Following Kerim’s excellent post regarding the sex/gender system and new efforts to bring an ethic of ‘self determination’ into the legal recognition of sexed and/or gendered bodies, a point about motherhood. As I have already written on this site, I have been teaching a course on kinship this term. The course is going well — I hope — and we are now moving from the classic ‘kinship and social structure’ type of analysis to the ‘cultures of relatedness’ stuff. Two segues: one, new reproductive technologies, which (again) may or may not animate ‘choice’/’self-determination’ in the context of the putatively natural realm of kinship. It’s almost as though laws in New York state and technologies everywhere are catching up to the radical feminist program of the 1970s: to undo compulsory systems of sex/gender domination by making them subject to individual negotiation (read: agency). Second, the history of marriage in Europe and the prohibition on incest. We have been reading Ariès’s contested thesis about the invention of childhood, Goody’s brilliant and contested argument about property and the church in the creation of modern marriage, and Duby’s sensitive ‘ethnographic’ portraits of kinship among the ruling classes of medieval Europe. It’s funny that the historians in this instance end up sounding more anthropological than the anthropologist: Goody reading Europe through the prism of inheritance/property flattens the cultural dynamics involved in church prescriptions regarding marriage (as N Z Davis, among others, has pointed out). So Duby’s histoire du mentalité ends up seeming rather like something that a cultural anthropologist would write. Which of course makes sense, given the intellectual background of these folks.
One thing that has come up over and over again in our course, and that I think I will consider the next time I teach it, is the putative naturalness of the mother-child relation. Many introductory kinship texts begin by pointing out that while fatherhood is frequently non-obvious, motherhood never is. The obviousness of motherhood makes theories of primitive promiscuity in relation to classificatory kinship terminology problematic (extension of the term ‘mother’ to cover over possibly previous promiscuity really doesn’t make sense). And the problem of motherhood and nurture also gets built into mid/late-20th-century accounts of gender assymetry, as in critiques of the public/private or political/domestic divide. My students ask: how can motherhood be culturally constructed? I now realize that when I next use materials from medieval Europe in my kinship course, I will also want to teach Bynum’s “Jesus as Mother.”
There are abundant materials for prying apart the supposed univerality (or ‘obviousness’) of the mother-child relation. Melanesia offers some, and I would just point to Marilyn Strathern’s claim, on re-reading Kelly’s analysis of Etoro: “Put simply, I cannot find any Etoro mothers — analytically speaking, they offer no starting point for analysis.” (See, Gregor and Tuzin.) We have also visited Middleton’s account of ‘how Karembola men become mothers.’
Another potential source is Scheper-Hughes’ powerful stories of the choices that poor women in NE Brazil are forced to make with regard to their children. Scheper-Hughes talks about her work in a video interview available here.
Examples can of course be multiplied. Suggestions?
For a biological anthropological perspective, take a look at Sarah Hrdy’s book (1999) Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection. Pantheon Books
I second the idea of beginning and/or using evolutionary thinking in making these arguments with students. When I teach gender I often start with the evolution of our brains (encephalization), because our brains require an intensive period of child care and an enormous investment in resources in raising children. What makes humans interesting isn’t our “motherhood” among women, but rather the surprising amount of time and effort required by men for the successful raising of children. Because human children require adequate physical care (or they die) and adequate emotional and social care (or they are unable to adapt socially as adults), it requires an investment at the social level for the successful raising of children, which leaves a great deal of room for societies/cultures to organize childrearing in any number of ways. The “western” idea of “motherhood” is only one among them, and probably not even the best or most efficient. Besides, historically and sociologically, if children in the west were solely nurtured by “mothers” (especially the nuclear family model), there is no way that they would survive physically or adapt socially. The idea of motherhood in the ‘west’ is basically a social conceit that hides the actually complexity and the multiple adult individuals who must invest in a child for its successful growth.
May I suggest chapter 2 in Londa Schibinger (1993) “Why Mammals are called Mammals” in Nature’s Body. Gender in the making of Modern Science for a feel of the historicity regarding the image of the female as the main child rearer.
And for the notion of biology in kinship I would propose reading Sarah Franklin (2001) “Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of New Biologies” in Sarah Franklin & Susan McKinnon (ed) Relative Values. Reconfiguring Kinship Studies.
In addition I would like to guide your attention to the performative turn in discussions like these. Authors such as Karen Barad (2003) talks about becomings – in regard to the question of motherhood I would imagine that she would argue that motherhood is not a question of biology nor social constructions rather motherhood is a becoming through repeated performance. A blend of biology, matter, discourse, social praxis etc.
I’d also recommend Linda Layne’s _Motherhood Lost_, which is actually an ethnography of pregnancy loss, that is, miscarriage. It’s an excellent and heartwrenching account of how women negotiate their identities as mothers when the child is never born, how it relates to religion and feminism and reproductive rights and so on. Often hard to read, but a beautiful analysis of a common, important, and often overlooked phenomenon.
A recent social construct of motherhood just happened with publication, analysis and interpretation of the Dikika fossil individual, a A. afarensis specimen. If you don’t know or don’t quite remember, this fossil hominid has been toted to be “Lucy’s” child, and it reeks of anthropocentric assumptions. Lots of far reaching implications of not-quite-ape-but-not-human gender roles have been made in a National Geographic article not so recently, an Anthropology.net blogger, Kelly Hale recently wrote a critique on how it is wrong for us to apply these constructs of motherhood on extinct animals other than humans. This could be of interest to any of your students with interests to interpreting culture and behavior from archaeological and paleontological evidence. Here’s the link: Dikika, culture and other things to ponder.
“Kelly Hale recently wrote a critique on how it is wrong for us to apply these constructs of motherhood on extinct animals other than humans.”
For that matter, as Donna Haraway showed, it’s wrong to apply these constructs of motherhood to extinct animals even if they are human. This is, to me, one of the big blind spots of evolutionary psych — you get projections of modern fantasies of maternalism and paternalism projected back on pre-modern history, which is then used to explain where our modern sense of maternalism and paternalism came from…
Thanks for these great suggestions.