CHAPTER SEVEN Mommies Dearest
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.
KAHLIL GIBRAN
The diffused sense of parental responsibility resulting from these intersecting webs of sexual interaction extends to mothers as well as fathers. Anthropologist Donald Pollock tells us that while the Kulina believe the fetus to have originally been formed of accumulated semen (men’s milk, in Kulina), they attribute the baby’s growth after birth to women’s milk. “Any number of women might nurse the child,” he writes. “It is particularly common for a group of sisters .to share nursing functions; it is not unknown for the mother’s mother to allow an infant to nurse, even if the grandmother is no longer lactating, to quiet a crying child whose mother is occupied.” When he asked whether these other women were also mothers of the child, Pollock was told this was “obviously so.”1
Recalling his childhood among the Dagara, in Burkina Faso, author and psychologist Malidoma Patrice Some remembers how freely children wandered into houses throughout the village. Some explains that this “gives the child a very broad sense of belonging,” and that “everybody chips in to help raise the child.” Apart from the many obvious benefits to parents, Some sees distinct psychological advantages for the children, saying, “It’s very rare that a child feels isolated or develops psychological problems; everyone is very aware of where he or she belongs.”
Though Some’s account may sound like idealized memory, what he describes is still standard village life in most of rural Africa, where children are welcome to wander in and out of the homes of unrelated adults in villages. Though a mother’s love is no doubt unique, women (and some men) the world over are eager to coo over unrelated babies, not just their own—an eagerness common to other social primates, none of whom, by the way, are monogamous. This deeply felt, broadly shared willingness to care for unrelated children lives on in the modern world: the bureaucratic ordeal of adoption rivals or exceeds the stress and expense of childbirth, yet millions of couples eagerly pursue its uncertain rewards.
Scientists focused only on the nuclear family miss the central
*
role of alloparenting in our species. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mothers and Others, laments, “Infant-sharing in other primates and in various tribal societies has never been accorded center stage in the anthropological literature. Many people don’t even realize it goes on. Yet ... the consequences of cooperative care—in terms of survival and biological fitness of mother and infant—turn out to be all to the good.”3
Darwin entertained the radical possibility that the mother-child bond may have been less important to “barbarous” individuals than their bond with the greater group. Commenting on the customary use of familial terms like mother, father, son, and daughter in reference to all group members, he suggested, “The terms employed express a connection with the tribe alone, to the exclusion of the mother. It seems possible that the connection between the related members of the same barbarous tribe, exposed to all sorts of danger, might be so much more important, owing to the need of mutual protection and aid, than that between the mother and her child..”4
When seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune lectured a Montagnais Indian man about the dangers of the rampant infidelity he’d witnessed, Le Jeune received a lesson on proper parenthood in response. The missionary recalled, “I told him that it was not honorable for a woman to love any one else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was there present, was his son. He replied, ‘Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we all love all the children of our tribe.’ “5
Though it seems like common sense to most of us, our own biology-based kinship system is another case of Flintstonization. We simply assume our own conception of family reflects something eternal and universal in human nature. But as we’ve seen, there isn’t even agreement among all people that one sex act is sufficient to result in pregnancy.
The concept of one-mother-per-child is running into trouble in Western societies too. “Motherhood is splintering,” writes William Saletan, the “human nature expert” at Slate.com. “You can have a genetic mother, a gestational mother, an adoptive mother, and God knows what else. When one of your moms is Grandma, it’s even more confusing.” Speaking of surrogate mothers who gestate another woman’s fetus, Saletan argues that it makes sense for a woman’s mother to offer to carry the baby: “When the surrogate is Grandma, the mess is less. Mother and daughter share a genetic bond to each other and to the child. They’re much more likely to work things out and give the child a stable family environment.”6 Perhaps. Either way, with widespread adoption, stepfamilies resulting from remarriage, and techniques such as surrogate gestation, sperm donation, and cryogenic embryo preservation, Homo sapiens is on the fast track away from “traditional” family structures, perhaps headed toward more flexible arrangements reminiscent of the distant past.
Belief in partible paternity spreads fatherly feelings throughout a group, but this is just one of many mechanisms for enhancing group solidity. Anthropologists report numerous societies in which naming ceremonies and clan affiliations create obligations between individuals more binding than blood relations. Referring to the Matis people, with whom he lived, anthropologist Philippe Erikson notes, “When it comes to defining kinship ties, relationships deriving from naming practices have absolute priority over any other considerations, such as genealogical connections. When conflicts arise between the two modes of reckoning, sharing a name has precedence.. ”
Some anthropologists question whether kinship is an important concept in band-level societies at all—however defined. They argue that since everyone in such a small-scale society is likely to be related to each other in some way, affinity tends to be measured in more fluid terms, such as friendship and sharing partners.
As Darwin understood, even the most direct and immediate kinship terminology is subject to cultural definition. “Fatherly behavior is expected of all the males of a local clan toward all the young of the clan,” says anthropologist Janet Chernela. “Multiple aspects of caretaking, includin8 affection and food-getting, are provided by all clansmen.” Anthropologist Vanessa Lea notes that, based upon her experience among the Mebengokre, “The allocation of responsibility is socially constructed and not an objective fact..”9 Among the Tukanoan, “Clan brothers provide for one another’s children as a collective. Through the pooling of the daily catch, each male regularly labors for all of the children of a village—his own offspring as well as those of his brothers.”10
This diffused approach to parenting isn’t limited to villages in Africa or Amazonia. Desmond Morris recalls an afternoon he spent with a female truck driver in Polynesia. She told him that she’d had nine children, but had given two of them to an infertile friend. When Morris asked how the kids felt about that, she said they didn’t mind at all, as “all of us love all of the children.” Morris recalls, “This last point is underlined by the fact that, when we reach the village . she passes the time by wandering over to a group of toddlers, lying down in the grass with them and playing with them exactly as if they were her own. They accept her instantly, without any questioning, and a passer-by would never have guessed that they were anything other than a natural family playing together.” 1