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"Ethnographically explores the construction of motherhood in indigenous Mexico. Adds to anthropological literature on reproduction, economic development, and motherhood. Explores how indigenous mothers are viewed and managed by welfare programs as well as how humor becomes a way for the women to cope with their own marginality"--Provided by publisher

ABSTRACTBirthing experiences for low‐income and marginalized women have frequently been framed within explanatory models of authoritative knowledge and power dynamics. Many of these explanatory models have pointed out the structural violence inherent in the biomedical model of birth. The research on which this article is based suggests that clinicians' stressful work environment and class‐based stereotypes of low‐income women resulted in the routinizing of inhumane medical practices. Hospital overcrowding due to health reforms led to clinicians being primarily concerned with moving patients swiftly through the system. Clinicians increasingly relied on the cervical examination as a marker for labor's progress and a shorthand method to track cervical dilation. Using ethnographic data collected in the obstetrics ward of a public hospital in Mexico, in this article I explore the emergence of a bureaucratic routinizing of obstetricians' everyday practice. I provide a new understanding of the encoding and entrenching of everyday medical practices and their effect on the reproductive rights of women.

ABSTRACTBodies are useful instruments for understanding the reproduction of inequalities. In this article, we investigate why and how bodily, social, intimate, and physical boundaries are crossed and what this can tell us about individual and social bodies. We unpack how seeing and being seen, touching and being touched, or feeling and being felt are conditioned in very particular ways by the broader political economy. Participants in this ethnographic research in Mexico used the term manitas to describe how they trained their senses (hands, ears, eyes) during medical practice; how they learned through practice on the bodies of less‐agentive populations (female, raced, or impoverished); and how they crossed intimacy, structural, and physical boundaries through what we term somatic translation: seeing others' bodies with their own. Manitas was developed unconsciously by doctors, never explicitly taught or learned in practice, reproducing social difference. These forms of learning highlight a friction between the violence of knowing and the importance of touch as a legitimate mode of care. This form of tactile and sensorial learning entails not only a form of boundary crossing that is medically useful, but it is also a form of boundary crossing that surfaces social inequalities by taking advantage of them. [hospital ethnography, anthropology of reproduction, embodiment, social boundaries, Mexico]

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part One. Global Medicines in Local Cultures -- Chapter 1 Global Health Goals and Local Constraints in a Rural Peruvian Clinic -- Chapter 2 Science and Sanctity: Biomedicine and Christianity at an Ethiopian Hospital -- Chapter 3 The Cosmopolitan Hospital -- Chapter 4 "Dangerous Disease" Epilepsy in Asante -- Chapter 5 The Salience of the State in Biomedicine: Congo and Uganda Cases Compared -- Part Two. Care Giving and Hospital Labor -- Chapter 6 Creating a Therapeutic Community: Lessons from Allada Hospital Benin -- Chapter 7 Medical "Errands" among Women with Cervical Cancer in Guatemala -- Chapter 8 Routinized Caring or a "Call" to Nursing: Shifts in Hospital Nursing in Rukwa, Tanzania -- Chapter 9 "We Work with What We Have, Not with What We Would Like to Have" Hospital Care in Mexico -- Part Three. Hospitals and the Patient -- Chapter 10 The Navigation of Public Hospitals by West African Immigrants with Cancer in Paris, France -- Chapter 11 Each Child Is Unique: The Responsible U.S. Parent's Take on Hospital Care Gone Wrong -- Chapter 12 Making Ethnographic Sense of Cesarean Rates in Greek Public Hospitals -- Chapter 13 The Nightside of Medicine: Obstetric Suffering and Ethnographic Witnessing in a Pakistani Hospital -- Afterword -- References -- Notes on Contributors -- Index