Sensitive Bodies: Materialisation,Energetic States and the Balancing of Bodily Boundaries During Pregnancy and Birth

Introduction

In September 2019, I met Shanti ¹ for an interview in the office of her family’s business in Nickerie, Suriname. Shanti is a henna artist in her 20s and regularly draws elaborate henna designs, mostly on Hindu brides and increasingly on the bellies of pregnant women. During our conversation, Shanti introduced me to the use of blauwsel, a blue dye that was originally a laundry whitener and is today used to ward off evil among a wide range of Surinamese social actors (De Klerk, 1998; Ruysschaert et al., 2009). It is applied directly onto a person’s skin, most commonly behind the ears. Shanti explained that she uses blauwsel when she dresses up and goes to parties to protect herself against the ‘evil eye’, the evil and harmful gaze of envious others. She emphasised that blauwsel protects humans (and other entities, such as flowers and plants) from such a gaze, particularly pregnant women, the unborn and young children. She further explained that

when you are pregnant . . . your belly will show anyway after some months, but when they look at your belly, it is not good for the child. And you get sick of it too. That’s why they say, ‘Put blauwsel!’ And blauwsel is actually protecting you from such looks from people.

(Shanti, 20s, Nickerie, September 2019, emphasis in original) ²

In this article, I argue that body-marking practices, such as applying blauwsel, must be considered ways of maintaining and regulating bodily boundaries. They are porous and may be at risk of being dissolved during pregnancy. Indeed, pregnancy may be considered a phase of extraordinary openness and particular ‘sensitivity’ to subtle energies and substances. In this context, I further discuss that in the Hindu Suriname context, pregnancy and birth are understood as being based on the material and social processes of bodily union and separation, creating what social actors then interpret as distinct human bodies. I analyse the materialisation of different human ‘units’ based on Hindu understandings of matter and degrees of materiality. Adopting a posthumanist perspective, I consider embodied humans an ‘integral part’ of entangled agencies but without sole responsibility in ‘active processes of materialization’ (Coole and Frost, 2010: 8). I argue that pregnancy and birth, as ‘naturalcultural’ practices, allow us to rethink ‘the relationship between “the natural” and “the social” [. . .] without defining one against the other or holding either nature or culture as the fixed referent for understanding the other’ (Barad, 2007: 30). Thus, I reflect on my findings through the lens of new materialist and material feminist theories.

Although this case study may seem to reproduce a focus on humans and their bodies, I suggest that the processes of human (re)production provide a means of reflecting humanity, agency and matter. By drawing attention to the fact that the ‘concept of matter is itself culturally and historically specific and, as such, contested terrain’ (Willey, 2016: 993), I address the epistemological hegemony of ‘Western’ science as the only route to knowledge about bodies and matter, a privilege often reproduced also in new materialist and material feminist studies (Irni, 2013; Willey, 2016). To diversify these theoretical foundations of (bodily) materialisation, I discuss my Hindu interlocutors’ notions of materiality and concepts of pregnant and birthing bodies. These understandings are influenced by various (Hindu) ontological concepts, experiential knowledge and (Western) scientific discourse. Relying on these different knowledge systems and embodied ways of knowing, my interlocutors emphasised that bodies are in a continuous transactional exchange with other (human and other-than-human) bodies and entities. According to them, Western scientific knowledge regarding matter, pregnancy and bodies remains partial due to the privilege of human agency. From this perspective, I argue that a (human) body may not be considered as a single ‘unit’ but instead a range of intra-acting entities that vary in subtle and gross degrees of materiality. In this context, pregnancy may be considered a process in which agency is distributed among various social actors who actively produce and compose different kinds of material bodies.

The latter is discussed in the first section of this article, where I analyse my interlocutors’ specific and contextual concepts regarding the materiality, union and separation of bodies, providing a basis for further analysis of bodily boundaries and related maintenance practices. Here, I suggest that pregnancy cannot be considered a condition; rather it is an active process – the process of gestating and merging different kinds of (material) bodily entities. Furthermore, birth is a kind of bodily separation involving social and material (re)constructions of boundaries. Although my interlocutors perceived bodies to be separate and distinct, they also considered them to remain in a state of exchange with their surroundings and other entities through bodily transactions (Kloß, 2016, 2025; Marriott, 1976). In the second part of this article, I analyse how my interlocutors conceptualised bodily boundaries as needing careful maintenance and regulation, especially during pregnancy. In this context, they referred to ‘heat’ as a catalytic force with transformative potential that both causes and is also created by bodily transactions. Thus, body-marking practices, including using blauwsel, are a means of (material) balancing. I conclude that bodily boundaries must be reconsidered as being based on specific energetic states, giving way to alternative approaches to agentive capacities with regard to pregnant or birthing bodies.

