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 Somé remembers how freely children wandered into houses throughout the village. Somé 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, Somé 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.”2
Though Somé’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….”7
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, including affection and food-getting, are provided by all clansmen.”8 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.”11
“A natural family.” Perhaps this easy acceptance between adults and unrelated children, the diffuse nurturing found in societies where children refer to all men as father and all women as mother, societies small and isolated enough to safely assume the kindness of strangers, where overlapping sexual relationships leave genetic paternity unknowable and of little consequence … perhaps this is the “natural” family structure of our species.
Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband-wife nucleus with an orbiting child or two is in fact a culturally imposed aberration for our species—as ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor? Dare we ask whether mothers, fathers, and children are all being shoe-horned into a family structure that suits none of us? Might the contemporary pandemics of fracturing families, parental exhaustion, and confused, resentful children be predictable consequences of what is, in truth, a distorted and distorting family structure inappropriate for our species?
Nuclear Meltdown
If the independent, isolated nuclear family unit is, in fact, the structure into which human beings most naturally configure themselves, why do contemporary societies and religions find it necessary to prop it up with tax breaks and supportive legislation while fiercely defending it from same-sex couples and others proposing to marry in supposedly “nontraditional”ways? One wonders, in fact, why marriage is a legal issue at all—apart from its relevance to immigration and property laws. Why would something so integral to human nature require such vigilant legal protection?
Furthermore, if the nuclear triad is so deeply embedded in our nature, why are fewer and fewer of us choosing to live that way? In the United States, the percentage of nuclear family households has dropped from 45 to 23.5 since the 1970s. Married couples (with and without children) accounted for roughly 84 percent of all American households in 1930, but the latest figure is just under 50 percent, while the number of unmarried couples living together has mushroomed from about 500,000 in 1970 to more than ten times that number in 2008.
Before Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), the most respected and influential anthropologist of his day, declared the issue settled, there was plenty of debate over whether or not the mother-father-child triad was, in fact, the universal atomic unit of human social organization. Malinowski scoffed at Morgan’s notion that societies could ever have been organized along nonnuclear lines, writing:
These actors are obviously three in number at the beginning—the two parents and their offspring…. This unquestionably correct principle has become … the starting point for a new interpretation of Morgan’s hypothesis of a primitive communal marriage. [They are] fully aware that group-marriage implies group-parenthood. Yet group-parenthood [is] an almost unthinkable hypothesis…. This conclusion has led to such capital howlers as that “the clan marries the clan and begets the clan” and that “the clan, like the family, is a reproductive group” [emphasis added].12
“Unquestioningly correct principle?” “Unthinkable hypothesis?” “Capital howlers?” Malinowski seems to have been personally offended that Morgan had dared to doubt the universality and naturalness of the sanctified nuclear family structure.
Meanwhile, within a few blocks of the London classrooms where he lectured, untold numbers of infants whose existence threatened to expose the colossal error at the heart of Malinowski’s “unquestioningly correct principle” were being sacrificed, quite literally, in foundling hospitals. The situation was no less horrific in the United States. In 1915, a doctor named Henry Chapin visited ten foundling hospitals and found that in nine of them, every child died before the age of two. Every child.13 This dark fate awaited inconvenient children born throughout Europe. In her memoir of middle-class life in early twentieth–century Germany, for instance, Doris Drucker describes the village “Angel-maker,” who received babies from unwed mothers and “starved the little children in her care to death,” while the unwed, now childless mother was hired out as a wet nurse to upper-class families.14 How efficient.
Horrifying as it is to contemplate, widespread infanticide was not limited to Malinowski’s day. For centuries, millions of European children had been passed through discreet revolving boxes set into the walls of foundling hospitals. These boxes were designed to protect the anonymity of the person leaving the child, but they offered scant protection to the infant. The survival rate in those institutions was little better than if the revolving boxes had opened directly into a crematorium’s furnace. Far from being places of healing, these were government- and church-approved slaughterhouses where children whose existence might have raised inconvenient questions about the “naturalness” of the nuclear family were disposed of in a form of industrialized infanticide.15
In his book Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History, historian Robert S. McElvaine gets off a few “capital howlers” of his own, writing, “the general trend in human evolution is undeniably toward pair bonding and lasting families. Pair bonding (albeit often with some backsliding, especially by men) and the family are,” he insists, “the exceptions notwithstanding, among the traits that characterize the human species [emphasis added].”16
Sure, forget all the backsliding and the many exceptions, and you’ve got a real strong case!
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Malinowski’s position remains deeply embedded in both scientific and popular assumptions about family structure. In fact, the whole architecture of what qualifies as family in Western society is based on Malinowski’s insistence that each child everywhere has always had just one father.
But if Malinowski’s position has won the day, why is poor Morgan’s intellectual body still being regularly disinterred for further insult? Anthropologist Laura Betzig opens a paper on conjugal dissolution (failed marriage) by noting that Morgan’s “fantasy [of group marriage] … expired on encountering the evidence, and a century after Morgan … the consensus is that [monogamous] marriage comes as close to being a human universal as anything about human behavior can.”17 Ouch. But in truth, Morgan’s understanding of family structure was no “fantasy.” His conclusions were based upon decades of extensive field research and study. Later, a bit less wind in her sails, Betzig admits that “there is still, however, no consensus as to why” marriage is so widespread.
That’s a mystery all right. We’ll see that anthropologists find marriage wherever they look mainly because they haven’t quite decided what it looks like.
* Where nonparents act in a parental role.