Anthropological reflections on breastfeeding between care and culture

Abstract

Breastfeeding is a practice so far unobtrusively studied by cultural and medical anthropology, an act placed between nature and culture, between private and social women spheres and which, like birth and pregnancy. It expresses hierarchies in roles and gender relations among biopolitical dynamics which denote the organization of society itself. As a cultural practice, breastfeeding differs itself on the basis of the social and ethnic belonging of the mother and the child, leading to ritual differences such as the law of the “kinship of milk” in muslim societies or the apothecary taboo of Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper reflects on how much this is occurring in Western society where breastfeeding is less and less widespread and how much the lobbies influence technological and biomedical hypertrophy.