查看文章

The concatenation of (i) the cultural norm that births should be spaced at intervals of at least two years,(ii) the custom of prolonged breast-feeding, and (iii) the existence of a postpartum taboo resulting in sexual abstinence for the mother after each birth, was already being reported at the time of the first major waves of colonial administrators and Western missionaries, doctors and anthropologists in sub-Saharan Africa. Ever since, the postpartum taboo and its correlates have been recurrent subjects of study and discussion in the anthropological literature. Since the aim of this chapter is simply to provide background information about traditional patterns for the other general chapters and for the case studies of this volume, we shall restrict our attention to a few points:(i) the geographic distribution of the postpartum taboo, both on a world scale and within sub-Saharan Africa;(ii) the hypotheses advanced by Whiting and Saucier concerning the possible reasons for the existence and maintenance of the taboo;(iii) compilation of an extensive list of African societies according to the reported length of the taboo and the pattern of child-spacing;(iv) use of this list for retesting some of the hypotheses advanced by Whiting and Saucier;(v) evidence that emerges from the more recent anthropological literature of variability in the degree of erosion of the postpartum taboo.