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Breastfeeding as custom not culture: Cutting meaning down to size (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

  1. Richard A. O'Connor1,
  2. Penny Van Esterik2

Article first published online: 4 OCT 2012

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8322.2012.00897.x

Issue

Anthropology Today

Anthropology Today

Volume 28, Issue 5, pages 13–16, October 2012

Additional Information

How to Cite

O'Connor, R. A. and Van Esterik, P. (2012), Breastfeeding as custom not culture: Cutting meaning down to size (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate). Anthropology Today, 28: 13–16. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8322.2012.00897.x

Author Information

  1. 1

    Biehl Professor of Anthropology at Sewanee: The University of the South.

  2. 2

    Professor of Anthropology at York University, Toronto. This article is developed from a chapter in ‘The dance of nurture: Embodying infant feeding’ (in preparation) by the authors, and builds on the biocultural approach begun in ‘Negotiating anorexia: From virtue to vice’ by the same authors.

Publication History

  1. Issue published online: 4 OCT 2012
  2. Article first published online: 4 OCT 2012

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Seeing breastfeeding as culturally constructed highlights its overall meaning only to hide the activity's inner dynamic and structural separateness. To study breastfeeding in its own terms, our paper flips culture as meaning on its head, asking how the whole (culture) fits the part (breastfeeding). Addressing that question to cultural, regional and cross-cultural bodies of evidence, we find that what's viable bioculturally is nowhere near as malleable as what's imagined culturally. In understanding these arrangements, history and function need as much consideration as anthropologists currently give meaning.

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