II Encontro Internacional de Novos Paradigmas no Nascimento

Participação especial de Robbie Davis-Floyd (Antropóloga), com a palestra: “Birth Models That Work” e o workshop “Birth across Cultures: An Evolutionary Perspective”

This four-hour workshop takes an evolutionary perspective on the cultural treatment of human childbirth, exploring cross-cultural birth practices in all six types of human subsistence strategies (hunting-gathering, horticulture, agriculture, pastoralism, industrial society, and the technocracy),
noting premodern similarities across vast cultural differences, examining the homogenizing effects of modernization,
and exploring the possibilities of a postmodern mentality for improving the technocratic treatment of birth.

The story of the Three Little Pigs provides an over-arching framework for the talk, with the “big bad wolf” understood as a metaphor for the
dangers of nature and the cultural fears of nature that developed in concordance with the evolution of agriculture and industrialization.

Although premodern birth practices varied widely across the cultural spectrum, they held strong similarities in that they consistently honored the normal physiology and psychology of birth. An anthropological view shows that appearance of cultural difference fades in relation to the cross-cultural similarities
in the provision of companionship for laboring women, freedom of movement, upright positions for birth, and the use
of various artifacts such as ropes, hammocks, and poles to support upright positions.

The advent of industrialization and the concordant ascendance of technology and biomedicine obfuscated traditional knowledge about
birth physiology, replacing it with mechanistic efforts to control the birth process.

Our challenge today is to reincorporate traditional understandings of birth physiology, use new technologies appropriately, and bring a postmodern mentality that incorporates scientific evidence with traditional and professional midwifery knowledge to our cultural understanding and management of birth.

Mais informações em https://nascerpositivo.wordpress.com/