Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel

Abstract

Ivry, T. Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel . New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press 2010 vii+ 298 pp. $28.95 (pbk ) ISBN 978-0-8135-4636-0 Embodying Culture is an ethnographically grounded exploration of pregnancy in two different cultures—Japan and Israel—both of which strongly medicalise pregnancy. Tsipy Ivry, who is lecturer in medical anthropology in Haifa University and a mother of four daughters, focuses on “low-risk” or “normal” pregnancies and the modes of their social construction in the two societies. Using cultural comparison, she explores the complex relations between ethno-national discourses on procreation, local reproductive policies, medical models of pregnancy care, and local understandings of maternal agency. Ivry’s critical point of departure is that concern about the ramifications of technologically assisted reproduction that predominates in the contemporary professional discourse should not usurp representations of the cultures of pregnancy. She writes: “At the beginning of the third millennium, it remains true that any living human being will have been gestated... inside a woman’s body. This includes both premature babies and babies who have been conceived through surrogacy arrangements. Not even ‘test tube babies’ are actually gestated in test tubes. Yet how many of us acknowledge pregnancy as a significant part of our life histories?” (p.4). The ethnography pieces together the voices of pregnant Japanese and Israeli women, their doctors, their partners, the literature they read, and depicts various clinical encounters such as ultrasound scans, explanatory classes for amniocentesis, birthing groups, and special pregnancy events. Research in Japan and Israel reveals how ostensibly standard state-of-the-art medical knowledge and technologies are differentially applied in these two contexts by both physicians and women to accomplish a remarkably dissimilar embodiment of future motherhood. In her concluding chapter Ivry writes: “In the Japanese arena, the protagonist of pregnancy is the interconnected entity of mother-baby, whereas in the Israeli case the protagonists are the pregnant woman and her suspect fetus. Pregnancy is conceptualised as an early stage of parenting in Japan and is all about the interdependence of mother and baby and their ongoing relationships. The Israeli model defines pregnancy as a state in limbo that involves two separate individuals (of whom only one is a person). Yet whether a fetus is understood as a person or not, its health is a major concern of all who are involved an a pregnancy under both formulations of gestation” (p.233) [emphasis mine – LR]. In both cultures women are burdened with a heavy moral responsibility for the well-being of their fetuses (with the ensuing ‘education’ and indoctrination about their optimal nutrition, lifestyle and avoidance of bad habits such as smoking). The emergent pictures suggest that although experiences of pregnancy in Japan and Israel differ, pregnancy in both cultures is a project of meaning-making— suggesting that the meaning of biomedical technologies of prenatal care is assigned and reinforced by those who practice and experience them. The high evaluation of this book of the renowned ethnographer of American birth Robbie Davis-Floyd (featured on its jacket) is very close to my own.” This outstanding book reveals stunning cultural differences in the interpretation of the embodied experience of pregnancy. In spite of their mutual technological sophistication, Japanese and Israeli views on pregnancy could hardly be more different, nor could the biomedical advice that women in each culture receive. Ivry’s work takes Brigitte Jordan’s analysis of birth in four cultures to a new level, focusing specifically on the cultural influences that profoundly affect both women’s and obstetricians’ perceptions and management of pregnancy, and deeply demonstrating the influence of culture on biomedical ‘science.’

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