| DanaC |
11-26-2014 03:42 PM |
Here's a really interesting article about gender roles amongst the Aka:
Quote:
It's a question that has united Aristotle, Darwin and my three-year-old in puzzlement: what exactly are male nipples for ? This week, the charity Fathers Direct came up with an answer, courtesy of some research it unearthed about a nomadic tribe of African hunter-gatherers. The answer, it seems, is the one my three-year-old (and Darwin, to be fair) suspected all along: male nipples are there as a stand-in for when mum isn't around and there's a squawking bambino in dire need of something to suck.
And, when you think about it, why ever not? Surely a male nipple, deficient though it is in terms of sustenance, gives a more pleasant sucking sensation than, say, a dummy.
That's certainly how it seemed to Professor Barry Hewlett, an American anthropologist who was the first person to spot male breastfeeding among the Aka Pygmy people of central Africa (total population around 20,000) after he decided to live alongside them in order to study their way of life more closely. By the time he noticed that babies were sometimes being suckled by their fathers, it wasn't as stunning a revelation, however, as it might have been had he spotted it going on in the breastfeeding room at Mothercare in Manchester.
Because by then Hewlett had realised that, when it comes to gender egalitarian parenting, the Aka - who call themselves the people of the forest - beat anyone else he'd ever studied hands down. According to the data he began collecting more than two decades ago, Aka fathers are within reach of their infants 47% of the time - that's apparently more than fathers in any other cultural group on the planet, which is why Fathers Direct has decided to dub the Aka "the best dads in the world".
What's fascinating about the Aka is that male and female roles are virtually interchangeable. While the women hunt, the men mind the children; while the men cook, the women decide where to set up the next camp. And vice versa: and it's in this vice versa, says Hewlett, that the really important message lies. "There is a sexual division of labour in the Aka community - women, for example, are the primary caregivers," he says. "But, and this is crucial, there's a level of flexibility that's virtually unknown in our society. Aka fathers will slip into roles usually occupied by mothers without a second thought and without, more importantly, any loss of status - there's no stigma involved in the different jobs."
One especially riveting facet of Aka life is that women are not only just as likely as their men to hunt, but are even sometimes more proficient as hunters. Hitherto, it has usually been assumed that, because of women's role as gestators and carers of the young, hunting was historically a universally male preserve: but in one study Hewlett found a woman who hunted through the eighth month of her pregnancy and was back at work with her nets and her spears just a month after giving birth. Other mothers went hunting with their newborns strapped to their sides, despite the fact that their prey, the duiker (a type of antelope), can be a dangerous beast.
If it all sounds like a feminist paradise there is, alas, a sting in the tale: Hewlett found that, while tasks and decision-making were largely shared activities, there is an Aka glass ceiling. Top jobs in the tribe invariably go to men: the kombeti (leader), the tuma (elephant hunter) and the nganga (top healer) in the community he has studied are all male. But that doesn't detract, he says, from their important contribution as co-carers in the parenting sphere: and nor, either, does it reduce the impact of the message he believes the Aka people have for western couples struggling to find a balance between the demands of employment, home-making, self- fulfilment and raising kids.
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Read the rest here
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2...drelationships
I find the Aka really interesting. Particularly in the light of so much of the popular evo-psych findings which all take as their foundation the notion that amongst early humans, men hunted and women gathered/tended. There is pretty much no evidence whatsoever for the gender division of labour amongst early humans - we know nothing about how they organised labour or conceived of gender. Most of what we asume about them is based on a combination of our current assumptions of gender, and observations of recent and modern hunter gatherer societies. We've essentially been taking information of today and working back to a conclusion about yesterday.
In reality a truly sharp division of labour along gendered lines makes very little sense for early humans - role interchangeability and cooperation makes more sense. |
