Something that really caught my eye in Dixon’s piece was the slippage between “professional” and “traditional” as it relates to midwifery practices. From the very get-go, Dixon presents what seems to lean towards a generational divide: “if you want traditional plant remedies, see the younger midwife; if you want drugs, see the elder” (2). Rather than continuing this seemingly binary opposition between younger and older practitioners, Dixon moves us into seeing the messiness present within biomedical vs. herbal remedies and midwifery practices before bringing us to think through global health as something that is similarly refusing a clear delineation. Global health is both a particular and a universal, a local practice and an international set of standards. Similarly, global health is not seen in Juana’s Pitocin and self-proclaimed “traditional” title, but perhaps the simplicity of anti-hemorrhaging shots and basic training are what bring in international funding to practitioners like Juana.
Returning once more to the “traditional” and “professional” slippage, the initial story in Chapter 3 about Irma’s birthing experience outside of a clinic speaks to the ways we privilege ideals of “global health” in ways that often miss the particularities and underlying inequalities and inequities within each local context. Dixon uses this to present the professionalization of midwifery that is in emergent stages in Mexico and follows Julieta, a midwife that underwent professional training yet used non-biomedical practices and thus earned the respect of her fellow midwives in training. In this chapter, Dixon does not bring back this slippage of traditional and professional, but I think it reflects Juana’s use of pitocin and self-identifier of traditional. Here, I want to ask the question: How can we think about traditional practices as able to be professionalized, and in what ways does self-identifying as traditional or professional, regardless of training, speak to the larger systems of global health as discussed by Dixon?