Dynamics of Family Interaction: Caring for Children
From Studyplace
These are notes I'm taking for Professor Varenne's class on the Dynamics of Family Interaction. I'm using it as an opportunity to play around with wikis and shared community knowledge. Please feel free to contribute to these notes or share your ideas about how it can be expanded, changed, improved.
Contents |
[edit] Caring for Children: Mothers, nannies, and the State
[edit] Readings
- Boon, James "Anthropology and nannies." Man 9: 137-39. 1974
- Drummond, Lee "Transatlantic nanny: notes on a comparative semiotics of the family." American ethnologist 5: 30-43. 1978
[edit] Reading notes
[edit] Boon, James: "Anthropology and nannies."
- Goodenough: women have right to children as long as they have the right to bear it and asset the claim
- how did the role of the nanny arise?
- emerged in England and followed by Europe and Americas
- Nanny as "trickster" (p. 138)
- dichotomized women in the lower class into sexual and upper class into asexual
- Nanny as rule-proving exception?
- allows mother-child solidarity to remain as a universal, with upper class use of nannies as the exception
- have anthropologists assumed that nuclear families are universal?
[edit] Drummond, Lee: "Transatlantic nanny: notes on a comparative semiotics of the family."
- kinship studies: institution of mother not a crucial variable for theory of kinship
- Drummond: motherhood neither an ethological law nor genealogical constant; more of a "cultural unit" (Schneider)
- Morgan: the most "natural" kinship is that of the mother
- Schneider's critique: mother is found in every kinship system, and is an exact correspondence of nature and culture
- Drummond: motherhoods are unnatural; birth of child is an intrusion into the noncultural being into domestic sphere
- process of investing child with human identity is cultural
- interested in the meaning of the cultural unit of mother
- Schneider: meaning not from directly observing mother but at observing other cultural units in the system
- "what is a mother that should make her actions subject to particular interpretations in given situations?"
- people invest meaning in biological motherhood
- having one unique mother is not always the case
- newborn perceives mother as the other; acquires distinction between him/herself and another being
- some have denied family's membership in nuclear family; Boon denies the mother's right
- Gathorne-Hardy: wrote about nannies; believed that mothers should nurse their own children instead of having wet nurses; sees nannies are "unnatural"
- Boon: nannies can be seen as a transformational element; "cultural amplication" (Drummond)
- with nurses and nannies, mothers become part of conjoined units that give meaning to the notion of motherhood
- British nanny exists because English society differentiated by class; mother and nanny are both conjoined but also exclusive (p. 34)
- nanny and mother did not have same meaning in all levels of society; not every women had nannies even if they had babies (nanny givers and nanny takers)
- nannies, grandmothers, foster mothers are semiotically related by not identical; they are transformations of a theme
- analogous to Bickerton's idea of grammatical continuum
- when transported across cultures (e.g. black nurse), some imported governesses to reculture young brought up by black nurses
- governess and black nurses need to be considered as part of semiotic system
- in Guyanese Creole, grandmother called "mother" and mother called "auntie"
- male partner usually not in position to support a family, so child becomes part of grandmother's household
- grandfather is called "father" while father called "(big) brother"
- to have a "nana" in Guyana is lower class, suggesting that nanny influence went to the bottom instead of the top
- underemphasis of blood ties among upper class while overemphasis in lower class in Britain
- whites who worked with slaves may have spread understanding of English kinships into Creole culture
[edit] Class notes
Link to Professor Varenne's notes
- two articles are sexist from the 70s, from male perspective
- Transition from last class
- V: review of research on developmental psychologists suggest that children as young as three months can distinguish different languages
- children as "sponge"; but they are not simply sponges but actively seeking to understood
- we are not simply following a script, but we are using it to figure out what is going on in the present; we have to "reinvent" it
- languages drift far and fast; it gets inscribed lightly; easy for people to lose their mother tongue
- Boon discussion
- what is universal about the family?
- Murdoch: some things you can't get rid of (e.g. mother, father, children); universal structures
- males not universally involved in child-raising; in many cases they are kicked out
- by 50s-60s, you can no longer talk about universality of father but you can still talk about mother-child universality
- institution of the nanny in upper class
- in many parts of the world, children not raised by biological mothers
- in 18th century, upper class started reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who sugggested that children's personalities come from breast milk; upper class removed wet nurses and used nannies
- middle class slowly began adopting nannies
- Drummond discussion
- motherhood is the most cultural
- where is culture most visible, most intense?
- rituals hardest to change are births, funerals
- V: multiple roles for the mother; in developing certain roles, it begins to have certain kinds of implications for other parts of the population
- nanny-givers: people who give nannies; nanny-takers: people who take nannies; play with LS (wife-givers/takers)
- exchanging and creating dependencies bring about social solidarity
- division of labor in the child-rearing tasks
- motherhood can be divided into any number of women
- will create inequalities in these women (e.g. being a nanny, you cannot have children)
- nanny-givers and takers are tied even though their interests are vastly different
- A: this discussion reminds me of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day
- increase of orphans
- not much attention paid to the interconnection of the classes
- upper class lifestyles dependent on others' lifestyles
- A: now it reminds me of Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed
- parents give child class status
- if institutional possibilities make it possible for males to take care of children, they will
