Poor Suffering Bastards. An Anthropologist Looks at Illegitimacy.
1994; Hoover Institution; Issue: 68 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0146-5945
Autores Tópico(s)Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences
ResumoHE HAS NO RELATIVES' Bastard has always been a pejorative term. The word is a Spanish idiom: bastardo, or pack-saddle child; the French term is fils de bast, the child of the saddle bag, implying rootlessness. An alternative etymology derived from the Saxon base or lowly, and start or origin. Being a was to be a natural child, lying outside of society. The name is an insult, bastard being associated with mongrel or inferior breeds of animals. The inferiority derived from improper mixture, or blending. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a phrase from 1641, To beget and bring forth mules, a brood. Spurious, adulterated, debased, corrupt, unauthorized, and counterfeit are other connotations of the word. Our colloquial language expresses this concern. Consider how the word bastard has come to mean someone heartless, cruel, or prone to cheat. We are not alone in this judgment. A Navajo saying captures well the universal stigma that attaches to illegitimate offspring. Do Ahalyada, they call them, who care for nothing. The worst social characterization the Navajo can offer of a thoughtless, deviant man is the charge that acts as if he has. no relatives. This phrase tells us that being embedded in relationships, in a network of legitimated and recognized kinsmen, is a powerful reinforcement for moral action. A man with no relatives, the Navajo feel, is a man with no concern for the shame or honor that his behavior might bring upon those he loves. He acts, therefore, control or humanity. European countries of the Middle Ages felt the same, regarding illegitimate children as virtual outlaws. They called them filii nulii, those without relatives. We see a similar phenomenon in modem America. People concerned about the reactions of relatives behave differently than do people who are atomized as anonymous strangers. The husband at a distant convention, or the tourist abroad, may do things under the cover of anonymity that would bring embarrassment were they done in front of one's mother, wife, children, or in-laws. A culture of bastards is a world of hardened carelessness. DOMESTICATE THE MALE That women domesticate men who marry them has been widely noted; indeed groom derives from guma, Indo-European for servant. In addition, children domesticate both men and women. In American cities the presence of children has become a miner's canary for social health; where we find children playing, there we find safety for ourselves. Consider how we feel in a potentially threatening neighborhood where two young males approach. There is a relief that comes from seeing them hand-in-hand with a young child. We recognize instinctively that males caring for children are not seeking violence. Neighborhoods fathers, by contrast, are seedbeds for predators. Without a female and a male who consider themselves responsible for children, the stable features of social continuity are not constructed. Without marriage, there are fewer relatives--fewer people to help when things go wrong, fewer people to set a moral example. Children are any society's greatest hope, at the same time that they are its greatest threat. Since citizenship, as with any art, is made and not born, children are the most consequential social investment. Bastards are undercapitalized. And they die for it. Shakespeare's Timon shouts in his rage, Spare not the babe ... think it a ... and mince it sam remorse. This is not just a Western prejudice. In cultural contexts far removed the vulnerability of the is a troubling theme. For the Nyakyusa of Tanzania, reports Monica Wilson, being illegitimate is dangerous. Nyakyusa ancestors jealously guard procreation, and must sanction childbirth. But if a man fails to legitimate his children, he is powerless to intercede for them when the ancestors cause disease. The agony for a father of bastards is that his negligence may kill them. …
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