From dlupher@ups.edu Thu May 4 11:48:29 2000 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA23064 for ; Thu, 4 May 2000 11:48:27 -0700 Received: from mail.ups.edu (mail.ups.edu [192.124.98.111]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA10337 for ; Thu, 4 May 2000 11:48:26 -0700 Received: from [10.80.1.53] (howarthdhcp53.ups.edu [10.80.1.53]) by mail.ups.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id LAA24374 for ; Thu, 4 May 2000 11:48:13 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <3910F549.C40461BA@charm.net> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Thu, 4 May 2000 11:48:41 -0700 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Re: Grief for dead children (+ a note on twins) Thanks to Margaret Phillips, Diana Wright, and Judith Sebesta for their thoughtful and informative comments about modern (and early modern) parental grief. List-members with sufficiently Stoic emotional constitutions may be brave enough to tackle a morbidly fascinating work of anthropology on this subject: Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil" (Univ. of Calif. Press, 1992--- Scheper-Hughes is Prof. of Anthopology at UC Berkeley). It's a 600-page book, powerfully written and well illustrated. If you thought moments of "Central Station" were depressing, wait until you read this. Especially relevant to our discussion are chapters 7 ("Two Feet Under and a Cardboard Coffin: The Social Production of Indifference to Child Death") and 8 ("(M)Other Love: Culture, Scarcity, and Maternal Thinking"). Here's an extract from ch. 8 (pp. 363-4): ...(T)he ethos of "holy resignation"...informs maternal thinking and practice. It is present every time Alto [Alto de Cruzeiro, a hillside shantytown] mothers say that their infants are "like birds," nervous and flighty creatures that are here today and gone tomorrow. A perfectly good mother can in good faith and with a clear conscience let go of an infant who "wants" to escape life, just as one may set free into the heavens a miserable wild bird that was beating its wings against its cage. "What does it mean, *really*," I asked Doralice, an older woman of the Alto who often intervenes in poor households to rescue young and vulnerable mothers and their threatened infants, "to say that infants are like birds?" "It means that...well, there is another expression you should know first. It is that all of us, our lives, are like burning candles. At any moment we can suddenly 'go out without warning [a qualquer momento apaga].' But for the infant it is even more so. The grownup, the adult, is very attached to life. One doesn't want to leave it with ease or without a struggle. But infants are not so connected, and their light can be extinguished very easily. As far as they are concerned, *tanto faz* [it makes no difference], alive or dead, it makes no real difference to them. There is not the strong *vontade* to live that marks the big person. And so we say that 'infants are like little birds,' here one moment, flying off the next. That is how we like to think about their deaths, too. We like to imagine our dead infants as little winged angels flying off to heaven to gather noisily around the thrones of Jesus and Mary, bringing pleasure to them and hope for us on earth." And so a good part of learning how to mother on the Alto includes knowing when to let go of a child who shows that he wants to die. The other part is knowing just when it is safe to let oneself go enough to love a child, to trust him or her to be willing to enter the *luta* that is this life on earth. Doralice's comment about dead babies as noisy angels reminds me of a thought I had when looking at the charming Della Robbia reliefs of lively kiddie angels in the museum of the Duomo in Florence. It occurred to me that such artworks might have been a real consolation to those who had lost young children. The ancient Greeks, however, seem to have allowed themselves no such comforts regarding the "untimely dead," the "aOroi," as I am being reminded now that I am reading Sarah Iles Johnston's fascinating book "Restless Dead" (Univ. of Calif. Press, 1999). Reading Scheper-Hughes' account of contemporary Brazil puts me in mind of John Gould's claim that classical Attica was "a world far closer to present-day village India than to anything in our own immediate experience, a world in which the expectation of life was appallingly low and in which medicine (the most articulate and sophisticated of ancient sciences) was all too often an unavailing witness of human suffering..." ("On Making Sense of Greek Religion," in Easterling & Muir, ed., "Greek Religion and Society," Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985, p. 6). But if we accept Gould's analogy, perhaps we can assume that the mode of life in "village India" is a notch above that of shantytown Brazil? (You see, I am desperately clinging to the hope that Scheper- Hughes' book is about a very special case.) Art Pomeroy suggests that a parental indifference bred of high infant mortality rates > also helps to explain why exposure was an acceptable form of > population control in the ancient world. Mark Golden addresses this question in his 1988 G&R article "Did the Ancients Care When Their Children Died," p. 158. He argues that the practice of infanticide "tells us nothing about the ancients' responses to the deaths of the children they did decide to raise. Infanticide is known to coexist with care of and affection for children both in societies studied by anthropologists---once again we may point to the Kalahari Desert San--and in pre-industrial Europe." He proceeds to offer at some length the analogy of American and European women who choose to have abortions at one stage of their lives and yet show strong maternal feeling toward the children the do choose to have at another time of their life. He cites a number of studies bearing this out. Golden cites the pro- choice slogan "Every child a wanted child." (Cf. the bumperstickers proclaiming: "Pro-Choice. Pro-Family.") Diana Wright wrote: >In that same culture, it was still known (though illegal) for twins to be >exposed, for the reason that one of them obviously had a non-mortal for a >father. Victor Turner, in "Paradoxes of Twinship in Ndembu Ritual" (ch. 2 of "The Ritual Process," Cornell, 1969), cites H. Baumann on the Bushmen of the Kalahari: "L'infanticide est frequent par suite des conditions economiques difficiles, mais le meurtre des jumeaux ou de l'un d'entre eux est du a la croyance qu'ils portent malheur" (p. 47). Turner argued that for many "primitive" societies twins constitute an affront to established kinship systems: For it is widely held, in Africa and elsewhere, that children born during a single parturition are mystically identical. Yet, under the ascriptive rules associated with kinship systems, there is only one position in the structure of the family or corporate kin-group for them to occupy. There is a classificatory assumption that human beings bear only one child at a time and there is only one slot for them to occupy in the various groups articulated by kinship which that one child enters by birth. Sibling order is another important factor; older siblings exert certain rights over junior siblings and may in some cases succeed to political office before them. Yet twinship presents the paradoxes that what is physically double is structurally single and what is mystically one is empirically two. By the way, I have found Turner's essay useful when teaching about twins in classical myth and legend. Especially interesting is his citation of Evans-Pritchard's observation that for the Nuer of the Sudan twins are divine and birdy: "Birds are children of God on accouont of their being in the air, and twins belong to the air on account of their being children of God by the manner of their conception and birth" ("Nuer Religion," p. 131, cited by Turner on p. 47). Also, I have a note that somewhere (though I can't locate the passage right now) Turner alludes to a belief of the Indians of British Columbia that twins were endowed with special powers to bring good weather and avert storms. Paging the Dioskouroi! David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .