Embodying Culture

A fascinating double-ethnography of pregnancy in two cultures. 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.' Robbie Davis-Floyd, author of Birth as an American Rite of Passage

Ivry's extremely rich ethnography succeeds in defamiliarizing assumptions about pregnancy and gestation in both Israel and Japan. Recommended. Choice

Ivry's timely book adds ethnographic description and analysis to public discussions about exactly what pregnancy means. This book reminds us why pregnancy--not just the newest technological methods--is a fascinating window into culture, and the themes it considers will be of interest to teachers and students in anthropology, gender studies, medical anthropology, epidemiology, and area studies. Ethos

With finely crafted ethnography, Tsipy Ivry engages her readers in the most intimate of experiences--pregnancy. Research in Japan and Israel reveals how medical knowledge and technologies are made use of differentially in these two locations by both physicians and women to accomplish a remarkably dissimilar embodiment of future motherhood. Ivry's position is that concern about the ramifications of technologically assisted reproduction should not usurp representations of the cultures of pregnancy. Margaret Lock, author of Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death