Marcia Good is a cultural anthropologist with a masters in Latin American Studies and a PhD in anthropology with a focus on Medical Anthropology and a PhD concentration in Women's Studies and Gender Research. She conducted research in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico on childbirth. She studied midwives and their relationship to the Mexican medical system and how their practice was shaped by the changing Mexican medical system and the urban environment.
The urban landscape of Merida, Yucatan is rich with overlapping and criss-crossing imaginaries of what it means to be a good person and have a good birth and this increasingly includes the cesarean as an evermore ordinary way to give birth. Her dissertation explored the many ways that people use narrative labor about their cesareans as a way of exploring and explaining their identity and social position in society.
Before completing the doctorate, she worked and lived in Mexico, Bolivia and Costa Rica doing community development, administering a training center, leading workshops and training seminars, creating and working in community libraries and women’s centers and teaching adult literacy. She readily tells tales of an ethnographically engaged life and is on a quest to enable students to live, tell and teach their own.