Cultural Midwifery is a theoretical inquiry that explores an ontology of being, being with, and being within the becoming that may ease the transition of individuals, communities, organizations, and social institutions through the uncertainties of “postnormal times”—the undefined spaces between paradigms that are failing and those that have yet to emerge. With a mind toward a declining Industrial Age in the West, and a possible Ecological Era on the horizon, Cultural Midwifery attempts to cull the knowledge and skill sets of midwives, who have been attending to liminal spaces for millennia, so as to inform and to narrativize the emergent and complex adaptive dynamics of epistemology, leadership, relational care, and culture. Midwifery is presented as an originary, poetic, pragmatic, and embodied ēthos of relating, meaning-making, and leading into being. To engage this inquiry with a depth of understanding and a breadth of awareness that honors myriad ways of knowing, that calls upon a wholeness of being, and that allows for nonlinear emergentism, a new, processual inquiry perspective, entitled the “complex gaze,” is also introduced.
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