Body and Milk. Neonatology Units, Medical Power and Breast Milk Traffic

Abstract

This work describes the medical conception of premature babies and the resulting exclusion of the mother of the neonatology areas. It aims to show that the mother is viewed as containing a double vector of pollution, its body and its milk. This study begins from the author"™s very own experience, a quarry of (self) ethnographic material. It shows, through a fieldwork of three months in the city of Santiago de Chile (Chile), the resistance manifested by the mothers of preterm hospitalized children in neonatology units belonging to both the public and private health care system to the medical power. This resistance is maximally expressed in breast milk traffic "“the covert donation of milk- as a manifestation of reciprocal help within a resistance group.