Embodying Culture
312 pages, 6 x 9
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Release Date:30 Sep 2009
ISBN:9780813546360
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Release Date:30 Sep 2009
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Embodying Culture

Pregnancy in Japan and Israel

Rutgers University Press
Embodying Culture is an ethnographically grounded exploration of pregnancy in two different cultures—Japan and Israel—both of which medicalize pregnancy. Tsipy Ivry focuses on "low-risk" or "normal" pregnancies, using cultural comparison to explore the complex relations among ethnic ideas about procreation, local reproductive politics, medical models of pregnancy care, and local modes of maternal agency.

The ethnography pieces together the voices of pregnant Japanese and Israeli women, their doctors, their partners, the literature they read, and depicts various clinical encounters such as ultrasound scans, explanatory classes for amniocentesis, birthing classes, and special pregnancy events.

The emergent pictures suggest that although experiences of pregnancy in Japan and Israel differ, pregnancy in both cultures is an energy-consuming project of meaning-making— suggesting that the sense of biomedical technologies are not only in the technologies themselves but are assigned by those who practice and experience them.

A fascinating double-ethnography of pregnancy in two cultures. This outstanding book reveals stunning cultural differences in the interpretation of the embodied experience of pregnancy. In spite of their mutual technological sophistication, Japanese and Israeli views on pregnancy could hardly be more different, nor could the biomedical advice that women in each culture receive. Ivry's work takes Brigitte Jordan's analysis of birth in four cultures to a new level, focusing specifically on the cultural influences that profoundly affect both women's and obstetricians' perceptions and management of pregnancy, and deeply demonstrating the influence of culture on biomedical 'science.' Robbie Davis-Floyd, author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage
Ivry's extremely rich ethnography succeeds in defamiliarizing assumptions about pregnancy and gestation in both Israel and Japan. Recommended. Choice
Ivry's timely book adds ethnographic description and analysis to public discussions about exactly what pregnancy means. This book reminds us why pregnancy--not just the newest technological methods--is a fascinating window into culture, and the themes it considers will be of interest to teachers and students in anthropology, gender studies, medical anthropology, epidemiology, and area studies. Ethos
With finely crafted ethnography, Tsipy Ivry engages her readers in the most intimate of experiences--pregnancy. Research in Japan and Israel reveals how medical knowledge and technologies are made use of differentially in these two locations by both physicians and women to accomplish a remarkably dissimilar embodiment of future motherhood. Ivry's position is that concern about the ramifications of technologically assisted reproduction should not usurp representations of the cultures of pregnancy. Margaret Lock, author of Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death
TSIPY IVRY is a lecturer in anthropology at the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel.
Introduction
Part I. The Doctoring of Pregnancy
1 Pregnancy in the Eyes of Israeli Ob-Gyns
2 The Front and the Backstage of Japanese Prenatal Care
Part II. Experiencing Pregnancy
3 The Path of Bonding
4 The Path of Ambiguity
Part III. Embodying Culture
5 Juxtapositions
6 Pregnant with Meaning
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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