Cultures of birthing in transition

Abstract

Being born and giving birth have received little sociological appreciation so far, although they are fundamental everyday events. In the last decade, the German language literature on the subject comprises only one extensive publication and a few articles (Hirschauer et al. 2014; Villa et al. 2011; Rose and Schmied-Knittel 2011; Rose 2010). It is astonishing that there are so few empirical and theoretical studies of birth and birthing. Theories involving the links between nature, body, and culture, which have been broadly examined in recent years in the context of Science and Technology Studies and New Materialism, offer versatile approaches to the phenomenon of birth. Moreover, practices and discourses of birth can be theorized in terms of the relationships between nature, body, and culture. How birthing is perceived and experienced strongly depends on social conditions, cultural norms, and gendered concepts, which determine whether it is an individual event or a collective matter. Thus, at the birth of every society and throughout its reproduction—in the truest sense of the word—there is birth.