Robbie Davis-Floyd
Robbie Davis-Floyd is an American cultural, medical, and reproductive anthropologist, researcher, author, and international speaker primarily known for her research on childbirth, midwifery, and obstetrics. She chose to study women's birth experiences due to her own birth experiences and espouses the viewpoint that midwives play an important role in safeguarding positive outcomes for women giving birth. Beginning in 1983, she has given over 1000 presentations at universities and childbirth, midwifery, and obstetric conferences around the world.
Work
In Davis-Floyd's book first, Birth as an American Rite of Passage, she defines "technocracy" as a society organized around the super-valuation of high technology and the global flow of information. She argues that the beliefs and practices associated with birth are driven from a "technocratic model" that was influenced by the Industrial Revolution. Birth became industrialized in assembly-line fashion, then "technocratized" by the consistent use of high technologies such as ultrasound and the electronic fetal monitor, which is almost universally used in American births, even though it has been shown to fail to improve outcomes while increasing the cesarean section rate. The publication of the book furthered her interest to study the anthropology of reproduction. Her current focus is on transformational models of maternity care around the world, and on assisting in the humanistic transformation of childbirth via the International Childbirth Initiative described below.Within their scope of research, Davis-Floyd, other scholars and other birth advocates have worked to ensure that people have access to a range of knowledge on birth, childbirth processes, cultural perspectives, birth customs, safety practices, and health resources. Her primary work in this arena has been to serve as lead editor for the International MotherBaby Childbirth Initiative : 10 Steps to Optimal Maternity Care and then to serve as lead editor for the International Childbirth Initiative : 12 Steps to Safe and Respectful Maternity Care, which is a merger of the IMBCI and the 2015 FIGO Guidelines to Mother-Baby-Friendly Birthing Facilities and replaces both the IMBCI and the FIGO Guidelines.These different models of birth, healthcare, and technological usage exist in all societies and fluctuate according to surrounding conditions.
Another primary contribution was her 1993 complete revision and update of Brigitte Jordan's famous ': A Cultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States' --the book that generated the fields of the anthropologies of midwifery and childbirth. The book was first published in 1978 and won the Margaret Mead Award in 1980. Jordan and Davis-Floyd had completed a comparative analysis on how culture interacts with the physiology of birth in four different territories, showing how birth is everywhere socially marked and shaped. Brigitte Jordan's concept of authoritative knowledge has been heavily promoted by Davis-Floyd both in her update of Birth in Four Cultures, in her co-edited 1997 collection Childbirth and Authoritative Knowleldge: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, and in her 2019 co-edited collection Birth in Eight Cultures, designed with Jordan's encouragement to replace Birth in Four Cultures for undergraduate and graduate teaching. This concept has been distributed and utilized by scholars around the world. By Jordan's definition, authoritative knowledge is the knowledge that counts in a given situation, on the basis of which people make decisions and take actions. It often subsists in a hierarchy of knowledge systems in which one holds more weight than the other. A system comes to carry more weight when it has superior purpose to explain a state of the world or greater hegemonic force because it is held by people in power. Both anthropologists have acknowledged the use and spread of high technologies as a cultural factor of authoritative knowledge. The use of technologies has contributed to a new symbiosis between humans and machines, the study of which is termed "Cyborg Anthropology." Anthropologist Donna Haraway proposed this new discipline and utilized by Joseph Dumit of MIT and Robbie Davis-Floyd in 1998. Davis-Floyd's research concerns reproduction and the technologies associated with birthing standards, in which the natural process of birth is intervened in via technologies that interfere with the hormonal flow of physiologic birth; she has shown in many publications how these standard procedures serve as rituals that convey the core values of technocratic society to birthing women and practitioners alike. She has also analyzed medical training as a rite of technocratic initiation.
