To have a scientific and intellectually significant conversation about birth procedures and customs in the world we are living in (the first world industrialized corporate world) it is necessary to understand the significates of culture on the social mores and the reality of the birthing women who are living in these cultures.
When I refer to a “reality” I’m referring to a consensual reality or human culture. It is not hyperbole to talk about culture as reality, since human beings can’t experience anything at all without the filters and meanings that culture provides. Culture is traditionally considered the expression of human life-ways, our dress, art, and cuisine, our ways and means, but culture also determines what is possible and true, what exists or does not exist, who we humans are and what the meaning of our lives may be.
In a practical way, cultures are the realities in which we live, and if there is a reality that exists without culture, humanity will never know. What is culture and what is cultural conditioning?
Cultural frameworks are pre-determinative of one’s experience, interpretation of and responses to reality, and constitute the foundation for one’s attitudes and relations and even the formation of one’s personality. We therefore cannot escape these frameworks or the implications of their constraining influence in our lives, even if we wish or seek to do so.
All human reality is culturally based and defined within one cultural framework or another. Cultural frameworks shift and sometimes collide and overlap, and such transition can be the source of much confusion and symbolic contradiction for the individual living in the culture the culture-bearer.
[su_pullquote]For the purpose of this discussion, a person’s culture is the collection of beliefs, views, methods, and ways of thinking, worldview, and social perspective which a person has in their mind. [/su_pullquote]
Culture is said to be transparent and effectively invisible to the culture-bearer, who largely takes for granted one’s own cultural orientations and institutions as if these are naturally based in one’s being. Culture is therefore subjectively experienced by the culture bearer and only becomes objectively expressed through ritual and anti-structural contexts that provide for social action and collective response.
In the book Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge, 1997 authors Robbie E. Davis-Floyd, Carolyn Sargent, create a benchmark collection of cross-cultural essays on reproduction and childbirth that extends and enriches the work of Brigitte Jordan, who helped generate and define the field of the anthropology of birth. The authors’ focus on authoritative knowledge, the knowledge that counts, authoritative knowledge is the basis of which decisions are made and actions taken. This book highlights the vast differences between birthing systems that give the “authority of knowing” to women and their communities and those that invest it in experts and machines.
Cultural frameworks are pre-determinative of one’s experience, interpretation of and responses to reality, and constitute the foundation for one’s attitudes and relations and even the formation of one’s personality. We therefore cannot escape these frameworks or the implications of their constraining influence in our lives, even if we wish or seek to do so.
Nowadays most people demand better evidence before they accept as fact the existence of physical phenomena or explicit authority they have no personal or direct experience with. Education confers structures, which we use to classify incoming information. As we accumulate evidence we learn to discriminate between the probably true and the palpably ridiculous. We hear reports about advances in microbiology and learn that there are a lot of living creatures swimming around that are too small for us to see.
We accept the fact even if we never look through a microscope ourselves. The astronomers talk about remote galaxies and dwarf stars and black holes, and even if we haven’t the faintest idea what they are talking about, we take it as given that they have a scientific basis for their claims, and are not just spinning fantasies for our amusement.
It is my sincere hope that today’s women, those giving birth to our future, will take the time to examine their beliefs about pregnancy and birth with a self-critical eye. I suggest that most of the pathology we are seeing surrounding fertility and childbirth is culturally created. At “Birth, what is in it for ME!” I hope to provide a sounder more evidenced based body of knowledge for the women who carry the HOPE for our future.
