Browsing by Subject "auktoritatiivinen tieto"

Somalian migrant women living in Finland give up breastfeeding easily in favour of bottle-feeding their babies even though breastfeeding is given a high value in Somalian culture. The lack of support and knowledge related to breastfeeding is often referred as the reason for the frequency of bottle-feeding. My aim is conduct a participatory research on the knowledge systems which the Somalian mothers perceive as authoritative. I look at the concept of authoritative knowledge as put forward by the anthropologist Brigitte Jordan in the light of various ethnographic case studies. I use the theory of Jean Pierre Olivier de Sardan on local popular knowledge systems and how they meet scientific technical knowledge in the context of development. I also analyse how Somalian mothers’ knowledge systems encounter Finnish health care system’s breastfeeding information. The aim of participatory methods is to make the voices of the weak and oppressed populations heard. I use semi-structured interviews and Rapi Rurad Appraisal (RRA) -methods such as Venn-diagrams and score ranking in data collection. The informants of my research are seventeen Somalian migrant mothers and one Finnish maternity health care unit nurse. The result of my research is that Somalian migrant mothers’ breastfeeding-related knowledge system consist of three knowledge systems which are the traditional health-related knowledge produced by family networks, the Islamic health norms and the scientific health knowledge produced by the Finnish health care system. There is no contradiction between these three knowledge systems regarding breastfeeding. The major difficulties related to breastfeeding occur as a result of the breakdown of family networks and communication problems with the Finnish health care system.