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during various stays in the Surinamese district of Nickerie between 2017 and 2019 and in the Surinamese diaspora of The Hague, Netherlands, in 2018. The initial focus of my research was on embodied histories and life narratives of senior Hindu women, discussed via body modification practices (Kloß, 2022, 2024a, 2024b). Therefore, I did not choose or approach my interlocutors with specific questions about pregnancy but was gradually directed to the topic through our conversations. These conversations evolved around the women’s lives to analyse to what extent semipermanent modes of body modification – especially tattooing – may serve as a means of embodied memory-making that influence life narratives and oral history (Kloß, 2024b). Only when I was introduced to applying temporary body marks to protect against evil spirits during pregnancy did I become aware of my personal bias in not having considered pregnancy or birth as an important aspect of most of my interlocutors’ lives. My initial blind spot reflects the general and critical omission of the topic as a relevant aspect of anthropological enquiry (Davis-Floyd and Sargent, 1997; Han, 2015; Teman and Ivry, 2021). This is even more astonishing when considering that to most of my senior female interlocutors aged 80 years and above, pregnancy was not an exceptional phase of life but almost an expected bodily routine prior to menopause (Teman and Ivry, 2021). Thus, my initial prioritisation of senior Hindu women’s narratives and experiences of body modification has influenced my research agenda. In-depth discussions with younger generations on the topic of reproduction remain a future field of enquiry; however, I have reflected on this bias throughout my analysis.

To avoid the incorrect presupposition that it is only (living) women who can be or become pregnant, in my ethnographic interviews and everyday conversations, I raised the question of who is considered capable of pregnancy. I considered that in different cultural contexts, categories of social actors may include other-than-human beings who may or may not become pregnant, including spirits, deities and ancestors. In Suriname, the concepts of pregnancy and childbirth have been affected by an increasing influence of Western scientific knowledge, resulting in the medicalisation of these processes, as discussed in detail below. Consequently, pregnancy- and birth-related practices have been negotiated and adapted in Hindu Suriname over time and, today, are influenced by scientific discourse and practice, experiential ways of knowing and religious doctrines and philosophies.

Furthermore, when referring to pregnant women in the following, I am not neglecting trans pregnancy; instead I base my interpretation of pregnancy on my informants’ viewpoint. In contemporary Hindu Suriname, only living women (and girls) are considered capable of becoming pregnant. None of my interlocutors suggested that spirits or deities can be pregnant, although it is common knowledge that several Hindu deities have children. In this article, my use of ‘Hindu’ refers to my informants and interlocutors’ identification as Sanatan Hindus, referring to mainstream Sanatan Dharm traditions in Nickerie. ³

Birth, Materiality and the Separation of Bodies

In August 2018, I met a woman in her 30s near the town of Nieuw Nickerie, together with her teenage daughter and younger son. She introduced herself as Linda and explained that her husband was at a doctor’s appointment regarding an upcoming eye surgery. Touching on the topic of medicine and surgery, Linda recalled the only time in her life she had had surgery: the birth of her son, who had to be born by caesarean section in the public hospital. ‘In the case of my daughter I was able to bury the afterbirth’, she explained, ‘but with the hospital, everything became harder’. Invited to elaborate on these hardships, she responded that ‘they’ would not give a person with ‘rented accommodation’ the afterbirth. She explained that the afterbirth must be buried ‘on your own land’ and that if you bury it elsewhere, ‘evil spirits’ may do ‘something’ to it. Because she did not own the land she resided on, the afterbirth had to be burned in the hospital. Like Linda, several of my Hindu interlocutors in Nickerie expressed their wish to continue the practice of burying the afterbirth. They complained that in the current circumstances, in which deliveries happened in hospitals, women would no longer be allowed to bury the afterbirth and expressed ambivalent feelings about this situation. As I discuss below, traditionally, most Surinamese Hindus ritually took care of the afterbirth – including the placenta and navel string – as part of the child’s rites of passage. The afterbirth – a reminder of the original bodily union of mother and child – opens up questions regarding bodily union and separation, being an ambiguous material remnant of these processes.

Before reflecting on the processes of bodily separation and union, however, we should be cognizant that pregnancy and birth must be considered processes with social and material dimensions (Han, 2015), as also highlighted through the example of the afterbirth. As ‘naturalcultural’ processes, they include ‘everyday social practices, scientific practices, and practices that do not include humans’ (Barad, 2007: 32). While birth may be linked to the process of the material parting of mother and child, social birth may be considered to happen before, during and/or after parturition (Conklin and Morgan, 1996; Han, 2009; Layne, 2021; Neiterman, 2013: 112). In some cultural contexts, mothers and their children are still sometimes ‘treated as a unit’ (Conklin and Morgan, 1996: 672). The newborn may be perceived as not-quite-born, remaining linked to the mother until, for example, the necessary separation rites have been conducted. This state of being not-quite-separated is often considered liminal and dangerous; therefore, it frequently requires the seclusion of the woman and infant from society. Discussing pregnancy and birth as a rite of passage in the US context, Robbie E. Davis-Floyd (1992) also considers the ‘three seemingly separate events of pregnancy, birth, and the newborn phase of motherhood to be part of one single rite of passage’ (p. 20). Thus, it is necessary to first analyse my interlocutors’ understandings of pregnancy and birth before discussing pregnant bodies’ increased sensitivity, related balancing practices and the notion of bodily boundaries.

