Birth in Four Cultures:
A Crosscultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States
by Brigitte Jordan
revised and expanded by
Robbie Davis-Floyd

Fourth edition. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press. 235 pp. Paper 0-88133-717-X $9.95 plus $3.00 shipping

This book can be ordered directly from Waveland Press at 708-634-0081, fax 708-634-9501.

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"Jordan's work is not only a landmark crosscultural study of childbearing, but also an insightful analysis of methodological issues in anthropology.Brigitte Jordan is midwife to the anthropology of childbirth."

--Robert Hahn, Emory University

"The original edition of Birth in Four Cultures signaled a new level of detailed empirical investigation into birth as a sociocultural process. This revised edition carries this investigation even farther, contrasting the ecological embeddedness of indigenous birth practices and models of learning with the exportation of Western high technology and modes of teaching."

--Rayna Rapp, New School for Social Research

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. Jordan develops a framework for the discussion and investigation of different birthing systems based on her fieldwork in the United States, Sweden, Holland, and the Yucatan. This is the book that originated the field of the anthropology of childbirth. A must-read classic, since its initial publication in 1978 it has informed several generations of students about the cultural marking and shaping of this biological and intensely personal event.

Illustrated with useful examples and lively anecdotes from Jordan's fieldwork, the revised and greatly expanded Fourth Edition of this innovative comparative ethnography brings the reader to a deeper understanding of childbirth as culturally grounded, biosocially mediated, and interactionally achieved. Robbie Davis-Floyd has done a masterful job of updating Jordan's original research and adding three new chapters on authoritative knowledge in childbirth that represent Jordan's most recent work, probing even more fully the issues surrounding the anthropology of birth.

Table of Contents:

Foreword to the Fourth Edition, by Robbie Davis-Floyd

Preface to the Fourth Edition 1993

Preface to the Third Edition 1983

Part I: Childbirth in Biosocial, Crosscultural Perspective

1. A Biosocial Framework for the Crosscultural Comparison of Childbirth Practices

2. Buscando La Forma: An Ethnography of Contemporary Maya Childbirth in Yucatan

3. The Crosscultural Comparison of Birthing Systems

4. Fieldwork in Four Cultures: Methods and Experience

5. Birthing Systems and Change Part II: Authoritative Knowledge in Childbirth

6. The Achievement of Authoritative Knowledge in an American Hospital Birth

7. Models of Teaching and Learning: Pedagogy and the Construction of Authoritative Knowledge

8. Cosmopolitical Obstetrics: Technology and the Social Distribution of Authoritative Knowlege