author’s experiences conducting research on infant feeding and health in Mali. Through fascinating vignettes and honest, vivid descriptions, Dettwyler explores such diverse topics as ethnocentrism, culture shock, population control, breastfeeding, child care, the meaning of disability and child death in different cultures, female circumcision, women’s roles in patrilineal societies, the dangers of fieldwork, and facing emotionally draining realities. Readers will laugh and cry as they meet the author’s friends and informants, follow her through a series of encounters with both peri-urban and rural Bambara culture, and struggle with her as she attempts to reconcile her very different roles as objective ethnographer, subjective friend, and mother in the field. The 20th Anniversary Edition includes a 13-page “Q&A with the Author” in which Dettwyler responds to typical questions she has received individually from students who have been assigned Dancing Skeletons as well as audience questions at lectures on various campuses. The new 23-page “Update on Mali, 2013” chapter is a factual update about economic and health conditions in Mali as well as a brief summary of the recent political unrest.

Breastfeeding in Hospital

Breastfeeding in Hospital
Author: Fiona Dykes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2006-09-27
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1134157185

'Breast is best' is today’s prevailing mantra. However, women – particularly first-time mothers – frequently feel unsupported when they come to feed their baby. This new experience often takes place in the impersonal and medicalized surroundings of a hospital maternity ward where women are 'seen to' by overworked midwives. Using a UK-based ethnographic study and interview material, this book provides a new, radical and critical perspective on the ways in which women experience breastfeeding in hospitals. It highlights that, in spite of heavy promotion of breastfeeding, there is often a lack of support for women who begin to breastfeed in hospitals, thus challenging the current system of postnatal care within a culture in which neither service-user nor provider feel satisfied. Incorporating recommendations for policy and practice on infant feeding, Breastfeeding in Hospital is highly relevant to health professionals and breastfeeding supporters as well as to students in health and social care, medical anthropology and medical sociology, as it explores practice issues while contextualising them within a broad social, political and economic context.

Anthropologies of Global Maternal and Reproductive Health

Anthropologies of Global Maternal and Reproductive Health
Author: Lauren J. Wallace
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030845141

This open access edited book brings together new research on the mechanisms by which maternal and reproductive health policies are formed and implemented in diverse locales around the world, from global policy spaces to sites of practice. The authors – both internationally respected anthropologists and new voices – demonstrate the value of ethnography and the utility of reproduction as a lens through which to generate rich insights into professionals’ and lay people’s intimate encounters with policy. Authors look closely at core policy debates in the history of global maternal health across six different continents, including: Women’s use of misoprostol for abortion in Burkina Faso The place of traditional birth attendants in global maternal health Donor-driven maternal health programs in Tanzania Efforts to integrate qualitative evidence in WHO maternal and child health policy-making Anthropologies of Global Maternal and Reproductive Health will engage readers interested in critical conversations about global health policy today. The broad range of foci makes it a valuable resource for teaching in medical anthropology, anthropology of reproduction, and interdisciplinary global health programs. The book will also find readership amongst critical public health scholars, health policy and systems researchers, and global public health practitioners.

Lissa

Lissa
Author: Hamdy, Sherine
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2017-11-15
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1487593473

As Anna and Layla reckon with illness, risk, and loss in different ways, they learn the power of friendship and the importance of hope.

Banking on Milk

Banking on Milk
Author: Tanya Cassidy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2019-05-28
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1351364103

Banking on Milk takes the reader on a journey through the everyday life of donor human milk banking across the United Kingdom (UK) and beyond, asking questions such as the following: Why do people decide to donate? How do parents of recipients hear about human milk? How does milk donation impact on lifestyle choices? Chapters record the practical everyday reality of work in a milk bank by drawing on extensive ethnographic observations and sensitive interview data from donors, mothers of recipients and the staff of four different milk banks from across the UK, and visits to milk banks across Europe and North America. It discusses the ongoing pressures to do with supply, demand and distribution. An empirically informed "ethnography of the contemporary", where both biosociality and biopower abound, this book includes an exploration of how milk banks evolved from registering wet nurses with hospitals, showing how a regulatory culture of medical authority began to quantify and organize human milk as a commodity. This book is a valuable read for all those with an interest in breastfeeding or organ and tissue donation from a range of fields, including midwifery, sociology, anthropology, geography, cultural studies and public health.

The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Reproduction

The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Reproduction
Author: Sallie Han
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 631
Release: 2021-11-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 100045598X

The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Reproduction is a comprehensive overview of the topics, approaches, and trajectories in the anthropological study of human reproduction. The book brings together work from across the discipline of anthropology, with contributions by established and emerging scholars in archaeological, biological, linguistic, and sociocultural anthropology. Across these areas of research, consideration is given to the contexts, conditions, and contingencies that mark and shape the experiences of reproduction as always gendered, classed, and racialized. Over 39 chapters, a diverse range of international scholars cover topics including: Reproductive governance, stratification, justice, and freedom. Fertility and infertility. Technologies and imaginations. Queering reproduction. Pregnancy, childbirth, and reproductive loss. Postpartum and infant care. Care, kinship, and alloparenting. This is a valuable reference for scholars and upper-level students in anthropology and related disciplines associated with reproduction, including sociology, gender studies, science and technology studies, human development and family studies, global health, public health, medicine, medical humanities, and midwifery and nursing.