In her richly textured account of “the culture of infancy” in a West African Beng village, the cultural anthropologist Alma Gottlieb describes infant care practices that initially seem puzzling. To Gottlieb, the way the Beng treat their babies seemed so nonsensical that she became convinced that their mode of childcare could be understood only within their peculiar symbolic system. Like many cultural anthropologists, she saw little point in considering evolutionary contexts or adaptive functions.
At first glance, her prejudice against adaptive explantions in this instance seems well-founded. For Beng mothers engage in some remarkably counterintuitive, maladaptive-seeming behaviors. They force babies to drink water before allowing them access to the breast. They also adminsiter herbal enemas several times a day, and decorate their babies with protective painted symbols thought to promote health and growth, as well as to advertise tribal status or identity. Such practices, Gottlieb argues, flow from belief systems specific to the Beng, having to do with the sacredness of water and the origin of babies who enter the world reincarnated from ancestors, and can only be understood within the context of a specifically Beng worldview.
At first glance, such practices seem to defy common sense and functional explanation. How could enemas and body paint have anything to do with keeping babies healthier or enhancing their survival? [...] Symbolic decorations are not going to encourage babies to grow faster or make them healthier, and parasite- and bacteria-laden water forced down a baby’s throat is likely to do the reverse, causing diarrea. And what use are excretion-promoting enemas when the big problem in this society is malnutrition? [...]
And yet stand back and consider Beng maternal practice in terms of the universal dilemma confronting primate mothers who find themselves torn between heavy subsistence loads and the need to care for infants in the face of high rates of mortality. These are mothers who cannot possibly rear their infants without assistance from others. Next, consider the Beng in the context of a species that must have evolved as a cooperative breeder. Again and again, Gottlieb mentions the “enormous labor demands” on Beng mothers who farm full-time, chop and haul firewood, provide water, do the laundry, and prepare food using labor-intensive methods. A woman, especially an undernourished woman with several children, could not possibly manage these tasks without enlisting kin and other villagers to help her care for her infant. As it turns out, each of the seemingly useless cultural practice mentioned above also just happens to make babies more attractive to allomothers.
“Every Beng mother,” Gottlieb writes, “makes great efforts to toilet-train her baby from birth so as to attract a possible [caretaker] who can be recruited to hte job without fear of being soiled. The goal is for the infant to defecate only once or twice a day, during bath time, so as never to dirty anyone between baths, especially while being carried.” It is to make a baby more easily comforted by a nonlactating allomother that they are taught early—and forcibly—to be satisfied with a drink of water if no one is available to breastfeed. It is specifically to make her infant more attractive to caretakers that a mother beautifies her baby with painted symbols, for “if a baby is irresistably beautiful, someone will be eager to carry the little one for a few hours, and the mother can get her work done.”
This passage from Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origin of Mutual Understanding, on unexpected functionalist explanations of childrearing practices among the Beng, presents an evocative example of the kind of cultural adaptation Heinrich writes about—