Nature and Ethics Across Geographical, Rhetorical and Human Borders

Katharine Dow, Victoria Boydell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351333474
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

How we dispose of our rubbish, choose the foods we buy, enjoy art, relate to our families, and think about ourselves are just a few of the ways that ideas about nature shape our everyday ethical decisions. Nature and 'natural facts' have long been used to make sense of why we act a certain way. Nature is a concept with great power: when we describe something as 'natural' or 'unnatural', it has a moral force and political consequences. We see this in moral panics about genetically modified foods, the spread of government-enforced waste recycling schemes, concerns about assisted reproductive technologies. Our ideas about what is natural shape our ethical thinking, in terms of how people live (or want to live) their lives, but also in guiding our sense of morality, justice and truth.

The idea of naturalness is essential to grasping Anglo-American cultures. Throughout history and in different places, nature has had different forms, meanings, and moral valences. It is a knowable fact, but at the same time almost a divine principle that is ultimately unfathomable. Yet with the rise of new technologies, there is increasing uncertainty about what we claim to be natural, who we are, how we are related to each other, and how we should live.

This book examines the how ideas about nature and ethics overlap and separate across cultural, species, geographic, and moral boundaries. It compares the varied ways in which nature and ideas of naturalness pervade all aspects of people's lives, from family relationships, to the production and consumption of food, to ideas about scientific truth. In a world of increasing uncertainty, nature remains a powerful concept: the ultimate reference point, invested with profound moral authority to guide our ethical behaviour. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnos.

‘Natural’ Breastfeeding in Comparative Perspective: Feminism, Morality, and Adaptive Accountability

Charlotte Faircloth

ABSTRACT Based on research in London and Paris with mothers from an international breastfeeding support organisation, this paper explores the narratives of women who breastfeed their children ‘to full term’ (typically for a period of several years) as part of a philosophy of ‘attachment parenting’. In line with wider cultural trends (in the UK, at least), one of the most prominent ‘accountability strategies’ used by this group of mothers to explain their full-term breastfeeding is the claim that this is ‘most natural’, drawing on an evolutionary ‘hominid blueprint’ of care, as well as an ecological perspective on social life more broadly. What follows in the paper is a reflection on how notions of ‘natural’ parenting are given credence in narratives of mothering, and how this is used adaptively in local contexts as part of women’s ‘identity work’. If in the UK the ‘natural’ is used as a moral grounding for action, the same cannot be said for women in France. Using a comparative perspective, the argument is that this reflects very different trajectories within the feminist movement in the UK and France. Where in certain mileux in the UK it is considered desirable, even mandatory, to ‘get in touch with’ nature, in France, it is considered something to escape, subordinate, and resist. Far from being ‘flattened’, then, the purchase of nature as it relates to moral negotiations of mothering appears to be stronger than ever.¹

What anthropologists say: Determining what is a natural age of weaning for human beings raises some problems. Human beings’ ideas about when and how to wean are often determined by culture, not necessarily by what is best or natural for babies and mothers. Anthropologists who have studied weaning have found a great variety in weaning ages, from birth (in much of the United States and Western society in general) to age seven or eight in other cultures. … Dr Dettwyler has used the example of primates to try to determine a natural weaning age for humans, since ‘gorillas and chimpanzees share more than ninety-eight percent of their genes with humans’ but are lacking the cultural biases of humans. (D. Bengson, How Weaning Happens, emphasis added)

This paper explores the accounts of women in London and Paris who breastfeed their children to ‘full term’ (as known as ‘extended’ or ‘long-term’ breastfeeding). Breastfeeding ‘until their child outgrows the need’ – which ranged between one and eight years old, but was typically for three or four years in this study – was spoken about in both settings as part of a ‘natural’ trajectory, doing justice to what is termed a ‘hominid blueprint’ for behaviour. As in the quote above, this blueprint is derived from archaeological and anthropological evidence; in some cases, through historical studies of our evolutionary past, in others, through recourse to contemporary primates or ‘primitive’ peoples who are understood to represent it today. Drawing on this evolutionary paradigm as well as psychological work on attachment and an ecological world view, full-term breastfeeding is typically practised as part of an ‘attachment parenting’ philosophy (Bobel 2002; Faircloth 2013).

