Rich with the voices and stories of participants, these touching, firsthand accounts examine how women of diverse racial, ethnic, class and religious backgrounds perceive prenatal testing, the most prevalent and routinized of the new reproducing technologies. Based on the author's decade of research and her own personal experiences with amniocentesis, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus explores the "geneticization" of family life in all its complexity and diversity.

Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (The Anthropology of Everyday Life)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Rapp, Rayna

Diseases & Physical Ailments

Routledge

With his groundbreaking Europe and the People Without History, Eric R. Wolf powerfully advanced the project of integrating the disciplines of anthropology and history. In Articulating Hidden Histories, many of those influenced by Wolf―both anthropologists and historians―acknowledge the contribution of this great scholar while extending his work by presenting their own original field and archival research. The "hidden histories" referred to here encompass the histories of economic and political forces capable of dislodging people from their surroundings, of the people thus dislocated, and of the anthropological concepts developed to understand such processes. Within this framework, the contributors explore an extraordinarily wide range of topics, from the invention of tribalism in colonial West Africa to the ecological activism of North American housewives. This collection offers a fitting tribute not only to Eric Wolf's work, but to its continuing influence on the fields of anthropology and history.

Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf

Schneider, Jane

Biographies & Memoirs

University of California Press

This groundbreaking volume provides a dramatic investigation of the dynamics of reproduction. In an unusually broad spectrum of essays, a distinguished group of international feminist scholars and activists explores the complexity of contemporary sexual politics around the globe. Using reproduction as an entry point in the study of social life and placing it at the center of social theory, the authors examine how cultures are produced, contested, and transformed as people imagine their collective future in the creation of the next generation. The studies encompass a wide variety of subjects, from the impact of AIDS on reproduction in the United States to the aftereffects of Chernobyl on the Sami people in Norway and the impact of totalitarian abortion and birth control policies in Romania and China. The contributors use historical and comparative perspectives to illuminate the multiple and intersecting forms of power and resistance through which reproduction is given cultural weight and social form. They discuss the ways that seemingly distant influences shape and constrain local reproductive experiences such as the international flows of adoptive babies and childcare workers and the Victorian and imperial legacy of eugenics and family planning.

Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction

Politics & Social Sciences

Ginsburg, Faye D.

Social Sciences

This benchmark collection of cross-cultural essays on reproduction and childbirth 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, on the basis of which decisions are made and actions taken―highlights the vast differences between birthing systems that give authority of knowing to women and their communities and those that invest it in experts and machines. Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge offers first-hand ethnographic research conducted by anthropologists in sixteen different societies and cultures and includes the interdisciplinary perspectives of a social psychologist, a sociologist, an epidemiologist, a staff member of the World Health Organization, and a community midwife. Exciting directions for further research as well as pressing needs for policy guidance emerge from these illuminating explorations of authoritative knowledge about birth. This book is certain to follow Jordan's Birth in Four Cultures as the definitive volume in a rapidly expanding field.

Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Sargent, Carolyn Fishel

Davis-Floyd, Robbie E. E.

Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America

Disability Worlds

Ginsburg, Faye

Anthropology

Duke University Press Books

In Disability Worlds, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp chronicle and theorize two decades of immersion in New York City's wide-ranging disability worlds as parents, activists, anthropologists, and disability studies scholars. They situate their disabled children's lives among the experiences of advocates, families, experts, activists, and artists in larger struggles for recognition and rights. Disability consciousness, they show, emerges in everyday politics, practices, and frictions. Chapters consider dilemmas of genetic testing and neuroscientific research, reimagining kinship and community, the challenges of "special education," and the perils of transitioning from high school. They also highlight the vitality of neurodiversity activism, disability arts, politics, and public culture. Disability Worlds reflects the authors' anthropological commitments to recognizing the significance of this fundamental form of human difference. Ginsburg and Rapp's conversations with diverse New Yorkers reveal the bureaucratic constraints and paradoxes established in response to the disability rights movement, as well as the remarkable creativity of disabled people and their allies who are opening pathways into both disability justice and disability futures.

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Books by Rapp, Rayna