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Midwives and Mothers: The Medicalization of Childbirth on a Guatemalan Plantation by
Author(s) -
Teijlingen Edwin
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1111/aman.13022
Subject(s) - childbirth , medicalization , citation , sociology , media studies , gender studies , political science , medicine , law , psychiatry , pregnancy , genetics , biology
Midwives and Mothers explores birth, illness, death, and survival on a Guatemalan sugar and coffee plantation, or finca, through two generations of local midwives, mother and daughter Doña María and Doña Siriaca. The book covers a forty-year period during which Cosminsky keeps returning to the same finca for her field work. Some of this work has been published in articles as clearly stated in the Acknowledgements (p.xii), and on reading the book I remembered with joy snippets from some of these articles on Doña María I read nearly 30 years ago whilst working on my Ph.D. thesis. Cosminsky did a great job in bringing together a life’s time of anthropology (field) work a in very comprehensive and easy to read book.