STORIES OF BREAST MILK
iG | Susan Falls
White Gold
Anthropology of Contemporary North America
SERIES EDITORS
James Bielo, Miami University
Carrie Lane, California State University, Fullerton
ADVISORY BOARD
Peter Benson, Washington University in St. Louis
John L. Caughey, University of Maryland
Alyshia Galvez, Lehman College
Carol Greenhouse, Princeton University
John Hartigan, University of Texas
John Jackson Jr., University of Pennsylvania
Ellen Lewin, University of Iowa
Bonnie McElhinny, University of Toronto
Shalini Shankar, Northwestern University
Carol Stack, University of California, Berkeley
White Gold
Stories of Breast Milk Sharing
Susan Falls
University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London
© 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America ©
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Falls, Susan.
Title: White gold: stories of breast milk sharing /
Susan Falls.
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press [2017] | Series: Anthropology of contemporary North America | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016054690 (print)
lccn 2017000735 (ebook)
isbn 9780803277212 (cloth: alk. paper)
isbn 9781496201898 (pbk.: alk. paper)
isbn 9781496202697 (epub)
isbn 9781496202703 (mobi)
isbn 9781496202710 ( pdf)
Subjects: lcsh: Breastfeeding. |
Breastfeeding—Complications. | Breast milk. Classification: lcc RJ216 .F3527 2017 (print) | lcc rj216 (ebook) | ddc 649/33—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054690
Set in Charter ITC by Rachel Gould.
For my mother and all mothers
illustrations ix
My son has more than twenty-five siblings—milk siblings, that is. I first learned of milk siblings not by reading about kinship with my Anthropology 101 class but by attending a presentation at the 2010 Visual Research Conference. A group of young women scholars and their professor, Fadwa El Guindi, discussed various ways that people reckon kinship in Qatar. Milk siblingship—when a child receives breast milk from a woman who is not the child’s biological mother and thus enters into a kin relationship with her and her family—is practiced in many parts of the world. I was surprised and very excited to hear this.
Just a few weeks earlier, after having adopted a baby, I learned from my doula that if I was unable to breastfeed our son, I might be able to use donated breast milk. Many people around me were breastfeeding their children, and there seemed to be a general consensus that breast milk was better than formula. So I called the closest milk bank to inquire about getting some milk. To my great dismay I discovered that human milk is extremely expensive—all told, it would be almost six dollars per ounce. Since newborns consume about two to three ounces every four hours and older babies take up to six or eight ounces every six hours, the cost would be exorbitant. Unless, I thought, my insurance would pay for it. I phoned my medical provider and made an inquiry.
“Do you know if there is a generic brand of this medication?” the woman in customer service kept asking me. “No, it’s not a pharmaceutical product,” I replied. “It’s breast milk, you know, from a breast—it does not have a generic brand name. I want to order it from the WakeMed Milk Bank with a prescription from our pediatrician.” This situation was evidently one that her scripted answers to frequently asked questions did not cover. No matter how hard I tried I could not get her to understand my question: did our insurance policy cover the purchase of banked breast milk? It turned out to be a dead end. And there was no way we could spend that kind of money out of pocket every day. That experience did tell me, however, that what I was doing was out of the ordinary.
Serendipitously my doula—a birth facilitator—called that very afternoon to tell me about breast milk sharing. She had met the coordinator of a local milk-sharing group and wanted to introduce us. The group, all volunteer, uses an online forum to help donors find people who need breast milk. Women who have milk to give post information about themselves, the age of their child, the kind of freezer they have, where they are located, and so forth. It is not uncommon for new mothers to store breast milk for later use but then find that they do not need it. Sometimes their child will not “take a bottle” and they decide to donate the milk rather than throw it out. It is after all a precious, life-giving substance that has taken time and energy for them to produce and store. Lactating mothers may provide a one-time donation, large or small, or they may always have extra milk to share and thus become regular, long-term donors.
Parents seeking milk also provide information, sometimes including detailed narratives about why they need it. Sometimes these accounts include explanations about cancer or other medical conditions that hinder milk production, or they discuss the trials and tribulations faced in having or trying to have children (adoptions, failed fertility treatments, miscarriages, severely premature babies, twins or triplets, or prenatal drug exposure). They often refer to breast milk itself with value-giving names, such as “white gold” or “liquid gold.”
