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Hiding or hospitalising? On dilemmas of pregnancy management in East Cameroon
- Source :
- Anthropology & Medicine, 20(3), 288-298. Routledge
- Publication Year :
- 2013
- Publisher :
- Informa UK Limited, 2013.
-
Abstract
- Current international debates and policies on safe motherhood mainly propose biomedical interventions to reduce the risks during pregnancy and delivery. Yet, the conceptualisations of risk that underlie this framework may not correspond with local perceptions of reproductive dangers; consequently, hospital services may remain underutilised. Inspired by a growing body of anthropological literature exploring local fertility-related fears, and drawing on 15 months of fieldwork, this paper describes ideas about risky reproduction and practices of pregnancy protection in a Cameroonian village. It shows that social and supernatural threats to fertility are deemed more significant than the physical threats of fertility stressed at the (inter)national level. To protect their pregnancies from those social and supernatural influences, however, women take very physical measures. It is in this respect that biomedical interventions, physical in their very nature, do connect to local methods of pregnancy management. Furthermore, some pregnant women purposefully deploy hospital care in an attempt to reduce relational uncertainties. Explicit attention to the intersections of the social and the physical, and of the supernatural and the biomedical, furthers anthropological knowledge on fertility management and offers a starting point for more culturally sensitive safe motherhood interventions.
- Subjects :
- Male
Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice
media_common.quotation_subject
Reproduction (economics)
Culture
Psychological intervention
Developing country
Safe motherhood
Fertility
Health Services Misuse
Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
Nursing
Pregnancy
Perception
Dangerous Behavior
Witchcraft
medicine
Humans
Childbirth
Family
Interpersonal Relations
Cameroon
Marriage
media_common
business.industry
Parturition
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
Prenatal Care
General Medicine
Public relations
medicine.disease
Hospitals
Anthropology
Female
business
Attitude to Health
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14692910 and 13648470
- Volume :
- 20
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Anthropology & Medicine
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....f14c5acb992a6a617cf360d207566cde