Infanticide

Woman preparing the mesh for manioc beer
14x11 inches, watercolor, pencil, spray paint on paper, 2020

I think infanticide is pretty cruel. The whole concept of it seems very alien, but it didn't used to be that way. The practice was actually rather universal and still used among certain cultures that have not been in contact, or are independent from, the industrialized world. It's a debate of ethics I guess. We in the Western civilization would think of infanticide as unethical and the cultures who practice it as barbaric. They themselves think nothing of it. Ethics is a social construct and for most people in the world it is an effect of organized religion. Philosophy has a great deal to say about ethics too, but it is also formed on the same structures our civilization is built on. Philosophers think a lot about ethics,  they think about identity, and how and when a newborn baby becomes a person. They may consider that an infant becomes a person, a human being, at perhaps three years of age. Still philosophy will not condone infanticide. Imagine our cultural norms would shift, perhaps because of the philosophy of personhood, so that we come to think of babies becoming individuals at the age of one. This is when an infant would get "christened," named, assigned a gender, a character of its own, and so forth. The likely result of such a cultural debate would be that the general population could accept an abortion maybe a month or two later in the pregnancy than it is the case now. This, in my opinion, would be a good thing. Let them choose, and we, men, stay out of the debate altogether.

The Shuar are one of the peoples practicing infanticide, at least they did in 1984, when Michael Harner wrote Jivaro: Pepole of the Sacred Waterfalls.[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984] They would only kill deformed babies though and not, as with some other cultures, do it as a sacred ritual, neither do they have a preference for girls or boys. As I sketched out in May life for a Shuar woman is hell. Who would blame them if they didn't want to bring a new baby girl into the world.

The photograph the above drawing is based on was taken by the same Michael J. Harner who also recorded the Social dance song and produced the record both photo and song are found on: Music of the Jivaro of Ecuador. [Ethnic Folkways, 1972]