The following is a summary of the theoretical concepts Davis-Floyd has developed:
• The technocracy, a term she was given by anthropologist Peter Reynolds and re-defined for her own analytical purposes; she defines a “technocracy” as a society driven by the supervalution of the development of high technologies and the global flow of information. In her definition, technocratic societies are hierarchal, patriarchal, bureaucratic, capitalistic, and institution-laden. In numerous publications, she identifies the technocracy as the sixth subsistence strategy, after hunting-gathering, horticulture, agriculture, pastoralism, and industrialism. In her view, late modern technocracies are fundamentally different from industrial societies.
• Supervaluation, or supervalue: A term she coined to describe the hyper-valuation of high technology or any other phenomenon.
• Technocratic birth: The unnecessary application of too many technological interventions in the normal physiologic process of birth, thereby disrupting it and leading to the current global “cesarean epidemic.”
• The technocratic, humanistic, and holistic paradigms of birth and health care, defined in articles and book chapters that have been reprinted numerous times. In short, the technocratic model views the body as a machine and treats it accordingly; the humanistic model as an organism, with an emphasis on patient-caregiver relationship and humanistic treatment in birth and health care; the holistic model as an energy field, with emphasis on managing the “energy” of birth and on incorporating spirit/soul into the healthcare process.
• “Superficial” vs. “deep” humanism: Many hospitals around the world are “superficially humanistic”—they may have nice décor and treat patients kindly while still performing any many unnecessary, non-evidenced based interventions in labor and birth. A few hospitals and birth practices are “deeply humanistic,” honoring the deep physiology of labor and birth and working with women's emotions by providing one-on-one labor support.
• Standard obstetric procedures as rituals that enact and transmit the core values of the technocracy, fully detailed in multiple articles and books.
• Her own definition of a ritual is “a patterned, repetitive, symbolic enactment of a cultural belief or value. This definition is fully explained and worked through in The Power of Ritual, where Davis-Floyd and her co-author Charles Laughlin identify the primary characteristics of ritual as including: the neurological basis of ritual behaviors as coordination and communication systems that first developed in animals; the use of symbols to convey a ritual’s message; a cognitive matrix from within which a ritual emerges; ritual drivers: rhythm, repetition, and redundancy; the use of tools, techniques, and technologies to accomplish ritual’s multiple goals; the framing of ritual performances; the order and formality that separates ritual from everyday life, identifying it as ritual; the sense of inviolability and inevitability that rituals can generate; the acticing, stylization, and staging that often give ritual its sense of high drama, the facts that it is performed and that it often intensifies toward a climax. Davis-Floyd and Laughlin see ritual as existing on a spectrum, from ordinary everyday greeting rituals, for example, to high rituals such as the Catholic Mass.
• Hospital birth as a rite of technocratic initiation: The high technologies applied to birth make women psychologically and physically dependent upon them, initiating her fully into the core value system of the technocracy.
• The IV line as “the umbilical cord to the hospital,” strongly symbolizing the woman's dependence on the institution for her wellbeing, her life, and that of her baby—a concept fully developed in Birth as an American Rite of Passage.
• Medical training as a rite of technocratic initiation: Through their intense socialization into the technocratic model of health care, physicians are also initiated into the core value system of the technocracy, functioning as society's representatives to the individuals they care for. She fully explain this concept in a chapter by that title in Ways of Knowing about Birth and in From Doctor to Healer: The Transformative Journey.
• The postmodern midwife: A professional or traditional midwife who takes a stance Davis-Floyd calls “informed relativism” to integrate multiple knowledge systems into her praxis, often going “back to the future” to incorporate valuable aspects of traditional or indigenous knowledge with contemporary biomedical and scientific knowledge. She has fully described postmodern midwifery in “Daughter of Time: The Postmodern Midwife,” which appears in both article form and in revised, updated, and expanded form in her anthology Ways of Knowing about Birth: Mothers, Midwives, Medicine, and Birth Activism
• Informed relativism: A relativistic stance toward knowledge systems, learning about and incorporating into practice what works from each.
• The postmodern spiral—spiralling back to the past to bring the best of traditional and Indigenous knowledge into the present and combine it with the best modern scientific evidence to create postmodern knowledge systems about childbirth and other phenomena for a sustainable future.
