About the Book

Even childbirth is affected by globalization—and in India, as elsewhere, the trend is away from home births assisted by midwives toward hospital births that increasingly rely on new technologies. And yet, as this work of critical feminist ethnography clearly demonstrates, as biomedical models of childbirth spread throughout the globe, they fuse with local practices to create distinctive forms of modern birth.

Through vivid description and animated dialogue, this book conveys the birth stories of the women of Tamil Nadu in their own voices. Cecilia Van Hollen uses these stories to explore larger questions about how the structures of colonialism and postcolonial international and national development have helped to shape the form and meaning of birth for Indian women today.

Winner of Coomaraswamy Book Prize for Best Book in South Asian Studies

Association for Asian Studies, 2005

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Related Articles and Book Chapters

2003 Invoking Vali: Painful Technologies of Modern Birth in South India. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17(1):49–77. 

2002 “Baby Friendly” Hospitals and Bad Mothers: Maneuvering Development in the Postpartum Period in Tamil Nadu, South India. In The Daughters of Hariti: Birth and Female Healers in South and Southeast Asia. Santi Rozario and Geoffrey Samuel, eds. Pp. 163–181. New York: Routledge.

1998 Moving Targets: Routine IUD Insertions in Maternity Wards in Tamil Nadu, India. Reproductive Health Matters 6(11):98-106. 

1994 Perspectives on the Anthropology of Birth [A Review Article of Three Books]. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 18: 501–512.

Reviews

“…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…

—Coomaraswamy Book Prize Committee, Association for Asian Studies

“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”

—Soma Basu, The Hindu

“…the best of a new generation of ethnographies critically rethinking the anthropology of childbirth…necessary reading for all scholars of body, gender, and governmentality in South Asia…destined to become a classic in medical anthropology”

—Lawrence Cohen, University of California-Berkeley

“…sensitive ethnography…a valuable contribution to our understanding of women’s reproductive choices, childbirth, and biomedical intervention in India”

—Kusum Gopal, London School of Economics, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“…beautifully written….an important new contribution to medical anthropological scholarship on reproduction as well as to the theoretical debates on modernity and development”

—Carolyn Sargent, Washington University

“...valuably outlines means for critical feminists to intervene into the domain of reproductive rights in ways that remain mindful of parameters of marginality, such as caste, class and race.”

—Suchita Chakraborty, University of Delhi, Contributions to Indian Sociology

“Lessons from this book will provide salutary for medical students about how not to deal with their patients….useful for the development workers in the field of reproductive health”

—Sujata, Sriram, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Culture, Health & Sexuality

“…clearly written and very engaging…a highly teachable ethnography. It makes important scholarly contributions to critical medical anthropology…a welcome addition to a growing body of work in the anthropology of reproduction”

—Margaret MacDonald, York University, American Ethnologist