Suckling

Kinship More Fluid

Fadwa El Guindi

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429851865
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Antropología

A ground-breaking ethnographic study of suckling in the Arabian Gulf, this book reenergises the study of kinship. It analyses the misunderstood and marginalized phenomenon of suckling drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Qatar over a seven-year period.

Fadwa El Guindi situates suckling (often given other names or subsumed under misleading classifications) squarely in the analytical category of kinship, with recognition that kinship is necessarily biological, societal and cultural. The volume takes kinship study beyond origins, nature-culture debates, and social nurturing and relatedness, and challenges claims of deterministic, reductionist formulas.

As well as key reading for those involved in milk kinship research, this book is valuable for

anthropologists, Middle East scholars and others with an interest in breastfeeding, family and social organisation, and religion.

Part one

Metaphors from nature or naturalization of culture?

3 “He who begets never dies”

This common expression is the translation from its original Arabic “illi khallif ma match”. I used the translation “begets” for khallif, with stress on the first syllable (an Arabic term’s stress is relevant to the term’s semantics). It derives from the root kh-l-f, which merits further expounding due to its significance for understanding Arab kinship, and its implication for conceptualizing kinship as a category. This root has many derivatives, all of which have to do with procreation and succession. Some of these are khilfa (progeny), khalaf (offspring, descendants), khalifa (successor, caliph), khilafa (succession, caliphate), among others.

At the most rudimentary level, there is the connotation that one does not in fact die since genes live through offspring who pass them on for generations. But there is much more to the folk saying than that. While the reference is to “khilfa” (progeny, offspring, descendant, etc.), the key semantic element is succession and continuity invoked by the process of procreation. This way “he who begets never dies” since procreating offspring extends continuity of the family line which keeps its members “alive” even after their death. That is, the deceased is alive through the offspring, and the family’s collectively shared genes pass on to successors.

This sense of continuity is reflected in the organic metaphors through which nature gives form and meaning to human organizing around kinship principles and imbues them with stability and continuity. Or, are such representations a way that humans use to “naturalize” cultural categories?¹ Next I describe briefly how the ancient Egyptian vision of original creation was also a vision of procreation represented as continuity of life in cycles from life to death.

Origins: creation and procreation

We know humans have long gazed at the stars and the cosmos in an attempt to unlock the mysteries of the physical universe and integrate them with natural processes of life and death. The ethnographic record is full of mythological and cosmological content among human populations who pondered about nature and culture and relations of life and death providing coherent worldviews of balance and harmony. Anthropologists theorized about these, using different frameworks to describe them, from functional, to social organizational, to structural, to logical. Should we consider such expressions as parallel correspondences between nature and social organization or as expressions of cohesive visions?

It is through the sky, as the ancient Egyptians eloquently told us, that journeys of death were also journeys of life, and that the sacred terrain of spatiality and temporality creatively interwove a universe which brings together elements from the animal, physical, moral, and social worlds, coherently becoming a meaningful whole. And it is with ancient Egypt we remain in this prelude to the origins of creation and procreation. Kinship, as we shall see, was integral to this comprehensive vision of creation.

The cosmic Egg

The goddess² Nut (female) and the god Seb (male), in an originary embrace, together produced the Egg (universe), out of which rose Ra, the sun-god of warmth, energy, air, and light. Ra is generative of all life. It makes its daily journey from sunrise to sunset. Shu, the supreme neutral-gender creator, separated the two embracing bodies, Nut and Seb, an act itself representing the beginnings of creation (Budge 1969[1904]: 105 cited in El Guindi 2008, 56).³

No original sin, no original incest, no blood. Yet this imagery expressed creation as procreation. The cosmos is created in a process of cross-sex human procreation. The cycle of the sun is about birth and rebirth. In other words, the creative process is parallel to the procreative process, a transmutation, one and the same. In a cross-gender embrace by Nut and Seb, the process of creation begins. Shu separates the cross-gendered embrace, engendering a transformation whereby Nut (female) becomes sky and Seb (male) becomes earth. As they break up the embrace and separate, cosmic space is formed between sky and earth in which the sun is born and begins the cycle of birth, as it enters the mouth of Nut, and rebirth next sunrise, out of the body of Nut. Nut’s limbs, two arms and two legs, extend out of the sky and touch the earth, to form the four pillars as the outer boundaries of the cosmos.