Once a match is made, donors and donees (who are of course acting as proxies for their babies) negotiate additional medical or personal questions they feel need to be addressed. My local group’s coordinator, Ashley, provided me with a questionnaire that I was to give to potential donors. These questions helped me to understand the diet, lifestyle, and possible drug or disease exposures donors may have experienced.
I was amazed by how effectively this self-organized network functions. Except for when our son was just born (he drank formula until I got my network up and running, which took me about two weeks), he was fed breast milk until the age of eighteen months. Our adopted daugh-
ter also received donated breast milk until she was a bit more than a year old. Neither child, aged three and five in 2016, has experienced much in the way of sickness, which donors and doulas explain as a benefit of receiving antibodies from so many different families.
When I was new to the group I heard that although new mothers probably could make a handsome extra income, it is illegal to buy and sell breast milk. But when I looked into it I discovered that, for the time being, peer-to-peer milk shares are not overseen or regulated by the federal or state governments or by any other agency. A donee might offer the donor something in return for milk, and indeed in our case we often gave donors pumping supplies or flowers but never money. These offerings seemed to be appreciated but were neither required nor necessarily expected.
But back to milk siblings.
When we picked up the milk from one of our first donors, she asked for a photo and the full name of our son and provided us with the same, explaining, “Now that the children are milk siblings, we will need to know these things.” In my ignorance I thought Anuka, an architect from Egypt who was living in Atlanta with her husband and two children, was just trying to be kind by finding a way to sentimentalize or just normalize what seemed like a pretty odd situation. How charming, I thought, and I sent her a specially selected photo of our baby. Little did I know that she was drawing on a venerable cultural tradition of “nurture kinship” whereby even strangers can be transformed into kin (and vice versa), a concept very different than that of kinship by blood, an ideology that despite anthropological critiques by Schneider (1968) and others remains hegemonic in the United States.
According to the Qatari women’s presentation at the Visual Research Conference, the Quran explains the role and obligations of milk siblings in no less than three places (El Guindi 2011). Islamic law allows for women to cross-breastfeed babies, who may then become their children’s relatives, with all that entails (for example, veiling customs, rules about who one can marry, and even inheritance or property rights). Other research shows milk siblingship to be “a strikingly widespread phenomenon, practiced by peoples from the Balkans to Bengal, from Marrakech to Mandalay,” that creates lasting connections, shapes social distance
PREFACE xiii
from one group to another, and can be used to control others’ behavior (MacClancy 2003). On my way to the airport after the conference my cabbie, an Egyptian named Fadil, confirmed that although the practice seems to be less common in some places, milk siblingship is still alive and well in Egypt, at least among his people. When I returned home I found a post on Juan Cole’s blog Informed Comment that went beyond what Fadil had explained: Cole (2010) argues that Saudi clerics who are promoting kinship by sharing breast milk, while tinkering with the rules of traditional milk siblingship to apply to adults instead of children under the age of five, are doing so as a sign of modernization—not conservatism—in order to allow non-kin women and men to congregate. So the practice apparently continues to be both strategic and binding. And while very different in origin from Muslim milk siblingship, breast milk sharing in the American context is also a thoroughly modern affair.
After Anuka’s first donation we kept in touch with photos and emails about our kids’ development. When our son turned one, she wrote us a lovely letter wishing him a happy birthday and asked if she could send him hand-me-downs (which we naturally said we would love to receive). When she decided briefly to return to Cairo during the Arab Spring we periodically touched base with her to make sure she was safe. We continued to stay in touch and spent the day together when she and her children visited us in the fall of 2016.
I knew that this would probably be a unique experience. I live in Savannah, Georgia, where the population is not especially diverse. There are few Muslims here, and I did not expect to have many, or any, other donors who would offer milk siblingship. And while this expectation was borne out, others were not. I expected, for example, that most of the women involved in the group (and we met more than fifty when all was said and done) would be “lefty,” highly educated, Volvo-driving types. They were instead often “righty,” conservative, Christian home-schoolers who were wary of government and Western medicine.
Although many health professionals warn about the dangers involved, social media-enabled, person-to-person breast milk sharing is now going global. And while there are risks in accepting and giving a child another woman’s milk, many people find these risks manageable. It is likely that as more parents—those with a need for milk or those who have milk to give—become aware of milk sharing, the practice will become more common. As milk sharing expands I suspect there will be vigorous pushback from institutions such as the Human Milk Banking Association of North America (hmbana) that may have much to lose—from money to access to human milk donations for research to a sense of authority—by the mainstreaming of milk sharing. I must agree with Akre, Gribble, and Minchin (2011), who suggest that people involved in milk sharing are likely be undeterred by unsupportive or even critical public health voices; I suspect that donors will continue to provide breast milk to those who prefer to nourish their children with human milk rather than formula.