• Normalizing uniqueness: The midwifery art of extending the definition of “normal birth” to encompass each woman's uniqueness and present circumstances. Obstetricians tend to “standardize pathology” while midwives tend to “normalize uniqueness.”
• The notion of “intuition as authoritative knowledge in midwifery and homebirth,” fully explained in her article by that title. Intuition is supervalued in the holistic model of care, while devalued in the technocratic model.
Davis-Floyd has identified 4 types of articulation among knowledge systems: Dis-articulations, fractured articulations, smooth articulations, and seamless articulations. She developed these concepts to help understand the various the various possibilities inherent in the clash of knowledge systems that often occurs in most countries when midwives transport laboring women from home or birth center to hospital in cases of need.
• Qualified commodification: The notion that one can “qualify” one's degree of commodification, as did the Certified Professional Midwives of the US when they developed their certification to present themselves as valuable commodities without “selling out” their core values in the process.
• Embodied conception: The concept that women embody their conceptions and decision making about pregnancy and birth just as they physically embody the conceptions of their babies.
• Four Stages of Cognition and their anthropological equivalents: Stage 1: naïve realism, fundamentalism, fanaticism; Stage 2: ethnocentrism; Stage 3: cultural relativism; Stage 4: global humanism—and Substage, a condition of cognitive retrogression under stress—or "losing it"—that can lead to violence and abuse against others. These are fully explained in The Power of Ritual and an article by that title.
• Planet Earth as a cyborg—a cybernetic organism created by the thousands of satellites and other technological artifacts constantly orbiting the planet and the electronic signals they transmit.
• Inner space and outer space as cyberspace: Technocratizing womb and world. Both the planet and the fetus are consistently subjected to technological penetrations—for the fetus, these include ultrasound, amniocentesis, and electronic fetal monitoring during labor and birth. This concept is fully explained in her Epilogue to Ways of Knowing about Birth.
Personal
Davis-Floyd was born in Casper, Wyoming and is the daughter of Walter Gray Davis and Robbie Elizabeth Davis whose maiden name was Peyton. In 1979, she married Robert N. Floyd and later became a mother of two children, Peyton and Jason. Their daughter Peyton was killed in a car wreck in 2000 at the age of 20. At the request of Diony Young, editor of Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care, Robbie wrote an article about her experiences of Peyton's death called "Windows in Space/Time". It became the most-read article in the history of the journal.Education
Robbie Davis-Floyd was Valedictorian of her high school class at St. Mary's Hall in San Antonio, Texas. She attended Wellesley College between 1969 and 1970, then married and transferred to the University of Texas Austin where her first husband, Russell S. Johnson, was attending law school. Davis-Floyd later received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin in 1972. She earned her Master of Arts degree in anthropology and folklore, as well as her PhD from the University of Texas.Career
Robbie Davis-Floyd has served in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas in various forms since 1992, and continues to do so. In 1975-1976, Davis-Floyd was a summer Spanish instructor for Centro de Artes y Lenguas Mexicanas, Cuernavaca in Morelos, Mexico. The following year she was a high school teacher for St. Mary's Hall in San Antonio. Davis-Floyd was an adjunct assistant professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga and Trinity University, San Antonio. She was a lecturer at the University of Texas then became senior lecturer of anthropology and senior research fellow around 1990-1992 and 1998-current. Davis-Floyd was a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. In 1997-1999, Robbie Davis-Floyd was a participant of the Council for European studies for the International Research Planning Groups Program. She was a visiting lecturer at Baylor Medical School, where she taught Baylor's first-ever course in Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and at Southern Methodist University. Between 2002 and 2003, Davis-Floyd was the Flora Stone Mather Visiting Professor in the anthropology department at Case Western Reserve University and an adjunct associate professor. In 2019, Robbie Davis-Floyd continues to serve in the Department of Anthropology at University of Texas, Austin as Senior Research Fellow.Membership
