-
Shamanism, Phosphenes, and Early Art: An Alternative
SynthesisAuthor(s): DerekHodgsonSource: Current Anthropology, Vol.
41, No. 5 (December 2000), pp. 866-873Published by: The University
of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
AnthropologicalResearchStable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/317415 .Accessed: 29/11/2013
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843
Reports
Fig. 1. Edith Turner, 1997.
An Interview with Edith Turner1
matthew engelkeDepartment of Anthropology, 101 Brooks
Hall,University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va. 22903,U.S.A. 9 ii
00
Introduction: The following interview is taken from amuch longer
life history conducted over the course ofseveral months in 1997 as
a project sponsored in part bythe Historical Archives Program of
the Wenner-GrenFoundation for Anthropological Research. The
originalmotivation for that project was to explore the life
andwriting of Edith Turner, her marriage to Victor Turner,and how
the dynamics of gender and marriage affect theproduction of
anthropological work. This interview hasbeen framed to touch
briefly on the issues raised in thelonger work. In a few instances
it has been necessary towrite transitional paragraphs in order to
give this inter-view a more coherent form, but an effort has been
madeto keep the tone, ideas, and progression of the
originalconversations intact.
ME: When did you and Victor Turner meet?
ET: In 1942, at Carfax in Oxford, which is the main cross-roads,
right in the middle of Oxford. Thats where Vicand I arranged to
meet, an arrangement made by mybrother Charlie.
ME: Was it a blind date?
ET: It was through Charlie, but it didnt have the feelingof a
blind date. Charlie had been at university in Oxford,and then he
was drafted into the army, into the sameunit as Vic. In this unit
there was lots of lifted literarytalk and talk about politics. The
unit consisted entirelyof men who were conscientious objectors to
the war.Nevertheless, they were drafted and doing noncombatantwork
of various kinds. My brother Charlie said, Youought to meet Vic,
meaning something like My God,hes interesting. Hes the most
interesting guy in thisgroup, and you should meet him.
ME: So it was out of an interest in conversation
andliterature.
ET: Yes, thats right. It was so fascinating. But I dontthink we
even thought of ourselves as being literary, you
1. q 2000 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for
AnthropologicalResearch. All rights reserved
0011-3204/2000/4105-0006$1.00.
know? I was busy doing Land Army work, and Charlieand the other
conscientious objectors were all readingas fast as they could. I
was doing the same sort of readingat the gardens where I worked. I
would read at lunchhour and get in trouble with my workmate for not
talk-ing to her. It was just a spontaneous thing. We werentbeing
literary or anthropological, or trying to find lovers,or anything
like that.
ME: What were you reading?
ET: I had been reading Bernard Shaw and Henri Bergson.Vic had
been reading Kierkegaard, and he was also read-ing the symbolist
poets of France: Baudelaire, Rimbaud,Verlaine, and Marlarme. I was
reading stuff I used to get
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844 F current anthropology
out of the library. There was a whole series of Penguinbooks
out, the New Writing group of writers. We werereading those like
mad, in addition to the new poets.There was a conscious effort to
keep poetry and the artsgoing in the war. In fact, a little later a
group from Vicsarmy unit was formed to publish our writing. It
wascalled Oasis because we were an oasis in the desert.We regarded
the war scene as a sort of great patrioticdesert.
Rimbaud called what he was doing the reasoned de-regulation of
all the senses. We didnt go that far, butwhat Rimbaud saw was the
immense beauty of the worldif you werent hedged in by conventions.
This is moreor less what it was like for us. My mother-in-law
latercalled me a bohemian.
Vic and I married in 1943, six months after we met.For me,
finding him was like the discovery of poetry. Soit hadnt been a
blind date but I fell in love anyway. Andlater he said that after
two weeks he knew I was the one.After the war Vic went back to
University College, Lon-don, to resume his studies where he had
left off on beingcalled up. But during the war we had discovered
anthro-pology through the books of Margaret Mead and A.
R.Radcliffe-Brown, so after the war Vic changed his coursefrom
literature to anthropology, which was under DarrylForde at the
time. We moved down to Hastings, southof London, to where Vics
mother, Violet, was living. Heused to take the train into London
for his seminars.
Vic used to read out all of his assignments to me whileI was
doing chores around the house, and so I was gettinga course under
quite an interesting person who was abudding professor himself.
Though now I feel Id havegiven anything to have gone in and written
papers my-self, I could not because I had three young kids on
myhands. But at home it was one long seminar all the time,day and
night. We were thinking of anthropology all thetime.
And then, Vic came back from London University oneday and said,
Ive met Max Gluckman, and he wantsme to put in for the
Rhodes-Livingstone grant. He wantsme to get my Ph.D. at Manchester.
Vic was very en-thusiastic about this offer. Max was a bit of a
Marxistand was interested in the Hegelian dialectic, which wasa new
thing in anthropology. Any kind of idea whichcould encompass change
was new at the time, becauseBritish structuralism was the fashion.
Max was an in-novator, and Vic could see this. With all the
politicalwork wed been doing, we thought it was a great chanceto do
research into the very heart of human society inAfrica. It looked
just right.
A lot of good things did indeed happen in Africa, anda lot of
them happened because Vic was the kind of per-son he was and just
ate up hard work. Vic worked for ayear as a research assistant in
Manchester, attendingseminars, and I also audited seminars
occasionally. Lateron in Manchester, Max would show his delight
that hedgot Vic around.
ME: When you were preparing to go to Africa, how wereyou feeling
about your role in the whole trip?
ET: Vics getting a grant and going to Africa and mygetting
travel money to go, too, simply confirmed thatwe would go on doing
this collaboration. I knew I coulddo fieldwork among the women,
taking for granted Iwould do so. I was extremely hopeful. It was a
matterof not even wondering if I would fit in. I dont rememberthere
ever being any question or doubts or fears or any-thing like that.
It was a matter of Now we have a chanceto do our proper work. We
knew how important field-work was in anthropology, and, well, I had
this marvel-ous husband, so I wasnt nervous.
ME: What did you expect as a family and as anthropol-ogists in
this first trip to the field?
ET: I think we had the old fieldworkers guide, Notesand Queries
[Royal Anthropological Institute 1957].Yeah, we had that. Max
[Gluckman] didnt run fieldworkpreparation classes. In fact, I still
dont think they doenough of that in anthropology.
Vic plunged into his research with vigor, at a tremen-dous rate,
and grew familiar with the little enclave ofvillages around the
rest house where we stayed for thefirst three months. I made
friends with a woman calledFatima, who took me to rituals. I saw
the girls ripeningceremony, Nkanga. We saw the girl coming out
danc-ing. I was writing rapidly. I had a clipboard, and Vic hada
clipboard. We were at it as hard as we could, with notape
recorders. We just simply wrote down rapidly ev-erything that
happened. And I was taking a lot of pho-tographs, being the main
photographer. At night wewould write up the fieldnotes. Sometimes I
typed outVics fieldnotes for him. Sometimes we just collated
nu-merical material of various kinds.
ME: In The Spirit and the Drum [1987], you write aboutyour
research assistant, cook, and friend Musona/Ka-sonda a lot. He also
appears in some of Vics early work,especially Schism and Continuity
[1957]. Did he alwaystravel with you?
ET: Yes, he did. He regarded it as his labor migration.We never
really went that far from Mukanza [his homevillage], and we kept on
going back there because it wasa center of ritual activity. Musona
brought his threewives and children with him wherever we were.
ME: Did you talk to the women more than the men?
ET: Yes, on the whole, although there wasnt a lot of
sexsegregation. I often used to go to the gardens, and wedtalk
there. I used to ask the women what it was like tobe in a
polygamous marriage. The first wives would say,Its great, its a
good life. And the second and thirdwives said, No, its not a good
life. More or less wedont get much of a look-in. And the young
third wives,who were usually kankanga [having just gone throughthe
puberty ritual], would be married off to wealthy oldermen whether
they liked it or not. In one case there was
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Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 845
a man about 50 or 60 years old whose young wife ranaway. I
thought that she ran away because she found himdisgusting, but she
ran away, you see, because hecouldnt get it up! And I liked to hear
that, because thesegirls were really glowing with sexuality. They
were su-perb young women. That was where I caught on to
themarvelous sexuality of African life. The Ndembu lovedsex. The
most pleasant and cheerful conversations wereabout sex, and their
only fears were of witches who werehot in their sex livestoo fast
and sudden. The womenliked it chovu, which means gently and
quietly. Theyliked sex to come up gently. Boy, they loved it.
ME: How did having children in the field influence thedynamics
between you and the Ndembu?
ET: What do you think, for heavens sake?
ME: Well, I would think it would make things a loteasier.
ET: Yes, of course! Obviously! Freddie, Bobbie, and Reneall got
along with the Ndembu children. Freddie andBobbie would run off in
the afternoon with theirgangshunting for little animals or just
playing around.We would spend each morning on lessons from a
cor-respondence course that I sent away for in Salisbury, butthese
lessons always seemed to get sidetracked. For Vicand me, having our
children made us more human inthe eyes of the adults.
ME: So what was the Rhodes-Livingstone plan of study?
