In searching for something else, I ran across this article about differences between European and Native American attitudes toward children at the time of the European conquest of North America. It provides food for thought about what has made modern capitalism, with its lack of soulful purpose and its machined inhumanity, possible. Here is an excerpt:
As it happens, I am now reading Of Water and the Spirit, a memoir of traditional West African ritual initiation by Malidoma Patrice Somé. It's some story, and it illuminates the point that consumer life unanchored in participatory meaning is one hell of a horrible way to starve.
But, like I said, I found the article about childhood while looking for something else. I was seeking information I remembered having seen about sleep patterns for a friend who awakens inexplicably in the middle of the night. And I found it: in the form of a New York Times op-ed by Virginia Tech professor A. Roger Ekirch. His basic premise, which I have also seen elsewhere, is that our idea of a continuous, unbroken, peaceful night's sleep is a recent one. Historically, insect bites, cold, and other unavoidable discomforts have made sleep a more normally fragmented proposition. In European colonial America, for instance, the nightly habit of a "first sleep" and a "second sleep," separated by a period of wee-hours wakeful activity, was commonly accepted.
So if you're awake and perky -- as I am at the moment -- sometime after 3 in the morning, there may be more reason for it than you know. In my case, my siblings and I had night-owl parents. But that simply begs the question of where they got it.
In any case, Ekirch's article might give you some things to ponder late at night. Me, I'm now going to bed. It's time for my First Sleep.
European observers were shocked by the differences between their child-rearing customs and those of the Indian peoples of the Eastern woodlands. There were certain superficial similarities. Native peoples, like Europeans, surrounded pregnancy with rituals to ensure the newborn's health, and practiced rites following a childbirth that Europeans regarded as perversions of baptism and CIRCUMCISION (such as rubbing an infant in bear's fat and piercing the newborn's tongue, nose, or ears). The differences in child rearing were especially striking. Girls were not expected to spin, weave, or knit, as they were in Europe, and boys were not expected to farm. Nor were children subjected to corporal punishment, since this was believed to produce timidity and submissiveness.It goes on from there. I suggest reading it in its entirety. But you get the idea. The momentum toward today's treatment of 11-year-olds as consumer decision-makers was set early. The culture we now live in continues to pay dearly for its careless, randomized view of life trajectory, as if each of our 70-year episodes of life on earth is a mechanically-jangled course in material competency, or, alternatively, employment in servitude toward an autocratic afterlife CEO.
Maturation among Indians was much more enmeshed in religious and communal rituals than among Europeans. For boys, there were ceremonies to mark one's first tooth, killing of one's first large game, and a vision quest, in which boys went alone into the wilderness to find a guardian spirit. Many girls were secluded at the time of first menstruation. Among certain Southeastern tribes, there was a ceremony called huskinaw through which boys and girls shed their childish identity and assumed adult status.
English colonists regarded children as "adults-in-training." They recognized that children differed from adults in their mental, moral, and physical capabilities, and drew a distinction between childhood, an intermediate stage they called youth, and adulthood. But they did not rigidly segregate children by age. Size and physical strength were more important than chronological age in defining a young person's roles and responsibilities. Parents wanted children to speak, read, reason, and contribute to their family's economic well-being as soon as possible.
Infancy was regarded as a state of deficiency. Unable to speak or stand, infants lacked two essential attributes of full humanity. Parents discouraged infants from crawling, and placed them in "walking stools," similar to modern walkers. To ensure proper adult posture, young girls wore leather corsets and parents placed rods along the spines of very young children of both sexes. The colonists rarely swaddled their infants, and not surprisingly some youngsters fell into fireplaces or wells.
As it happens, I am now reading Of Water and the Spirit, a memoir of traditional West African ritual initiation by Malidoma Patrice Somé. It's some story, and it illuminates the point that consumer life unanchored in participatory meaning is one hell of a horrible way to starve.
But, like I said, I found the article about childhood while looking for something else. I was seeking information I remembered having seen about sleep patterns for a friend who awakens inexplicably in the middle of the night. And I found it: in the form of a New York Times op-ed by Virginia Tech professor A. Roger Ekirch. His basic premise, which I have also seen elsewhere, is that our idea of a continuous, unbroken, peaceful night's sleep is a recent one. Historically, insect bites, cold, and other unavoidable discomforts have made sleep a more normally fragmented proposition. In European colonial America, for instance, the nightly habit of a "first sleep" and a "second sleep," separated by a period of wee-hours wakeful activity, was commonly accepted.
So if you're awake and perky -- as I am at the moment -- sometime after 3 in the morning, there may be more reason for it than you know. In my case, my siblings and I had night-owl parents. But that simply begs the question of where they got it.
In any case, Ekirch's article might give you some things to ponder late at night. Me, I'm now going to bed. It's time for my First Sleep.
