The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-DayChamberlain, Alexander Francis
Science
The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-Day
Chamberlain, Alexander Francis
Child rearing; Children -- Folklore; Folklore and children
The wet-nurse was held in especial honour. The
milk-relationship sometimes completely takes the place of
blood-relationship. The Koran forbids the marriage of a nurse and a man
whom, as a child, she has suckled; the laws of the Hanafi forbid a man
to marry a woman from whose breast he has imbibed even a single drop of
milk. Among the southern Slavonians: "If of two children who have fed at
the breast of the same woman, one is a boy and the woman's own child,
and the other (adopted) a girl, these two must never marry." If they are
both girls, they are like real sisters in love and affection; if both
boys, like real brothers. In Dardistan and Armenia also,
milk-relationship prevents marriage (167. 263).
In Mingrelia as soon as a child is given to a woman to nurse, she, her
husband, children, and grandchildren are bound to it by ties more dear
even than those of blood-relationship; she would yield up her life for
the child, and the latter, when grown up, is reciprocally dutiful. It is
a curious fact that even grown-up people can contract this sort of
relationship. "Thus peasant-women are very anxious to have grown-up
princesses become then foster-children--the latter simply bite gently
the breasts of their foster-mothers, and forthwith a close relationship
subsists between them." It is said also that girls obtain protectors in
like manner by having youths bite at their breasts, which (lately) they
cover with a veil (167. 263). Adoption by the letting or transfusion of
blood is also found in various parts of the world and has far-reaching
ramifications; as Trumbull, Robertson Smith, and Daniels have pointed
out. The last calls attention to the Biblical declaration (Proverbs,
xxviii. 24): "There is a friend which sticketh closer than a brother,"
underlying which seems to be this mystic tie of blood (214. 16).
The mourning for the death of children is discussed in another part of
this work. It may be mentioned here, however, that the death of a child
often entails other, sometimes more serious, consequences. Among the
Dyaks of Borneo, "when a father has lost his child, he kills the first
man he meets as he goes out of his house; this is to him an act of duty"
(100. 238).
_Hereditary Bights._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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