ET: One year in the field and one year back for findingout what
you dont know, then one year in the field againto fill in what you
dont know, and then one year forwrite-up.
ME: Im curious to know what you were reading at thetime and what
types of issues from the first field tripstuck out for you and Vic
as needing more explorationduring the second.
ET: Well, we were reading a lot of Meyer Fortes. Thiswas the big
thing then. Vic was also reading MarcelGriaule around that time. We
were interested in whatthe French were doing, but Vic was very
critical becausethey didnt have a sense of social interactions and
socialcontexts that the British always had. And he was then,as
always, very proud of what the British were doing. Hethought French
anthropology was superficial because itwas not alive in human
interaction, and that is what Vicwas talking about. His version of
political anthropologywas local-level politics and the actual
political rivalries,like those he was to write up later in Schism
and Con-tinuity. We were also both reading Henri Junod, and Iwas
very fond of his work.
We were encouraged by conversations with Max in theManchester
interim. There were several rituals going onwhen we got back [to
Mwinilunga], and Vic was then
fully able to put them in the proper setting of kinshipand
political rivalries. As I said, Meyer Fortess work wasvery useful
to us because we realized that those concernsoverlap each other and
influence each other, just asMeyer had shown among the Tallensi.
But we felt thiswas even more so among the Ndembu, because the
con-cerns werent only kinship and clanship; they consistedof local
political rivalries and illnesses and curative cultsand the new
influences from the British government andthe march of colonial
developmentall kinds of forceswere playing there, doing their work,
creating a present,the now.
So we went into the field again, and this time we ar-ranged to
stay in Mukanza [Kajima] village for the wholeperiod because it was
at the crossroads of many differentinfluences.
This was when our trips out to the Mukanda ritual,the boys
initiation involving circumcision, started. Itbecame clear that
these rituals were performed by peoplewho had complex motivations
and rivalries and conflicts[see Mukanda: Rites of Circumcision in
The Forest ofSymbols (V. Turner 1967)]. Certain people had
morepower because they were earning money building a newroad, and
others were the old-fashioned type. In the endit was one of the
old-fashioned type, Nyaluhana, whodid the circumcising. He just
took it over and pushed byeveryone else as they laid the boys out;
he was therewith his knife and did the cutting. They had to hold
downthe boys because they were only six or seven years old,some of
them, and they just wouldnt stay still. So themen played drums
loudly to drown out the crying.
Rituals quickly became the focal point of all that wedid. I
remember that at the beginning of a twin ceremonyonce, my friend
Nylakusa came out of her hut yellingcheerfully, Lets go! I can see
her now. Ritual is fun,and her shout captured something. I dont
know whatsthe matter with us anthropologists. For instance, as
Vicanalyzed the twin ceremony in his writing, it was schol-arly and
showed the detail of the symbolism. I myselfwould like to have
described the ritual in a different way;to have shown something of
the swing of the whole thingas a kind of a great event. Im
interested in capturingwhat that woman felt when she said, Lets go!
Youknow? And thats what I feel is missing in anthropology.Many
people have felt it incumbent upon them to writewith deadly
seriousness. It must be said that Vic wasneeding to write a
foolproof Ph.D., because he had a wifeand three children to
support. The blame falls squarelyon the coldness of academic
demand.
Spending a whole year and a quarter in Mukanza vil-lage was just
the right thing to do. It was tempting tous to go from place to
place as we had done in the firsttour, but the richness of the
material was there in Mu-kanzathe intimate knowledge of
personalities, people,the friendships. These were of the essence in
this kindof fieldwork. Other disciplines regard much of
anthro-pology as a string of anecdotes and dont think highly ofit,
because they value statistics and think such resultsare the truth,
produced according to the real scientificmethod. But when youre
staying in a village like Mu-
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846 F current anthropology
kanza for a length of time, getting to know an intimatelittle
place, even though its only a tiny spot on the mapof Africa,
somehow or other you get in-depth documen-tation and understanding.
Human sympathy with whatson the ground is what the anthropologist
is talkingabout. The stuff of life is difficult to bring into
relationwith a comprehension of the whole human scene, but Ithink
we have to do it.
When Vic went back to Manchester University withthese cases,
with the Kamahasanyi Ihamba case, and soon, Max Gluckman said, Dont
do the ritual first. Dothe social structure and make that your
dissertation.Vic was, for better or for worse, linked irrevocably
withManchester for his Ph.D., so he wrote Schism and Con-tinuity,
which is in great part the statistical picture of amatrilineal
people, including plentiful case material anda discussion of the
implications of marriage locality. Maxhad thus set Vic an exercise
in describing a social systemas a preliminary to his writing on
ritual.
So we built up these statistics. But there was an oc-casion in a
pub in North Manchester, which Ive dis-cussed in the introduction
to On the Edge of the Bush[V. Turner 1985], about the social drama.
Vic was in thepub with Bill Epstein wondering what it was about
an-ecdotes, episodes, and trouble cases that was so impor-tant.
There was process going on here, and not justsocial process but a
special form of ritual process.We had been thinking about what
happened in the sec-ond field trip, when Sandombu/Samutamba had
terriblerows in the village when he was drunk, blaming his wifefor
not having any children and his mother-in-law forbeing a witch.
Sandombu would roar out the frightfulwords Wanza weyi!(Dirt under
your foreskin!). He wasfurious, and this was a real curse. That
scene and thequarrels that followed and the trouble that came up
inepisode after episode, as documented in Schism and Con-tinuity,
meant that the very roots, the vital existence ofthe village was
trembling and tottering all the time. Thiswas in front of our eyes
during the second session in thefield. Vic couldnt look at these
events as just anecdotesor mere trouble cases. He strung them
together later inSchism and Continuity, but while still in the
field hewas taking notes, massive notes, paying attention be-cause
of this hunch which he hadnt yet articulatednotuntil the pub in
Manchester with Bill Epstein. The hunchin Manchester was the
concept of the social drama andits definable form: breach, crisis,
redress, and reconcili-ation. After the pub conversation, Vic wrote
it all downand turned it in to Max as the major chapter in his
dis-sertation. And Max liked it.
There are other stories important to that early work.Once during
the second field period we were walkingover an old village site, a
bit north of Mukanza village,just taking a walk. The old village
site had ghosts becausepeople had died in those huts. You would
hear voices,and they were talking about you, and they would tellyou
not to eat the bananas. As Vic and I were walkingover this place we
were talking, and we came on to thesubject of Sigmund Freud, whose
work had become veryimportant to us in the field. Vic had got hold
of The
Interpretation of Dreams [Freud 1955] in the field, andit all
came out in 3-D for him. During that walk I, too,saw the curious
imagery in dreams as echoing every-where in Ndembu consciousness.
We were both excited.Decades later I experienced dreams, as Native
Americansdo, as truly prophetic. This time, however, the
ghostsdecided Freud should rule! The Interpretation of
Dreamspowered Vics work on symbolic analysis and was a
realbreakthrough in the field itself. So this all came out atthat
time and we discussed it night and day, and it wasmarvelous for us.
I loved it.
When we returned from the field, we had to get tobusiness and
write, get this dissertation through. Wereckoned it was from the
September term to the springthat Vic would have to do the work,
while the grantlasted. We had all these figures to deal with and
recheckand we also had to consider which tables would be use-ful,
perhaps introduce some other ones, too. Vic was deal-ing with the
field notes and the main series of cases, thesocial dramas. We were
busy in our rented house inNorth Manchester, going in to the
department very of-ten, and because the children were in school it
was pos-sible for me to take part.
Wonderful seminars were being held, and we had li-brary research
to do. But we did a great deal of work athome. Vic kept all his
main materials and his typewriterand books at home; he didnt have
an office at the uni-versity. And we began to build up the
dissertation, chap-ter by chapter, very carefully, starting with
the geogra-phy, means of subsistence, political systems and
history,etc. Nowadays, I discourage students who want to dotheir
write-up that way. I tell them to start with some-thing which is at
the heart of the topic, which begins tobreathe real life into the
piece. But those were the dayswhen the old conventions still
reigned, and you simplydid it this way. Vic handled the main
writing. There wasonly one typewriter. I did the editing
throughout, andthe tables and the photographs, working all the
time.Max Gluckman, when he finally got a complete draft inhis hand,
with great painstaking care went through everyword of it,
copyediting in detail.
I liked this work a lot because we used to talk aboutthe subject
matter all the time. I did the maps for Vic.These details are
important to know, but they dont getvery much regarded. Vics mother
came up when Vic gothis dissertation, and it was quite an occasion.
I was im-mensely proud, and I bought myself a new hat.
ME: Is there any part of Schism and Continuity that youand Vic
kept coming back to as something to argue over,agree on, or revel
in?
ET: Yeah, the social dramas were all of those. They werethe
great events in the villages that affected us all. Andwe wrote it
all down and took great pains to record themall in photographs in
the dissertation. And yet I felt therewas no sense that there was a
spirit being passed downin the book, but Vic said there was,
because of the Chi-hamba ritual given at the end. I regarded that
analysisof Chihamba as being tailored to fit the theme of the
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Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 847
book as a wholeemphasizing the unifying effect of thecult of
Chihamba throughout that vicinage. Its too so-ciological, although
there are hints in the analysis thattheres more to Chihamba than
whats written and it didlead on to Chihamba, the White Spirit [V.
