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Learning How to Mother: An Ethnographic Investigation of an Urban Breastfeeding Group
Author(s) -
Merrill Elizabeth Bryant
Publication year - 1987
Publication title -
anthropology and education quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.531
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1548-1492
pISSN - 0161-7761
DOI - 10.1525/aeq.1987.18.3.05x1134p
Subject(s) - emic and etic , breastfeeding , ethnography , sociology , style (visual arts) , gender studies , group (periodic table) , social psychology , psychology , anthropology , geography , medicine , chemistry , archaeology , organic chemistry , pathology
This investigation describes an urban La Leche League breastfeeding support group in western New York. In viewing the organization's origins as a per‐petuative‐rational nativistic movement (Linton 1943), the group demonstrates how some mothers are adapting to the effects of rapid social change, particularly on the mother‐infant bond. Members of the group are transmitting a style of natural mothering based on complete breastfeeding by relying on intragenerational modeling (Mead 1978). The study follows a method of “well‐grounded ethnography” (Gearing 1981); the result is a (behavioral) emic structural‐functional analysis.