Reviews: Birth on the Threshold
Coomaraswamy Book Prize Committee, Association for Asian Studies
“Van Hollen displays her considerable skills as an incisive, innovative, and compassionate ethnographer throughout this standard-setting book. Birth on the Threshold is an example of medical anthropology at its very best, but is also crucial to a general understanding of the lives of Tamil women and to the economies of birth in India in general”
Lawrence Cohen, University of California-Berkeley
“Compellingly argued and exquisitely written, Van Hollen’s work stands as the best of a new generation of ethnographies critically rethinking the anthropology of childbirth. Accessible to anyone with an interest in the everyday and extraordinary politics of development, family planning, and poor women’s lives, Birth on the Threshold is necessary reading for all scholars of body, gender, and governmentality in South Asia and is destined to become a classic in medical anthropology”
Margaret MacDonald, York University. American Ethnologist
“Birth on the Threshold is clearly written and very engaging in its description and argumentation and thus is a highly teachable ethnography. It makes important scholarly contributions to critical medical anthropology for the way it connects small ethnographic moments to larger forces of history and political economy and presents local cultural expression and experience as a deeply tuned response to local and global assemblages of power. Finally, this book is a welcome addition to a growing body of work in the anthropology of reproduction”
Kusum Gopal, London School of Economics. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
“…sensitive ethnography…a valuable contribution to our understanding of women’s reproductive choices, childbirth, and biomedical intervention in India”
Sujata Sriram, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Culture, Health & Sexuality
“Nay-sayers of globalization can use this book as an illustration about how the modernization and development agendas have been misappropriated. Lessons from this book will provide salutary for medical students about how not to deal with their patients. The early chapters on obstetrics in colonial India and maternal and child health services in post-colonial India will be useful for the development workers in the field of reproductive health”
Susan Seymour, Pitzer College. Anthropological Quarterly
“Bracketed by modernization and development discourse, this rich ethnography makes a strong contribution to medical anthropology and the cross-cultural literature on birth practices… One of the book’s contributions is to challenge Western feminist assumptions about male control of women’s bodies as pregnancy and childbirth become increasingly biomedicalized. Another contribution is Van Hollen’s insistence that, although the global process of biomedicalizing childbirth is occurring in India, it is not hegemonic.”
Soma Basu. The Hindu
“Cecilia Van Hollen interestingly looks at how childbirth, reproductive rights and feminization of poverty are inextricably linked. Her evocative detailing of Indian customs and the pangs of childbirth in a public hospital read like pathos with a punch”
Carolyn Sargent, Southern Methodist University
“This is a beautifully written and well-organized book, combining theoretical insights and ethnographic detail. It represents an important new contribution to medical anthropological scholarship on reproduction as well as to the theoretical debates on modernity and development”
Kathryn Coffey, SUNY College-Cortland. Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s & Gender Studies
“In her book Birth on the Threshold, Cecilia Van Hollen describes the modernization of childbirth among poor women in Southern India…Throughout the book, Van Hollen skillfully interweaves Tamil women’s stories together to describe the childbirth experience from pregnancy through the postpartum period.”
Mohan Rao, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Zubaan
“This is an excellent manuscript that I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending for publication. The manuscript shows deep scholarship, a rich survey of literature, a profound engagement with the author’s anthropological subjects and an engaging writing style, both inviting and accessible…..What is singularly remarkable is the scholar’s respect for quantitative data and the skills with which she uses them to make her point…The insights provided into avoiding public health care, despite the lower costs are deeply valuable…I profoundly appreciate the manner in which the scholar sensitively, and skillfully, questions populist notions of development or medical technology…A deeply enjoyable book, the scholar has obviously been deeply influenced by India. The evidence is there all over…”
Robin Oakley, Dalhousie University. Critique of Anthropology
“The relationship between modernity and maternity in Tamil Nadu is explored by Celia van Hollen [sic] in this ethnography of critical medical anthropology interested in social justice”
Lakshmi Ramachandar. The Australian Journal of Anthropology
“The book includes very useful descriptive materials on ‘professionalization of obstetrics in colonial India,’…‘MCH services in the postcolonial era,’…and the complex interactions between Hindu cultural practices and the ‘modern’ policies invoked in ‘baby friendly hospitals’… These descriptions are valuable resources for social scientists and other public health researchers. Her rich narrative about the pregnancy ritual, cimantam…is exemplary”
Suneet P. Chauhan, M.D. South Asia Review
“This book of medical anthropology is a perfect reading for those not content with the current, parochial obstetric practices, for it skillfully intertwines stories of childbirth in Tami Nadu, a state in South India, with abundant explanations of how poverty and politics, historical factors and modernization have shaped how delivery is conducted there…on account of its sheer arduous research, this fascinating book is a must for a medical anthropologist, and, for health-care providers, it is a mine of unusual information about the practice of obstetrics in a traditional society. Women curious about what it means to be pregnant, or a mother, in other cultures can turn to this book for an absorbing reading
Patricia Jeffery, University of Edinburgh
“By locating women’s experiences of childbearing within a local political economy of class, caste and gender politics, and international debates about development and human rights, Birth on the Threshold provides a subtle and important contribution to the understanding of Indian modernity”
Laura Tesler, University of California-San Francisco. Transforming Anthropology
“This is a compelling historical and ethnographic case study of the biomedicalization of childbirth and its effects on poor women’s lives in the state of Tamil Nadu, India… By attending to the intersections of macrolevel and microlevel social forces in discourses, policies, and practices, she shows that maternal and child health (MCH) services and statuses have not been valued intrinsically but as objectives of international, national, state, and local policy agendas wherein women are both ‘obstacles’ to and ‘vessels’ of the modernist project in India. Four years after her book’s publication, it remains well suited for graduate courses in medical anthropology, international development, and gender analysis.”