In highly industrialised societies, risk shapes representations and practices surrounding childbirth. However, few studies examine the impact of the transnational diffusion of risk in medium and low income societies, where, despite the adoption of biomedical protocols on an institutional level, women and birth attendants often seem to follow different rationales in their practices. In this article, we are interested in the various components of the notion of risk, which shall be understood and examined in relation to specific socio-economic, political and cultural configurations. Drawing on two ethnographic studies conducted, respectively, in a Swiss university hospital and in three Jordanian government hospitals, we investigate how surveillance and medical interventions are deployed in pregnancy and childbirth in unequally structured health systems and describe negotiations and appropriations surrounding this management. These two contrasting cultural, socio-economic and health ‘system’ contexts reveal important differences in the way birth attendants and women consider the notion of risk in childbirth in that it is seldom present in clinicians’ and women’s discourses and practices in Jordan, whereas it plays a pertinent role in Switzerland. We argue that the heterogeneous configurations of risk mobilised by the participants in these studies reveal that dissimilar histories in terms of medical institutions and health care service provisions, political regimes, economic conditions, and social configurations shape the cultural and techno-medical arrangements of the institutions we studied. Comparing our Jordanian and Swiss ethnographies, we show that the mobilisation of biomedical risk does not happen in a vacuum but rather intertwines with specific social arrangements, eliciting resistance and adaptation that fashion the discourses and behaviours of birth attendants and pregnant women.

在高度工业化的社会中，风险影响着分娩的表征和实践。但是，很少有研究检查风险的跨国传播对中低收入社会的影响，尽管在机构层面采用了生物医学协议，但妇女和接生员似乎在实践中往往遵循不同的原理。在本文中，我们对风险概念的各个组成部分都感兴趣，应该根据特定的社会经济，政治和文化结构来理解和研究这些概念。利用分别在瑞士大学医院和约旦三所政府医院进行的两项人种学研究，我们调查了在结构不均衡的卫生系统中，如何在妊娠和分娩中部署监视和医疗干预措施，并描述了围绕该管理的谈判和拨款。两种截然不同的文化，社会经济和卫生“系统”背景揭示了接生员和妇女在考虑分娩风险概念时的重要差异，因为约旦很少在临床医生和妇女的话语和习俗中出现这种情况，而在瑞士发挥着重要作用。我们认为，这些研究的参与者动员的风险的异构结构表明，在医疗机构和医疗服务条款，政治制度，经济状况，社会结构决定了我们所研究机构的文化和技术医学安排。比较我们的约旦人种和瑞士人种志，我们发现动员生物医学风险并不是在真空中进行的，而是与特定的社会安排交织在一起，引起抵抗和适应，从而形成了接生员和孕妇的话语和行为。