Cultural Anthropologist
Obstetric training as a rite of passage This article appeared in Obstetrics in the United States: Woman, Physician, and Society, Robert Hahn, ed. Special Issue of the Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 1( 3): 288-318, 1987.
Types of midwifery training : An anthropological overview by Robbie Davis-Floyd PhD This article appears in Pathways to Becoming a Midwife: Getting an Education, eds. Joel Southern, Jennifer Rosenberg, and Jan Tritten. Eugene, Oregon: Midwifery Today, 1998, pp. 119-193. Copyright is held both by Robbie E. Davis-Floyd and Midwifery Today, 1998. Either copyright holder may give full permission for this article to be reprinted or reproduced. Robbie E. Davis-Floyd hereby gives permission for this article to be copied and distributed for educational and informational purposes. Potential midwives reading this book will want help in picking their educational path. Hoping to be of assistance, I offer the following brief overview. (More thorough and detailed overviews can be found in Frye 1995: […]
Ways Of knowing : open and closed systems Robbie Davis-Floyd This article appears in Midwifery Today 69 (Spring): 9-13. Copyright is held both by Midwifery Today and by Robbie Davis-Floyd. Both give permission for the replication of this article for educational purposes. This special issue of Midwifery Today focuses on midwifery knowledge. The following articles in it will address the specifics of this body of knowledge. But first, it is important to take a broader look at the differences between open and closed knowledge systems. Why? Because any knowledge system whose adherents wish it to remain responsive to changing events in a rapidly changing world must remain open to absorbing new information and adapting itself to that new information. To […]
Some thoughts on bridging the gap between nurse – and direct-entry midwives by Robbie Davis-Floyd This article appears in Midwifery Today, March issue, 1999. The author and Midwifery Today grant permission for its replication for educational purposes. It is with dismay that I have listened, for the past five years or so, to direct-entry midwives criticizing nurse-midwives as “medwives” and “physician extenders,” and to nurse-midwives talking about professional direct-entry midwives as if they don’t know very much, and working in some states to pass exclusionary laws. Such behavior is a classic feature of oppressed groups who turn on each other instead of concentrating on fighting their oppressors. An oppressed group will tend to want to fight its battle for identity […]
The ups, downs and interlinkages of nurse- and direct-entry midwifery : status, practice, and education by Robbie E. Davis-Floyd Ph.D. This article appears in Pathways to Becoming a Midwife: Getting an Education, A Midwifery Today book. Eugene, Oregon: Midwifery Today, 1998, pp. 67-118. Copyright is held both by Robbie E. Davis-Floyd and Midwifery Today, 1998. Either copyright holder may give full permission for this article to be reprinted or reproduced. Robbie E. Davis-Floyd hereby gives permission for this article to be copied and distributed for educational and informational purposes.
Landlady at la grange : The folklore Of a texas madam Robbie Davis-Floyd This article was originally published in the Journal of American Folklore 86(41):212-224, July-September 1973. This version has been revised and updated for publication on this website, as an important piece of Texana, and to preserve a record of the very woman-centered way in which Miss Edna ran her establishment, the Chicken Ranch in La Grange.
Articles on childbirth and obstetrics “On Pregnancy” (ok as is) “On Childbirth” (ok as is) “Childbirth” (Sagesbirth4) “Culture and Birth: The Technocratic Imperative” {ok as is} “The Rituals of American Hospital Birth” {ok as is} “Obstetric Training as a Rite of Passage” (ok as is} “The Technocratic Body: American Childbirth as Cultural Expression” {ok as is} “The Technocratic Model of Birth” {TechMod} “The Technocratic, Humanistic, and Holistic Models of Birth” {ok as is} “Anthropology and Birth Activism: What Do We Know?” {ANBirth6}
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.
Inner space and outer space as cyberspace? Technocratizing Womb and World Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association December 1994, Atlanta Draft for Oral Presentation–References Not Included. Abstract Current planning for the commercialization of outer space by a NASA/aerospace industry interface group called SATWG (Strategic Avionics Technology Working Group) is focusing on the creation of a “shared vision” that stresses increased launch vehicle capacity, with one end goal being the ready delivery of more and more satellites into LEO (low earth orbit). This emergent phenomenon–an organic, living planet ringed by thousands and thousands of satellites, all sucking information up from the earth and beaming information down at it–seems to me to constitute a techno-organic system, a […]
On biomedicine Atwood D. Gaines and Robbie Davis-Floyd This entry appears in the Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, eds. Carol and Melvin Ember. Yale: Human Relations Area Files, 2003. The designation “Biomedicine” as the name of the professional medicine of the West emphasizes the fact that this is a preeminently biological medicine. As such, it can be distinguished from the professional medicines of other cultures and, like them, its designation can be considered a proper noun and capitalized. The label Biomedicine was for these reasons conferred by Gaines and Hahn (1985) on what had variously been labeled “scientific medicine,” “cosmopolitan medicine,” “Western medicine,” “allopathic medicine” and simply, “medicine” (Engel 1980; Kleinman 1980; Leslie 1976; Mishler 1981). “Medicine” as a label was […]
From technobirth to cyborg babies Reflections on the Emergent Discourse of a Holistic Anthropologist Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments…first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts…Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves…Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I […]
On pregnancy Robbie E. Davis-Floyd, Ph.D. and Eugenia Georges, Ph.D. This entry appears in the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, New Haven CT: Human Relations Area Files, 1996. pp. 1014-1016 The experience of pregnancy encompasses physiological, psychological, spiritual, and socio-cultural dimensions. Because the future of any given culture depends heavily on women’s procreative abilities, these abilities carry strong social significance. Thus, every culture takes upon itself the regulation and management of women’s pregnancies. In other words, pregnancy is never an unmarked category; in every society, it is the occasion for special attention and specialized treatment, in forms that vary widely. In Polynesia, for example, the news of a pregnancy is greeted with great joy. Pregnant women move about freely, are nurtured […]
Dying as medical performance : the oncologist as charon Megan Biesele and Robbie Davis-Floyd In The Performance of Healing Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman, eds. New York: Routledge, 1996:291-322. I think EVERYTHING in the universe is interconnected. And there are some interconnections we haven’t been conscious of, and they’ll come out sooner or later. Probably later, because knowing the AMA’s grip on things, it’s going to take a long time, and it’s going to take a lot of people who aren’t afraid to speak out for what they really believe in….a lot of people who are simpatico with this new way of living, with this wholeness of living.
Windows in space and time: A personal perspective on birth and death Robbie Davis-Floyd This article appears in Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care, Vol. 30( 4):272-277, Dec. 2003. The author gives permission for its reproduction. My daughter was born through a window in my uterus, and she died through the windshield of her car. I don’t know what to make of this beginning that became an ending. There are easy parallels: cesarean birth is a rapid transition in which you are suddenly taken from one reality to another. Certainly Peyton’s death was like that. But she worked to get born, just as I worked to birth her, for 26 hours before the cesarean was performed. In the end we were […]
Daughter of time: the postmodern midwife 1 For past millennia, midwives have served women in childbirth. In premodern times, midwives were usually the only birth attendants. With the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of modernism, male physicians either replaced midwives or superceded them in the modernist medical hierarchy, leaving them with plenty of women to attend but with relatively little autonomy. As the new millennium dawns on a growing worldwide biomedical hegemony over birth, midwives, the daughters of time and tradition, find themselves negotiating their identities, searching for appropriate roles, and seeking new rationales for their continued existence.