Knowledge of pregnancy and childbirth should not be solely a medical-scientific understanding; it requires broader reflection of the specific and situated sociocultural and religious concepts. In Hindu Nickerie, birth is conceptualised not only as the process of parturition. It also requires a social dimension and a child’s introduction to the (social) world to become a person. In the past, social birth required the temporary seclusion of the mother and child as part of a rite of passage. It ended with the rituals and festivities of chathi on the sixth day after the delivery of the child and the cutting of the umbilical cord. The mother and child had to be secluded as both were viewed as ‘impure’, as discussed in detail below. This period of ritual impurity could extend up to six weeks and was called kraamtijd, a term translated as puerperium or (period of) childbed. Kraamtijd commenced during the jātakarma ritual, conducted directly after parturition. Jātakarma comes under the Hindu rites of passage category, the so-called sanskaras. Most Surinamese Hindu families did not follow the orthodox Vedic rituals but conducted popular rites, including bury-ing the placenta and umbilical cord in front of the maternity home and lighting a fire on this spot and keeping it ablaze for six days to protect against evil spirits (De Klerk, 1998: 95). As part of chathi, the end of kraamtijd, the mother and child were ritually cleansed, the fire extinguished and the baby taken outside. The extinction of the fire was referred to as the ‘cooling’ or ‘settling’ of the afterbirth (De Klerk, 1998: 98), an aspect I return to in the final section of this article. Many of my female interlocutors who were older than 50 years described chathi as a festive day, filled with rituals and social festivities in the late afternoon. For example, Soenita, my oldest informant at 82 years and a mother of four, described chathi as the ‘bathing’ (ritual cleansing) of mother and child, the ‘coming outside’ of the baby, and the calling of the entire family for celebrations. The specific rituals conducted on chathi, ranging from name-giving ceremonies to cooling rituals and the consumption of specific foods, imply chathi’s significance as a separation rite for woman and child that ended the liminal phase of pregnancy and birth. Chathi marked the social birth of a child, its transformation into a social being and the woman’s reintegration into the social structure as a mother.

Chathi also ended the phase of ‘birth impurity’. Birth impurity is a specific kind of impurity referred to as āśauca in many Hindu philosophical traditions. Both birth and death cause this impurity and require the individual and their related family to undergo a phase of social restraint and perform practices of purification (Aktor, 2018; Inden and Nicholas, 1977; Lamb, 2000). During this period, a person affected by birth or death impurity cannot conduct rituals (except for funerary rites), which is why āśauca has been translated and defined as being ‘incapacitated’ (Mines, 1989: 103). In Nickerie, most senior informants, regardless of their gender, referred to birth impurity as chut or dhjutt. They described it as causing ritual incapacity (e.g. ‘not being allowed inside a temple’) and highlighted that it required temporarily adapting dietary and behavioural rules related to touch and social interaction. ⁴

Based on our conversations on birth and death, I suggest that my interlocutors did not consider birth impurity to be primarily caused by physical contact with potentially polluting substances (e.g. blood and afterbirth) but instead by the separation of bodies. Indeed, bodily separation has been discussed frequently as a cause for bodily impurity in different Hindu contexts. For example, in her study of ageing and gender in northern India, Sarah Lamb (2000: n.p.) – in reference to Frédérique Apffel Marglin – suggests that specific kinds of impurity, including those related to childbirth, are linked to ‘violations of the boundaries of the body’. Similarly, in their study on kinship in Bengali culture, Ronald B. Inden and Ralph W. Nicholas (1977) confirm that the āśauca period starts ‘with the separating act which begins the [bodily] transformation’, elaborating that the separation relevant in birth is ‘the cutting of the umbilical cord’ and in death is ‘the firing of the body on the funeral bier’ (pp. 102–3).

Death and birth are understood as transformative phases of bodily separation. However, this notion of separation does not define bodies as distinct and stable units. Indeed, my interlocutors considered bodily separation to be partial and in need of continuous maintenance and reconstruction. This understanding is supported by Hindu concepts of the body, according to which bodies constantly interchange with other human and other-than-human bodies, beings and entities. All bodies and beings vary in degrees of (subtle to gross) materiality. They are considered to emit energies and substances into the world and to absorb those of others (Böhler, 2010: 115). In South Asian scholarship, such processes have been discussed as bodily transactions, where ‘dividual’ and divisible persons and bodies are considered to ‘absorb heterogeneous material influences’ and to ‘also give out from themselves particles of their own coded substances – essences, residues, or other active influences’ (Marriott, 1976: 111).

