Social Embodiments: Prenatal Risk in Postsocialist Germany

Abstract

Anthropologists have linked bodies to social histories,
events, and structures by way of a presence of illness or physical
pathology. The social embodiment of risk evident in a hospital
in former East Germany at the millennium was conceptually
different: women described bodies marked by absences—of
pregnancy, employment and feelings of safety. Central to the
theoretical concerns of social embodiment in this article are
observations of how the pregnant body embodies competing
notions of risk. This article shows how notions of prenatal risk
can illustrate the ways in which social embodiment can be not
only a presence, but can also manifest as reproductive absence,
hesitation and ambivalence.