Children are born as outsiders. This is why they are aliens. They have no emic knowledge other than what they might have learned in the womb (perhaps nothing emically). They must quickly construct an identity as insiders for themselves as they undergo emicization for the first (and for most, only) time in their lives. The first step in their journey from the strange to the familiar, from observer to knower, is attachment.
Attachment (Bowlby 1969; Otto and Keller 2014) is the construction of the primary bond between infant and caregivers, the first step in emicization. Dark matter has already been forming before birth, but through emicization via attachment, language learning, cultural learning, and so on, the child becomes able to better categorize, store, and arrange its apperceptions, thus constructing itself, its environment, and its society (other examples of related cultural learning are Deloache 1997 and 2000).
Attachment cannot be understood well—or even presented as a useful idea—unless it is studied in a variety of cross-cultural contexts. Although early studies focused on mothers and infants, the work summarized in Otto and Keller (2014) shows that there are various important, different manifestations of attachment from the standardly assumed Western model of mothers and infants—dyadic relations—to more varied, network attachment patterns as found in many traditionally agrarian communities, hunter-gatherer societies, or more close-knit, smaller village societies around the world. As Otto and Keller (2014, 3ff) note, “The evolutionary/ethological foundation does not justify the assumption that attachment has the same shape, emerges the same way, and has the same consequences across cultures.” In other words, the variation in attachment of children to caregivers not only devolves from variation in cultures but also reinforces and further separates different cultures from one another. Attachment relations serve a variety of functions and take on a variety of forms.
The importance of attachment studies is twofold. First, they add to our understanding of the range of attachment possibilities selected by our species. Second, they help us to at least begin to tease apart the relative contributions of nature vs. nurture in the shaping of human development. But rather than merely survey the literature on attachment, what I want to do below is to describe concentric circles of attachment in Pirahã and to discuss the significance of this attachment sequence for the acquisition of dark matter. It is useful to offer this (surface) description of how attachment works in Pirahã culture, in order to provide a case study of how people build their identities—personally and culturally—in specific settings. As the description proceeds, I also comment on how values, norms, practices, and conventions emerge from such attachment, returning to all of these issues at different points in later chapters.
This section can be taken also as a sustained discussion and description of emicization in a particular society, the transmogrification of the child from alien to native. One thing that does set humans apart from other species is our ability to accumulate knowledge by means of language. If a chimp, for example, learns that a particular plant is poisonous, its offspring might learn that valuable lesson if they observe their parent avoiding the plant (or getting sick and dying from it). But European chimps (in zoos) do not know about poisonous plants in “the old country” (Africa) because of lore passed down through their grandparents. Chimps do not build tools whose basic design is elaborated with additions and improvements in each succeeding generation. Culture can be shared transgenerationally, via the transmission and elaboration of knowledge.
Through language, each generation learns not only from the generation before them but also potentially from all the generations that have ever lived. Language is not the only tool by which we construct knowledge, values, ways of behaving, and so on. But it is the most important, even as it itself is shaped by culture (D. Everett 2012a).
Beyond language, there are other tools used in constructing a cultural identity. For example, imitation is crucial. Thus, Boyd and Richerson (2005) argue that imitation plays a significant role in the learning and transmission of culture. And as actions that we imitate change across time, imitation alone can carry some cumulative cultural knowledge (e.g., the transmission of a bow and arrow’s design changes down through the history of a specific culture through mere imitation of the latest and best design). But imitation is not quite enough for cultural transmission. One cannot learn the specialized hierarchical knowledge (e.g., the theory of relativity) to support many social roles merely by imitating another’s actions. Language is crucial for the construction and transmission of culture that goes beyond the day-to-day. Still, our quotidian life is dripping with cultural knowledge and values that can be transmitted by imitation alone; and for the child learning its culture, these are crucial to the initial formation of “self.”
PIRAHÃ EMICIZATION AND ATTACHMENT
The attachment I describe here works as a series of “concentric circles,” from caregivers to family to society as a whole. At each stage of development, the child is attaching to particular sets of individuals, each more inclusive than the other—mother, parents, family, village, larger Pirahã population.5
Hunter-gatherer attachment begins differently, often radically so, from Western practices. For example, I once watched a young woman named Xioitaóhoagí set off from her village with some other women to harvest sweet manioc from her family garden.6 She walked out with only the clothes on her back, machete, and a basket woven from palm leaves. What made Xioitaóhoagí stand out from the other women walking with her, all laughing and talking loudly, surrounded by numerous small, malnourished dogs, was that she was heavily pregnant.
Later that afternoon, the women returned from the gardens. Xioitaóhoagí passed by my study hut carrying about forty to sixty pounds of manioc roots packed in her basket, secured by a tumpline across her forehead. Like other Pirahãs, her arms were crossed across her chest. I started to return to my work when I suddenly realized that she was carrying something else. Looking again, I saw a newborn baby in her arms and that her stomach was much smaller. She had given birth and then continued on with her work. The baby was born on the ground by the side of the field. After the birth, the mother continued harvesting and trekked back with the other women, carrying two external loads instead of the single load she had intended to carry when the day began.