The operation of the natural as a domain of foundational cultural practice has long been a site of anthropological interest (e.g. MacCormack and Strathern 1980), and since then, there has been a move towards foregrounding the ‘constitutive role of metaphor, analogy, classification, narrative, and genealogy in the production of natural facts’ (Franklin 1990: 127, see introduction to this special issue). It should be said at the outset, therefore, that the intention here is not to explore whether these mothers correctly rehearse discussions going on within (both biological and social) anthropological disciplines around the evolutionary bases of human mothering. In using the term ‘nature’ to produce models of mothering, the mothers here draw on elements of academic discussions that support their overall philosophy, but tend to overlook aspects that do not (such as those which stress flexibility, in place of the need to breastfeed for a specific length of time). Rather, the intention is to explore the implications of this construction of ‘natural’ mothering in particular social, economic, and political circumstances. The broad spectrum of anthropological perspectives on this issue converges on flexibility and adaptation to local circumstances as the most prominent features of infant care; and that includes adaption to local cultural values, foregrounded in the British and French contexts here.

In the two case studies (London and Paris), women’s narratives about ‘natural’ parenting draw on a set anthropologically informed parenting advice literature. This literature, typically written in the USA, has an increasingly globalised, online reach (albeit with a different reception in each cultural setting). Indeed, this literature rubs up against important, and contrasting, views of nature in British and French cultures, which are also influenced by (and influence) trends in feminism and family policy. If in the UK the ‘natural’ is used as a moral grounding for action by these mothers, the same cannot be said for women in France. Where in the UK it is considered desirable, even mandatory, to ‘get in touch with’ nature, in France, ‘nature’ is considered something to escape, subordinate, and resist. The argument is that while the endorsement of full-term breastfeeding by women in London is a magnification of a culture which encourages intensive, embodied ‘natural’ parenting on the part of mothers, the same mothering practices look very different in Paris. In French culture, where maternal–infant separation and autonomy is lauded as ideal, embodied care on the part of the mother is perceived as an impingement on female liberty (Badinter 2010).

Context: Parenting Culture and Feeding Practices

Across space and time, societies have had different ideas about children, which in turn shape how parents are expected to behave towards them (Badinter 1980; Fildes 1986; Thurer 1994). Today, in Britain and France, childcare can be roughly divided into styles that are structured, and those that are more liberal. The former is characterised by practices such as scheduled feeds, formula feeding, and separate sleeping. Liberal models, by contrast, take a less regimented approach in favour of more relaxed styles of care, often characterised by practices such as long-term, on-cue breastfeeding, a family bed and ‘positive’ discipline (Buskens 2001: 75).²

Liberal models of childcare have been made most famous by the work of William and Martha Sears who coined the term ‘Attachment Parenting’ in The Baby Book (2003 [1992]). They drew on the work on bonding done by Bowlby and others to argue that the optimum way of caring for a child was to keep mother and baby in prolonged physical contact. The argument is that babies have evolutionary expectations that must be met if they are to mature into happy, healthy children and adults (paraphrased from Bobel 2002: 61). Arguing that modern culture has impeded ‘common sense parenting’, the Sears say that it is ‘what we would all do if left to our own healthy resources’ (Sears & Sears 1993: 2):

THE ABC’S OF ATTACHMENT PARENTING (Sears & Sears 2001: 4)
When you practise the Baby B’s of AP, your child has a greater chance of growing up with the qualities of the A’s and C’s:
A’s	B’s	C’s
Accomplished	Birth bonding	Caring
Adaptable	Breastfeeding	Communicative
Adept	Babywearing	Compassionate
Admirable	Bedding close to baby	Confident
Affectionate	Belief in baby’s cry	Connected
Anchored	Balance and boundaries	Cuddly
Assured	Beware of baby trainers	Curious

Of course, the distinction between the various models of parenting may be more heuristic than descriptive, as many parents will attest as there may be a gap between intention and outcome (formula feeding not always being a deliberate, reflexive choice, but a necessary intervention if breastfeeding is problematic). But because the plurality exists, at a heuristic level at least, parents are accountable for the choice they make both within and between these competing models.