While separation may seem obvious in the context of birth, the separation of bodies at death may not be as evident. Nevertheless, this aspect is also relevant to the discussion of pregnancy and birth because it precedes birth and allows for a better understanding of bodily separation and untying, as discussed in detail below. My Hindu informants in Nickerie – and elsewhere in Suriname – reported that a (human) being has both a ‘gross’ and a ‘subtle’ body. They considered that the subtle body comprises psychological, emotional and spiritual qualities and is to be differentiated from the gross body, which is more tangible. Subtle and gross bodies consist of different levels of materiality. Their differentiation is not based on a dualistic understanding. Indeed, subtle bodies and energies are not considered immaterial but are, in contrast, material to a certain degree (Holdrege, 1998: 347).

Most Hindus understand materiality as a continuum, ranging by degree from subtle energies to gross substances (Holdrege, 1998; Inden and Nicholas, 1977; Kloß, 2016; Marriott, 1976). In this way of thinking, everything in this world is more or less material, including souls, knowledge, sound and energies. Subtle bodies are not considered as existing independently from gross bodies during the temporary condition of life; they are thought as merging and existing in heightened exchange processes. Indeed, the degree or composition of a body’s subtle and gross materiality is malleable and can be actively transformed. Regarding Hindu transactions, McKim Marriott (1976) suggests that ‘subtler essences may sometimes be ripened, extracted, or distilled out of grosser ones . . . [. . .]; and grosser substance-codes may be generated or precipitated out of subtler ones’ (p. 110). As dynamic processes, transaction and transubstantiation cannot create distinct units; rather, they produce a continuum of (material) beings comprising humans and deities (Marriott, 1976: 113). This understanding supports new materialist approaches, which stress that the ‘difference between humans and animals, or even between sentient and nonsentient matter, is a question of degree more than of kind’ (Coole and Frost, 2010: 21).

Suggesting a unitary Hindu approach to understanding bodies and materiality would be homogenising. In the context of my study, my interlocutors usually referred to different (Hindu) philosophical schools and ontological concepts to define materiality, adopting a range of concepts and understandings, which were also influenced by knowledge labelled as ‘scientific’. However, when asked about birth and death, most referred to Hindu concepts and explained that the subtle body reincarnates in different gross bodies over time, as dictated by samsara, the cycle of death and birth. They usually explained that a subtle body is eventually liberated and achieves moksha, the ultimate state of release from samsara and the reunion of atman (a soul or subtle body) with brahman (the world soul, the ultimate reality). Hence, they often referred to Śaṃkara’s doctrine of nonduality, according to which brahman and atman are understood as identical, brahman as absolute and everything else as unreal, including ‘the world of duality’ (Michaels, 2004: 269). They sometimes added aspects of the dualist Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophy to this concept, according to which spirit (puruṣa) and materiality (prakṛti) are opposed. As some of these aspects – the guṇa – will become relevant in the second part of this article, I provide Axel Michaels’ (2004) definition of Sāṃkhya dualism here in detail:

The Puruṣa is completely unchanging, eternal, omnipresent, pure spiritual light; in short, pure consciousness, sufficient unto itself, but not consciousness of something; its individuations, also called puruṣa, are the ‘parts’ of the individual soul capable of salvation. The Prakṛti, on the other hand, is active, unconscious material – eternal, omnipresent, and imperceptibly subtle (sūkṣma) – and it is also thought, will, and feeling, for it comprises physical and psychical things. It consists of three components (guṇa): sattva (‘goodness, light, purity; state of light, joy, and peace’), rajas (‘passion, agility, excitement’), and tamas (‘darkness, heaviness, obstruction’). (p. 264)

Notably, my informants were more comfortable or accustomed to discussing the relation of gross and subtle bodies in their reflections on death. They considered death to be the loss of the gross body and the transition of the subtle body into a new life or ‘rebirth’. They further stated that at death the subtle body may ‘wander around’, and that only if you perform a specific puja (Hindu ritual veneration of deities) can the soul leave this world. For example, Kowsilia and Balram, a married couple in their 60s, explained to me that the soul ‘goes away’ from the body after 10 or 13 days, after ‘the work’ – referring to funerary rites – has been conducted. According to them and others, if funerary rites and ancestral pujas are not correctly performed, a deceased subtle body can become a wandering entity. This may become a menace to humans as the wandering subtle body may transform into a spirit or ghost, attacking pregnant women, an aspect I return to below.

