Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Journal of Material Culture
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Landzelius, K. M.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Charged Artifacts and the Detonation of Liminality

Teddy-Bear Diplomacy in the Newborn Incubator Machine

Kyra Marie Landzelius

Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, UK, kml24{at}cam.ac.uk, kyra_landzelius{at}yahoo.com

This article employs ethnography to explore the multiple significations of ornamenting the incubator, a quasi-ritual practice wherein mothers of preterm babies place rudimentary things, like stuffed animal toys, into their infants’ life-support machines. I contend that such enactments pose more or less conscious endeavors to domesticate and animate these prosthetic devices, as veritable cyborg wombs which interpolate mother-child bonding and problematize maternal identity. In these acts, the ‘technoscapes’ (Appadurai, 1990) of cheap, mundane items and exclusive, precision instruments converge in a paradoxical, but fertile juxtaposition to make the ambiguous figure of the preterm infant culturally-intelligible as well as biologically-viable. It is suggested that the liminality of toys and trinkets out of place empowers them to attenuate the alienness of the incubator and its technoliminal capacity to alienate. A kind of teddy-bear diplomacy is in play wherein juvenile playthings are enlisted to detonate the charged foreignness of the incubator-other, and bring baby into familiar cultural grammars.

Key Words: incubator • liminal • motherhood • preterm • prosthesis • technology • teddy bear

Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 6, No. 3, 323-344 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/135918350100600303
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?