Anthropology plays an important role in defining problems within the field of childbirth, because ethnographic methods can be used to collect data about women’s specific health problems, in order to ensure better policy and practice, as well as evaluate future health interventions. During the first decades of the twentieth century, anthropologists paid very little attention to childbirth within different cultural contexts, perhaps due to the dearth of female anthropologists, and therefore a lack of interest, and access to an exclusively female domain. However, with the influx of female anthropologists, their ethnographies and comparative studies have shown the different ways in which pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period have been managed physically, but also socially constructed in unique ways within different cultural contexts (von Hollen, 2003). Inhorn (2007) states that, by listening to the women themselves through ethnographic research, anthropologists are able to determine women’s own health and childbirth priorities, as the setting of priorities in women’s health still tends to come “from the top down” (2007, p.4). With regard to the anthropology of childbirth, childbirth story interviews with mothers are often a research method in the anthropology of childbirth (Davis-Floyd, 1992; Callister and Vega, 1998; von Hollen, 2003), as it is understood to produce vital insights into the experiences of birthing women ( Savage, 2001; Carolan, 2006). Leamon highlights that, within each mother’s childbirth story, lies a ‘complex combination’ of factors involving the storyteller, her sense of self, the childbirth, and her reflections about the experience (2009, p.171).
Farley and Widmann describe how childbirth stories are “symbolic representations of birth through word” and argue that articulating the birth experience into a story gives it structure, as well as “an onset, a climax, and a resolution” (2001, p.22). Livo and Ruitz (1986) maintain that, in the ‘narrative exchange’ that takes place when a childbirth story is told, the ‘learner’ reconstructs knowledge amassed from the story. The shared story therefore becomes a ‘vicariously learned experience’ (Savage, 2001).