Intuition as authoritative knowledge in midwifery and home birth Robbie Davis-Floyd, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin and Elizabeth Davis, Woman to Woman Clinic, Windsor, California This article appeared in The Social Production of Authoritative Knowledge in Childbirth, a special edition of the Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Robbie Davis-Floyd and Carolyn Sargent, eds. 10(2):237-269, 1996. Permission is hereby given by the authors to reproduce this article for educational purposes.

Anthropology and birth activism : what do we know? Robbie Davis-Floyd This article appears in the Anthropology News 46(5):37-38. A few days ago, I attended a dinner for birth activists in Seattle. The 14 women (and one man) gathered there held our glasses aloft as a doula (a woman trained to provide support to the laboring mother) made the last toast—“for all the women who don’t know.” My reactions trembled on the existential brink. As both an anthropologist and a birth activist, I am trained to honor and respect women’s choices and the knowledge systems on which they base those choices, but also to deeply question the cultural conditioning underlying all “choice.” And in both roles, I heard just as […]