Teaching the anthropology of reproduction: Notes

T'was the Sunday night after Thanksgiving...

At least three of us in the household are sooo not looking forward to Monday. StraightMan is looking rather long faced about the pile of papers that he did not grade over his "break," which after all had been occupied with driving the four of us to my parents' home for Thanksgiving dinner, then driving us back again. While I slept both ways, still recovering from a cold and lack of rest. I feel creeping anxiety about the week ahead, but console myself that even though I still have classes to prepare for tomorrow, I washed, folded, and even put away all of the laundry this weekend! One must find solace where it can be found, like here in the kitchen near the box of wine that StraightMan has propped open. (Respect the box of wine. It is not your parents' box of wine.) Meanwhile Beanie is skulking around, peevish and bored with her dull family after spending the entire day yesterday stomping around the woods in this unseasonably mild weather with her best friend and her much more fun family, collecting acorn caps and milkweed to create "nature crafts."

Upstairs, I hear Bubbie taking his twice-weekly bath. Improvising his own lyrics to "Puff the Magic Dragon." No amount of gently suggesting to him that Puff lives in Hanalei will convince him that the dragon does not live in Hallowee (which BTW is not the same as Halloween).

Oh, to be Bubbie and four years old!

Some time this week or next, I will be required to give student evaluations in class. Which, despite the fact that I receive good numbers and even quite good written comments, I never can bring myself to read until an entire semester has passed and my memories have been dulled a bit. Kind of like actors not wanting to read the reviews for fear that they will not be able to continue acting.

In fact, I have had a fairly good time this semester teaching the Anthropology of Reproduction. This is a 200-level course that I have tried to teach once a year. It is now an elective not only for anthropology majors, but also biology majors in the human biology track at my college. (Another huzzah for the so-called teaching college! I mean, imagine undergraduate students at a research university being permitted such an opportunity to broaden their training.) The course is also cross-listed with Women's and Gender Studies.

The class typically has been overwhelmingly female, but there are at least a few more male students now than in past years (still only five out of 30), and they tell me that they are talking it about with their friends! On top of which, they and my female students alike make a point of describing reproduction as an issue for everyone to study.

As a teacher, this is just such a feel-good kind of class :)

A plea for syllabuses and suggestions on teaching the anthropology of reproduction just circulated on a listserv to which I belong (for the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction). In part b/c I am not convinced that I will get another chance to blog this week, I thought I might post my response here:

I assigned the edited volume, Reconceiving the Second Sex, this semester, and I am finding it has been terrific for provoking discussion in class:

Esp. memorable discussions so far on the chapters on sperm by Lisa Jean Moore and Helene Goldberg, which I prefaced with short "conversation starter" videos from YouTube. One is a 30-second TV commercial for a Belgian bank. (BTW, this might pair well also with Emily Martin's classic article on the romance of the egg and sperm.) The other is a 2-minute video of animation spliced together from Spike Lee's film "She Hate Me." I have not seen the film, but you get the gist from the clips, which play on the ideas that Moore discusses.

Also, an at times raucous discussion on the chapter by Laury Oaks on the male pill, esp. whether or not female students in my class trusted males to remember to take it! The readings and discussion on semen, sperm and the male pill followed readings and discussion of menstruation and the (female) pill, including menstrual suppression. So, I showed a PBS American Experience documentary on "The Pill" to preface discussion on Oaks and the male pill. It helped bring out discussion on how birth control can be experienced as a burden, a theme that other chapters in Reconceiving the Second Sex also explore.

Another terrific piece to read and discuss (not in Reconceiving the Second Sex) is Linda Layne's "The Home Pregnancy Test: A Feminist Technology?" Again, students had a lot to say, in part b/c they felt they really had not been esp. well informed. I showed two 30-second TV commercials from YouTube, one for EPT that featured a couple confessing their anxieties and hopes as reasons for wanting to know the results early (BTW, this commercial became lampooned on "Saturday Night Live") and a humorous one for a digital test ("the most sophisticated technology you will ever pee on") that we debated about who is the intended audience / market.

Hope that helps :) Curious to learn about other experiences with teaching anthropology of reproduction!

"Tackling Infant Mortality Rates": A response

B/c my daughter has been monopolizing my kindle, I did not read this NYT article from Saturday, Tackling Infant Mortality Rates Among Blacks, until I read Denene Milner's impassioned critique of it this morning - "Tackling Infant Mortality Rates—Without Stereotyping Black Mothers" - on her blog, My Brown Baby.

