Cradles of Life

Abstract

Medical technologies have intervened on the critical post-natal time and space by augmenting and/or optimizing conditions intended to increase survival. As contested, contextual, and transformative spaces, incubators fulfill particular biological needs while also becoming sites where political realities, human emotion, ritual and symbolism converge upon vulnerability. I explore sociopolitical contexts of vulnerability and protection in global and cross-cultural context, while drawing on prior scholarship in anthropology of motherhood, material culture, as well as feminist and reproductive anthropology. Events in popular culture like the Danish Octo Project and Purple Butterfly Initiative provide insight into lived experience and everyday interactions with incubators and the neonatal intensive care environment. In response to popular assumptions of technological advancements in clinical medicine as apolitical apexes of innovation, we must complicate their technical utility with profoundly human experiences toward and around them. In doing so, we situate and implicate technology in political and discursive narratives and reflect on these objects as more than sums of their parts. This essay contributes to broader discussions about the materiality of medical technologies and their environments, and illuminates new possibilities to examine corollaries of grief, hope, maternalism, memory, and the resilience of human psyches and physiologies.