Turner 1962].So OK, there were these differences of opinion. What
Iwas pleased about was the fact that in Schism you couldsee the
Ndembu ritual system in action. It was set intime. And then of
course there was my manuscript Ka-jima. I was writing myself while
doing all this disser-tation work with Vic, because I couldnt not
do it. Africahad such an effect on me, and I missed the people
somuch. I had a vivid dream about them, and I just simplyhad to get
the events down the way I personally sawthem and experienced
them.
ME: The manuscript Kajima has always fascinated me.It was
eventually to become The Spirit and the Drum,some 30 years after it
was originally written. But Ivealways wondered about how you
thought of it when youwrote it. Did you think of it as
anthropology? How didyou and Vic talk about it?
ET: He was supportive about my doing this, but it wasnta part of
the departments research. I never read any ofit in the department;
it was private writing. I didnt ex-pect that anything I wrote would
be given in theseminars.
ME: Why?
ET: Because no wives ever did this, unless they
wereuniversity-trained. And that was that. Otherwise youwere just
going to be a bother. As one professor at [theUniversity of]
Chicago later said, We dont want allthese Hyde Park housewives
around here. Thanks, youknow? Im very angry still. Such a dictum
was taken forgranted in England at that time, and probably
universally.I did go and sit in on the seminars, but the
possibilityof my contributing simply didnt come up. But Man-chester
was a comfortable atmosphere, and so muchwent on outside of the
seminar setting. Elizabeth Colsonused to do her knitting at the
seminars. It was very hu-man, and I was extremely glad to be there
at all.
The manuscript stayed in a drawer, and we were busythinking out
what was going to come next. In the late1950s, a very important
thing happened in our lives: wejoined the Catholic Church. It was
at St. Josephs, inManchester. We had been knocking around in
Man-chester for a few years after the field, a little depressedfor
a number of reasons. The Communist party, whichwe had joined after
the war in Hastings and which in-formed a good deal of our first
fieldwork, had lost allappeal. African ritual had taken its place,
and I supposethat for us there was something of this ritual fever
inthe Catholic Church. It would be hard to fully ex-plainor
understandthe reaction we got in the Man-chester department. A lot
of our friends were card-car-rying members of the CP, and almost
everyone inanthropology was a left-leaning atheist. Joining the
Cath-
olic Church was probably the worst thing we could havedone. It
didnt end friendships, but it did cause tensionswith some people.
In any case, we wanted to get out. Vicwas very devoted to Max but
also wanted to get out fromunder his thumb, so in 1960 he accepted
an offer fromthe Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sci-ences at Stanford to spend a year there. Soon after that,he got
an offer from Cornell University to come as a fullprofessor, which
was very rareespecially given his age.So in 1964 we moved to
Ithaca, and Vic started teachingat Cornell.
ME: It seems that when Vic was at Cornell your researchinterests
began to expand. Im thinking here of the Mor-gan Lectures Vic gave
at Rochester during that time.
ET: The Ritual Process [V. Turner 1969], which was basedon those
lectures, was the key to the Cornell period. Itwas partly a
recognition of the developing hippie era andof the demonstrations
and love-ins at Cornell. We hadtransferred the pub discussions of
Manchester with thelikes of Bill Epstein to Cornell, although it
was in ourhouse rather than a pub. We developed a liminal systemin
our seminars. Somebody gave a presentationthiswas the structured
part. Then the interval, the liminaltime, when we all got cans of
beer and had a break. Thenwe came together afterwards for the
reaggregation, tosay more on what wed been talking about in the
beerinterval. We would have a discussion and people wouldbe able to
hear each other. That system worked like atreat. At least 12 heads
of departments have resultedfrom those seminars, and students with
many, manypublicationsI cant count the number of books thathave
been written by students who have been to thoseseminars.
Within a short time the Chicago offer turned up. Thatappointment
was for the Committee on Social Thought,with a joint appointment in
anthropology, but Vic wasto be paid by the Committee. Without much
hesitationhe said yes, because he liked some of the faculty a
lot.He was also interested in the liberty that the Committeemight
offer, because he could teach outside of anthro-pologycourses on
Dante and Blake or whatever caughthis fancy. We had been at Cornell
four years and felt thatwe could move on. We didnt necessarily want
the beautyof nature and the quiet life that Ithaca offered. We
wantedto be where the action was.
At the time, Vics reputation was rising. He and I wereproducing
a lot of work. These books were popping outlike mad, and people
were reading his papers in differentcollections. Maybe if Chicago
had been like the Virginiadepartmentif it had had the same ethosit
would havebeen a permanent affair for us. But there was
somethingabout the University of Chicagoa kind of tough,
bittersteel from the city itself that had gotten into the fabricof
the school.
The first impressions in Chicago were of Hyde Parkitself. When
we first arrived the place was in an absoluteuproar because of the
1968 elections and what was hap-pening at the Democratic
Convention. The police were
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848 F current anthropology
so jittery, I thought, my Lord, this place is very upset.Very,
very upset. Vic and I felt for the students a lot. Wewanted to be
identified with them. Most of the facultyat Chicago didnt feel this
way, and there were some uglyrows. But I always thought that the
students were likeyour children, and how could you betray your
children?Anyway, this is part of what we plunged into when wefirst
reached Chicago. I know these events played a bigrole in how we
thought about our work in anthropologyfrom then on.
ME: Did you two carry the seminar format developed atCornell on
to Chicago?
ET: Yeah. That seminar went on. It was known as VictorTurners
midnight seminar. It would start at eightoclock on Thursdays and
just go on and on. The gath-ering just couldnt stop. Vic and I
would wake up lateon Friday, about nine or ten, and go along to
Walgreensand have some coffee and sweet rolls. And Vera, the
wait-ress, would always come to our table, and wed feel to-tally at
peace. We would walk around the Point, out nearthe Lake Michigan,
and then come and have our coffee,talking about what had been going
on in the seminar.Those were great days. It was the students who
helpedus think through everything.
The seminars were the heart of that Chicago period,but Vic also
gave courses to students who were interestedin Durkheim. He gave
lectures on Kierkegaard, WilliamBlake, Dante, and other figures. He
was able to do thisin the Committee on Social Thought, you see, and
herelished it because at University College, London, he hadgone
deeply into literature. Besides, he and I were con-tinually
exploring literature, the various Greek poets, theFrench
symbolists, the American visionary romantics,and so on. It was a
very busy time in Chicago, nine yearsin all.
ME: Did faculty come to the seminars at your house aswell?
ET: Some faculty, yes. I wouldnt say a lot. Maybe theywere there
more than I realized. Fred Eggan was oftenthere. Not many
anthropology faculty. Jamie Redfieldwas there sometimes. Who else?
If there were SouthAsian themes, it would be A. K. Ramanujan and
RalphNicholas turning up, depending on the topic on whicha student
was presenting. The only regular was FredEggan.
ME: At this point I wonder if we can talk about whenyou started
to work on the journal Primavera. Im alsointerested in hearing
about your experience of thewomens movement and how feminist
sentiments werecoming into the university.
ET: At the time I was more caught up in it than in any-thing
else. I hadnt been totally aware of feminist issues.When I was a
little kid I was kind of a feminist, but Ididnt attach myself to it
because I was so busy with
Vics work and his thinking. Primavera was actuallypointed out to
me by Vic in The Maroon, the universitysstudent newspaper. He said,
Theres this ad calling forpeople to work on a literary journal, why
dont you doit? It was his suggestion that legitimized it for me.
Iwould have loved to do it anyway, but since it was com-ing from
him that meant, OK, thats a go-ahead.
There were more than a dozen of us working on thisjournal. Some
of us were associated with the universityand some werent. We
published poetry and articles. Iwrote Girl into Woman for one
issue, which was thefirst thing I published on the Nkanga ritual. I
liked work-ing in a literary style very much. I worked hard on
Pri-mavera, to such an extent that Vic started to feel hewasnt
seeing much of me. But the journal work contin-ued right until we
left Chicago. We had a break for oneyear in Princeton when Vic was
at the Institute for Ad-vanced Study. He was there during the
197576 schoolyear and then back in Chicago until 1977.
ME: I wonder about the progression of all this. You werewriting
a lot in the 1940s, and weve talked about thework in Oasis. And
then in the 1950s, after the field,you were writing both with Vic
and on your own. In the1960s, when you got to America, you mention
editingmore than writing, and then, in the 1970s, with thisliterary
journal, writing comes up again. How do you seethis history? Were
you always thinking as a writer?
ET: On and off, yes. I can see the uneven developmentin any
writers life. And incidentally, about the Oasispoetry: I much
admired Vic, who was writing very pre-cise poetry. It was almost as
if every line came out inbalance, and I liked that. Of course that
was one of thereasons I fell for him. But I tended to regard my
ownwriting as this kind of flyaway stuff. I admire Walt Whit-man
because he has a free style. And I felt that probablymine was not
gifted poetry because others had said itwas sort of wild. But the
works of the hippie poets ac-tually encouraged me a lot; Alan
Ginsberg, Gary Snyder,and the others. Ginsberg just let it all hang
out, and thatwas encouraging for me.
