Kuña ipuru’a ha’e imemby’a. Cuidados de gravidas e parturientes mbya guarani em Iguazú (Misiones)

Abstract

The main theme in this thesis refers to pregnancy and childbirth as an event that does not manifest in an uniform way across different groups and people. Meaning that this does not come down to an homogeneous condition, as might be thought from a biologistic perspective. On the contrary, the process of pregnancy and childbirth will be thought of as an experience in which multiple dimensions are implicated. This thesis makes focus on mbya guarani women 's maternity in the north of Misiones, Argentina. It retrieves the voices of women who live in communities surrounding Puerto Iguazu, where the bonds with the public healthcare system are a daily occurrence, and every time more frequently, women control their pregnancies and give birth to their children in the city’s hospital. This thesis promotes a contextualized and historical analysis where women are not represented as a background landscape of their communities, nor are they reticent to engaging in (often tense) dialogues with the public healthcare system. On this note, it looks to retrieve the points of view of the mbya guarani women in relation with their gestations as well as their voices and practices. The pregnancy and childbirth experiences combine diverse elements that end up to create multiple different ways of being a woman and trajectories of motherhood. From here, this text is structured in four chapters centered on different topics: corporality, healthcare sanitary expectations, cares and technologies. The first two chapters present a discussion in a more theoretical key, it is not that field registers don’t appear here appear field registers, but they serve the purpose of opening a discussion with class focus to address the issue. I discuss the closed representations of the women’s bodies and healthcare system. In the first chapter, I show that the gestational process is not an individual experience, rather a corporizing and experimenting process through specific social bonds. Along this line, I discuss maternity as the only role of the women but try to reflect about the importance of going through the pregnancy and childbirth process for them. In the next chapter, I focus on the expectations as a category which abilities me to analyze the healthcare system as heterogeneous and retrieve the projections of different people, institutions and surrounding speeches. It is from this point that I wonder what is expected from the pregnant women and which speeches fall upon them. The trajectories of care are the structural axis of chapter three and four. Here is where the women’s experiences are more present. In chapter three, I problematice the care and reflect on the people who accompanied the pregnancies and childbirths. This is an articulating chapter of the entire thesis because, as the same time that it focuses on the concept of care,It takes the life history of the women and the people who are close to them. The accompaniment of relatives works as a strong dimension, and we see that the practices of care are different depending on the gender. In chapter four, I will refer to no-humans agents who participate in women’s trajectories and I analyze three technologies: reproductives, communications and citizens. The data that sustains these chapters are specifically the narratives of those women or their companions. Through these devices, I question that the ethnic identity has its limits in the cultural patrons or It is lost when the indigenous incorporated reproduction objects with occidental history, or digital technologies, or those creating major dependence on the State. It is from this point that I explain how the relationships with the public healthcare system are recreating, but also communitaries and relatives. In conclusion, I take pregnancy and childbirth as heterogeneous practices and knowledges, It always is a situational and multidimensional experience. In this way, ethnographic ”here and now” leads to the conclusion that It is an ever changing and communitary process