Chapter 14: Collaborative and Comprehensive Research in Bahia, Brazil: Reframing Researcher–Participant Relationships

Everything started at birth: childbirth. Roger Bibace, Kenneth Noller, and Jaan Valsiner, launching from different bases, had collaborated on a research proposal on the subject of the cultural construction of childbirth. Jaan brought that proposal to my students and me in the state of Bahia, with an invitation to collaborate on the study of meanings and circumstances of birthing in Brazil—at that time, the country with the highest frequency of Caesarian-section deliveries. Pregnancy was also considered relevant to the analysis of developmental phenomena in irreversible time,¹ taking into account its quite apparent double nature as a public and private experience.