ME: This was also the time that you and Vic startedgetting into
the pilgrimage work, which resulted in yourfirst officially
coauthored book, Image and Pilgrimagein Christian Culture [1978].
That work strikes me asbeing of a very different nature from the
Ndembu workand more a continuation of the later chapters in
TheRitual Process. How did you do the work for that project?
ET: It was different from standing with a clipboard inthe middle
of the bush writing about medicines and rit-ual. For the pilgrimage
work we did do traditional field-work in the sense that we went on
pilgrimages our-selves, but a lot of it was textual analysis. We
looked alot at writing by devotees, which was an important partof
the project. And then of course the experience of goingon the
pilgrimages as Catholics was personal as well asobservational. We
were worshipping at the shrines; this
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Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 849
did not get into the writing very much, but it did creepin a bit
here and there. So, we used more historical ma-terial and less
straight ethnographic material about whatthe pilgrims said to us.
In hindsight, I feel we didnt haveenough time to do any consistent
following-up of specificgroups of pilgrims. Thats why I went back
to the fieldin Zambia after Vic died, because Id been missing
thatsort of thingintegration with what the people were ac-tually
doing.
ME: Looking back on the course of your work togetherand trying
to situate the different projects, how do youthink about the
question of authorship?
ET: Theres not much differenceis there?in what wedid together.
It was just a matter of the political climateof the age. In the
1970s you could begin to say, OK, thiswas a collaborative effort,
but it was about the samebefore. For example in The Drums of
Affliction [1968],Vic had a big chapter on the girls initiation,
Nkanga. Alarge amount of that was my material, and the ideas
werefrom our collaboration, but it was a book by VictorTurner,
published by Clarendon Press. So its a matterof the politics of the
time. The fact that feminists in the1970s could raise these issues
is very important, and Ido thank them. To a certain extent I wish
there weremore of my stuff in the work, but then, in a way,
thereis, indirectly. But, you know, its actually hard to
col-laborate in writing. It requires you to slow, and we wereboth
in full-tilt with what we were doing, you know?We liked it that
way, and we liked the fast pace.
ME: Youve mentioned to me before that when you twowent on your
pilgrimage research trips, you started towrite fieldnotes in your
own style, which was differentfrom how you approached fieldnotes
with the Ndembu.I wonder if you can talk a little more about the
processof writing fieldnotesfrom the early days with theNdembu to
your latest work in Alaska [1996] and inIreland.
ET: In Mwinilunga, my fieldnotes were not as academicas Vics,
but they were running accounts of what peopledid as I watched
rituals. I did not give any emotionalreactions of my own at all. I
tried to get the accountobjectively, but my emotional reactions
were runningthrough my head, and thats why I wrote Kajima
[TheSpirit and the Drum]. I wanted to get it before the feel-ings
disappeared. I didnt regard that as academic; I re-garded it as a
narrative account that I wanted to do be-cause I liked doing it.
So, OK, I was writing whathappened as a report of various rituals
and so on, and Ialways reckoned that they probably werent as
completeas Vics and that he would be aware of social processesgoing
on that I wouldnt because of his training. He hada good eye for
antagonisms in the village and the curioustangle of personalities
that he wrote about in Schism andContinuity. I wasnt up to writing
on the intricacies, orso I thought at the time. And so, OK, I wrote
thesereports.
ME: Did you think of yourself as an anthropologist inAfrica?
ET: I felt that I was a junior anthropologist, yes, but astrange
one because I hadnt been shaped in the mill atUniversity College. I
was freewheeling a bit. My think-ing wasnt shaped in the
professional way, although I hadbeen fairly close to it. And
believe me, I had a deep re-spect for it, or else I wouldnt have
helped Vic with allthose books. I was a sort of an anthropologist,
and ananthropologists assistant 100 percent.
ME: When you moved to Virginia in 1977 for Vic to takeup the
Kenan Professorship in anthropology and religiousstudies, you
delved even further into the realm of lit-erature by enrolling in
English and creative writingcourses. I imagine this all fits into
the trajectory youredescribing.
ET: I found myself in this new place, and I was gettingmore and
more interested in writing. I felt I could do adegree, and since
there are extraordinary writers in Char-lottesville, people like
John Casey and Greg Orr, andothers visiting, I felt I could take
some courses in Englishand the symbolist literature. I was hoping
and thinkingthat maybe one day I would learn how to write whatwas
going to be The Spirit and the Drum, you see. Iwanted to do it
right. Eventually, when I did take courses,John Casey helped me a
lot. He looked at that manu-script, once I had done quite a bit
more to it, and he gaveme a great deal of help.
I eventually decided to enroll full-time at the Univer-sity of
Virginia, in English. I was accepted to the M.A.program, despite
the fact that I had never earned a Bach-elors degree. There was a
question of whether I shoulddo it in anthropology or in English. Of
course, Vic and Ihad been writing poetry and reading great
literature,which is a kind of passion in our family. I felt that I
didnot want to learn what Vic had been teaching me all thetime and
take classes on what was prevalent then, whichwas solid
structuralism. I felt that if I did, there wouldbe something
slightly invidious about it, like nepotismor something. My
hesitation was mainly because I hadbeen living in the element of
anthropology all the time,and I had my own rather strong ideas
about itaboutliminality not being subsumed under structure.
ME: How did it feel being in school at 60?
ET: Oh, fine. I could cope much better than most of
thosegraduate kids because I had been with Vic doing a lot
ofwriting. I was more mature. And they were trying, I felt,to get
the grades with more or less the least trouble theycould. I guess
it was a little strange to be in school be-cause I was older than
the others, but as you get olderyou find things less strange
anyway, you know. And Ifelt capable and experienced. One of the
professors gaveus Henry Miller to studyyou know, Tropic of
Capricorn[1965], real way-out stuffand I did the best of all
onthat.
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850 F current anthropology
ME: And the administration didnt mind your not havingbeen to
college?
ET: Well, they counted my being a coeditor of Primaveraas pretty
important. They also saw other pieces I hadwritten, and there was a
very liberal attitude towardwomen at that time and women that came
into studieslater in life. And they knew I had done the editing
ofVics books and that I had been collaborating with Vicall this
time.
ME: Did you ever think about a Ph.D.?
ET: Yes, obviously, but I was very involved in Vics workso it
didnt seem possible. Of course, I remember theoccasion when the
possibility came up, and in a way Iregret it, and yet I knew that I
couldnt.
After Vic died in 1983 I was appointed a lecturer inthe
anthropology department at UVA, which was appro-priate, I think. It
was only part-time, and I immediatelyhad a lot more on my plateit
was as if a great deal ofwhat Vic was doing was suddenly put on my
platesothe part-time lectureship gave me time to deal with
allthis.
ME: Many of your former students have told me aboutthe
performance seminars at Virginia that you and Vicled, which is also
something I want to touch on becauseit seems as if the move to
performativity was carried outmost thoroughly at Virginia.
ET: We were trying to convey an understanding of ritualin a way
that reading and writing cant capture. This wassomething that Vic
always talked about in hisworkthat a lot of ritual couldnt be put
into words.Wed try to get the students in the spirit of it, and
theyvery quickly couldnt resist. There were strategies to
fa-cilitate this. In these settings, youre not getting
thestructural relationshipshot and cold, or whatever itis. You have
those as well, but you get a sense of theprogression, the process,
the body. And one has to sus-pend disbelief, as old Wordsworth
said, and flow withit. Flow is so importantthe actual pacing and
sense ofbeing right in the thick of things. You can
understandthrough the nonverbal. And when people go to the
field,having done anthropology without having tried any
per-formance, they see people fooling around and they dontknow what
the hell theyre at. They write it down andget the structural
relationships, but they remain on theoutside, because they would
have to drop that criticalityto understand. If you go in the field
and you haventperformed ritual before, and you see the natives
actinglike that, you look for signs of the social constructionof
reality and you find them, because you find whatyoure looking for.
There are always people running thetemple and doing accounts, so to
speak. There are alwayspeople at pilgrimage centers selling
zillions of blue plas-tic virgins, plastic bottles with Knock
Shrine printedon them, and so on. So then you have your social
con-
struction of reality and its workings and all, but thatisnt
much, and it isnt always interesting.
ME: This makes a lot of anthropologists uncomfortable.
ET: Oh, yeah. It used to make me uncomfortable.
ME: When was the switch for you?
ET: Well, after we joined the Catholic Church. You see,there are
various ways in which Vic wrote. Very hard-headed, but then
sometimeswhats the word?experiential, and with an infinite respect
for what wasgoing on. Such is the way he wrote in Chihamba,
theWhite Spirit. And in not a very different era he wroteThe Drums
of Affliction, in which he practically ana-lyzed away the true
meaning of the Ihamba ritual. Thesetwo things were going on side by
side. I was usually inthe same mode as he. I often saw him
responding in thisdouble way to the anthropological material. To
forestallthe critiques of this, he took a great deal of trouble
withscholarship. This is what has kept the discipline in
deeprespect of Vics work. I know Im not the scholar thatVic was,
but still, Im perhaps even more of a maverickthan he. I dont give
much of a damn, perhaps acting likethe naughty one of the
family.