It is also important to note a nominative slippage here. Attachment parenting, as a specific way of raising children, has little correlation with Bowlby’s attachment theory: practices such as co-sleeping, breastfeeding and baby wearing are not necessarily tied to the development of greater attachment in mother–infant pairs (see Faircloth 2014 for more on this).³

Using Goffman’s idea of (1959) ‘identity work’ – in this case, the narrative processes of self-making that mothers engage in as they account for their parenting practices – is part of an argument that for certain middle-class parents in the London (and to a lesser extent in Paris), the word ‘parent’ has shifted in recent years from a noun denoting a relationship with a child (something you are), to a verb (something you do). ‘Parenting’ is now an occupation in which adults (particularly mothers) are expected to be emotionally absorbed and become personally fulfilled; it is also a growing site of interest to policy-makers in the UK, understood as the cause of, and solution to a wide range of social ills (Lee et al. 2014). The ‘ideal’ parenting promoted by these policy-makers is financially, physically and emotionally ‘intensive’, and parents are encouraged to spend a large amount of time, energy and money in raising their children – the ‘attachment’ parenting explored here just one of many permutations of this (Hays 1996). One of the reasons this injunction wields such power, Hays suggests, is because ‘intensive’ mothering is perceived as ‘the last best defence against what many people see as the impoverishment of social ties, communal obligations, and unremunerated commitments’ (1996: xiii).

Feeding, one of the most conspicuously moralised elements of mothering, was the focus of the study. Because of its vital importance for the survival and healthy development of infants, feeding is a highly scrutinised domain where mothers must counter any charges of practising unusual, harmful or morally suspect feeding techniques (Murphy 1999). Powerful feelings about feeding are derived from the fact that it operates as a ‘signal issue’ which boxes women off into different parenting ‘camps’ (Kukla 2005).

The World Health Organization (WHO) states that breastfeeding in developed countries should be exclusive for six months and continue ‘for up to two years, or beyond’ in conjunction with other foods (2003). Along with other EU member states, this is endorsed by both the UK and French governments. Breastfeeding initiation rates at the time of research stood at 78% and 69% in Britain and France, respectively,⁴ with no formal statistics existing in either place for rates of breastfeeding at a year, or beyond. While there were no statistics for the number of children breastfed beyond a year in the UK, by six months, 75% of children were totally weaned off breastmilk and only 2% of women breastfed exclusively for the recommended six months (Department of Health 2005a, 2005b).

The women profiled here therefore use various ‘accountability strategies’, to explain and justify their non-conventional feeding patterns (Faircloth 2013). These centre around referring to what they do as ‘most natural’ – whether evolutionarily, through recourse to what ‘science’ says is best, or what ‘feels right’, and it is the first of these that forms the subject of this paper. At the level of their own ‘identity work’, women mobilise the moral authority of the natural, to explain, justify and account for their statistically unusual practices. As Cronon notes, the attraction of nature ‘for those who wish to ground their moral vision in external reality is its capacity to take disputed values and make the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Nature and Ethics Across Geographical, Rhetorical and Human Borders
• 1. ‘Natural’ Breastfeeding in Comparative Perspective: Feminism, Morality, and Adaptive Accountability
• 2. The Ethics of Patenting and Genetically Engineering the Relative Hāloa
• 3. Snared: Ethics and Nature in Animal Protection
• 4. ‘A Nine-Month Head-Start’: The Maternal Bond and Surrogacy
• 5. A Response to the Issues Raised in the Special Edition of Ethnos
• Index