The NYT reports on a serious problem that is not unfamiliar to me as an anthropologist, but that receives not enough public attention and frankly (I think) not enough outrage: In America, the babies of black women die at twice the rate of the babies of white women. The article also describes efforts (in Pittsburgh) to address what public health officials call a "differential" or a "disparity" in the rates of infant mortality.

Echoing the perspective of critical medical anthropologists like Merrill Singer, I think it ought to be called "inequality":

While the term "health disparities" references differences in health across groups, the term "health inequalities" points, as well, to underlying structural causes in disease distribution, namely, that social inequalities produce health inequalities (Singer and Baer 2007:152).

The higher rate of infant mortality has been observed for all black women, regardless of their income, education, access to prenatal care, and so on.

Denene Milner responds to the portrayal of a particular pregnant black woman in the article, who comes to stand for all pregnant black women:

Witness the subject the Times story highlights: A poor, uneducated, 20-year-old pregnant black woman from Pittsburgh who the reporter suggests had to be talked into actually wanting her baby, and has so little self-control or pre-natal intellect that she’s spent the last seven months gorging on chips, soda, tacos and her “mama’s cooking,” gaining 50 unhealthy pounds that could put her baby at risk. Her baby has a chance of surviving only because of Healthy Start, a nonprofit group that, despite scant federal and absolutely no local financial support, manages to give in-home pre-natal care to moms-to-be who qualify for and need their services.

The piece makes the story of that mom-to-be all of our stories—puts the black infant mortality onus squarely on our shoulders by suggesting if we planned our pregnancies, ate better and were smart enough to seek out and follow up with quality health care, our babies would live.

This is pretty awful, but also, unfortunately, not surprising. A favorite rant that I like to go on in my medical anthropology class is that introducing the concept of "lifestyle" was possibly one of the worst mistakes for public health b/c it deflected attention from political, economic, and social concerns and shifted responsibility entirely to individuals making "bad" choices. "Lifestyle," esp. when crossed with class and race and gender, produces some ugly stories.

Not to mention that I find myself reminding my students at least two or three times in a semester of medical anthropology and anthropology of reproduction that almost half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended - with higher rates of unintended pregnancy among younger women and women of color, which itself is another sign of another disparity / inequality.

I agree with Milner's point also that there is a missed opportunity in the NYT article, which itself reports:

Recent studies have shown that poverty, education, access to prenatal care, smoking and even low birth weight do not alone explain the racial gap in infant mortality, and that even black women with graduate degrees are more likely to lose a child in its first year than are white women who did not finish high school. Research is now focusing on stress as a factor and whether black women have shorter birth canals.

The point about stress, I will return to in a moment. First, to address the suggestion that black women might have shorter birth canals - I was not aware previously of any research along these lines, but as an anthropologist, I felt more than a twinge of nervousness reading this in the NYT, especially with no further explanation offered. So, on the one hand, my nervousness arises from the awareness that race historically has been and continues to be biologized - and that science, including anthropology, has been used to legitimize reductionist understandings about race-as-biology. (In the PBS documentary series, "Race: The Power of an Illusion," which I use in introductory anthropology classes, there is a discussion of the ways in which there has been hardly an anatomical feature that has not been examined - from brow to brain to heart and so forth - in search of the "essential" difference between black and white races.)

On the other hand, there might in fact be a legitimate question to ask about the biological variation that is exhibited across all humans. As my colleagues in biological anthropology emphasize, humans exhibit biological variation that ought to be viewed as a continuum, not as either / or. The classic example is skin color, which differs in gradation from darker to lighter, not either dark or light, and which we recognize as variable even within a given cluster or group of individuals.

From the perspective of medical anthropology, there should be no doubt that social conditions produce health and sickness. A social condition we ought to be taking far more seriously is racism itself (and the stress it causes) and the effects of it has on biology. This video clip, "How Racism Impacts Pregnancy Outcomes," from the PBS documentary series, "Unnatural Causes," explains.

The NYT article and Denene Milner's response also make me think about the interventions that anthropologists in particular might make. Clarence Gravlee published a piece that I encourage anyone teaching the concept of race to read (and assign) - "How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality." In it, Gravlee challenges scientists (esp. anthropologists) "to explain how race becomes biology. Our response to this challenge must deal with with two senses in which race becomes biology: Systemic racism becomes embodied in the biology of racialized groups and individuals, and embodied inequalities reinforce a racialized understanding of human biology" (Gravlee 2009:54).

