Redefining homebirth: An ethnography of trust in Caetê-Açú, Bahia
homebirth, trust, autoritative knowledge
This dissertation is an ethnographic contribution to the literature on the diverse modes of the production of (mis)trust across and within cultures, highlighting the social role of trust in highly intimate processes such as pregnancy and childbirth. I explore what different acts and notions of trust the women and involved birth attendants engage in as they journey towards birth and how they built trust through the challenging and redefinition of authoritative knowledge, and vice versa. The investigation of the inter-subjective processes that underlie the production of knowledges and ‘truths’ about (home)birth in the sociocultural heterogeneity that characterizes Caetê-Açú has shown that trust-building in the time-space of pregnancy and homebirth is integral to these processes.