A Note on the Nuer

Bioethicists know that classic cases and stories can stick in our minds and assume a life of their own. They are remembered in part because they may exemplify moral principles, dilemmas, or simply the oddities of moral experience. Does it matter that they be factually true? The question got stuck in my mind when, looking into another topic (what Jeffrey Blustein passingly refers to as "monstrous moral principles"[1]), I remembered reading about the Nuer. The Nuer, of the southern Sudan, are described by Stanley Hauerwas as a good and gentle people, "who have a strong sense of communal care for one another." However, there is this oddity: "they have the view that any of their children born obviously retarded or deformed is not a Nuer. Instead, they think such a child is a hippopotamus. An elaborate mythology, in which the various kinds of animals have their place and responsibilities, underwrites this belief. The Nuer do not have a well-defined concept of 'human being' or 'animal,' but ... they feel strongly that each type of creature is best cared for by its own kind. Therefore a deformed child is placed in the river to be cared for by its own--namely hippopotami. From our perspective this is child euthanasia, but the Nuer feel they are doing the only thing they can do if they are to act responsibly. For them a 'quandary' would be raised if the mother of such a child decided she was so attached to this 'hippopotamus' that she wanted to keep it."[2] Hauerwas's source is Purity and Danger by anthropologist Mary Douglas. She writes little about the Nuer here but does tell us that "the Nuer treat monstrous births as baby hippopotamuses, accidentally born to humans and, with this labelling, the appropriate action is clear. They gently lay them in the river where they belong."[3] The context for Hauerwas's comment is, among other things, the abortion debate; he wants to provoke us into examining the narratives that make us "the kind of people we are." The context for Douglas's comment is to illustrate how cultures might interpret things which, given their world views, are "anomalous." What to us, apparently, is drowning, infanticide, or euthanasia is to the Nuer the returning of like to like. The original account behind this story, by anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Douglas's only cited source, is strikingly different. E-P's context was how mythological twin births figure in Nuer explanations of their totems and how contemporary twin births are sometimes interpreted. He explains: "I had not been long in Nuerland [1930] when one morning my Nuer servant Nhial came in some excitement to tell me that a woman of his village, where we were staying, had given birth to a hippopotamus and a male child, both dead. It was too late to see what happened, but I was told that the hippopotamus had been placed in a nearby stream and the child, being a twin and therefore in Nuer eyes a sort of bird, had been placed in a tree.... The reason given for this particular twin-birth was that the woman's husband had killed several hippopotamuses and they had revenged themselves on him by stamping their likeness on one of the twins. . . ."[4] Let us note well: Both twins were still-born, none was "gently" drowned as Douglas implies and Hauerwas infers; the infant was buried in the stream, not drowned there. …