The fact that in America, the babies of black women die at twice the rate of the babies of white women ought to impress upon us that the social practices and ideas that we call racism have biological consequences.

Another item to file under WTF

Just read this item in the NYT today about Arizona banning abortion for "race selection."

I feel that I am fairly well informed on issues of reproduction in the United States, but I am unaware that race-selective termination is a concern here.

Which is not to say that policies surrounding reproduction do not effectively privilege some women over other women.

However, I am not convinced that this ban addresses an "actual" practice. Instead, it strikes me as pitting "race" against "gender."

I think it is interesting also that Arizona is positioning itself as a defender of human rights and of race and ethnicity.

Is the "race" being defended against selective abortion black / Latino / Native American / Asian? If so, then this is an interesting maneuver for Arizona, with its anti-immigrant legislation.

Or it could also be a defense of any race, including "white," which could define all terminations as violating an "ethic" against race selection.

Either way, reproductive justice is being hit. We need to hit back.

A feminist teaching moment

Yesterday, as faculty advisor to the undergraduate Anthropology Club, I showed the film, "The Business of Being Born," and facilitated a discussion afterward. About 50 students attended. Not bad for Friday at 4pm. (Then again, at least one other colleague and I offered extra credit...)

I could go on and on more about the surprise and shock and earnest questioning that they expressed, including the guys: One approached me afterward and admitted that childbirth had not been a topic he had thought was all that important to him, but now he was not so sure.

Also, I thought I might share part of an e-mail that a student wrote to me after viewing the film:

I don't even know how to describe how I feel after watching it! WOW. First of all, I cannot believe how they used to strap women down to tables like they did in the 1920s like they were test subjects!! I am shocked about the statistics concerning Cesarean Sections- I don't know WHY anybody would choose a surgery over what your body was created to handle itself! I am just mortified over any type of surgery but specifically this one in general. I am also shocked at the connection they mentioned between the rise of unnecessary medical intervention during child birth and the increase in developmental problems in children. It seems so obvious now. And the overall medicalization of child birth- how it is treated like an illness to be "cured". Is child birth really needing a "cure?" Is the cure not being pregnant? Is the "treatment" of pregnancy as an illness seriously necessary? How and why is it looked upon as a "problem to be addressed" is just absolutely fascinating. Child birth is truly a business in modern America- another opportunity to capitalize, which totally takes away from something that is an inherent natural right as a woman. I just loved the film and I needed to email you to share it!

These are exactly the moments when I realize what is so important and meaningful about teaching: It is producing a moment for us to think beyond what we accept as reality, making possible a different reality.

Talking and Listening to Kids about Difference (1)

Last Friday, I had the privilege of giving a keynote lecture at the city school district’s teachers conference on diversity. This week, I will be posting excerpts from my talk, “Talking and Listening to Kids about Difference: Perspectives from Parenthropology.” Here is part 1:

The purpose of my talk is to remind ourselves of why it is important and meaningful to talk and listen to kids about difference, and to consider why we as adults refrain too often from this discussion, not only with children, but also among ourselves. I also offer my own thoughts on how we, as parents and teachers, might find ways of talking and listening that work for us all. In particular, I offer insights and approaches from the discipline in which I am trained, anthropology, which has engaged in more than 100 years of discussion on the meaning of difference.

Look around our classrooms and communities or read the news, both local and national, and it is hard not to notice that differences between people matter – even or, I suggest, especially in communities as apparently “homogeneous” as our community. These differences can include race, ethnicity, culture, language, class, gender, religion, and ability, among countless other ways that we might distinguish ourselves and each other. In my talk today, I will focus particularly on race and culture because they have been, and continue to be, especially powerful ideas and practices about difference among people in the United States and around the world today.

