Paper short abstract:

Childbirth among Mehinaku women is a process shared with many. Mehinaku women have been chosen the hospitals to have their babies. This paper aims to explore, from bibliographic research and preliminar fieldwork data results how women make sense and experience these processes through their bodies.

Paper long abstract:

Childbirth among Mehinaku women (Upper Xingu/MT/Br) is a process shared with many, contrary to the biological ideia that the pregnant woman is the only who's direct responsible for the growing of the baby in the uterus, there are a variety of agents who inflects to the good development of the children, as close relatives who shares diets and prescriptions, specialists as midwives and shamans, and even non-human entities, as Mahaialo, "the body's owner". This collective process evinces the way women of this region make sense of ontogenesis, reproductive processes, "bodies fabrication". These shared agencies embraces questions of affection and kinship. In this context, the body is presented as a potency who imagines and conceives meanings, feels the fear, pain, and love intrinsic to these processes, communicates with the substances who get into it, receive the agentivity of the older women with their wisdom and specific practices. Recently, Mehinaku women have been chosen the hospitals in the cities that surround the "Indigenous land of Xingu" to have their babies. It implies in radical transformations on the practices traditionally experienced, because in these places there is a unique and dominant way of making sense of the pregnancy and childbirth that prevails. This paper aims to explore, from bibliographic research and preliminar fieldwork data results, the body undissociated of the ideas and affection, seeking to understand how this new configuration provoked by the women' move to hospitals inflects on the way they make sense and experience these processes through their bodies