Not all Pirahã births happen at the side of a field or in the jungle. At low water, women often wade into the Maici river up to their waist, crouch down, and deliver the baby underwater. Births also occur on the raised sleeping platform in the woman’s hut. The first question that arises for me, then, is how the Pirahã way of birthing affects—if at all—the Pirahã mother-child relationship.
It is important to understand that Pirahã birth is dangerous and hard for both the mother and newborn. It happens without pain medication, without a comfortable bed, without the assistance of a physician or midwife, on the jungle floor or crouched in a tropical river with piranhas, electric eels, anaconda, caimans, and so on. Pirahã mothers are usually unassisted in childbirth, the solitary effort of the mother to bring forth life. The husband is rarely present. This form of birth leaves the mother with a greater sense of the unbuffered immediacy of her biological connection to her child. A Pirahã woman will have a different understanding of the physical and psychological act of giving birth than the suburban American woman. Yet, beyond the stoicism of this or that particular Pirahã woman, what does her different attitude toward birth mean for Pirahã culture?
Well, it means several things. First, the immediately postpartum and subsequent experiences of the newborn—as well as the experience, observations, and expectations about birth of other children—are also important in-group identity formation. As the Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa remarked on his own birth in his insightful autobiography, The Falling Sky, “I fell on the ground from the vagina of a Yanomami woman.”
Second, it means that Pirahã infants’ personal characters are formed partially in response to the different material and cultural circumstances. An inf
ant can be cared for by others for brief periods during the day, but will by and large be cared for and spend most of its hours with its mother for the next three to five years. Third, it means that Pirahã mothers and children will attach differently than, say, American mothers and children, due to the distinct personal, unmediated (by teachers, doctors, and other professional caregivers) nature of their relationship.
It is also worth commenting on the marital status of the mother in relation to identity formation and attachment. Unlike some Western mothers, the Pirahã woman is not concerned with stigmas associated with her marital status or age at birth. No one condemns her for children out of wedlock—the concept doesn’t even exist, aside from the economic challenges of a woman alone. And even in the latter case, she will always have family of some sort to depend on. Attachment of the child only optionally (though usually) includes the biological father.
The child spends brief periods with other Pirahãs, relatives, or simply others of the same village its mother is in. The child easily distinguishes Pirahãs from non-Pirahãs early on because Pirahãs have a particular smell (of smoke, fish diet, etc.), look (brown skin, black hair, little body hair, etc.), feel (calloused, sinewy), and talk (Pirahã). The average Pirahã infant will willingly go to almost any other Pirahã who stretches their arms out to it, while rejecting the embrace of non-Pirahãs violently.
The Pirahãs occasionally go hungry. They have few material possessions. They have rare access to medical help. They have almost no connection to the economy of the national culture. Moreover, infant mortality among the Pirahãs is very high; perhaps 60 to 75 percent of all children die before the age of ten (though this is improving due to regular visits of the National Health Agency of Brazil, FUNASA). In these ways, the Pirahã mothers’ circumstances seem similar to those described for Alto do Cruzeiro mothers by N. Scheper-Hughes (2013).
Yet their responses are quite different. According to Scheper-Hughes, the Alto do Cruzeiro mothers show a degree of aloofness to their infants, whose “spirits” may leave them unpredictably. These mothers rely on a strong sense of religion to enable them to cope with the tragedy of losing their young at a higher rate than the wealthy Brazilians they see on television or work for in one way or another. However, unlike the Alto do Cruzeiro mothers, Pirahã mothers show no aloofness to their infants, showering their infants with affection and attention, sobbing long and loud when they die. What might account for this contrast between mothers in materially similar circumstances? I think that there are two potential explanations. First, the Pirahãs, unlike the Alto do Cruzeiro mothers, have no concept of poverty nor a desire for alternative material conditions (e.g., the lives of the relatively well-off or even of Americans like me, since nothing I have seems to attract them or interest them a great deal). This absence of a concept of poverty means that the Pirahãs’ experience is not filtered through any perception of how much better life should or could be if only they had more material resources. As far as they are concerned, they live in ideal circumstances and this is just how life is. Once when I asked a Pirahã man why he thought I had come to their villages on the Maici, he responded without hesitation, “Because the Maici is a good place.” Taking a Pirahã to visit another group I worked with, the Banawá, he opined, after only a few minutes, “They are ugly. Their water is ugly. Their jungle is ugly.” Second, the Pirahãs have no religion. They believe that you live life as it comes, with no thought of God protecting, killing, or otherwise affecting anything of their daily lives, much less the health of their infants.
