Dept. STS

Using as examples three of the earliest pregnancy and infant loss organizations and multiple recent initiatives, I argue this is a unique patient movement, in part due to the particularities of pregnant patienthood. Although during the first 20 years of this distinctively US movement, pregnancy and infant loss support was hospital-based, there was remarkably little attention to the ''medical'' dimensions of these losses, e.g. etiology, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. The thrust was instead on changing ideas and feelings. It is only since the turn of the century that bereaved parents have started to forge collaborations with physicians to work toward prevention. During the first phase (mid-1970s to mid-1990s), it was a women's movement, though it did not present itself as such, and although it was indebted to the feminist movement and included some feminist initiatives, the movement was dominated by a traditionally feminine ethos and included pro-life elements. During the second phase, as physicians and researchers have become more involved, leadership has become somewhat less female-centric while at the same time, more initiatives are explicitly feminist. r

 This volume represents a watershed in the anthropology of reproduction. Studies of new reproductive technologies have tended to have an overly narrow focus on the medical. For instance, anthropologists reporting from the North have often referred to the “miracle babies” that come from the “medical miracle” of in vitro fertilization (IVF) without considering the ways in which Christianity may inform the meaning of these “miracles” for parents, medical staff, and newspaper reporters. In “Of Fetuses and Angels” (1992), I suggested that despite the tendency to assume a rigid separation of science from religion and to study these discursive systems in isolation, people may not experience their lives in this fragmented way, and in fact often actively weave together these domains. The easy, but initially surprising, integration of religious and medical images and beliefs found in narratives of pregnancy loss might, in fact, point to a common feature of everyday life (Layne 1992). I concluded

This article describes how residential energy consumers measure and analyze their own energy consumption and energy costs. Using in-depth interviews, we find more extensive data collection and analysis by residential energy consumers than has been previously documented in the energy literature. However, the conclusions consumers can draw from their analytical efforts are restricted by the form in which they receive price and consumption data and their limited analytic capabilities. The relative information processing strengths of consumers are compared with those of institutions such as energy utilities, leading to the conclusion that many of the analytic tasks are currently assigned to the less efficient parties, degrading decision quality and creating a market barrier to energy conservation. We suggest a more efficient allocation of data collection and analysis between the consumer and energy utility.