We know from our own experiences that difference can be cause for celebration and pride, and for conflict and pain. Children are no less aware of and sensitive to difference than adults are. They see it around them – even despite, for example, what we grown-ups might consider our well-intentioned efforts to keep our kids “color-blind.” They also observe our reactions, witness our behavior, and look to us as models for how they themselves ought to act and think. So, it seems to me that our challenge as teachers and parents is to help children make sense of what difference does and does not mean in our world today. At the same time, it seems to me that we might cultivate in children a sense of how we might think and act differently about difference. After all, we – adults and children alike – are not only members of our society and culture, we are also the makers and breakers of our own rules and customs. There is always, then, the possibility for change. This is why it seems to me important and meaningful for us to consider the matter of talking and listening to kids about difference – and for us, as teachers and parents, to be able to articulate a case for having this conversation to those who might require persuasion. In this talk, I offer words that you might use.

My interest in how we talk and listen to kids about difference emerges from my concerns as a second-generation Korean American raising children of “mixed” heritage. On their father’s side, my children can claim roots in Italy, Germany, and other parts of Europe. Initially, I thought simply celebrating our family’s mixed heritage might be enough – that is, passively exposing them to the “positive” meanings of difference.

Then my daughter came home from school and asked me: “Why is it so important about Barack Obama?” Being a college professor, I demurred – I deflected the question back to her so that I could understand what she was asking me. I asked her: “What do you know about Barack Obama?” She told me: “Everyone is excited that he is running for president. Why?” So, I told her: “A long time ago, before your grandparents and your great-grandparents were born, some people, even a lot of people, in America believed that someone who looked like Barack Obama could never be president, could not go to school like you can, and even could belong to someone else who owned him.” Since then, Beanie and I have read stories together about enslavement and the Underground Railroad, and about heroes of the civil rights movement, like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. We have talked about how she, with a Korean American mother and a white American father, is like Barack Obama, who had a white American mother and a black Kenyan father.

Talking and listening to my daughter has changed my mind about whether or not “passive exposure” to race and ethnicity, and history and heritage is enough. I think we must talk and listen to kids about difference actively. If we do not guide our children on how to understand difference, then they will take their ideas from other sources who might not share the same cares and concerns that we have or who might not take the time and effort to explain what difference does and does not mean.

Three Women

Taking a break here in grading hell to read about other kinds of heaven and hell: The New York Times reports on the translation to stage of a radio play that Sylvia Plath wrote shortly before her death.

Called "Three Women," it invokes the voices of three women describing a wanted baby, a miscarriage, and an unintended pregnancy. (Keep in mind that roughly half of all pregnancies in the United States today are unintended, and that about half of them were conceived on birth control...) The text of "Three Women" is available here.

This stanza from the Third Voice struck me:

I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind. They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

I think it is the line, "They hug their flatness like a kind of health" that got me.

The radical agenda

A bit hectic here on the parenthropological home front: I was invited by the honor society at my campus to give my "Famous Last Words" lecture. So, I wore a suit that I thought might be appropriate to be buried in, and gave a talk about anthropology and reproduction last evening. I am happy to report that two students in my Anthropology of North America class today told me not only that they had attended (without the carrot of extra credit...), but that it seriously made them think that when the time came, they wanted to have their babies with midwives. Two cheers for the re-production of culture!

Yesterday, I also enjoyed a Leftist Moment with a colleague during a Women's and Gender Studies reception. Hmm, I am beginning to think that the reason why there are so few opportunities for faculty to co-mingle and converse is that THEY want to keep us alienated and mystified, divided and conquered. B/c imagine all the righteous lefty talk that professors could engender... Which brings me to this item from Inside Higher Ed. Which I admit that I clicked on because of the titillating title, "Christine O'Donnell on 'Orgy Rooms' at Colleges":

All eyes are on Christine O'Donnell, the Tea Party-backed candidate who won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Delaware on Tuesday. Among the various quotes from her past that surfaced on Wednesday were some views on coeducational dormitories. Salon found quotes she gave to The Washington Times in 2003, criticizing coeducational dormitories. The article excerpt:

"What's next? Orgy rooms? Menage a trois rooms?" asked Christine O'Donnell, spokeswoman for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Del., which publishes a college guide.

All this coedness is outside normal life, said Miss O'Donnell. "Most average American adults don't use coed bathrooms - if they had the option of a coed bathroom at a public restaurant, they wouldn't choose it." Coedness "is like a radical agenda forced on college students," she said.

Get thee to a nunnery.

Learn from book reviews, Part Tres

Pain in childbirth had been considered inevitable until the 19th century, when chloroform came into more common use during labor. Donald Caton, an anesthesiologist, wrote a history on the use of anesthesia and analgesia titled, What a Blessing She Had Chloroform, itself a declaration attributed to Queen Victoria.

