© 2019 Tatiana KUKSA
2019 — №1 (17)
Keywords: natural childbirth, medicalized childbirth, home childbirth, hospital childbirth, traditional childbirth rite, urban obstetric practices, partner childbirth, doula’s care, childbirth narratives, transformation of Russian obstetrics, obstetrics medicalization, reproductive control
Abstract: The article reviews key Russian and foreign studies of perinatal culture. Explored are various theoretical approaches to studying and analyzing obstetric practices and texts about childbirth; also brought up is the diversity of problems, concepts and methods applied in studies of childbirth culture and obstetrics in Russian and foreign academia. Materials for the review and analysis are academic publications by Russian and English-language researchers of the last 40 years.
Author info:
Tatyana Leonidovna Kuksa is Head of Legislative Reforms Department at the Institute for Public Administration and Governance, Higher School of Economics (Moscow)
Summary
In the recent decades, the perinatal culture has been an object of poly- and interdisciplinary research in a variety of scientific disciplines: cultural and social anthropology, history and ethnography of motherhood and childhood, history and ethnography of midwifery and obstetrics, history and anthropology of medicine, history and sociology of everyday life, cultural studies, bioethics, philosophy, philology, linguistics, and folklore studies.
This article provides a brief overview of the most important academic works by Russian and international researchers, as well as corresponding explanatory models and concepts. The purpose of the review is to illustrate the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as the abundance of methods for conceptualization, problem-solving and analysis of texts about childbirth and regional obstetrics and childbirth practices.
Russian researchers utilize in their works various theoretical concepts and analyze both local village traditions of the past and modern urban practices and texts. The works based on Russian field materials collected over the last three decades can be divided into three thematic categories:
• Post-Soviet folklore and anthropological studies of urban texts about women in labor and their physicians;
• Russian studies of traditional Slavic peasant maternity rites and folklore texts;
• Russian anthropological and sociological studies of urban perinatal practices.
The article also reviews the Russian works analyzing English-language studies of childbirth medicalization and obstetrics.
The article’s final chapter provides a brief overview of the last four decades of Anglo-American research of women’s texts on childbirth and delivery practices.
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