The Weight of Listening to ‘Keeriyeduthadhu’: Reflexive Challenges in Hearing Birth Story from My Umma

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ABSTRACT ‘Amal, you were not born; they took you out by tearing me open (Keeriyeduthadhu)’. My Umma said this without flinching, without drama. But to me, it landed like a rupture. It weighed guilt, raised questions on agency and stirred embodied doubts. Her words stayed with me, echoing louder than any medical term I’d come across in readings on birth, surgery or maternal health. This ethnographic description of interviewing my Umma was difficult, as I navigated the role conflicts generated by my researcher positionality. An anthropology that hears women's birth stories needs to transcend the ocular-centric practices of disciplinary conventions and adopt radical empiricism, which is attentive to embodied knowledge. This requires the researcher to be reflexive and to do emotionally intelligent anthropology, because bodily narratives often transcend visual narratives and contain complex layers of emotion. These emotions are not hierarchical but complex, requiring a stance that accommodates dissonance and disorientation in the field. In doing so, one can produce ethnographies that resonate deeply, as Ruth Behar suggests, ethnographies that break our hearts. Rather than merely recounting my vulnerability as an observer, I also aim to echo the language and euphemisms my Umma used. By closely reflecting her language and embracing the challenges I faced, I seek to reduce what Clifford Geertz termed the ‘burden of authorship’, the difficulty of conveying lived realities while not overshadowing the narrative with the researcher’s voice. In this process, I write as a daughter-anthropologist, navigating the complex intersections of personal experience and scholarly inquiry.