The Afterlife is Where We Come From

"With these five books, I have tried to give a sense, not only of what is going on in psychology, but also of what is going on in other disciplines. This is a book by an anthropologist, and what she wrote is an anthropological account of babies and children in a very poor community in Africa. It is a beautiful and moving account of the relationships between the mothers and children in this community and how close they are, even when childhood is endangered. Even though many children die within the first year, the mothers have learned to try to cope with the vulnerability of these babies. As always with really interesting anthropological accounts, it is fascinating, first, because the attitudes and beliefs it describes are so different from ours. So for example, the mums make a point of putting beautiful jewellery on the babies because they think that will ensure the babies will be happy to stay in this life and won’t die and move back to the afterlife they were in before. But there are also parts that are fascinating because they will sound like what any contemporary mother will know about. One of my favourite parts is the description of the local shamans, whom the mothers consult about their babies. They all sound exactly like paediatricians. They have that incredibly calm attitude and that absolute certainty of what they are talking about, even if it involves magic and ritual. It could easily be someone like Berry Brazleton or Gina Ford talking, which makes you wonder a little about how much of what we Western mothers do with our babies is really a form of magic too…"

"This is perhaps the most ambitious ethnography of infants to date. The babies here, seen by adults as reincarnations of the dead, are players in their own right, endowed even with powers that adults lack, such as the ability to understand all languages. Meanwhile, religious beliefs condition the way babies are taught to crawl and walk, socialise and more. She studied the Beng of Côte d’Ivoire. Though this is what you could call an infant-centred ethnography, even Gottlieb approaches babies largely through what adults and older children say about them and do with them. But “largely” is not exclusively and in this case the distinction is vital. Gottlieb’s ethnography would have been a book about adult beliefs and practices in relation to infants had the work not also been built around careful observation of babies. She identified numerous instances in which the infants began to reveal how they act in culturally inflected ways, even well before they can speak. For instance, she writes, “I [once] left both a book and a video camera within reach of the babies… Both were unfamiliar objects that I expected to elicit much curiosity and exploration… But the babies saved their excitement for the older children and women who had gathered.” As this scene suggests, Beng babies seem to rate their relations with both older children and adults quite highly. This is perhaps the best place to start to appreciate where the anthropology of infants has come from."