Mandinka mothers and nurslings: power and reproduction

In a traditional Mandinka village of the Casamance Region of Senegal, indigenous understanding of the interdependencies of women and their children include not only patterns of nursing but the prospects for continued fertility as an outcome of the mother/nursling relationship. Based on two years of participant-observation and focused observations of 40 nursing mothers and their children from birth to over 12 months of age, this study examines breastfeeding as a relationship that is part of the process of dali lo, or socialization to the "Mandinka way." Patterns of nursing are elaborated by women's recognition of the power of fetuses and young children to control fertility, a power that affirms the concomitant role of nursing mothers as being agents of culture who nurture and wean cultural novices. The methodological implications of the female ethnographer as a social location for traditional fertility work and the ethnographers' child as resistant cultural novice are also discussed.