ME: Thats your favorite role, I think.
ET: Oh, yes, youve got it.
ME: All of this brings us to some key themes in anthro-pology.
Do you go native?
ET: As much as I bloody well can! To me thats the point.There is
a slight limitation, but human beings are ex-traordinarily pervious
to each other. As Vic said, thereare these prepositional plugs in
everybodyto, for, from,against, by, with, of, within, out. Everyone
has theseplugs, and they plug into other people.
Im a woman. In a bygone era, the man took the ini-tiative, and
the woman would be trying to work alongwith the man. I knew this
from the environment I wasin, and I had quite a lot of practice in
it. A part of mewould say, Well, if Im going to be flexible and
take onother peoples viewsa husbands or whateverIll takeon a lot of
other peoples views. What the hell is thedifference? This is
something of the way my mind ar-gued. I went the way of Vic being a
Catholic. He got thesense of it first and I did afterwards,
although when Iwas given the original sense it was very strong to
me.So in whatever we did, I delighted in getting alongsideothers
with their agenda. And getting it, if I could.
ME: Thats an interesting connection, I think, and aninteresting
crossover between the personal and the pro-fessional. Can you say
more about how you approachedthe idea of a relationship with Vic in
that sense? Mysense is that it was a very complicated mix. You and
I
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Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 851
have talked a lot about how you contributed to Vicswork and how
it was very much a collaborative effort.And everyone Ive talked to
who knew you both has saidthe same thing, without fail. And
certainly the two ofyou had profound impacts upon one another about
howyou wrote things up. Its this very complicated mix
ofgive-and-take. There are moments when I think you as-sert your
position within this all and make a point ofclaiming that
partnership and a very active role. I thinkthis is important and an
accurate sense of the give-and-take. But the way in which you just
described itnowand this ties into other ways you have
describeditwas taking on his mission, adapting yourself to
hisculture. So its curious to me in what ways you see your-self
adapting to Vic and in what ways you see yourselfas a point of
reference.
ET: I think I know what youre getting at. I think its todo with
the fact that in my consciousness I understoodwhat Vics agenda was,
and as it developed I understoodit. I dont think there was any
point at which I didntunderstand it. Hes not here to ask, but I
think hed sayhe was doing a lot of things in reference to me. He
wastesting things off of me to a certain extent. He wouldframe
things in a way that I could absorb, and this israther sexual,
actually. Because I was there, he would dothings in a certain way,
or frame things in a certain way.I didnt have to tell him what to
say, I didnt have todirect. But he knew I was receptive to certain
things, andhe knew how my mind was moving and was
perhapstelepathic. So he would do this, and I would suggest tohim
what he was thinking, too. You see? And then hewould develop it,
and vice versa. This was thecollaboration.
But then, when you look at the collaboration, as youveinsisted
upon doing, you see this thing from his point ofview. And if he
were here (which he isnt), he would beshowing this himself, you
know? But I was very con-scious in this social world that I was not
trained at Uni-versity College, London, and all the rest.
Therefore, Ivalued very much this part of me that was
interactingwith Vic, and looking at myself as the adaptable
person.I was, in a way, determined to develop this like an artform.
I would think about this. And therefore, well, Ithink he translated
this into communitas. It was there.It was conscious, but he didnt
look at it as a womanwould. It wasnt so personal to him, as it
sometimes isntwith men. But he did know what communitas was, andhe
loved it.
So, I think this is how it was. And there is such a thingas
being a woman and being a man. Its absolute rubbishto say there are
just human beings, because one is verymuch sexualized. And true,
this is structured in our so-ciety. Conscious persons know they
have to live in thisworld and will adapt as they can. Thats what
was goingon. Does that answer your question? Or is there some-thing
more?
ME: I think that gives me a sense of the connections yousee
between the two of you and even going native.
Lets talk more about these ideas of the man and thewoman and the
different roles, perceptions, and atti-tudes. I think talking about
these as concrete, essentialrealities is another strong
characteristic of your work,something that you dont shy away from.
Its also some-thing that a lot of anthropologists would be
criticalofnot seeing these as categories that can be brokendown.
You talk about religion in these terms, too. Itssomething thats not
a social constructionwhich is avery nonanthropological
viewpoint.
ET: Absolutely. Im highly conscious of this. Ive beenworking
away at trying to shift this from all kinds ofangles. Yes, Im quite
aware of what Im feebly trying todo.
ME: So tell me something about your latest work, fromThe Spirit
and the Drum to what youve been doing inIreland over the past five
years.
ET: I got the manuscript for The Spirit under control inthe
summer of 1985, when I was on my own and therewasnt anybody in the
house at all. There were someplaces in it that I was bothered
about, and I had a chancefrom that May onwards to have a look at
it. And I sawthat what Id got was centered on four rituals; the
boysand girls initiations, the Tukuka healing ritual, and
theChihamba. In the 1980s, the material was more vivid tome. I was
more convinced, for instance, that Manyosahad gone into trance. I
was more sure of the symbols,more sure that these were a force in
themselves in thissituationsymbols that were playing their own
sym-phony, as it were. I didnt have any qualms about theway it was
written. I cared if people read it, but I didntwant to put it into
an academic frame, really. So I thoughtabout it in much the same
terms as I had originally writ-ten it in the 1950s, but by the
1980s the material wasmuch richer to me. All the work that Vic and
I had doneover the years confirmed what I wanted to do, confirmedmy
own sense of the human story, and it is portrayed inThe Spirit and
the Drum.
ME: The reviews of that book are interesting becausemost of the
reviewers obviously didnt know about thehistory of the bookthat it
was first conceived and ex-ecuted in the 1950s. Im thinking
particularly of GeorgeMarcuss [1987] review in Parabola, where he
said thatit was a first-rate account of the postmodern approachto
writing narrative anthropology. I thought this was awonderful
instance of how the categories we use aretricks to define
ourselves. Do you think of that book asa postmodern text?
ET: I think of it, as well as Experiencing Ritual [E.
Turner1992], as evidence that this is where anthropology mightbe
goingthe richer the better. Human material is al-most impossibly
rich, and so we have a mandate now togo ahead and unfold the full
richness of humankind tothe best of our ability. Its there, and we
should all tryto show it. Its a marvelous field, anthropology, and
I see
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852 F current anthropology
Experiencing Ritual fitting somewhere into all of this.Whether
its postmodern or not, I want to recount therelevant details to
anyone who will listen. There shouldbe an accumulation of these
pieces to engage the aca-demic stages of theory making.
ME: When I read Experiencing Ritual I was struck bythe different
ways in which you referred to Vic through-out the text. There are
passages that create a sense ofintimacy, and there are passages
that create a sense ofscholarly distance. In some passages its Vic
or myhusband, and in others its as Turner argues, and soon.
ET: The fat and the thin Vic, really. Its like Philip Kab-wita,
who had a fat and a thin side. Vic had a lean andmuscular mind and
rather a fat body! You had to respectthat lean and muscular mind in
the writing and also theother side.
ME: I assume that the specific ways you referred to himwere
strategically placed.
ET: Of course. To engage with the academic side of an-thropology
has meant engaging with the canon, and soIve had to think of him in
that way. But he was also avery full human being. These were
dialogues of a sort.
ME: I have another question to do with the Ihamba ritualyou
describe and the tooth you saw. I think there wouldbe a lot of
anthropologists who would say that its all abit crazy, your seeing
a spirit form.
ET: Yes, yes. Some people, including some anthropolo-gists,
think this is crazy. Ive been helped by Roy Wagnerin this. The
tooth is a peculiarly strong thing, and so,was this going through
the veins? And the concept of aspirit tooth is also somewhat
strange. Jesus said, Putyour fingers in the holes in my hands and
you will be-lieve. This is a spirit figure, coming after the
crucifix-ion, and yet this poor guy Thomas was able to feel it.And
people say this is a myth. How could it be?
I was certain it happened to me. I didnt actually seea tiny
little tooth coming out of the skin. I saw the spiritobject, a gray
blob, come out. I dont know whether aconcrete tooth came out of the
vein, or a spirit tooth asa gray blob came out. But I saw it,
whatever it was. Andone does not retract things like that, you
know? I knowits hard for people, but if they begin to take in a
littleof the reports they hear (like Evans-Pritchard walking inthe
Azande village and seeing a spirit light) then we canget somewhere.
We havent sufficiently grappled withthese issues, and yet they dont
go away. There are al-ways more coming up. It stays like a tooth in
our veins,if I can put it that way. We dont know what to do. I
justlike to go on with this study on the quiet. Its the samewith my
work in Point Hope, Alaska, and in Ireland. Iwill always try to get
into the thick of things in this way,whether its the whale spirit
in Alaska or visions of Maryat Knock Shrine in Ireland.
Sometimes I wonder what Vic would think of me now.What would he
think of me running shamanistic ses-sions? How would he think of my
Catholicism, in whichI say, God the Mother Almighty? Theres a
certainfeminism in this. What Im doing now is an extensionof the
Chihamba, the White Spirit side of Vic, not theDrums of Affliction
side. I obviously take off from thespiritual side of thinking. I
dont get any visions orflashes about what Vic would think, but Im
grateful tothat guy, and, God, the communitas. The
conversationswith Vic were marvelous. We would get
breakthroughsright and left. Those were great times.
