Perspectives from a case study on childbirth among mehinako people (Indigenous group from Upper Xingu /Brazil)
The Centre for Maternal and Child Health Research at the School of Health and Psychological Sciences, City, University of London welcome Aline Regitano to discuss how anthropological thinking and ethnographic analysis are tools to build health research in a responsible way, as part of the research seminar series.
Abstract
In this presentation, Aline Regitano draws attention to how anthropological thinking and ethnographic analysis are tools to build health research in a responsible way. Anthropology, as a discipline that was born interested in exploring the differences and similarities between different “cultures”/“societies”, has been committed to understanding the diverse layers of humanity.
Anthropological thinking has highlighted for other disciplines the necessity to recognise other systems of knowledge and practices, to validate not only the diversity of people, but the multiplicity of perspectives and the multiple existing worldviews.
The rise of scholars coming from non-hegemonic backgrounds, sometimes writing about their own history, has transformed anthropology in a powerful way to break with the logics of coloniality, to de-colonise our thinking, our studies, and to not only be not racist, but anti-racist.
Ethnographic analysis, an elementary research instrument of anthropological work (although it is not the discipline’s exclusivity) offers a possibility to picture with accuracy and respect for interlocutors a specific context and reflect on it.
For health studies, it can be helpful to go beyond what is written in books and journals, and benefit from what emerges during fieldwork, and after that, in the writing process.
This approach may also be effective for reflecting on themes that are recurrent in health studies debates, such as where policies and guidelines are applied on a large scale, and then applied to people where these postulates don't fit their realities.
While they explore this strategy, Aline Regitano brings examples of anthropological research of Mehinako childbirth, the events of pregnancy, labour and postpartum lived by an Amazonian people from Upper Xingu, in the Xingu Indigenous Territory, in Central Brazil. Through ethnographic data it is shown that in this context, childbirth processes were hospitalised, and practised in a medicalised and highly interventionist way.
In the medical institutions where Mehinako women now experience childbirth, labour induction is taken for granted, as part of the admission routine. As a result, Mehinako midwifery is weakened and there are only a few midwives left.
Despite all this, these women find their own ways to resist, and experience childbirth or support birthing women with the resources they find, by daily actions, through their relations to the gardens and the plants that prepare their women’s bodies or through political organisation and inter-ethnic meetings.
Regitano suggests that ethnography always somehow shows ways to walk through the future and how to address what is to be addressed in a more plural, respectful and responsible way.
About the speaker
Aline Regitano is a brazilian anthropologist, masters and PhD candidate in Social Anthropology.
Her study area is Indigenous Ethnology, and she has been working for the last eight years with Mehinako people from Upper Xingu (Brazilian Amazonia).
Her work focuses on childbirth and related events, such as contraception, pregnancy, postpartum condition, indigenous health and public health policies.
She is also interested in the themes of amazonian care, corporeality, kinship and gender relations.
She is a researcher of the Centre for Amerindian Studies, from University of Sao Paulo. And she is currently a visiting scholar at City University of London, joining the Centre for Maternal and Child Health Studies.
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