The baby in the body: Pregnancy practices as kin and person making experience in the contemporary United States.

Abstract

The focus of this dissertation is on pregnancy practices that are regarded as ordinary activities in the United States today. They include what I call belly talk (i.e., interaction with the expected child through speech or other communications, such as touch), ultrasound scans, baby showers, and childbirth education classes. These pregnancy practices highlight what I suggest are two especially significant aspects of everyday experience in kinship and reproduction. First, these practices of pregnancy are practices of the body, or bodies, including both expectant mother and expected child, and involving sensory engagements such as hearing, touching, and seeing. Second, they demonstrate that experience is creative---that is, not only do they involve imaginative effort, but they also create social bonds through which we make kin, and act and apprehend ourselves as persons in the world. This dissertation is based on anthropological research with American middle-class women in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan between October 2002 and January 2004. Fieldwork was conducted primarily with first-time mothers, and included repeated, in-depth interviews, participant-observation in various settings, and the collection and analysis of media sources. As a cultural analysis of contemporary American pregnancy practices, this dissertation contributes to a reorientation toward accounts and approaches that emphasize embodiment and especially experience in studies of kinship and reproduction. It also contributes in particular to a reconsideration of the significance of biology and the biological in ideas and practices of kinship and reproduction. As an ethnographic account of everyday life in the United States, this dissertation considers ideas and practices of American middle-class kinship and reproduction, and contributes to an examination of how anthropological knowledge, especially kinship, becomes reproduced.