If the subtle body is not automatically released from its gross body but has to be un-tied upon the death of a human, I suggest that this implies a counterprocess of merging or tying these entities together. From my informants’ perspective, this tying together process is linked to pregnancy and its related social and material dimensions. Only a limited academic literature exists regarding this process in Hindu contexts. For example, Inden and Nicholas (1977) comment that during ‘the process in which the gross body is formed, its complementary subtle body is thought to combine with it’ (p. 63). Discussing funerary rites, they explain that part of a deceased person’s subtle body is ‘attracted to a new embryonic gross body to which it is suited, and it is reborn’ (Inden and Nicholas, 1977: 63). However, they do not define how this attraction is caused. When I enquired about how I should imagine this specific process happens, my interlocutors usually advised me to consult a pandit (Hindu priest) because they ‘did not know’. Pandit Pradeep, a Sanatan pandit in his 40s who lives in Nickerie, eventually explained to me that the Hindu deity Shiva determines this process and sends souls to be ‘born’ in specific ‘units’. He commented thus:

This sharir, this body, [. . .] is not going to be with us forever. This is going to be dead. This is nothing. [. . .] [But] the atman, the soul that is inside our body, is sent to all kinds of places by Shiva. Maybe, now [. . .] I got the unit of a human, [a] human unit, and through my karma, through my karma behaviour, [. . .] I am going to get an-other life. That is what Shiva is going to determine.

(Pandit Pradeep, 40s, Nickerie, emphasis in original)

Although our conversation took place in Dutch, he used the English term ‘unit’ to refer to the (human or other-than-human) gestalt of the atman after rebirth. Using (Guyanese) English terms is not unusual in the border region of Nickerie, where the continuous sociocultural and economic exchange with Guyana has influenced Sarnami and Dutch. However, I suggest that the term ‘(human) unit’ indicates a particular understanding of (human) bodies, based on a specific composition of subtle and gross bodies in which they are connected and in exchange, yet separable.

Accordingly, (human) pregnancy may be interpreted as a phase and an active process of such units’ social and material gestation: gross bodies transform, gestate and actively link with subtle bodies. Although this requires further research, I suggest that in the past, the process of tying may have been linked to the specific sanskara of puṃsavana, a rite no longer conducted in Suriname (De Klerk, 1998: 91). In contemporary Nickerie, agency regarding the tying process appears to be distributed among the gross body of the pregnant person and the divine (yet material) social actors (i.e. Shiva). Thus, pregnancy and birth involve a range of intra-acting ‘units’ comprising varying degrees of materiality. At death, untying further requires the involvement and necessity of other human social actors during funerary rites: a pandit and usually a male family member.

If the human body is not a singular unit but a union of intra-acting subtle and gross bodies, we must analyse bodily separation at birth beyond a binary perspective that defines and opposes maternal and foetal bodies. Presupposing that maternal and foetal bodies are considered ‘ontologically separate and separable’ (Martin, 2010: 36) reflects a specific sociocultural understanding of the self and (in-)dividual, which cannot be generalised and must be reflected on, also in Hindu contexts (Marriott, 1976; Smith, 2012). This is especially the case with Western medical presuppositions of the singular (material) body that shape scientific discourse and practices related to pregnancy and birth, which affect individuals and communities. For example, in their thought-provoking discussion of scientific immunology, Aryn Martin (2010) and Rebecca Scott Yoshizawa (2016) critically analyse how, in much immunological discourse, the mother and foetus are conceptualised as ‘two distinct beings’ who are treated as individuals although interconnected through the placenta (Yoshizawa, 2016: 80). However, this is but one way the maternal–foetal relationship can be understood. Moira Howes identifies three ontological models of maternal–foetal relationships: (1) the ‘foreign-foetus model’, according to which mothers and foetuses are conceptualised as two separate entities whose ‘physical connection’ is ‘de-emphasised or ignored’, (2) the ‘body-part model’, which refers to an understanding of the foetus as part of the mother’s flesh, similar to an organ, and (3) the ‘not-one-but-not-two-model’, characterised by blurry ‘distinctions between mother and fetus’ that develop progressively (Howes, 2008: 248).

At first glance, the ‘not-one-but-not-two-model’ seems to apply in the Surinamese Hindu context. However, this model or the immunological-scientific discourse, in general, does not consider that a body may encompass a range of connected and intra-acting entities (Yoshizawa, 2016). This reflects a tendency to think of the materiality of pregnant bodies in reference to only (Western) medicine and natural sciences (hereinafter referred to as ‘Science’). Ontological concepts of matter and materiality excluded from the category of Science continue to be neglected in much of the new materialist and material feminist theorising (Willey, 2016: 998) and also in pregnancy studies. This is especially the case with regard to knowledge systems labelled as ‘belief’. Such a perspective recreates and emphasises the problematic and imperialist opposition of religion versus science and privileges Science as the realm in which ‘true’ knowledge about matter can be found (Irni, 2013: 349; Willey, 2016). However, understandings of materiality and bodies are usually influenced by socioreligious and scientific/medical conceptualisations; this is not limited to Hindu Suriname. Considering this variety ensures a more comprehensive understanding of the (re)production of bodies and acknowledges that knowledge is always partial and contextual.

