The Attachment Imperative: Parental Experiences of Relation-making in a Danish Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
In this article, we explore how parents establish relations with extremely premature infants whose lives and futures are uncertain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), we engage recent discussions of the limits of conventional anthropological thinking o...
| Publicado en: | Medical Anthropology Quarterly Vol. 32; no. 1; pp. 120 - 138 |
|---|---|
| Autores principales: | , , |
| Formato: | journal article |
| Publicado: |
Wiley-Blackwell
Mar2018
|
| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=128361364&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 128361364 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 07455194 GFS jtl: Medical Anthropology Quarterly issn: 07455194 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Mar2018 vid: 32 iid: 1 pid: 480 pub: Wiley-Blackwell artinfo: ui: 128361364 10.1111/maq.12412 ppf: 120 ppct: 18 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 131KB tig: atl: The Attachment Imperative: Parental Experiences of Relation-making in a Danish Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. aug: au: Navne, Laura E. Svendsen, Mette N. Gammeltoft, Tine M. affil: Department of Health Services Research, University of Copenhagen Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen su: Parenting Infants Reproduction Attachment behavior Psychological disengagement sug: subj: Parenting Infants Reproduction Attachment behavior Psychological disengagement keyword: attachment detachment infants parental experience reproduction attachment detachment infants parental experience reproduction ab: In this article, we explore how parents establish relations with extremely premature infants whose lives and futures are uncertain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Danish Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), we engage recent discussions of the limits of conventional anthropological thinking on social relations and point to the productive aspects of practices of distance and detachment. We show that while the NICU upholds an imperative of attachment independently of the infant's chances of survival, for parents, attachment is contingent on certain hesitations in relation to their infant. We argue that there are nuances in practices of relationmaking in need of more attention (i.e., the nexus of attachment and detachment). Refraining from touching, holding, and feeding their infants during critical periods, the parents enact detachment as integral to their practices of attachment. Such "cuts" in parent-infant relations become steps on the way to securing the infant's survival and making kin(ship). We conclude that although infants may be articulated as "maybe-lives" by staff, in the NICU as well as in Danish society, the ideal of attachment appears to leave little room for "maybe-parents." pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: journal article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
|---|