No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Local Knowledge in Health: The Case of Andean Midwifery
Abstract
This chapter discusses local knowledge in the area of health and medicine in the Andes. It highlights the conflicts between the knowledge and practices of traditional Andean midwifery and those of Western scientific medicine.
... Jordan, 1993). Interestingly, these attitudes towards gestation and labour choices often change from childbirth to childbirth in a non-linear manner, for instance when a homebirth is followed by a hospital birth, which in turn is followed by a homebirth with a midwife present (Bradby, 1999(Bradby, , 2002. ...
... Bolivia's maternal mortality rates remain elevated by international standards, despite implemented government programs aimed at monitoring pregnancy and infancy, such as the Juana Azurduy stipend (Bono Juana Azurduy) or the aforementioned Universal Mother-Infant Insurance, SUMI (cf. Moloney, 2010Moloney, , p. 1955Bradby, 1999Bradby, , 2002. 6 Tiefer (1994); Martin (2001); and Kleinman (1980Kleinman ( , 1995. ...
This paper uses ethnographic data on reproductive experiences of indigenous Andean migrant women in the lowland eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra as a starting point for discussion of different perspectives on the efforts of the Bolivian state to biomedicalise the processes of pregnancy and childbirth. Pregnant women and babies up to six months of age are covered by the state-funded Universal Mother-Infant Insurance (SUMI) that favours the use of biomedical facilities over the services of traditional midwives that are not covered by the insurance. Unlike in the western Andean highlands of Bolivia, most women in Santa Cruz give birth in hospitals while actively negotiating their options. They are not motivated by strictly medical factors as social or economic circumstances also come into play. Simultaneously, the increased levels of hospital deliveries in Bolivia translate into decreased levels of maternal and perinatal mortality, which in turn help Bolivian statistics to fare better from the point of view of the government and international bodies, such as the WHO. However, the restrictions on qualifying for SUMI are such that women in Santa Cruz are often forced to meet the costs of medical services themselves. I argue that the initial socio-biomedical intention of SUMI has become obscured by its political impact.
... Littéralement, « celui qui soigne ». 11 Voir J.-L.Christinat (1976), F.Lestage (1999), B. Bradby (1988, T.Platt (2002), etc. ...
This article presents a study of stories of learning collected from healers of a village in South Peruvian Andes. Paying particular attention to relations with the body, the analysis exposes learning mechanisms linked to the construction of the healer’s reputation. It also reveals founding stories whose crucial passages concern death and describe divine and/or social elections.
The goal of this paper is to analyse the phenomenon of sobreparto, a traditionally Andean postpartum condition, among Andean migrants to the lowland city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Although matters of maternal health have usually be examined through the lens of traditional Andean understandings of the body, health, and illness, it is also analytically worthwhile to foreground the social and emotional dimensions of this postpartum illness. This is especially important given the fact that most research participants emphasised that biomedical doctors do not know how to cure sobreparto. In particular, it is especially productive to consider it as a lens for wider, not necessarily medical, processes at work in migrant women’s lives, such as motherhood and womanhood, emotions and sociality, or the biomedicalisation of pregnancy and childbirth. While narrating their individual experiences of sobreparto, female migrants in Santa Cruz pointed to aspects of women’s lives beyond the episodes of illness, revealing the complex landscapes of their everyday existence. Using migrants’ accounts of their experiences of childbirth, I argue that sobreparto may be read as a way of dealing with the feeling of loneliness within a weakened social network, so common among migrants to urban areas. Furthermore, this postpartum illness becomes an emblem of ethnicity for the Andean migrants in the increasingly biomedicalised landscape of childbirth in Santa Cruz, enabling them to articulate an embodied commentary on the social realities they experience.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.