As this case study shows, different knowledge systems and practices of knowing about pregnancy and birth may overlap. They may be in conflict and result in feelings of ambiguity, as my example of the afterbirth has indicated. During my fieldwork, I talked to a wide range of human social actors whom my informants considered to ‘know’ about pregnancy, including mothers, nurses, midwives, pandits, massage therapists and medical practitioners in Nickerie. Most of these interlocutors expressed that Science was ‘only now finding out’ what Hindu scriptures had been teaching them ‘all along’. Most provided examples of bodily emissions and the absorption of energies and substances, which Western medicine now highlights by referring to the transmission of bacteria. Others ridiculed the allegedly ‘novel’ insights of Science, according to which ‘material phenomena are increasingly being conceptualised not as discrete entities or closed systems but rather as open, complex systems with porous boundaries’ (Coole and Frost, 2010: 15). These interlocutors usually pointed out that this knowledge can already be found in ‘age-old’ Hindu scriptures, such as the Vedas.

‘Age-old’ Hindu knowledge supported by ‘novel’ Scientific insight influenced my informants’ understandings of bodily materialisation, reproduction and the openness and porosity of (human) bodies. As I discuss in the final part of this article, the shared Hindu and Scientific understanding of bodies’ openness supported their focus on bodily boundaries and maintenance practices.

Sensitive Pregnant Bodies and the Balancing of Bodily Boundaries

Shivanie, her mother Aarti and I sat on the floor of their apartment in August 2019, with Shivanie’s month-old baby in our midst in a bathtub filled with bluish water. They carefully poured the water over the boy’s head and limbs, explaining that this would ‘cool’ him and that they usually bathed him in the morning and during the hot lunch hours. After the bath, they dried and powdered him from head to toe with baby powder. Then, underneath one of his feet and behind one ear, Shivanie, a practising Hindu woman in her 20s and first-time mother from Nickerie, applied two blue marks, explaining that they are for protection against the evil eye. She elaborated that what she applied is called blauwsel – introduced above — which she had also added to the bath water, contributing to its blue colour and its protective capacity. Later, while preparing dinner, Shivanie and Aarti elaborated that mothers and young babies must be careful of churiles, or ‘evil ghosts’, besides the evil eye.

Churiles are spirits who dwell in the Caribbean and possibly elsewhere. They are said to be ‘ghosts’ of women who died during pregnancy, childbirth or postpartum. They are considered spirits or wandering subtle bodies (De Klerk, 1998: 87–8). Several of my interlocutors discussed the related dangers and protective measures that pregnant women, in particular, should perform. Initially, Balram and Kowsilia introduced me to churiles in a formal interview in August 2019, which evolved into a discussion of childbirth. In this interview, Balram, a retired teacher in his 60s, told me about his niece, who had become possessed by a spirit who later revealed herself as a churile. Many Surinamese informants explained to me that different kinds of spirits may possess people and manifest in them (Pires et al., 2018). Churiles are said to attack only pregnant women and women with ‘young children’. They are motivated by their envy of the attacked person’s pregnancy, motherhood or child – all of which were denied to them. They are persistent and may attack a person more than once, causing a miscarriage.

Dangers and risks like the churile heighten the perception of pregnant bodies as being especially vulnerable and in need of protection, surveillance and professional attention – a common trope found beyond Suriname (Burton-Jeangros, 2011; Lupton, 1999; Oakley, 1986; Ross, 2015; Shaw, 2012). Usually, the concern for the well-being of the unborn is voiced by medical practitioners and the public. The pregnant person’s needs and wishes are often downplayed, which is a stance that pregnant people themselves take at times (Lupton, 1999). I do not believe functionalist interpretations suffice to explain churiles; however, I believe it is relevant to consider them in the wider context of risk discourse and its related notion of protection. Protection has been part of the Western medicalisation of pregnancy and birth, which began in the 19th century. Based on medicalisation, pregnant people’s treatments have been increasingly standardised and controlled by social authorities, juxtaposing medical doctors and midwives, or ‘male scientific knowledge’ and ‘female experiential knowledge’ (Hanson, 2004; Oakley, 1986; Shaw, 2012). The medicalisation of pregnancy and birth was not restricted to European and North American contexts but also extended to European colonies at the time (Van Hollen, 2003). In Suriname – a Dutch colony until its independence in 1975 – concepts and practices related to pregnancy and birth have also been significantly affected by medicalisation. For example, most births (86%) currently take place in hospitals; few (4%) take place in private homes (Kodan et al., 2021). According to the Surinamese Ministry of Health, between 2013 and 2016, women obtained antenatal care from medical doctors (71%), nurses or midwives (19%) and community health workers (4%) (Ministry of Health Suriname, 2021: 19). This is in line with the data I collected on antenatal care while in conversation with women who experienced pregnancy in recent years.

