I can't comment on this very much, but I do know where it is published --
it's in an edited volume titled "The Anthropology of Breastfeeding," edited
by Vanessa Maher (who lives in Italy).  The chapter on Iceland is one of the
chapters.  I read this book years ago when it first came out -- it is packed
away somewhere in the garage and I can't recall any of the particulars about
the Iceland chapter except perhaps that there was little/no evidence to back
up what she was saying.

There was a chapter on sub-Saharan Africa that was awful -- arguing that
women there had so much work to do and were so malnourished that it was
ridiculous to think that they should also breastfeed their children, and
that it made much more sense for them to feed formula.  I guess the author
didn't realize that if they did that, their children would be much more
likely to die, *and* that if they didn't breastfeed they wouldn't have
lactational amenorrhea so their fecundity would return and they'd get
pregnant again a lot sooner.  As I recall, the basic premise of the book,
except for Panter-Brick's chapter on Nepal, was that women needed to be
*liberated* from their biology and not be expected to breastfeed because it
was too taxing and exploitative of them.

The book in general, with the exception of the excellent chapter by
Catherine Panter-Brick (of Durham University, UK) was uniformly panned by
anthropologists.  I recall that Penny Van Esterik (of York University,
Canada) wrote a blistering review of it for American Anthropologist.

Kathy Dettwyler
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