Seb (male) is transformed into earth, forming the lower part of the enclosure of the cosmos. The bodies of Nut and Seb, de-embraced, separate, thus creating space, but their limbs touch to form the outer boundary of the cosmos. Egyptologist Budge (1969[1904]) puts it this way: “The creation of Shu made a space between the heavens and the earth into which the Eye of Nu could rise out of the waters and shine” (299).

In other words, breaking up the cross-gender embrace enabled the creation of space in which the cycle of life began. The Eye of Nu, in reference to the sun rising and shining. “Element after element unfolds in transformational conceptual embeddings,” I wrote in my book By Noon Prayer, “a rich and complex conceptual order begins to emerge” (El Guindi 2008: 56). The neutral-gender creator Shu appears in different contexts and historical periods of Egyptian imagery by different names, including Ptah and Khnemu. This transformational variance is a quality characterizing Egyptian mythology, as it does in all mythology.⁴

Birth, procreation, family

The ancient Egyptian imagery described here would make kinship scholars Harold Scheffler and Warren Shapiro happy, as it could be seen as supporting “focality” of the biological process, namely birth, in generating relations (Shapiro 2018). But it is focality without a proposed primacy since the creative process is born out of the procreative process in a transmutational rather than linear pattern. First we have the cross-gender embrace of the two key elements in the cosmos, the sky and the earth, the female and the male. Then the sky gives birth to the sun, the key to life. The procreative cycle of birth goes this way:

Nut, the sky-goddess, first gives birth daily to the sun-god, who then passes over her body until he reaches her mouth, into which the sun disappears, then passes through the inside of her body (which is nighttime) until it is reborn the following morning to fill the world with its rays (daytime).

(El Guindi 2008: 61)

Egyptian creative imagery renders the beginnings of the universe, the beginnings of cross-sex gendering, and the beginning of “family” as a unitary vision integrating the physical, natural, animal, and social as one whole universe. Cross-sex without sin, originary kinship by birth without incest, and cross-sex bilateral parentation are all integral to those beginnings.

Procreation is inherent to creation; cross-sex unions generate life, which is a cycle of birth and rebirth. There is harmony and cohesion to the vision that puts procreation at the center of creation and societal beginnings as integral to the cosmos.

Khilfa, in Arab tradition, invokes two culturally significant elements, succession and corporate identity, considered necessary for the “line” to continue. These cannot be reduced to notions distorting reality such as “lineal masculinity” (King and Stone 2010) or “kinship as patriarchy”. Procreation of offspring of both sexes descending from parents of both sexes ensures both a lineal and a bilateral identity that preserves and engenders the collective character of the kinship system. Procreative continuity and succession, as a cultural premise, are necessary features which, combined with a few others to be discussed as this work progresses, would define the character of kinship as a category and distinguish kinship relations, as recognized culturally, from other forms of societal relations.

Asl wi Fasl Hasab wi Nasab

Another two sets of expressions are quite common among Arabic speakers: “asl wi fasl” and “hasab wi nasab”. Both invoke origin, parentation, roots, and ancestry, as well as family standing in society. “Asl” means origin and “fasl” refers to lineage or family branch. They are similar to another expression set “hasab wi nasab”, the subject of study by Sophie Ferchiou, in collaboration with Francoise Héritier, of the relationship, and “correlation” as the author puts it, between the system of kinship and alliance, the institutional notion of ‘ayla, and the transmission of patrimonial property in their exploration of the waqf (called habous in Tunis) record of all family property transmitted over the generations in urban Tunis.

