Converging knowledges in the maternity ward in Ghana: an ethnographic study of care for women with pre-eclampsia

Efforts to improve maternal health rely heavily on biomedicine. Anthropologists, often US-based, have critiqued biomedicine for being 'authoritative knowledge' that shifts power from women to medical experts, and colonises and de-values other birth traditions. However, this ethnographic study of care for pre-eclampsia patients in Ghanaian hospitals shows how embodied, religious, and Indigenous knowledges co-shape biomedical care. Through a form of health care bricolage, health practitioners negotiate different knowledge traditions and the interests of different knowledge bearers, including pastors and husbands. The classic concept of 'authoritative knowledge' appears to be a Euro-American framework requiring contextualisation. We must also avoid romantisation. Religious and Indigenous healing traditions may serve patriarchal and commercial interests rather than those of women. We can learn from practitioners on the ground how to have inclusive conversations and negotiations that promote reproductive health and freedom, including the freedom to use life-saving medical interventions. This paper contributes to re-worlding reproduction by re-centring relational and spiritual onto-epistemologies and complicating Euro-American ideals of shared decision-making between doctors and individual patients.