To create a sacred interstice to be born. An anthropological analysis of the excersice of the urban professional midwifery in a midwifery house in Mexico

Abstract

In this text I analyze the contemporary practice of urban professional midwives in a midwifery house. I am interested in showing how the parties build their profession and workplace in dialogue with local, national and global processes. My reflection emerges through ethnographic work with the team of La casa de Iemanjá, a house of midwifery located in one of the most densely populated metropolis in the country. I argue that these midwives mutually construct their professional practice and the midwifery house as sacred expressions in an effort to demarcate themselves from the dominant biopolitical regime of birth care. Through the anthropological analysis of practices, speeches, objects and spaces I show the relevance of understanding the delivery house as a heterotopic space-time based on a logic that aims to subvert and compensate the process of violence attributed to the biomedical exercise, not without overlaps, ambiguities and contradictions.