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122 Chapter 4 Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum Care in Prewar Rhodes In this chapter, I describe the body of ethno-obstetrical knowledge that prevailed in rural Rhodes through the first half of the twentieth century. I devote particular attention to the figure of the village midwife, the only specialized occupation then performed exclusively by women. Although largely neglected by anthropologists and folklorists, midwives were important members of the “universe of female activity outside the realm of men” described in the previous chapter (Caraveli 1986, 169–70). Embedded in the broader village system of values and understandings, this realm also exhibited “its own variants of these, while many of the tasks, social roles, and expressive genres were gender -specific, limited only to women.” Her discovery of this universe led Anna Caraveli to conclude that “narratives about female ‘heroes’ (worthy mothers or wives, skilled midwives or healers, talented storytellers, or craftswomen) constituted a female history of the village, a body of women’s expressive genres, and a female line of transmission” (170). Like Caraveli, other ethnographers of rural Greece (especially Danforth 1982; Seremetakis 1991) have attended to the mobilization of this “female universe” around the events and rituals of death. Women’s role as gatekeepers at the cultural boundary marking the end of earthly life has thus been richly documented. But women, and midwives in particular, also commanded a specialized and culturally valued body of knowledge, also transmitted from woman to woman (usually from mother to daughter), that enabled human beings to cross the threshold into life in the first place. What is more, the midwife , in addition to being an obstetrical expert, was a specialist in the postpartum rituals that initiated the gradual incorporation of the newborn into the larger human community. Midwives were for this reason respected figures in their communities, and children “whose navel had been cut” by the midwife treated her with deference all their lives (Rigatos 1992, 31, my translation).1 Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum Care in Prewar Rhodes 123 Pregnancy: Protecting the Open Body From both official and popular Greek Orthodox perspectives, children were seen as “sacred gifts from God.” Because she bore this gift of new life, a pregnant woman was herself infused with a kind of sacred valence. She acquired this special quality, as Kiria Melpomeni explained to me, by virtue of the fact that “she is bringing a person, a soul, mia psikhi, into the world. Only God and woman can do this.” Through her unique collaboration with the divine, a pregnant woman entered into a prolonged phase of liminality, that transitional state of suspension “betwixt and between” everyday realms of experience that was marked by its own distinctive qualities, behaviors, and expectations (V. Turner 1979). Intensifying the charged valence of a woman’s liminality were the dangers inherent in the progressive “opening” of her body that was essential to the process of procreation. This “openness,” triggered by pregnancy, culminating with childbirth, and requiring a full forty days afterward to reverse, increased her vulnerability to a host of hazards, both physical and spiritual. Reducing or counteracting the dangers threatening her and the new life she was bringing into being required the vigilance and cooperation of her family and kin, and ideally of the larger collectivity of which she was a part. From the moment her pregnancy was revealed, she became the object of everyday acts of solicitude that expressed a collective desire to protect her, prevent misfortune , and ensure a good outcome. Despite its charged aura, and unlike childbirth and the postpartum period, pregnancy was not a condition that demanded the care, advice, and esoteric knowledge of specialists. It was, however, associated with an array of special behaviors on the part of the pregnant woman and those around her. Pregnant women, for example, could demand and expect special foods to satisfy their cravings. After their fifth month or so, they could sit comfortably with their legs apart (havdha), an immodest posture that otherwise would have provoked criticism and gossip. Conversely, if a nonpregnant woman indulged in such behavior, she might be chastised for inappropriately acting “like a pregnant woman, kani san gastromeni” (Chrysssanthopoulou 1984, 27–28). From the time a woman interpreted certain bodily signs and symptoms, such as nausea, food cravings, and, above all, quickening, as pregnancy, she entered a state of liminality that made her susceptible to penetration by a host of harmful physical and spiritual forces. Like other transitional phases of the life course, pregnancy acted like a magnet for...

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