I think we can go on with Victor Turners work. Mywork, of
course, is relatively obscure, but it does affecta small range of
people, and I think theres a certaincommunitas in it. I always hope
we might get somebreakthroughs.
References Cited
f r e u d , s i g m u n d . 1955 The interpretation of dreams.
Trans-lated and edited by James Strachey. New York: Basic
Books.
m a r c u s , g e o r g e . 1987. Review of: The spirit and the
drum:A memoir of Africa, by Edith Turner. Parabola 12(3):11618.
m i l l e r , h e n ry. 1965. Tropic of Capricorn. New York:
GrovePress.
ro y a l a n t h ro p o l o g i c a l i n s t i t u t e o f g r
e a t b r i -t a i n a n d i r e l a n d . 1951. 6th edition. Notes
and querieson anthropology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
t u r n e r , e d i t h . 1987 The spirit and the drum: A memoir
ofAfrica. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
. 1996. The hands feel it: Healing and spirit presenceamong a
northern Alaskan people. DeKalb: Northern IllinoisUniversity
Press.
t u r n e r , e d i t h , w i t h w i l l i a m b l o d g e t t
, s i n g l e -t o n k a h o n a , a n d f i d e l i b e n w a .
1992. Experiencingritual: A new interpretation of African healing.
Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press.
t u r n e r , v i c t o r . 1957. Schism and continuity in an
Africansociety: A study of Ndembu village life. Manchester:
Manches-ter University Press.
. 1962. Chihamba, the white spirit: A ritual drama of theNdembu.
Manchester: Manchester University Press for theRhodes-Livingstone
Institute.
. 1967. The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual.Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
. 1968. The drums of affliction: A study of religious pro-cesses
among the Ndembu. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
. 1969. The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure.Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
. 1985. On the edge of the bush: Anthropology as experi-ence.
Edited by Edith Turner. Tucson: University of ArizonaPress.
t u r n e r , v i c t o r , a n d e d i t h t u r n e r . 1978.
Image andpilgrimage in Christian culture: Anthropological
perspectives.New York: Columbia University Press.
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Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 853
Fig. 1. Map of Southern Germany showing the posi-tion of Hohle
Fels and other sites mentioned in thetext.
New Evidence for Paleolithic RockPainting in Central Europe1
nicholas j . conard andhans-peter uerpmannInstitut fur Ur- und
Fruhgeschichte und Archaologiedes Mittelalters, Universitat
Tubingen, SchlossHohentubingen, 72070 Tubingen,
Germany([email protected]). 8 xii 99
Despite Paleolithic research dating back to the 1860s,little
evidence for parietal art has been documented inthe caves of
Central Europe. However, on August 3, 1998,Patrick Russell, a
member of the excavation team atHohle Fels Cave, located near
Schelklingen, Germany(fig. 1), recovered a painted rock fragment
from an ar-chaeological horizon containing abundant
Magdalenianartifacts. The find was photographed in situ and
belongsto geological stratum 1k. This fragment of limestone
pre-serves a double row of seven and a truncated double rowof four
dark-red, subcircular dots and provides new ev-idence for rock
painting in Central Europe. While anearlier age cannot be ruled
out, stylistic and contextualarguments suggest that the depiction
dates to the Mag-dalenian (Conard and Floss 1999). The rich
Magdalenianlayers of Hohle Fels are well documented and date to
ca.13,000 b.p. (Blumentritt and Hahn 1991, Housley et al.1997,
Conard and Uerpmann 1999).
Hohle Fels Cave is located at an elevation of 543 mabove sea
level in the Ach Valley near Schelklingen, ca.20 km west of Ulm.
Along with the nearby Blau andLone Valleys, the Ach Valley, with
its many caves, formsthe heartland for Paleolithic research in
southwesternGermany (Muller-Beck 1983). The cave is one of the
larg-est of the Swabian Jura, with a 30-m-long entrance pas-sage
leading to a main hall with an area of 500 m2 anda ceiling as high
as 12 m (Blumentritt and Hahn 1991).The entrance passage to the
cave, 6 m wide and 3 mhigh, opens toward the north-northwest and is
situatedroughly 100 m southeast of and 7 m above the Ach River.
Hohle Fels has been studied by several generations ofscholars
beginning with the work of Oskar Fraas (1872)and continuing into
the 20th century with the work ofRobert R. Schmidt (1912). More
recently Gustav Riekconducted excavations in the entrance to the
cave from1958 to 1960 (Saier 1994). Further excavations were
con-
1. q 2000 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for
AnthropologicalResearch. All rights reserved
0011-3204/2000/4105-0007$1.00.Thecurrent research at Hohle Fels is
funded by grants from the Deut-sche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the
Sonderforschungsbereich 275 ofthe University of Tubingen, and the
Heidelberger Zement Companyand by contributions from the
Landesdenkmalamt and the Gesell-schaft fur Urgeschichte. We thank
Harald Floss, Gerhard Bosinski,and Michael Bolus for their helpful
comments and A. Frey, H. Jen-sen, and Andrew Kandel for technical
support. We are particularlyindebted to A. Aksoy for his careful
work in conserving the paintedwall fragment from Hohle Fels.
ducted under the direction of Joachim Hahn of the Uni-versity of
Tubingen in 197779 and 198796. These ex-cavations again focused on
the entrance rather than thepresumably more disturbed deposits in
the interior ofthe cave (Blumentritt and Hahn 1991, Hahn
1997a).Hahn reopened the excavation at Hohle Fels with thegoal of
recovering archaeological material from a chrono-stratigraphic
setting similar to that from his nearby ex-cavation at
Geissenklosterle (Hahn 1977a). FollowingHahns death, excavation at
the site has continued underour direction from 1997 to 1999 and has
focused on ec-ological and economic questions related to the
UpperPaleolithic of the region. Beyond the important Magda-lenian
and Gravettian deposits at Hohle Fels (fig. 2), thesite shows
potential for yielding both Aurignacian andMiddle Paleolithic
materials, as is the case at sites in-cluding Geissenklosterle in
the Ach Valley and Hohlen-stein-Stadel and Vogelherd in the Lone
Valley (Hahn1977b, Muller-Beck 1983).
The debate over the presence of parietal art in CentralEurope
has lasted for decades and has been characterizedby a series of
claims and subsequent refutations for theexistence of cave painting
since the recognition of Pa-leolithic cave paintings in France and
Cantabrian Spainat the turn of the 20th century (Conard and Floss
1999).Over the past three decades, the work of Joachim Hahnhas
played a central role in regional research on Paleo-lithic art.
Hahns excavations at Geissenklosterle pro-vided new evidence for
Aurignacian figurines (Hahn1986) that complemented the previously
excavatedmammoth ivory statues recovered from Vogelherd (Riek1934)
and Hohlenstein-Stadel (Schmid 1989, Hahn 1986).Susanne Munzels
archaeozoological work also led to the
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854 F current anthropology
Fig. 2. Schematic stratigraphic profile of Hohle Fels including
four major stratigraphic units (after Conard andUerpmann 1999): A,
with finds from the Magdalenian and radiocarbon ages of ca. 13,000
b.p.; B, correspondingto the last glacial maximum, ca. 20,000 b.p.;
C, containing Gravettian finds and dating to ca. 29,000 b.p.; andD,
containing early Upper Paleolithic finds from a test
excavation.
recovery of the remains of two bone flutes from
Geis-senklosterle including one made from the radius of aswan (Hahn
and Munzel 1995). These musical instru-ments and the ivory
figurines from the site stem fromthe Aurignacian find horizon II
and date to ca 33,500 b.p.with radiocarbon and 37,000 b.p. with
thermolumines-cence (Richter et al. 2000).
Prior to the 1970s, painted stones had been recoveredfrom
several sites in southern Germany. Best-knownamong these are
several painted stones from the Mag-dalenian which were excavated
in 1912 by J. Fraunholzin collaboration with H. Obermaier at Obere
Klause (Ob-ermaier 1914, Freund 1963, Bosinski 1982).
Additionally,E. Soergel and W. Soergel recovered a 9.4 # 5.5 #
2.2-cm painted cobble of either Magdalenian or Late Pale-olithic
age from HohlensteinKleine Scheuer in 1923(Wetzel 1961, Hahn and
von Koenigswald 1977), whileG. Rieks excavations at Vogelherd (Riek
1934) andHohle Fels (Saier 1994) provided further examples ofstones
and rock fragments with traces of pigment. Saier(1994) describes
five painted rock fragments from theMagdalenian layers of Rieks
excavation at Hohle Felsand has been able to refit one specimen to
a broken cob-ble from Hahns more recent excavation there. Amongthe
early finds from Obere Klause, Kleine Scheuer, andHohle Fels, rows
of small red dots and faint lines con-stitute the most common
motifs. Despite the existence
of earlier ivory figurines from the Aurignacian, femalefigurines
and occasional figurative engravings fromGravettian contexts, and
hundreds of figurative engrav-ings from the Magdalenian (Bosinski
1982, Hahn 1986,Scheer 1994), figurative painting is entirely
unknown inGermany. Moreover, with the possible exception of
apurported painted animal from Byci Skala Cave (Oliva1996),
figurative painting has remained absent in the Pa-leolithic of
Central Europe.
