Ethnopediatrics and Fertility Among the Amele of Lowland Papua New Guinea
The health and nutritional status of Papua New Guinea&s;s children has captured the interest of numerous investigators ever since the earliest medical patrols. Infant feeding and child-rearing practices in general have often been considered responsible for the frequently documented poor growth and nutritional status of these children ( Becroft 1967 ; Oomen and Malcolm 1958 ; Malcolm 1975 ). While ethnographers have recorded belief systems concerned with reproduction, growth, development, food taboos and ethnomedicine ( Cook and Pflanz-Cook 1981 ; Hogbin 1943 ; Lewis 1980 ; Meiser 1959 ; Whiting 1941 ) they have rarely been in a position to demonstrate the interrelations among these aspects of culture, and their influence on children&s;s growth and health. Gajdusek ( 1963 ) drew attention to these issues as a field of inquiry which he labelled “ethnopediatrics” and defined as “the study of child growth and development and disease patterns in primitive cultures” (p. 554). While a full-scale ethnopediatric study would involve representatives of a number of disciplines, the present investigation limits itself to the combined approaches of nutrition and anthropology. In this chapter we examine selected aspects of the ethnopediatrics of the Amele, a people of lowland Papua New Guinea, and their relationship to growth in infancy and early childhood.
Carol L. Jenkins, Peter Heywood