Good introductory cultural anthropology books include those by William
Haviland and by Conrad Kottak.
For a glimpse at how varied infant feeding/child-rearing beliefs can be in
one area of the world, I highly recommend Leslie Marshall (ed) "Infant Care
and Feeding in the South Pacific." It has a number of chapters, each about
a different island or part of New Guinea, and there is MUCH variation. It
has the added bonus of including a chapter by Penny Van Esterik where she
first lays out clearly her distinction between breast milk as a product and
breastfeeding as a process.
You can read my publications on breastfeeding in Mali for specific
information about breastfeeding beliefs among some Bambara women in Mali in
the late 1980s (see my CV on my web page for specific citations to those
publications). Still -- would reading my work give you an advantage if a
Malian woman showed up on your maternity ward? Maybe, maybe not, because I
did my research more than 10 years ago, and because I worked with Bambara
women in one specific part of the country (near the capitol city) and one
specific socio-economic status (lower class, but not destitute, but also not
rural subsistence farmers).
If you read my research, and then you meet a woman who says she's from Mali,
you may THINK you have some insight into her cultural beliefs. But in fact,
she may not be culturally Bambara, because there are many other ethnic
groups in Mali (Mandinka, Senuofo, Bobo, Bozo, Songhrai, and Dogon, to name
just a few). If she's in the US, chances are she's an upper-class Malian
woman, whose family hasn't breastfed for at least one generation, and she
may think 'rural peasants' in Mali are backwards, and NOT to be emulated.
I read Pascal James Imperato's work on the Bambara of Mali before I went to
do my research, and time after time, I heard different explanations of
things from my Bambara informants than what he had described. When I would
read my informants parts of his book, they would just laugh and say "Whoo
boy, never heard of that, nope." He wasn't incorrect, not at all. He had
just asked different people, in different regions of the country, and
several decades before I was there (he was there for the smallpox
eradication campaign in the 1960s).
So -- you have to be careful. You have to always keep in the forefront of
your mind that the specific individual you are talking to may or may not fit
the 'pattern' that has been described for their particular group.
Kathy Dettwyler
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