Interestingly, the idea that childbirth need not be painful also spurred others to consider alternatives to medication, which itself presented problems, not the least of which included serious side effects and consequences for women's own experiences of childbirth. An early proponent of "natural" childbirth in the mid 20th century was Grantly Dick-Read, an obstetrician who cited examples of painless "primitive" birth from late 19th century anthropology in his book, Childbirth without Fear.

This story has been told before, but a book review in the May 31 issue of The Nation suggests another dimension that seems well worth exploring. The review, by Paula Findlen, discusses Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. As Findlen explains:

The objective developments in science of the preceding century gave way to subjective reflection about the meaning of understanding nature. Poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats marveled at the new vision of the world wrought by science. At the same time, the British astronomers, naturalists, chemists and experimenters of their generation developed a conception of the world that was, in its own way, profoundly poetic.

One of the developments of Romantic science was nitrous oxide:

In spring 1799, Humphrey Davy invited a circle of friends to experience the giddy effects of laughing gas. He was inspired enough to write a poem about it. Davy's celebrated self-experiment, in which he inhaled six quarts of N2O on May 5, 1799, led to a loss of consciousness, feeling and memory.... The psychosomatic effects (to borrow Coleridge's term) of Davy's discovery fascinated his contemporaries. He invented a new pleasure for which they had no name.

If Romanticism began as an exploration of the enhancement of the senses, at the height of its success it grappled with the novel sensation of feeling nothing at all.

It makes me wonder what we want today - to feel more or to feel less or both at the same time - and what that means.

Doula

Just learned that the wonderful doula who supported StraightMan and me during Beanie's birth has decided to "retire" - at least for the moment.

The reasons that she gives for leaving it aside resonate with me. This just is not the right time for this kind of work. It always struck me as an irony of doula work that the women who esp. feel called to it are exactly in the "right" place to know all the fears and hopes of a woman in labor - so many doulas having been motivated by their own (recent) birth experiences - and also in the "wrong" place in their own lives to drop what they do in order to attend a birth.

Women's lives do not proceed in exactly the "order" of men's lives. To borrow a metaphor from my fiber crafting friends - we knit, we weave, we tangle, we unstitch, we start again, we make do.

Still, I feel loss at doulicia's announcement. She was so much a part of Beanie's birth, which in my mind remains An Especially Special Birth because, after all, it was my first. (Bubbie, your birth, too, is especially special.)

Next week, Beanie "graduates" from kindergarten. Or as she crooned to me, to the tune of "New York, New York," rehearsing a bit from their performance next week: "I want to be a part of it, First Grade, First Grade!"

So, I guess I should just say, good luck in first grade, doulicia!

Keeping up with The Times

Just read philosopher Peter Singer's contribution to the Opinionator, "Should This Be the Last Generation?"

Which on the one hand brought to mind a joke that StraightMan likes to make about teaching and parenting: That had he known in advance what they both involved, he might have reconsidered one of them.

The exact wording, the brevity, the delivery, and with them, the impact, might be lost, but I think you get more or less the idea.

On the other hand. I found Singer's piece interestingly provocative, as it clearly is intended to be, but I admit that I also thought: Written like a man.

I mean that without essentializing either "man" or "woman." Of course. Mindful of the gendered existences and experiences that "we" have. That said, I think men and women build their relationships to / with a child rather differently. Having a child, or not having a child, becomes attached with importances and meanings. How we feel about having children and what we do about it, in fact, genders us.

It might be just my disciplinarily-bred defensiveness or my crankiness with the field of "ethics" - I has less problem with ethics themselves - but I disagree with Singer's contention that "very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself. Most of those who consider that question probably do so because they have some reason to fear that the child’s life would be especially difficult — for example, if they have a family history of a devastating illness, physical or mental, that cannot yet be detected prenatally."

Given that at least some kind of testing has become routine in the medical management of pregnancy in the United States - and this includes fetal ultrasound imaging, which has become more or less a ritual for "seeing" the baby - I suggest that the question of coming into existence haunts a lot of women in the family way.