The Pirahãs are their only world. This explains why infant attachment is to Pirahãs only. Most infants will turn and scream if a foreigner—especially a bearded foreign male like me—tries to take them. Commenting on the occasional baby who will accept my extended hands, their parents usually say, “My child is unafraid.”7 These parents appear to believe that their babies show courage by coming to me. Yet the deeper value for their parents is that children not come to me. The parents who appeared proud earlier that their children came to me might be overheard later telling the child to beware of me because I might take them away to another jungle, ’merica. Caregivers will often intentionally scare their small charges by acting like they are going to throw them to me or hand them to me when I am leaving in my boat. This type of caregiver behavior dramatically increases fear of me, and most parents laugh out loud when their children scream at my approach—a valuable lesson from their perspective is being learned (i.e., non-Pirahãs can be dangerous—a lesson based on history). Simultaneously, this sharp delineation between Pirahãs and “others” strengthens attachment of Pirahã children to Pirahã adults.
Pirahã children are raised to be physically and emotionally reliant only on other Pirahãs, to avoid imitation of or admiration of foreigners or their ways. The bond between Pirahãs is partially built around the homogeneity of their sensory experiences, though none of this is ever stated. This is all dark matter, most of it of the ineffable variety—how can you put into words the totality of apperceptions structured by episodic memory that makes you “you”? Thus, although Pirahãs do not normally talk about the distant future, they do at times, when asked, say something along the lines that their children will be like other Pirahãs.
As is the case with other cultures’ infants, Pirahã infants are cared for around the clock. Mothers, nursing or otherwise, are not inseparable from their infants, however. Occasionally one mother may nurse another mother’s baby, allowing the latter to spend more time gathering or engaged in other activities. This depends on the supply of food, (i.e., how well fed both mothers are), both mothers’ health, and the relationship between the mothers (e.g., neighbors in the village, kinship, and so on—with mothers’ sisters being the most common surrogate milkgivers, but not the only). Also, older siblings of the infant often care for it between feedings, but even when carrying it about (such as to proudly show it off to the anthropological linguist), the mother is never far away. Others may also carry the infant, but rarely out of earshot of the mother.
Infants are regularly talked to, but without special “baby syntax” or “baby phonology.” So far as I have been able to tell, on the other hand, mothers (and, to a lesser degree, fathers) often use hum speech (D. Everett 1985, 2005a, 2008) with their babies. They also often speak to them in a high-pitched voice, full of laughter and punctuated with kissing, tickling, and playing.
A strong, somewhat paradoxical attachment/identification practice is the nursing of nonhuman mammals. That is to say, Pirahã mothers not only nurse their own and other mothers’ infants, but they also nurse other mammals, as in figure 3.1. In fact, I have seen Pirahã women nurse dogs, monkeys, peccaries (as in the photo), and other animals (even the smaller, tree-dwelling anteaters—Tamanduá mirim). Pirahã men joke that women will nurse anything except piranhas (then laugh very loudly and raucously). The Pirahãs are aware—based on comments from river traders, government employees and others—that this is an unusual practice (though it is not unique to the Pirahãs), but they continue it for a couple of reasons.
Figure 3.1
The first is that all Pirahãs love animals, and the Pirahã women in particular like to raise young animals. They enjoy playing with them, training them, and so on. But the second—paradoxically to Western thinking, perhaps—is that they raise these pets, nursing them as needed, in order to eat them when they reach adulthood. This doesn’t prevent a close, caring relationship while the animal is moving inexorably toward esculent adulthood. The Pirahã name these animals, raise them with much affection, and take them almost everywhere they go. Multiple mothers may nurse the mammal, or it may be nursed by only one, depending on many factors, such as perceived ownership (if one woman or her husband makes a strong claim to possession of the animal, other women are less likely to nurse it); who killed or captured the animal’s parent; who has the most breast milk (e.g., a woman just beginning to wean a toddler but who has no new infant); and so on.
Thus chil
dren learn values about animals, build animal experience into their all-important “apperceptional set,” and integrate these experiences into their emerging selves even as their selves are merged into these experiences. The sharing of human breast milk with animals is observed by children keenly, who seem to find it entertaining. Infants occasionally nurse alongside or immediately following animals. Despite the likelihood that the taste of the animal lingers on the woman’s breast, they display no overt reaction. But this taste adds to the child’s formative apperceptions and is not shared with members of “buffered” societies—for example, American or European—as Pirahã children blend these experiences into their emergent selves.
All of this builds the child’s connection to the Pirahã community and to nature—the nursing of other mammals adds a highly peculiar Pirahã sensory experience to the child’s development, both conceptually and physically. For example, one remarkable feature of Pirahã children is their almost complete lack of fear or repugnance of animals, even dangerous ones (e.g., harpy eagles and weasels, which are also raised among them), when in the village. They learn the behavior of many jungle animals from direct observation (even ones that are captured, but not raised, and killed soon after capture, such as caimans). As Pirahã children age, they share not only their mother’s milk with animals but solid foods as well, usually sharing their plates with dogs and occasionally other animals, both contentedly eating from the same mound of fish and manioc. Values are created and ranked about community, animals, dirt, mother, and so on. Culture encompasses the entire ecology.
Dark Matter of the Mind Page 18