Since 2010, new medical guidelines, trainings, initiatives and campaigns have been implemented, drawing attention to maternal mortality (Kodan et al., 2021). A fortunate decline in maternal deaths has been noted in recent medical research on Suriname, showing that maternal mortality ‘has dropped 43%, from 226 to 130 per 100,000 live births, between 1990 and 2015’ (Verschueren et al., 2020: 3). This may partially explain the often-heard statements that ‘today there are not as many churiles as there used to be’. Regardless of gender and age, when I asked my interlocutors about churiles, they usually explained that their number and/or their attacks have declined significantly. For example, during our dinner preparation after bathing her grandchild, Aarti, who is in her 40s, stated: ‘if in the past there have been one hundred per cent, today there may be twenty per cent left’ (author’s field notes, August 2019).

Death during pregnancy or childbirth brings the extraordinary risk that women might become restless and malevolent spirits, causing miscarriages and ultimately endanger reproduction. Protective measures, thus, remain crucial if pregnant women are to be spared eternal harm, but they are also vital for society because they minimise the number of wandering spirits and spirit attacks. For example, temporary body marks can be applied to protect against spirits and lower sensitivity towards subtle bodies. I suggest that these marks are part of body and boundary maintenance, which become especially relevant during pregnancy and birth.

Pregnant bodies emphasise the unboundedness and porosity of bodies. Their boundaries are perceived to be especially blurry, highlighted by the maternal–foetal relationship. Unstable, porous and nondiscrete bodies may be perceived as dangerous and threatening (Budgeon, 2003; Douglas, 2002 [1966]; Grosz, 1994; Kristeva, 1982; Pitts, 1998). Consequently, they may cause abjection by drawing attention to this borderlessness (Kristeva, 1982), emphasising that the body is always ‘more-than-one’ (Manning, 2010) or that a pregnant body is neither one nor two (Pitts, 1998). Discussing the corporeal boundaries of pregnant bodies, Robyn Longhurst (2001: 84) examines how pregnant bodies are often considered to be ‘leaking’, transgressing the borders between self and other and, hence, producing ‘border ambiguity’, which is perceived as a threat for and by other people. In the remainder of this article, I analyse the sociocultural practices in which pregnant people engage to negotiate, actively regulate and balance these bodily boundaries.

As discussed above, the openness of bodies and their capacity to emit and receive energies and substances has long been remarked upon in Hindu contexts. Examining bodily openness, for example, Sarah Lamb (2000) notes that her informants perceived women’s bodies to be generally more open than men’s bodies, making them especially vulnerable to pollution and impurity. These gendered dimensions of bodily openness are inherently linked to heat/coolness and fluidity/dryness modalities. All bodies are impacted by these conditions, which vary over the course of a person’s life. However, women are considered to be ‘the most “hot” (garam) and “open” (kholā)’ during their reproductive years (Lamb, 2000: n.p.). The body of the reproducing woman, a category that would appear to culminate in a pregnant or birthing body, hence, is understood as especially open.

A pregnant body must be open and permeable, as it has had to absorb a subtle body. A pregnant (subtle-and-gross) body, thus, must be exceptionally sensitive and open to subtle entities. Its receptive potential facilitates life-creating processes, but it also poses an inherent risk to the pregnant woman’s health and well-being. Her increased openness allows a range of subtle bodies and entities to enter her body. Her creative openness simultaneously generates a risky permeability. My informants referred to bodies that were particularly accessible and susceptible to subtle bodies as ‘sensitive’. They used the Dutch expression gevoelig, which can be translated as tedj in Sarnami. Tedj may further be interpreted to mean bright, hot, powerful, strong and fierce (Bosch, 2002: 204). Hence, a sensitive body is considered particularly intense, powerful and effective; thus, such bodies cannot be related only to passive absorption. Sensitive bodies emit and attract, actively affecting themselves and others.

From my interlocutors’ perspective, a body’s degree of sensitivity depends on its specific modalities and intensities. Many Hindus consider each human body to exist in a specific thermal or energetic state; bodies may be ‘hot’ or ‘cold’, and, as mentioned above, they may also be actively cooled. The energetic state transforms throughout a lifetime or shorter periods, such as minutes, hours, days or months. It adapts without the influence of human agency. However, a human being is not passively exposed to these changes: a person can influence a body’s heat or coolness to a certain degree. Humans can contribute to (un-)balancing the energetic state of the body by, for example, consuming specific heating or cooling foods or drinks (Fuller, 2004: 45) that actively influence the body’s energetic balance. Thus, careful attention is paid to dietary rules in rites of passage, such as chathi. Similarly, my informants referred to the cooling capacities of specific body markings. For example, Meena, who is in her 50s and is originally from Nickerie but whom I encountered in a Hindu temple in The Hague, Netherlands, explained various kinds of body marks to me in April 2018. According to her, ritual marking with sandalwood is commonly placed on people’s foreheads during a puja. Pointing at her own forehead, between the eyebrows, she explained that the ‘third eye’ is located at this spot, which ‘gets warm’ and that ‘here’ sandalwood ‘has a cooling effect’ (emphasis in original). Cooling was referred to as actively limiting or lowering a pregnant body’s attractive force, serving as protection against both evil gazes and spirits.