Anthropologist Rayna Rapp wrote a compelling ethnography, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus, documenting women's decisions to have or not have an amniocentesis performed to test for chromosomal anomalies. Again, given the common use of the test, which is strongly recommended, almost required, for women over age 35, I think it is not unfair to say that a lot of American women face the dilemmas of do I test or not, do I want to know or not, what will I do with this information, what will I decide? Their, or I should say our choices might have been "either / or," but their / our questions and answers were far more complicated, including not only notions about the child's own "good," but also the good of their other children, who would be the siblings and possibly eventual caregivers of children with disabilities.

There is no "bracketing" or leaving aside "for the sake of argument" their experiences, expectations, and identities as women and particularly as mothers making choices for their children. I almost feel as though Singer were asking me, as a woman and mother, to inhabit his perspective without his making a similar attempt to challenge his own imagination. At risk of sounding like a stark raving feminist, I confess: I have begun to see this storied philosophic strategy of "just supposing" as an important means of universalizing a particular gendered perspective. Women constantly are asked, persuaded, pressured, and forced to accommodate men's arguments, ideas, and perspectives. Try asking men to "take on" women's ways of seeing: Become accused of being political or worse - soft, subjective, unscientific, not so smart.

The questions that Singer poses to readers are intended to be provocatively interesting, but I do not find them exactly that. I mean, are they not the questions that guide the ideas and practices of women and men across cultures and societies, in the past and in the present?

If a child is likely to have a life full of pain and suffering is that a reason against bringing the child into existence?

If a child is likely to have a happy, healthy life, is that a reason for bringing the child into existence?

Like so many other decisions that we as human people make in our lives, the "choice" to have (or not have) a child is itself constrained and conditioned and culturally mediated and socially policed and historically and politically / economically situated and gendered.

Feminist technologies

Linda Layne, an anthropologist whom I much admire, has a blog about her new book on Feminist Technologies. In her first posting, she poses an interesting question: Are fashionable birth control packs feminist or antifeminist?

I will give the prototypical cultural anthropologist's response right here: I suppose it all depends on what you mean by "feminism" :)

I know, I know: This is "just" another example of marketing. However. I like the cute case. I like the sense of play that it evokes. I think feminism can be playful. I think feminists themselves / ourselves can be fun and funny.

This question called to mind a conversation that I had this semester with a student whom I was advising on his independent study project on masculinity and the male pill. We started to think about the kind of packaging that might be developed for a birth control pill for men.

A soft slim case that looks like a condom stashed in a man's wallet? Or a hard sleek case that resembles a smartphone? It even could send a text message reminding him to take his pill at a given time.

(I bet there already is an iPhone app for women that can be used to track ovulation / menstruation?)

Sophomore slump

Miserable is the ABD anthropology graduate student. Approximately as miserable is the PhD who seems to have no second project.

That would be me. The latter, I mean.

I have a few irons in the fire, but with a 4/3 teaching load - yes, you read that correctly, and no, I do not teach at a two-year / community college - the fire burns low and slow.

A project with which I am flirting is the anthropology of spas, in particular looking at contemporary American ideas and practices surrounding hydrotherapy (water) and balneotherapy (baths).

In my random readings, I found an article titled, "The Bath: A Nursing Ritual" by Zane Robinson Wolf (1993), which considers the importance and meaning of bathing (especially others, but also selves) for the profession of nursing. "The nurse who learns to perform the bath artfully is proficient, knowing, subtle, and able," Wolf wrote. She concludes with a reflection on the importance of the bath as a ritual of knowledge and healing:

Consequently, it may be professionally hazardous for nurses to discard the bathing ritual by giving it up to nonprofessional personnel. The bath is more than a standardized and repetitive series of activities; it may be required by the rules of nursing (Gluckman, 1975). The bath can be viewed as a healing rite with great healing power; it may symbolize order, solidarity, and purity (Douglas, 1970).

This calls to mind the emphasis placed on the newborn's first bath (which nurses perform after the birth) and on the need for parents to learn how to bathe the infant properly - that is, safely and hygienically and so on. Following the cutting of the cord, the first bath in the hospital seems another step in the process of individuating (infant from woman), but also of socializing.

A bath is not always just a bath.

Keeping up with The Times

In today's Opinionator, Olivia Judson explains what "sexual tension" means for evolutionary biologists:

Normally, it’s not possible to free one sex from the constraints of the other, because the two are condemned to evolve together. But again, fruit flies are an exception. In the laboratory, it’s possible to let one sex to evolve while holding the other still.

In other words, it is not what was happening between various male and female characters on "Firefly." Yet, fascinating nevertheless.