Price: $34.95
Page Count: 232
Publication Date: May, 25 2017
ISBN: 978-1-77258-107-2
As a scholar working on traditional and emerging rituals centered on women’s bodies before, during, and after pregnancy, I was happy to finally see the publication of this anthology that carefully documents the representations, symbolic meanings, and uses of placentas. The originality of this book lies in its juxtaposition of personal narratives with reports of studies conducted in anthropology and other social sciences. This edited volume features a diversity of contemporary practices involving placentas around the word, including in North America, both in homebirth and in medical settings. It also analyses the discourses and worldviews that frame them, especially those that ascribe sacred meanings to birth and the immediate postpartum. Once considered as a “refuse of birth,” as a ritually impure waste, or as medical property, to be disposed of promptly and carefully, placentas and umbilical cords are becoming central objects of postpartum practices and sets of beliefs. Placenta consumption, use in artwork, or “placenterre” (burial of the placenta), are often intimate maternal or family practices that are difficult to access, document, and study. The 17 chapters in Placenta Wit highlight the vital role of placentas and those who grow them, get life from them, and manipulate them outside of the maternal body. Readers will get new perspectives not just on placentas and childbirth, but on maternal identity, spirituality, ritual, mothering, the environment, nature, midwifery and medicine.
Florence Pasche Guignard is assistant professor in religious studies at the Faculté de théologie et de sciences religieuses at the Université Laval in Quebec City.
Placenta Wit is an interdisciplinary anthology of stories, rituals, and research that explores mothers’ contemporary and traditional uses of the human afterbirth. Authors inspire, provoke and highlight diverse understandings of the placenta and its role in mothers’ creative life-giving. Through medicalization of childbirth, many North American mothers do not have access to their babies’ placentas, nor would many think to. Placentas are often considered to be medical property, and/ or viewed as the refuse of birth. Yet there is now greater understanding of motherand baby-centred birth care, in which careful treatment of the placenta and cord can play an integral role. In reclaiming birth at home and in clinical settings, mothers are choosing to keep their placentas. There is a revival, and survival, of family and community rituals with the placenta and umbilical cord, including burying, art making, and consuming for therapeutic use. Claiming and honouring the placenta may play a vital role in understanding the sacredness of birth and the gift of life that mothers bring. Placenta Wit gathers narrative accounts, scholarly essays, creative pieces and artwork from this emergence of placental interests and uses. This collection includes understandings from birth cultures and communities such as home-birth, hospital-birth, midwifery, doula, Indigenous, and feminist perspectives. Once lost, now found, Placenta Wit authors capably handle and care for this wise organ at the roots of motherhood, and life itself.
“Nané Jordan’s anthology, Placenta Wit, is completely fresh and original; the concept of “placental thinking” is striking and the essays are compelling—intelligent and persuasive. The book reads like the unfolding of a profound mystery, but with absolutely fascinating scientific evidence and support material. There is much wisdom and spirituality in these expositions!”
—VICKI NOBLE, author of Shakti Woman: Feeling Our Fire, Healing Our World, and
The Double Goddess: Women Sharing Power
“Placenta Wit merges theory and practice from a diversity of cultures and perspectives, to champion this primal organ that cries out from implantation and critical birthing moments to its re-emergence in transition rituals — for respect and ethical human decision-making. Sound evidence evolves from the lived experience of mothers, midwives, and holistic health practitioners, harmonizing the placenta’s molecular, genetic, and symbolic endowments, to deftly challenge the patriarchal, often dismissive metaphors and rituals of the biomedical model. These life-affirming and culturally sensitive metaphors and practices for the care and disposition of the placenta, which together effect the relational human beings that we shall become, will stay with practitioners and scholars long after their first reading of Placenta Wit.”
—DOROTHY LANDER, Arts-in-Health Researcher, Antigonish, Nova Scotia
Placenta Wit: Mother Stories, Rituals, and Research
edited by Nané Jordan
Demeter Press
Table of Contents
Introduction
Nané Jordan
PLACENTERRE I
1.
Placenta Consumption: Fourth-Trimester Energy Force and Source of Empowerment
Jonelle Myers
2.
Beyond the Birth Room: Building a Placenta-Positive Culture
Amy Stenzel
3.
Slightly Inappropriate, but Really Brilliant
Nicole Link-Troen
4.
“I’m just going to give you the injection for the placenta”:
Active Management of the Third Stage and the Myth of Informed Consent
Alys Einion
5.
“Placental Waste”: Wild Boys, Blood-Clot Boys, and Long-Teeth Boys
Barbara Alice Mann
6.
Discourses of Love and Loss: The Placenta at Home
Emily Burns
Artful Pause
Photographic artwork by Jodi Selander and Catherine Moeller
PLACENTERRE II
7.
A Medal for Birth
Molly Remer
8.
Planting our Placentas
Farah Mahrukh Coomi Shroff
9.
Circling the Red Tent
Alison Bastien
10.
Hélène Cixous: Matrix Writrix
Marie-Dominique Garnier
11.
The Amazing Placenta
The Placenta’s Behavioural and Structural Peculiarities
Amyel Garnaoui
12.
Placental Thinking: The Gift of Maternal Roots
Nané Jordan
Artful Pause
Artwork by Amanda Greavette and Nané Jordan
PLACENTERRE III
13.
Bledsung of the Placenta: Women’s Blood Power at the Sacred Roots of Economics
Polly Wood
14.
A Placenta by any Other Name
Valerie Borek
15.
“Baby’s Life is in the Placenta Only”: Hearing Dais’ Voices in India
Janet Chawla
16.
Placenta Wit and Chick Lit:
A Close Textual Analysis of “The Lost Journals of Sylvia Plath” by Kimberly Knutsen
Judy E. Battaglia
17.
Snakes, Berries and Bears: A Father’s Placenta Story
Chris Cordoni
Nané Jordan, PhD, is a scholar-artist-educator and mother of two teenage daughters, with a working background in pre-regulation Canadian midwifery and postpartum doula care. She is currently working as a sessional lecturer in art education at the University of British Columbia, and was recently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in women’s and gender studies at the University of Paris 8, France. Her love of placentas continues through her birthwork, art, and writing, as does her research into mothering, feminist arts, midwifery/birth, women’s spirituality, and transformative education. Nané has published widely on these topics in a number of anthologies and journals. She lives in Vancouver with her husband and daughters, where she takes opportunities to admire the placental roots and branches of West Coast trees.
