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  • The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: the culture of infancy in West Africa by Alma Gottlieb
  • Cati Coe
Alma Gottlieb, The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: the culture of infancy in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (pb $25.00 – 0 226 30502 3; hb $62.50 – 0 226 30501 5). 2004, 424pp.

Occasionally, one reads a book that is worth raving about to academic and non-academic friends alike. This beautifully written ethnography about Beng babies in Côte d’Ivoire is one such book.

While I have been involved in the childhood studies programme in my university, this book pushed the boundaries of what I thought possible by focusing on the culture of infancy. As Gottlieb argues, babies are ‘deeply constructed by culture’ (p. xvi). She explains why anthropologists have not paid attention to the experiences of babies: they are seen to lack experience and memory, to be more biological than cultural, to be more passive than active, and as incapable of speaking. As a result, babies are seen as pre-cultural and unworthy of anthropologists’ attention. Gottlieb contrasts each of these assumptions (many of which I held) with the Beng model of babies, in which they lead spiritual lives because they have recently emerged from the afterlife. As such, they have a memory of their life there, a desire for items that remind them of it, and an understanding of all languages. Thus, she shows how Euro-American assumptions about infancy are deeply cultural.

In debunking the Euro-American folk model of infancy which is sometimes legitimized by the academic literature, she elevates the Beng folk model of infancy, in which infants are accorded a high level of agency, to a theoretical level. Thus, following the Beng folk model, she asks us to consider how ‘infants [End Page 455] actively shape the lives of those around them, contributing to the constitution of their social worlds’ (p. 60). Gottlieb’s rotating of the folk model to privilege the Beng was valuable in making me ask: might a social theory be developed to account for different kinds of folk theories of infancy, including Euro-American and Beng?

The study of infants requires different kinds of methodologies. This study is based primarily on three months of fieldwork in 1993, although Gottlieb draws from her engagement with the Beng since 1979. She followed two babies intensely, at different ages, from morning to evening. She interviewed mothers, caretakers of infants, and diviners, who interpreted babies’ speech and desires. With her research assistants, she recorded what babies were doing minute by minute in a given period (generally a little more than two hours long), allowing her to take note of motor development, sleeping and feeding patterns, and how they were passed along quite frequently between a variety of caretakers.

The book is filled with wonderful photographs of babies protected against spiritual harm by the careful bathing and elaborate decorations – painting and jewellery – on their bodies. To friends with children, I shared titbits from the book: about babies being toilet-trained, through enemas a few months after birth, in order to decrease the risk of spiritual harm and to persuade babysitters, mainly young girls, to care for the babies; and about how 72 per cent of Beng babies’ naps lasted thirty minutes or less, with vertical naps on someone’s back lasting longer than those in which the baby was lying horizontally and out of somatic contact with another person.

Gottlieb has taken seriously Paul Farmer’s criticism of anthropology that it does not pay attention to structural violence, even when it affects the communities among which we work. She makes a strong case for how structural violence has affected the lives of Beng young people, particularly in terms of infant mortality and sickness. She criticizes sharply the lack of affordable vaccines, medical personnel’s paternalism towards their patients; the lack of accessible clinics and dispensaries; and the under-recording of infant deaths, which she traces back to structural adjustment’s effect on the Ivoirian government and economy. Furthermore, as young women migrate more and have more access to their own farm plots at younger ages, there is an...

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