Cultural Perspectives on Reproductive Health
Carla Makhlouf Obermeyer

This volume brings together studies carried out in a variety of contexts to explore the relevance of the notion of reproductive healt and the role of culture in shaping its diverse manifestations. The perspective that guides the collection is informed by anthropological and sociological research on the body, pluralism, and medicalization, and by recent debates regarding women's health and the need to reconcile global agendas and local conditions.

The fourteen chapters provide views of how reproductive health is viewed by women and men in differenct parts of the world, mainly at the level of local communities - in India, Egypt, Mexico, Kenya and South Africa - but also in centres of power in China and Iran, and in modern (and post-modern) settings of the North and Far East. The methodological approaches used by authors are varied, but all share a concern with the perceptions, decisions, and rationalizations that surround health and reproduction.

A central theme is the correspondence between professional and lay models of reproductive health, and some chapters explicitly seek to uncover the logic of practices that appear irrational from a biomedical point of view. By analysing behaviour from the perspective of the actors themselves, they show the relevance of local notions for understanding the factors that constitute risks for reproductive ill-health, including conditions of material deprivation, constraints in seeking care, and inappropriate use of therapies and technologies.

Cultural Perspectives on Reproductive Health illustrates complex processes of negotiation, adaptation, and manipulation in the formulation of ideas and policies related to reproductive health. It includes analysis of topics such as the state's discourse on population, religious constraints on abortion care, professional and legal policies on reproductive technologies, health professionals' response to violence, and the dilemmas that emerge from new diagnostic and genetic techniques. The volume also invites reflection on the societal construction of rights across cultures and on the place of cultural explanations in analyses of reproductive health.

This volume, which is perhaps the first to bring together a number of in-depth, specialist studies on Asian population history, should prove a useful and engaging tool for both students and academics in the fields of demography, history and Asian studies

Carla Makhlouf Obermeyer is Associate Professor of Population and Anthropology in the Department of Population and International Health at Harvard university. She is currently on leave from Harvard and working as a scientist with the World Health Organization on research and evidence related to women's health.

2001 - 333p. £33.75 (£45 to non members)