Birthing matters : care and belonging in Black Rural Bahia, Brazil

This thesis seeks to illustrate black rural communities’ struggle for survival in Brazil and a future through the lens of care, focusing on reproduction generally, and the process of birth, specifically. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the region of Baixo Sul in the state of Bahia, I engage with women and describe how these issues unfold in two spheres: their everyday relations in their rural communities; and their interactions with the health care facilities where they officially receive maternal health care. Drawing on extended participant observation, semi-structured and life-story interviews, I describe care practices at multiple scales and multifaceted angles, attending to the diverse ways in which care may manifest –informed by the wider sociocultural and political contexts –to ultimately reveal both, sites of precarious existence and fissures of radical possibility for/ by rural women. Part One, on Belonging, illustrates the many expressions of violence and death in Brazil at national and local level, and how these can impede a sense of futurity and belonging. Equally, I attend to life, and focus on how this is cultivated in black rural communities, looking at the ways in which both these contextual dimensions affect notions and processes of reproduction for local women. Part Two, on Birthing, scrutinises the official practices of each maternal healthcare service and women’s vernacular experiences in the prenatal, birth and postnatal periods. By pointing to the dynamics of visibility and invisibility, neglect and over-intervention, I allow for particular techniques, practices, and ideologies that (re)produce national and local regimes of gender and racial domination to be exposed. The overall argument of these two sections links a colonial past to an allegedly democratic present, where the status of the Afro-Brazilian population remains a state of quasi-citizenship, challenged by a continuous creative strive to belong.