Coming of age as an anthropologist: Edien Bartels

In this series we invite anthropologists to share stories of growth, change, and discovery throughout their careers. By reflecting on the life choices that shaped them, the unexpected moments in the field that shifted their perspectives, and the happy mistakes that led to new directions, we hope to shed light on the many ways an anthropological journey can unfold. These are not polished success stories, but honest accounts of becoming — moments of doubt, wonder, transformation, and resilience.

Through these reflections, we aim to inspire others who are finding their way in the discipline. Whether you are just beginning or already well along the path, we hope these stories will bring encouragement, laughter or a tear, and a reminder that every career is a process of coming of age.

Women in labor and my anthropological lifeline

By Edien Bartels – All over the world women give birth to children. And this basically happens the same way. The child is expelled through the birth-canal by labor pains. Not so special, you might say. However, women all over the world give different meanings to this birth-process. Women are also helped by different ‘types’ of caregivers, for instance midwives or doctors, neighbor women or mothers-in-law. Besides, women give birth in all kinds of positions and react in completely different ways. That is also what Anthropology of Birth tries to map. The well-known study by Brigitte Jordan, Birth In Four Cultures: A Crosscultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden and the United States, witnessed the burgeoning of the ‘Anthropology of Birth’, was from 1978. But that publication arrived  a long time after I passed my doctoral examination in anthropology. In that time and during much more years (1969-2013), I was teaching and researching at the department of social and cultural anthropology at the VU university. But what was the first time I was confronted with differences in delivery and the meaning of births? And how has this changed my lifeline as an anthropologist?  

During my first trip to Morocco, in the sixties of the last century, Morocco was a holiday destination for young people from Western Europe who wanted to pioneer with hash, kief and alternative lifestyles. Near Fez, we (five students from Amsterdam) were invited by a couple working in the Peace Corps program (set up by the USA president Kennedy) to support an agricultural program in the mountains. One of the workers from this project, just had his first child, a girl. His wife had given birth with the help of his mother and had held herself on to a rope, attached to the roof of their house. Mother and child were doing well and we collected money for a gift. We got a special birth dish to celebrate the newborn, porridge that the prophet was said to have eaten after his daughter was born. What did this mean? Giving birth, hanging from a rope?  I studied anthropology and knew what I wanted: anthropological research into women’s lives, childbirth and everything around it.  

Looking back to all my research, in Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Egypt/Sudan and the Netherlands, this image comes to my mind as the start. I then asked myself: why do women give birth hanging from a rope, who helps them, what happens when such a birth does not go well, how does their pregnancy progress and what do they think about the conception and having children in a patrilineal, patrilocal, patriarchal society? How does this play out for women from outside the patriline who are married in a different patriline than their own? Do they have a child for their husband or is the child theirs, after all? In literature, in countries outside Europe, births were characterized as events that women organized and were experienced as moments of ‘women’s togetherness’. In Western Europe, this experience of giving birth was supposed to be ‘taken away’ from women and ‘taken over’ by male medical specialists, as a discussion about giving birth evoked. Later on, during my fieldwork in a village in Tunisia, it turned out that almost all women either gave birth alone, or with their mother-in-law or neighbor woman, or -rare- with the traditional midwife, the qabla, from a nearby village. Only a few went to the hospital when the birth caused problems. A women’s party was the least of it. The traditional midwife did play a role, but for many women she was not available at the time the baby arrived. 

Looking back, this is the constant in my lifeline as an anthropologist. My researches mainly concerned women in their gender roles in which physical processes play, such as consanguineous marriages, female circumcision, abandonment and being left behind, forced marriages, women’s organizations, the role of culture in medical anthropology, violence against women, female identity and the relation with the body. Therefore I have a strong affiliation with feminist anthropology: mainly starting from the symbolic nature of behavior in which power relations are decisive. That is still a fruitful starting point, also in my current research on migrant women and violence!  And looking back at all my research work, what was the main constant, working as an anthropologist in relation to all the women I met? That concerns the question: what gave them, the women, the inspiration and the trust to tell me about their lives and their concerns? May be, it was that their problems were worth discussing, without judgement. Sometimes I tried to look at myself as a researcher ‘through the eyes of the women I studied’. This gave me the opportunity to make a step aside from the research itself and to understand the women and their stories, not as research participants, but as people who are worthwhile in themselves.     

Edien Bartels has been teaching anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit for decades. She retired in 2013.