Hahns careful excavations at Geissenklosterle andHohle Fels
provided more recent evidence for Paleolithicpainting in addition
to the stones mentioned above.Noteworthy are two finds of
Aurignacian age from Geis-senklosterle. One is an 8.5 # 6 # 4.5-cm
piece of lime-stone with red, yellow, and black pigment from layer
IIb.The other is a limestone fragment from the lower Au-rignacian
layer IIIa, which Hahn (1988) describes as pre-serving a black
V-shape. Hahn argues that this 10 # 10# 3-cm piece, which appears
to stem from the wall ofthe cave, was intentionally painted. While
this interpre-tation is plausible, the irregular nature of the
black andbrown color could be the result of natural processes
orincidental human agency. Hahns excavations at HohleFels have also
yielded at least three examples of stonespreserving traces of red
pigment (Blumentritt and Hahn1991, Scheer 1994). These often poorly
preserved finds,as well as the material from earlier excavations,
provide
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-
Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 855
Fig. 3. The painted fragment of limestone from HohleFels, scale
in cm. (Photo H. Jensen)
convincing evidence for nonfigurative painting on mo-bile
objects, small stones in particular. Before the dis-covery of the
new find from Hohle Fels, however, noconvincing evidence for cave
painting had been recov-ered within Germany. While the new
depiction stopsshort of furnishing definitive proof of the
existence ofcave painting in the region, it does provide the best
ev-idence thus far for parietal art in Germany.
The new find from Hohle Fels measures 7.6 # 5.9 #1.7 cm and was
recovered from geological horizon 1k.The painted surface is smooth,
whereas the reverse sidepreserves unweathered, angular surfaces.
The find pre-serves two double rows of 47-mm oval red dots (fig.
3).One double row is complete and depicts seven subpar-allel pairs
of dots. The other double row includes fourpairs of dots and is
clearly truncated, indicating that thedepiction originally
continued beyond the limits of thecurrent piece.
What distinguishes this find from the objects men-tioned above
is the excellent preservation of the pigmentand particularly the
recognition that the reverse side pre-serves unweathered, angular
surfaces. This observationindicates that the limestone fragment in
all likelihoodstems from the wall of the cave. This stone fragment
iscomposed of the same granular Upper Jurassic limestonethat forms
the walls of the cave. While fragments of thecave wall are
extremely common within the Paleolithicfind horizons of the cave,
this is the first such fragmentto preserve unambiguous evidence for
painting. The col-lapse and fragmentation of the cave walls have
beenclosely documented by Hahn (1991) in connection withhis study
of scratches on polished surfaces of the formerwalls of Hohle Fels.
The apparently ubiquitous fragmen-tation and collapse of the cave
walls of the region mayhelp to explain the scarcity of parietal art
in the region.While the theoretical possibility exists that the
lime-stone fragment was painted after it fell from the wall,the
truncation of the depiction and the fresh, angularnature of the
broken surfaces of the specimen indicatethat it was originally part
of a larger representation onthe wall of Hohle Fels rather than a
piece of mobile art.
In the context of southern Germany, the motif paintedon the new
find from Hohle Fels shows particularlystrong similarities with the
best-known painted stonefrom Obere Klause, where three double rows
of sevensmall red dots are depicted on a rounded,
16-cm-long,elongated piece of limestone (Obermaier 1914,
Muller-Beck and Albrecht 1987). Although the general absenceof
parietal art makes comparisons within Central Europeimpossible,
diverse depictions of red dots and rows of reddots are well known
in the Paleolithic art of WesternEurope, for example, at Niaux
(Clottes 1995), Grotte Car-riot (Lorblanchet 1984), and Grotte Le
Travers de Janoye(Clottes and Lautier 1984; Bosinski, personal
commu-nication, 1999).
This painted wall fragment from a Magdalenian layerat Hohle Fels
provides the best evidence to date for pa-rietal art in Germany and
helps to fill a gap in our knowl-edge of Paleolithic art that
appears to be in part dictated
by the poor preservation of cave walls in the karst regionof
Central Europe.
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schwa-bischen Hohlen: Der Hohle Fels im Achtal. Archiv fur
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h a h n , j . 1977a. Fossilvergesellschaftung nr. 72:
Nachgrabungenim Hohle Felsen bei Schelklingen, Alb-Donau-Kreis.
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. 1986. Kraft und Aggression: Die Botschaft der Eiszeit-kunst im
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. 1991. Hohlenkunst aus dem Hohlen Fels bei Schelklin-gen.
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m u l l e r - b e c k , h . Editor. 1983. Urgeschichte in
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Cooperative Reproduction in IturiForest Hunter-Gatherers:
WhoCares for Efe Infants?1
paula k. iveyDepartment of Anthropology, University of
NewMexico, Albuquerque, N.M. 87131, U.S.A.([email protected]). 13 iii
00
Efe foragers of the Ituri Forest, Democratic Republic ofthe
Congo, share in a unique child-rearing system inwhich infants
receive care from many individuals otherthan their mothers from
birth into early childhood (Tron-ick, Morelli, and Winn 1987,
Tronick, Morelli, and Ivey1992). Cooperative reproduction is highly
unusual froman interspecific perspective and is especially
challengingto evolutionary theory, compelling primatologists
andbiologists to devote considerable attention to
parentingbehaviors exhibited by alloparents (individuals otherthan
the parent) toward conspecific young (e.g., Reidman1982, Emlen
1984, McKenna 1987, Small 1990, Clutton-Brock 1991). From an
explosion of research on animalbehavior since the 1960s, three
general hypotheses havecome to dominate ecological perspectives on
apparentlyaltruistic parenting behaviors: nepotism, reciprocity,
andlearning-to-mother.
1. Nepotism predicts a substantial amount of variationin
alloparenting both within and between species (Mc-Kenna 1987).
Investing in kin is considered an extensionof investing in ones own
genetic reproduction, as thedegree to which genes are shared is
expected to predictshared fitness interests. This equation,
however, like allevolutionary predictions, is economic in nature
andweighted by the relative costs and benefits to individualsof
alternative behaviors within a specific environmentalcontext
(Williams 1966, Altmann 1979, Emlen 1995).The costs and benefits of
particular behavioral strategiesare determined by ecological
interactions of the socialand physical environment and individual
life-history pa-rameters affecting survival, growth, development,
andreproduction. Human life history sets the stage for atleast two
important opportunities for kin, as well as oth-ers, to care, with
important coevolutionary conse-quences. Parents nurture multiple
weaned dependents,
1. q 2000 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for
AnthropologicalResearch. All rights reserved
0011-3204/2000/4105-0008$1.00.Thisresearch was supported by grants
from the National Science Foun-dation (BNS-8609013), the National
Institute of Child Health andDevelopment (1-RO1-HD22431), and the
Spencer Foundation. I amdeeply grateful to those who made this work
possible: Edward Z.Tronick, Child Development Unit, Childrens
Hospital, Boston,Mass., and Gilda A. Morelli, Boston College,
Boston, Mass., for theopportunity to conduct this research; Jane B.
Lancaster, James S.Chisholm, David S. Wilkie, Bryan K. Curran, and
Hillard S. Kaplanfor additional assistance and counsel; Snowden M.
Henry and MariaElena Argueta for critical and continued support;
and anonymousreviewers for their comments. Above all, I am indebted
to the Efe.
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Volume 41, Number 5, December 2000 F 857
table 1Caregivers Predicted by Alloparenting Hypotheses
Allocaregiver Nepotism Reciprocity Learning-to-Mother
Adult male U Adult female
Reproductive U U Nonreproductive U Postreproductive U
Child male U U Child female U U U
increasing the demand for and availability of care (Lan-caster
1997). Consistent with theoretical indications thata lengthy
developmental period favors allocare by re-tained related
helpers-at-the-nest (Lack 1966, Brown1987, Koenig et al. 1992),
sibling care is the most com-mon form of alloparenting in
traditional societies (Weis-ner and Gallimore 1977). In addition to
the prereprod-uctive period, early female reproductive senescence
mayincrease the probability of completing investment inlater-born
young (Lancaster and King 1985, Hill and Hur-tado 1991, Hawkes et
al. 1998) and enhance the repro-ductive efforts of adult offspring
through assistance infood getting (Hawkes 1997) or child care (Hill
and Hur-tado 1996).
2. Reciprocity. Other interspecific research suggeststhat where
the costs of aiding unrelated young are lessthan the costs of
leaving the group (e.g., because of pre-dation pressure, low food
availability, or social compe-tition), unrelated helpers may assist
parents in return forenhanced access to physical (e.g., food,
territory) and so-cial (e.g., alliance, mating) resources necessary
for repro-duction (Ligon 1983, Reyer 1984, Davies 1990).
