The Afterlife Is Where We Come From
Among the Beng, babies arrive from the afterlife and only slowly consent to stay - and everything follows from that.
Gottlieb spent years with the Beng of Cote d’Ivoire, whose infants are understood to arrive from a spirit world they only gradually leave behind. The belief shapes everything: how babies are carried, spoken to, treated when ill, and mourned when they die, which many do. The result is an ethnography of infancy that makes Western assumptions about babies visible by standing outside them, without ever making the Beng exotic.
Recommended by 1 Person
Alison Gopnik
This is a book by an anthropologist, and what she wrote is an anthropological account of babies and children in a very poor community in Africa. It is a beautiful and moving account of the relationships between the mothers and children in this community and how close they are, even when childhood is endangered.
Interview · August 2012
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