Pregnancy, Anthropological Approaches to

Abstract

Defining pregnancy as a cultural and social experience, anthropologists have had a long‐standing interest in the topic but their aims and approaches have shifted over the years. While there had been a concern with comparing the customs, taboos, and rituals of reproduction across cultures during the early and mid‐twentieth century, scholarship by and about women since the 1970s called attention to the significance of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood in women's lives. The anthropology of reproduction gained momentum during the 1990s and 2000s with the publication of a number of works on childbirth, technologies used in assisted conception and in prenatal diagnosis, and previously neglected subjects such infertility, abortion, and pregnancy loss. More recently, the approach to pregnancy has shifted from critiques of the medicalization of reproduction and of reproductive technologies to the embodied everyday experiences of pregnant women, which includes consideration of gender, race, and class.