Theorizing Milk Kinship while Breaking Borders between Reproduction and Nutrition
Keywords:
anthropology of childbirth, human reproduction, lactation, milk banks, milk kinship, Muslim migrants, Spanish Catholic society, wet nursingAbstract
It is our condition as mammals that makes human milk, with all the symbolism that this entails, not only a bodily fluid but also as the most complete and nutritious food for the new-born child. Breastfeeding is an activity that can be performed by the biological mother or, in the event that it is not possible, by another woman (wet nurse), or just by accepting human milk from a donor woman at a milk bank. Drawn on two ethnographic case studies in Spain, and in dialogue with other ethnographies and anthropological theory, the aim of this article is to try to offer a broader and more complex way of looking at not only human milk but also human reproduction and milk kinship. In this study, one of the main questions is how through the flow and sharing of milk among two or more infants so far not biologically related, milk kinship identities (such as milk brother, milk sister, milk mother and even in some Muslim societies, milk father) and milk kinship relations can be constructed and meaning of them. As anthropologists we should try to recognise and analyse how each culture and society, in the present as in the past, constructs and recognises a relative. An emic perspective which might, or might not, include ideas of reproduction of the society studied, but if it is the case, then we should able to analyse how life is culturally transmitted, who has intervened in this process, and through which symbols: semen, blood, milk, genes… And, most importantly, what meanings are attached to these? However, this only will be possible, if we consider widening our narrow definition of biological reproduction while breaking the borders between reproduction (blood and genes) and nutrition (milk). Because, as stressed in these case studies based on an intra-extrauterine model of reproduction, milk (that “whitened blood”), can be more than just food.
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