Kathy's Commentaries

Nursing Other People's Babies

by Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.

Department of Anthropology,
Texas A & M University

I wrote a "scholarly journal article" about women in Mali who nurse other people's babies, titled "More Than Nutrition." It's about how women in Mali nurse children other than their own if those children are already "out of bounds" for their own children to marry, because they are too closely related by kinship. So women nurse their co-wives children (men can have more than one wife), their husband's brothers' children, and their grandchildren through daughters. This can be very convenient. One wife can go to the river to wash clothes and leave her child with her co-wife, knowing the co-wife will nurse the baby when she is hungry. Or she can leave the baby with her mother, knowing her mother will nurse the baby for her. On the other hand, a woman would never nurse her unrelated friend's baby, because they hope their children will grow up to marry one another, and if she nursed her friend's child, then that child would become related to her and her children because they shared the same breast. This belief that nursing a child creates kinship is very widespread across the world and is sometimes called the "milk tie." Unrelated children who nursed from the same woman are called "milk sisters" or "milk brothers" or "milk siblings".

Prepared August 6, 1995.

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