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[T]here is no vantage outside the actuality of relationships between cultures, between unequal imperial and non-imperial powers, between different Others, a vantage that might allow one the epistemological privilege of somehow judging, evaluating and interpreting free of the encumbering interests, emotions and engagements of the ongoing relationships themselves" (Edward Said, 1989, p.216).
Biology is an historical discourse, not the body itself" (Donna Haraway, 1989, p. 290).
In 1939, American anthropologist Margaret Mead gave birth to her daughter Catherine in Manhattan's French Hospital, "after many years of experience...in remote villages--watching children born on a steep wet hillside, in the 'evil place' reserved for pigs and defecation" (Mead,1972, p. 249). Before the birth, she had convinced her obstetrician, Claude Heaton, as well as her pediatrician, Benjamin Spock, to agree to very specific and unusual arrangements for the birth and subsequent care of the infant. Mead insisted that no anesthesia be administered to her unless absolutely necessary and that the baby be allowed to breastfeed on demand. In order to win the cooperation of the nursing staff in meeting these rather extraordinary requests, Heaton showed them a film on childbirth made by Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson during their anthropological field work in New Guinea (Mead, 1972). Mead viewed the female bodies of her New Guinea subjects and other "Primitives"(f.1) as immutably invested with the "immediacy of the human body plan" (Mead, 1967, p. 57) and therefore able to provide indisputable proof that Mead's own birth plan adhered scrupulously to the trajectory of what she called "woman's biological career line" (Mead, 1967, p. 174).
It was Mead's intention in much of her work to juxtapose examples of cultural patterns in other parts of the world with those in North America in order to dislodge notions of what was perceived as natural in North American society (Fischer, 1986). In the 1960s, Mead lent her considerable reputation as well as her anthropological research to the burgeoning North American childbirth reform movement (Edwards and Waldorf,1984). Her cross-cultural studies of childbearing among what she termed "Primitive" women seemed to prove that the medical technology and control which were the norm in American obstetrics distorted women's natural reproductive function. Mead's work and her personal example seemed to protest alienation from the body...