Emlen(1982a, b) modeled the fitness payoffs of helping
betweenunrelated individuals, concluding that contributing
re-sources to the reproductive success of an unrelated in-dividual
would be a successful strategy for both helperand beneficiary if
they resided in a marginal environmentwith highly unpredictable
access to the resources nec-essary for reproduction. Comparative
analyses suggestthat cooperative breeding is found in environments
thatare extremely limited in resources or saturated with
con-specifics, limiting opportunities for juvenile or subor-dinate
individuals to secure food, mates, space, or otherresources
necessary for independent reproduction (Clut-ton-Brock 1991). By
definition, small traditional societieslack the intensive
stratification that results in large-scalesubversion of the
reproductive interests of some mem-bers of the group to the
advantage of others. However,cross-cultural research confirms that
demographic, ec-onomic, and social limitations commonly impinge on
anindividuals ability to mate and parent young in thesepopulations
(Irons 1983; Hill and Kaplan 1988a, b; Bailey1991a; Hill and
Hurtado 1996). The extent of cooperativebehavior exhibited within
human groups, on a scale un-paralleled in other species, suggests
that in some eco-logical contexts allocare by unrelated but
frequently in-
teracting individuals may be included in the suite ofshared and
reciprocal social behaviors, such as cooper-ative resource
acquisition and food sharing, that char-acterize traditional
behavioral patterns.
3. Learning-to-mother. Like the reciprocity hypothe-sis, the
learning-to-mother hypothesis predicts that per-sonal but delayed
fitness benefits are associated withalloparenting. Through skills
gained from caring for theyoung of others, prereproductive
individuals may in-crease the chances of survival for their own
future off-spring without incurring the risks to their young of
in-experienced care (Spencer-Booth 1970, Lancaster 1971,McKenna
1987). This hypothesis is based on several ob-servations: (a)
parenting skills do not appear to be innateamong primates; (b)
survivorship among primate off-spring is highly dependent on the
quality of care theyreceive; and (c) the infant mortality rate for
primiparousfemale primates is higher than that for multiparous
ones.Field studies report increasing reproductive success withage
due to increasing reproductive skills in a number ofnonprimate
species as well (Lack 1966, Charlesworth1980, Clutton-Brock 1988).
Perhaps in no species is thequality of care more critical to
developmental outcomeand future reproductive success of young than
in hu-mans, with important life-history consequences for par-ents,
caregivers, and their wards (Bogin 1998, Charles-worth 1988, Hrdy
1992, Chisholm 1999). As predictedby their future role as mothers,
cross-culturally, younggirls most frequently perform allocare
(Barry, Bacon, andChild 1957, Weisner and Gallimore 1977).
The hypotheses of nepotism, reciprocity, and learning-to-mother
suggest specific life-history strategies for al-loparenting the
young of others (table 1). Evolutionaryecological theory predicts
that caregivers will allocateinvestment on the basis of the
inclusive-fitness costs andbenefits of providing care, with
individuals giving careto the closest dependent who is likely to
benefit fromchild care efforts. The probability and amount of
in-vestment should be determined by (1) the degree of re-latedness
between the potential caregiver and the childand (2) the ratio of
the cost of care to the caregiversfitness to the fitness benefit
received by the child. Whileecological theory implies an economic
impact (i.e., costor benefit) of behavior on individual
reproduction, mea-suring the survival or reproductive consequences
asso-ciated with specific behaviors remains challenging (Rog-ers
1990, Clutton-Brock 1991, Lessells 1991, Kaplan1997). The potential
overlap of individual investmentinterests (e.g., kinship and
reciprocal interests) and thecompeting tradeoffs of alternative
behaviors (i.e., oppor-tunity costs) complicates the task of
assigning costs andbenefits of behaviors to individual fitness.
With regardto these constraints, this investigation assumes a
tem-porally proximate focus: to examine the distribution ofEfe
infant allocare across caregivers to assess the ex-planatory
strength of alternative hypotheses.
alloparenting among the efe
While some form of allocare has been described, at
leastqualitatively, in most hunter-gatherer societies, the most
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858 F current anthropology
extreme example of alloparenting in a foraging popula-tion has
been reported for the Efe of the Ituri Forest. Datacollected in
198283 showed that the percentage of timeyoung infants spent in
physical contact with individualsother than their mothers increased
from 39% at 3 weeksto 60% at 18 weeks. During observations infants
werecared for by an average of 14.2 different persons, with arange
of 5 to 24 (Tronick, Morelli, and Winn 1987). Tron-ick et al.
hypothesized that this communal pattern ofcare was a cultural
adaptation to the thermoregulatorychallenges faced by Efe infants.
Infants on average weigh2.4 kg at birth, a weight considered at
risk in the West-ern medical context (Tronick and Winn 1992).
Peacock(1985) and Hewlett (1991) have suggested that the
uniquepattern of Efe infant care may be explained by high ratesof
infertility among reproductive-age Efe women. Tron-ick, Morelli,
and Winn (1989), however, found that thefrequency of care by
nulliparous adult females did notaccount for the extent of
allocare. A number of studiesdescribe Efe child care from a
developmental point ofview (Tronick, Winn, and Morelli 1987;
Morelli andTronick 1991; Morelli 1987, 1997; Tronick, Morelli,
andIvey 1992); however, it remains unclear why so manyindividuals
among the Efe forfeit their time and energyto provide care to the
young of others. This investigationwas prompted by the challenge of
alloparenting behaviorto ecological precepts: Who cares for Efe
infants, andwhat are the costs and benefits to alloparents of
childcare services rendered?
the study population
A corpus of research provides details of the environmentand
lives of the Efe (cf. Morelli 1987, Peacock 1985, El-lison,
Peacock, and Lager 1986, Tronick, Morelli, andWinn 1987, Wilkie
1988, Fisher and Strickland 1989, Jen-ike 1987, Bailey and DeVore
1989, Bailey 1991a, Wilkieand Curran 1993). The Efe are widely
accepted to be themost traditional population of pygmies in Africa.
Theyassociate with horticultural groups in an elaborateexchange
system whereby farmers trade cultivated foodsand material goods
(e.g., cloth and metal) for the valuableforest resources of meat,
honey, medicines, and buildingmaterials (Wilkie 1989, Bailey
1991a). The Efe periodi-cally provide labor in the gardens of the
Sudanic-speak-ing Lese; however, since the end of colonial harvest
quo-tas in the 1960s, the severe deterioration of roads, andthe
collapse of the cash market since the 1980s, mostLese gardens have
contracted to subsistence level. Labordemands are intermittent, and
many Efe lack access toopportunities for garden work. While some
Efe have es-tablished their own gardens, they tend to be small
andcommunal, with low and unpredictable yields (Wilkieand Curran
1993). Only one focal family in this inves-tigation planted a small
shared seasonal garden ofcassava.
The Efe live in camps ranging from 6 to 45 people,with an
average of 21. Typically, they clear a small areaof forest (1015 m
diameter) and construct low huts inan open semicircle around a
communal space in which
most daily camp activities occur. Although descent ispatrilineal
and residence is virilocal, maternal relativesmay also live in the
natal camp because of sororal mar-riage exchange between clans.
Nuclear families share ahut, which is primarily used for storage
and sleeping,and a cooking hearth, but children, including infants,
areby no means restricted from playing, exploring, and evensleeping
in other areas of camp. Efe women usually traveltogether in small
groups to gather forest produce, suchas fruits, nuts, tubers, and
mushrooms, fish in thestreams that traverse the forest, or forage
for bananas,cassava, and sweet potato in abandoned gardens.
Gardenlabor is highly seasonal; during planting and harvest
Efewomen may assist Lese women, and Efe men are usuallyengaged in
horticultural work only to fell trees whennew gardens are cleared
from the forest. Efe males huntwith bow and arrow in groups, using
dogs and huntersto flush game to waiting bowmen, or hunt primates
sol-itarily by stealth. Camps move on an average of everysix weeks
in response to changing access to forest andhorticultural
resources, from near-village gardens duringplanting and harvest to
deeper in the forest during primehoney, fishing, and hunting
seasons (Bailey and Peacock1988, Wilkie and Curran 1993).
methods
Data were collected between January 1988 and October1989 in 18
camps within a 36-km radius of the IturiProject research station in
northeastern Democratic Re-public of the Congo. The focal subject
sampling tech-nique (Altmann 1974, Borgerhoff Mulder and Caro
1985)was adapted to record the behaviors of infant and
mothersimultaneously across all contexts, with the infant asthe
priority focal subject. The focal sample consisted of20 infants (13
females and 7 males) between 12 and 15months of age. Infants were
observed for eight 15-minutesessions sampled across two consecutive
and typicaldays, evenly distributed across daylight hours.
Behaviorswere continuously recorded as they occurred on a
laptopcomputer that simultaneously tracked real time, facili-tating
a calculation of the absolute duration of events.Time measures were
adjusted to a 12-hour day. Scansrecording the identity of all
individuals within visual orclose hearing range of the infant
(i.e., within a reasonabledistance to respond to infant distress)
were conductedimmediately before and after each block of
continuousbehavioral coding, and departures and approaches of
in-dividuals were recorded as they occurred, to calculatethe total
proportion of time that individuals were inphysical proximity to
the infant. All exchanges of ma-terial goods, including food and
other resources, betweenparents and individuals other than
dependent childrenwere recorded, whether they occurred within
coding pe-riods or not. Systematic and informal interviews
wereconducted with mothers and other caregiv