| This dissertation examines the relationship between maternity and modernity in Ha Noi, Vietnam. It explores how modernizing factors have impacted childbirth and postpartum practices, discourse and experiences among urban women, midwives and doctors. The modernizing process in reproduction refers to an increase in the employment of medical technology and pharmacology to aid childbirth, the decline in the use of midwives, the commodification and consumption patterns of products related to maternity, and the implementation of population control policies such as the One-or-Two Child Policy in Vietnam. These factors collectively promote a medicalized view of reproduction, that is, the view that childbirth and reproduction are medical or illnessrelated conditions that require intervention and control by medical personnel, technology, and the state. In discussing the relationship between maternity and modernity, I also placed the concept of "modernity" under scrutiny. Scholars have recognized that modernity is not a monolithic western entity but a heterogeneous experience acted out on an individual, local, and global terrain. Accordingly, I explored the local meanings and embodiments of modern births in Ha Noi, the capital of Vietnam. The fusion of the modernizing process, such as the medicalization of childbirth, and the Vietnamese cultural customs associated with childbirth and motherhood invariably produced unique forms of discourses, practices, and experiences.; This dissertation is an in-depth ethnographic study in Ha Noi that investigated three hypotheses: (1) that traditional practices associated with childbirth and postpartum become reconfigured to appear "modern" in the discourse of maternity and modernity; (2) that women's consumption of maternal and infant supplements and other maternity products mark them as modern mothers; (3) and that women's absorption and retention of scientific knowledge about reproduction distinguish them as modern. The experiences of urban Vietnamese women with childbirth, with cultural practices and biomedical science, with consumerism, and with modernity are not neatly bounded, rather they are complex and heterogeneous as this dissertation will show.; Today, Vietnam is undergoing a massive economic and social transformation. As a result of the deteriorating economy in the decade after the end of the war with the U.S., the Vietnamese government enacted the Doi Moi policy in 1986. Doi Moi, literally "change into the modern" or as scholars have termed it, "Renovation," consisted of a series of economic policies that opened Vietnam's doors to capitalism, international corporations, and tourism. Vietnam has become one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, becoming the world's second-largest exporter of rice. As a country that is undergoing a modernizing and neoliberalizing transformation, Vietnam was uniquely situated for an exploration of the impact of this macro-level modernist discourse on micro-level individual actor's beliefs, values, and practices related to the experience of birthing and motherhood. |
