Pluralist risk cultures: the sociology of childbirth in Vanuatu

Abstract

Western medical approaches to childbirth typically locate risk in women’s bodies, making it axiomatic that ‘good’ maternity care is associated with medically trained attendants. This logic has been extrapolated to developing societies, like Vanuatu, an Island state in the Pacific, struggling to provide good maternity care in line with the World Health Organization’s Millennium Development Goals. These goals include the reduction of maternal mortality by two-thirds by 2015, but Vanuatu must overcome challenging hurdles – medical, social and environmental – to achieve this goal. Vanuatu is a hybridised society: one where the pre-modern and modern coincide in parallel institutions, processes and practices. In 2010, I undertook an inductive study of 30 respondents from four main subcultures – women living in outer rural communities with limited access to Western-trained health workers; women from inner urban communities with ease of access to medical clinics; traditional birth attendants who are formally untrained but highly specialised and practised mainly in remote communities; and Western-trained medical clinicians (obstetricians and midwives). I invited all the participants to comment on what constituted a ‘good birth’. In this article, I show that participants interpreted this variously according to how they believed the uncertainties of childbirth could be managed. Objectivist approaches that define risk as an objective reality amenable to quantifiable measurement are thus rendered inadequate. Interpretivist approaches better explain the reality that social actors not only find risk in different sites but gravitate towards different practices, discourses and individuals they can trust especially those with whom they feel a strong sense of community. Strategies are, therefore, formed less through scientific rationality but according to feelings and emotions and the lived experience. The concept of risk cultures conveys this complexity; they are formed around values rather than calculable rationalities. Risk cultures form self-reflexively to manage contingent circumstances.

Keywords:

• risk
• childbirth
• risk cultures
• maternity care
• Vanuatu