Someone wrote:
 A question that I have been pondering concerning the discussion of
becoming "related" through breastfeeding in certain cultures, is the
prevalence of "wet nursing" or "shared nursing" among the women in the
community??  Is it common??  Do they keep careful track of which mother
nursed which baby, or does it simply become part of one's geneology??

For those of you who are interested, in addition to the Counts and Counts
article I referenced earlier, I have published an article about this based
on my research with women in Mali.  It was published in 1988, journal is
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, title is "More than Nutrition."  Basically,
women only nurse babies who are already related to them and their children,
so they are strengthening the kinship tie that is already there, but not
making anybody kin who was not already kin.  Thus:

One wife can nurse her co-wife's children and vice versa because the
children already have the same father, so are already related and already
can't marry one another.

One woman can nurse her grandchildren because her children and grandchildren
are already related.

One woman can nurse her husband's brother's children, because they are
already related by having the same grandparents.

And so on and so forth.  Women do *not* nurse their friends' children,
because they want their children to grow up and marry their friends' children.

Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Nutrition
Texas A&M University