Privileged knowledge and mothers' "perceptions": the case of breast-feeding and insufficient milk in Bangladesh

Abstract

This article uses the example of breast-feeding and insufficient-milk syndrome in Bangladesh to illustrate the privileged status of professional discourse. While health professionals' discourse is given the status of scientific knowledge, the views and opinions expressed by breast-feeding women are referred to as "perceptions" and thus regarded as less objective. We use data gathered in two anthropological studies undertaken between 1987 and 1992 to examine some of the ambiguous qualities that breast-feeding mothers, their relatives, and health practitioners attribute to breast milk in Bangladesh. We discuss how old beliefs are incorporated into new systems and how bottles, which are associated with allopathy and science, provide a way of circumventing anxieties about female physiology and breast milk. Medical, religious, and popular ideas on breast-feeding and insufficient milk represent different intersecting discourses on the same theme-that female physiology and sexuality are problematic