Ferchiou uses this conceptual expression as the title of the book that resulted from that study, describing it as “une formule toute faite utilisée traditiononnellement lors de la cérémonie de demande de marriage, par les parents du future époux pour qualifier advantageusement la jeune fille” (an expression used traditionally surrounding proposals for marriage by the parents of future spouses to elevate the value of a young woman) [translation from the French by author] (Ferchiou and Héritier-Augé 1992: 17–18). “Hasab” refers to material and moral patrimony and “Nasab” is used to refer to both relations by filiation and marital kin.

Awlad il-Nas vs. Mamluk

It is appropriate at this juncture of the analysis to invoke the recently released historical novel on Mamluk Egypt. The Mamalik (pl.), or the owned, constitute those enslaved to serve the Uthmani (Ottoman) sultanate. They were bought or taken from mostly Circassian families in Central Asia and conscripted to live according to highly disciplinary rules in service as soldiers of the Sultanate or Caliphate. They are acquired by sale or capture, after which they are severed from their roots and their natal families. But, unlike slaves elsewhere, they can rise, and have climbed the rank ladder all the way to the top, serving in the highest offices of the land including becoming Sultans themselves. They are trained and disciplined as soldiers for the purpose of serving the state. The novel by Reem Bassiouney refers in fiction narrative to how Egyptians viewed the Mamluk rulers presented in very realistic imagery.

What era are we in? I wish I had died during the plague before seeing the rulers of our land plucking names for themselves, people without origin or homeland, what do you expect from them? The Amir Muhammad bin Abdullah! Abdullah because he has no father and Muhammad because he has no name. He needs to appear close to Muslim and pretends to protect Islam. What is his real name? What is his genealogy? Who is his father? They know we denigrate them and we know their true origins.

Bassiouney (2018: 99) [Translation from Arabic by author]

This is a quote from the recent Arabic historical novel, Awlad il-Nas, by Reem Bassiouney, which portrays Mamluk rule in Egypt. I read its content in terms of Egyptian social categories and in the context of kinship. It portrays history beneath romance and narrates romance within history – mostly society through fiction. As Bassiouney repeated in her book-signing event at the headquarters of the publishing house in Cairo in 2018, this is fiction, a romantic novel. Indeed it is, but it reveals historical matter of anthropological significance like history books rarely do.

The quote is part of a long conversation between protagonist Zainab and her father, who is on his deathbed. Zainab was released temporarily from imprisonment in the royal Mamluk fortress for reasons of her resistance against her husband, the Mamluk Amir. The Amir had fallen in love with her from the first moment when he happened to notice her in the street. Obsessed by her, he wanted her to concede to marry him. Zainab strongly refused to marry him despite the promised royal glamor. She hated him. He put pressure on her and the family and forcibly made her acquiesce to marriage, very much against her will and that of her father, and, officially, Islam.

In Islam, marriage has to ideally be approved by the bride, primarily, and her father. The Amir had threatened the lives of ones dear to Zainab in order to pressure her to marry him. She succumbed to the marriage in order to save the man she loved, her cousin, to whom she was betrothed. Her father never gave up trying to seek a legal channel to annul the marriage and save his daughter from an unhappy union. In the meantime, Zainab openly and strongly resisted her husband, the Mamluk Amir, to the point of causing embarrassment to him. He had to take public action. His punishment was to lock her up in the fortress where conditions are severe and uncomfortable.

Zainab was released from the darkness and harshness of prison for the sole reason of making that one visit to her dying father. The above quote is by the father speaking to his daughter on his deathbed. Both father and daughter shared the view, not uncommon in Egypt at the time, that non-Mamluk Egyptians had authentic superiority over the ruling Mamalik. It is how the Egyptian people felt, as the novel portrays them, being ruled by the Mamalik, the slaves who turned against the Ottomans in Egypt and established their own dynasty.

Mamluk in Arabic literally means “the owned”. During the Mamluk rule, which lasted from the overthrow of the Ayyubid dynasty until the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517,⁵ Mamluks considered themselves to be “true lords”, with social status above citizens of Egypt. The novel reflects a feeling of conflict among Egyptians who on the one hand loved Egypt and did not wish to see any harm done to it, and therefore appreciated how the Mamluks defeated the Moguls and the Crusaders in defense of Egypt, which they too lov...