Ethnographies of Breastfeeding: Cultural Contexts and Confrontations

Studies of breastfeeding have proliferated over the last decade. Breastfeeding is an intimate and deep-rooted bodily practice and yet also a highly controversial sociocultural process, invoking strong reactions from advocates and opponents. Whilst breastfeeding practices and experiences vary greatly in different parts of the world, reducing infant mortality is a pressing international goal for governments and societies. Representing cross-cultural concerns of researchers, policy makers and mothers, this book takes a rich ethnographic survey of breastfeeding all over the world. Breastfeeding is shown to highlight various links between gender, power and resources in culture. Each chapter covers a new topic and ethnic or national group, and major topical themes of research such as the rise of milk banks, mother-to-mother sharing networks facilitated by social media, breast milk and HIV are explored.

For the entire volume Ethnographies of Breastfeeding

This volume offers a twenty-first century perspective on the changing world of human milk feeding. These essays combine detailed ethnographic work with creative theorizations of the maternal body that offers a global perspective on how breast milk is produced, preserved, distributed and consumed in a variety of social and cultural contexts. Breast milk tests the limits of medical and familial authority as well as exploring the space between the self and the social. The feeding of infants is variously constructed as individual obligation, communitarian consensus and even as aesthetic distinction. The essays in this book illustrate the versatility not only of modern human milk feeding but also the variety of social meanings that human milk can be invested with. As human milk feeding develops in terms of range and complexity, the practice of breastfeeding generates new alliances and new antagonisms, demonstrating the power of this intimate yet public performance to disrupt and redistribute powerful vested interests and authorities.”

280 pages