Most Hindus consider a pregnant body to be ‘hot’. For this reason, they hold that a pregnant woman should avoid eating heating foods (Fuller, 2004: 45). Furthermore, in my research, my interlocutors referred to the relevance of heat and activity in the context of pregnancy. I suggest that these notions relate to the guṇa concept, which denotes the ‘three inextricably intertwined strands, or constituents, of material nature (prakṛti)’ (Johnson, 2010: 134–5). Guṇa – the three components of materiality – can be combined in various ways, thereby creating different beings and qualities (i.e. of a person). These material conditions are not fixed but may be actively transformed (Mines, 1989: 116). One of the three components of matter is rajas, representing the ‘principle of kinesis or energy’ and characterising ‘certain “hot” (i.e. stimulating) foods’ (Johnson, 2010: 257). Rajasik units – which are dominated by rajas – are characterised by heightened activity and exchange with the ‘external’ world:

Persons, like beings of all other categories, may preserve their particular composite natures and powers by stabilizing (typically by ‘cooling’, removing heat from) their constituents, and by admitting into themselves only what is homogeneous and compatible; or they may transform their bodies with their inherent codes by mixing and/or separating their particulate constituents, sometimes with the help of catalytic heat, or by heterogeneous inputs. (Marriott, 1976: 111)

Catalytic heat is the underlying potential in processes of transactional mixing and union and is considered both product and cause of attracting and emitting substances from and to the external world (Marriott, 1976: 136).

Accordingly, I argue that my interlocutors considered pregnant bodies to be especially rajasik during pregnancy and birth, which may be considered another iteration of the Sarnami tedj. Specific body markings may cool tedj bodies to recreate a more balanced bodily state and material condition. They are a means of actively negotiating bodily boundaries, which, in this context, may not necessarily be linked to or equated with an outer layer or a particularly ‘gross’ cover of a body (e.g. skin). Instead, the notion of what constitutes a body’s boundary must be reconsidered because it may be constituted and influenced by specific energetic states. A human body’s border is constantly (re-)created by its attractive force, which absorbs and emits energies and substances. The resulting material (im-)balance is never fixed and stable.

Body-marking practices, such as applying blauwsel, affect this balance, allowing humans to contribute to entangled agency in bodily transaction and materialisation. Applying specific marks actively cools the body, which balances its energetic state and transactional exchange and, therefore, its boundaries.

Conclusion

Birth is a process of separation, which has social and material dimensions. The processes and acts of separation define supposedly distinct (human) bodies by (re)creating boundaries among intra-acting entities. These entities consist of various degrees or levels of materiality. As discussed in this study, bodies or ‘units’ are specific composites of subtle and gross material entities. Although human social actors have the capacity to transform the energetic state and attractive force of their bodies, other-than-human actors – other subtle bodies (e.g. spirits and deities) and matter itself – also actively affect the processes of transactional exchange and bodily transformation.

Accordingly, pregnancy may be defined as an active process in which bodies gestate, transform and combine different materiality levels. A pregnant body has to attract and absorb a to-be-reborn subtle body. To allow and facilitate this process, a pregnant body has to be especially sensitive and open, which poses the risk of various kinds of subtle bodies to transgress its borders. Specific practices of boundary maintenance can be put into play to actively regulate the energetic state and material balance of (pregnant) bodies, which affect their openness and level of sensitivity.

Human beings cannot be understood to be the only and dominant actors in these processes of materialisation. Catalytic heat as attractive force and agentive capacity deserves more attention in future research to better comprehend the potential levels and degrees of (human) corporeality. This article hopefully invites further reflection on definitions and approaches to bodily boundaries beyond the skin. They may be based on a body’s energetic materialisation, sociocultural balancing practices and interpretations of bodily union and separation.

Most academic research and literature on pregnancy and birth, including many material feminist and new materialist studies, continue to interrogate bioscientific perspectives, reproducing the epistemological hegemony of Science as the only route to knowledge on bodies and matter. Attention must be drawn to the fact that matter in itself cannot be understood to be a universal given and that there exist many ways matter and materiality can be defined and experienced. More comprehensive theoretical foundations of bodily materialisation must be formulated, including the various ways of knowing that social actors negotiate and experience. If we continue to exclude specific ways of knowing from our analyses and discredit them as ‘belief’, we reconstruct an artificial and highly problematic opposition of religion versus science. Therefore, future studies on pregnancy and childbirth should consider the variety of knowledge systems in any given context. This will open up alternative approaches to theorising agentive capacities in processes of materialisation.