I love school! The days are long, the classroom is cramped and gets hot, but nothing is better. It's amazing! I feel so happy when I'm waking up at 5am for my three hour drive to Gainesville. I cannot express in words how much fun it is to be in school and to be learning something I am truly passionate about.
I spent 4 years at USF and I never felt this type of passion, ever! I can only imagine how much more successful I would have been in graduate school if I had discovered and established my passion two years ago.
I've thought about how much different my life would be if I hadn't gone to USF first, if I had went straight to FSTM after graduating high school. I mean, I would be a MIDWIFE by now with three years of independent practice under my belt. Plus, I wouldn't have 30,000 dollars of student loans to be paying off.
However, my undergraduate education was more than a four year detour on the path to midwifery school. It was an education in cultural relativism. Without my degree in Anthropology I know that I wouldn't have the background knowledge and skills to be objective and culturally conscious. Cultural relativism is the ability to see other cultures, practices and belief systems through the eyes of that culture, not your own. Plus, cultural relativism applies to more than just foreign belief systems and traditions. The United States is a heterogeneous mixture of all different types of cultures and belief systems.
Take maternity care in the US for example. You have the medical model of care which has its own practices and beliefs. The culture of the medical model views the female body as unable to birth a baby, fears the natural process of childbirth and sees danger as lurking around every corner. Tests and procedures are routinely used in excess because of this belief that the female body is flawed and childbirth is a faulty process in need of medical intervention. Like a fish that doesn't see the water it lives in, people who live in the medical model of maternity care often do not realize that their system is not evidence based and often does more harm than good.
As I become a contemporary midwife, I am also become a postmodern midwife. Anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd writes on postmoderm midwives:
"For past millennia, midwives have served women in childbirth. In premodern times, midwives were usually the only birth attendants. With the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of modernism, male physicians either replaced midwives or superseded them in the modernist medical hierarchy, leaving them with plenty of women to attend but with relatively little autonomy. As the new millennium dawns on a growing worldwide biomedical hegemony over birth, midwives, the daughters of time and tradition, find themselves negotiating their identities, searching for appropriate roles, and seeking new rationales for their continued existence.
“Modernity” is a narrow canal through which the vast majority of contemporary cultures have passed or are passing. It arrived in various parts of the world at different times; first in the industrializing countries of the North, and more slowly in the colonized and exploited countries of the South. So anthropologists consider “modernism” not to be a particular point in time but rather a univariate (single-pointed, single-minded, unvarying) orientation toward “progress,” defined in terms of Westernized forms of education, technologization, infrastructural development (highway, rail, water, and air systems etc.), factory production, economic growth, and the development of the global marketplace. This univariate orientation identifies a single point in a given area toward which development should be progressing: in economics, that single point is capitalism; in health care, it is Western biomedicine. Thus in modernizing societies traditional systems of healing, including midwifery, have become increasingly regarded by members of the growing middle and upper classes as “premodern vestiges” of a more backward time that must necessarily vanish as modernization/biomedicalization progresses.
Yet around the world, the univariate orientation of modernization is increasingly contested. Postmodern thinking widens the narrow canal of modernization beyond uncritical acceptance of modernization as good, noting the enormous environmental, social, and cultural damage modernization entails, and seeking to generate more polymorphous societies in which multiple knowledge and belief systems can coexist and complement each other. In postmodern societies and groups, conservation and preservation of the environment and of indigenous or traditional languages, cosmologies, health care, and economic systems take on particular urgency and importance, and such endeavors are sometimes considered to be more important than expanding the reach of industrialization, capitalism, and biomedicine.
Around the world we are witnessing the emergence of a phenomenon that I call “postmodern midwifery” –-a term aimed at capturing those aspects of contemporary midwifery practice that fall outside easy distinctions between traditional birthways, professional midwifery, and modern biomedicine. With this term, I am trying to highlight the qualities that emerge from the practice, the discourse, and the political engagement of a certain kind of contemporary midwife—one who often constructs a radical critique of unexamined conventions and univariate assumptions. Postmodern midwives as I define them are relativistic, articulate, organized, political, and highly conscious of both their cultural uniqueness and their global importance. By "postmodern midwife" I specifically do not mean midwives who accept without criticism either their own folk system or that of biomedicine, but rather midwives who fully understand these in a relative way, as different ways of knowing about birth, discrepant systems that often conflict but can be complementary."
With a background in Anthropology, I am better able to understand Davis-Floyd's interpretation of the postmodern midwife as I strive to become an "agent of change." Who knew six years after changing my major from pre-med to anthropology I'd be embarking on a such a dynamic field with a rich, powerful history?
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