While the process of childbirth is, in some sense, everywhere the same, it is also everywhere different in that each culture has produced a birthing system that is strikingly dissimilar from the others. Based on her fieldwork in the United States, Sweden, Holland, and Yucatan, Jordan develops a framework for the discussion and investigation of different birthing systems. Illustrated with useful examples and lively anecdotes from Jordan's own fieldwork, the Fourth Edition of this innovative comparative ethnography brings the reader to a deeper understanding of childbirth as a culturally grounded, biosocially mediated, and interactionally achieved event.
Titles of related interest also from Waveland Press: Davis-Floyd, Ways of Knowing about Birth: Mothers, Midwives, Medicine, and Birth Activism (ISBN 9781478633624); Gabriel, Touching Bellies, Touching Lives: Midwives of Southern Mexico Tell Their Stories (ISBN 9781478627104); and Holloway, Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali (ISBN 9781577664352).