Robbie Davis-Floyd is a member of the American Anthropological Association, American Holistic Medical Association, Association for Feminist Anthropology, the American College of Nurse-Midwives., and the Midwives Alliance of North America. Davis-Floyd served as consumer representative to the Board of the North American Registry of Midwives for 15 years as well as serving on the Midwifery Certification Task Force 1994-1997. Davis-Floyd was chair of the editorial committee of the Coalition for Improving Maternity Services, helping to create the Mother-Friendly Childbirth Initiative for the US . Currently, Davis-Floyd is a member of the board of the International MotherBaby Childbirth Organization and lead editor for the International MotherBaby Childbirth Initiative. She has served as an executive board member and program chair of the Society for Medical Anthropology, from 2004 to 2007. Robbie Davis-Floyd was a founding member of the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction and currently serves as its senior advisor. She was also a member of Council on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing, Society for the Social Study of Science, as well as a board member of the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health for 19 years. She is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in American Women, and Who's Who in the World.BOOK SERIES LEAD EDITOR
Davis-Floyd serves as lead editor for a series on “Social Science Perspectives on Birth and Reproduction” for Routledge. To date the series contains Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier, The Global Witch Hunt, and Birth as an American Rite of Passage. Books on birth among the Cree, by Ieva Pabertzky, and on midwifery in Yemen, by Annica Kempe, among others, to be added soon. The series is accepting book applications.
Publications
BOOKS- Davis-Floyd, Robbie. Birth As An American Rite Of Passage. Berkeley : University Of California Press, 1992. Print.
- Jordan, Brigitte. Birth in Four Cultures: A Crosscultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States, Fourth Edition. Waveland Press. Print. Revised, expanded, and updated by Robbie Davis-Floyd, 1993.
- Davis-Floyd, Robbie E., and Carolyn Sargent. Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. University of California Press, 1997. Print.
- Davis-Floyd, Robbie and P. Sven Arvidson, eds. Intuition: The Inside Story. New York: Routledge, 1997.
- Davis-Floyd, Robbie, and Joseph Dumit, eds. Ebrary, Inc. Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots. Routledge, New York, 1998. Print.
- Davis-Floyd, Robbie, and Gloria St John. St. From Doctor to Healer: The Transformative Journey. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Print.
- Bourgeault, Ivy Lynn, et al., editors. Reconceiving Midwifery. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004.
- Robbie Davis-Floyd and Christine Barbara Johnson, eds. Mainstreaming Midwives: The Politics of Change. New York: Routledge, 2006.
- Davis-Floyd, Robbie, et al., editors. Birth Models That Work. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2009.
- Davis-Floyd, Robbie, Kenneth J. Cox, and Frank White. Space Stories: Oral Histories from the Pioneers of America's Space Program, Kindle e-book, 2012.
- Davis-Floyd, Robbie and Charles Laughlin. The Power of Ritual. Brisbane Australia: Daily Grail Press.
- Davis-Floyd, Robbie and Colleagues. Ways of Knowing about Birth: Mothers, Midwives, Medicine, and Birth Activism. Long Grove IL: Waveland Press, 2018.
- Davis-Floyd, Robbie, and Melissa Cheyney. Birth in Eight Cultures. Long Grove IL: Waveland Press, 2019.
- Daviss, Betty-Anne and Robbie Davis-Floyd, eds. Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier: Speaking Truth to Power. New York and London: Routledge, in press, forthcoming 2020.
Daviss, Betty-Anne, Hermine Hayes-Klein, and Robbie Davis-Floyd eds. The Global Witch Hunt Plaguing Birth: Practitioner Persecution and Restorative Resistance.
Davis-Floyd, Robbie and Beverly Chalmers, eds. Birthing Techno-Sapiens: Human-Technology Co-Evolution and the Future of Reproduction
ARTICLES
Davis-Floyd has authored or co-authored over 80 published articles and 23 encyclopedia entries. Many of her articles are freely available on her website www.davis-floyd.com, where her full CV is also available.