Having weaned my own kids, I turned my energies to exploring more systematically what these exchanges might suggest about the larger political, economic, and cultural contexts in which they take place. Anthropologists are tasked with the study of powerful but hard-to-see structures, such as policy, ideology, or even design conventions. I had stumbled upon what seemed a relatively invisible phenomenon, but I have since discovered that there are quite a few of us, using various methodologies and different theoretical lenses, working to understand what milk sharing is and what we can learn from it. I am convinced that studying milk sharing will provide many interesting revelations.
Producing this book has been an experience in the best sense of the term, but it would not have been even remotely possible without the help of many people and organizations. I can never adequately express my gratitude to all of the mothers (and fathers) who shared milk and their stories with me. I also want to thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation; a Wenner-Gren Hunt Post-Doctoral Fellowship was absolutely essential to the completion of this project. This project was also supported by a stipend from the Savannah College of Art and Design faculty awards program. I would like to thank Beth Concepcion, dean of the School of Liberal Arts, for providing crucial advice and support.
All of my work seems to circle around a set of questions about meaning and agency. I must acknowledge the awesome Richard Smythe and McLean Brice for helping me to hone strategies for exploring these issues early on. Initial work on breast milk sharing was presented in conference panels. Julian Brash, Jeff Mascovsky, Elsa Davidson, Elana Shever, Kristin Lawler, and Genese Sodikoff heard various iterations of this research, and I thank them for their feedback (and forbearance) and encouragement as I worked through my ideas.
I would also like to thank the many students, friends, mentors, and colleagues who talked with me about this project, read all or part of this manuscript, and gave me their honest assessment. Vincent Crapanzano, Lisa Young, Nancy Abelmann, Jayne Howell, Penny Van Esterik, Peter Biella, Catherine Kingfisher, Paul Stoller, Stephanie Takaragawa, Kate Newell, Scott Singheisen, David Stivers, Mary Doll, Larisa Honey, Steven Cox, Andrea Morrell, Julie Rogers-Varland, Allison Jablonko, Jerome Crowder, Thomas Blakely, Jonathan Marion, Liz Sargent, Capri Rosenberg, Tracy Cox-Stanton (and her cards), Sheila Matyjasik Edwards,
Jessica Smith, and Jean Murley in particular kept me from going off the rails. My father, Gene Falls, reads and responds to every last word of my work—possibly the only one to do so—and has listened thoughtfully to the (good, and bad!) ideas leading up to this book.
A special acknowledgment goes to James Bielo, who encouraged me to pursue a manuscript on this topic. James Bielo as well as Derek Kris-sof, Carrie Lane, and Alicia Christianson at the University of Nebraska Press carefully read various drafts of this work; their comments have improved it greatly. Erin Martineau, colleague and friend, did, as always, a superb job of editing the manuscript at all stages; her knowledge of anthropology and beyond improved this book immeasurably.
Two insightful external reviewers identified strengths and potential weaknesses of the text. I want to express my deep gratitude for their sensitive, close, and generous reading. I thank them for their helpful suggestions. The book is much better for their input.
White Gold was inspired by my discovery of the late architect Lebbeus Woods. I am forever indebted to Aleksandra Wagner for listening to my ideas (with her third ear), reading the manuscript, and entertaining my request to include images from the Lebbeus Woods estate. I hope that readers will be as stimulated as I am by Woods’s work.
I am lucky to have a circle of people encouraging me: Tinka Falls, Anne Falls, Valerie Lee, Angie Dukes, Debbie Dukes, Darrell Dukes, Job Moore, Katherine Falls Menghedoht, Lee Falls, and Ifetayo White have helped me to turn the idea of this book into a reality. Thank you Dare, Zim, and Tallulah. Nothing would be possible without you.
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AAP |
American Academy of Pediatrics |
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ACA |
Affordable Care Act |
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BMS |
breast milk sharing (also breast milk substitute) |
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CF |
cystic fibrosis |
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CMV |
cytomegalovirus |
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DES |
diethylstilbestrol |
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EBF |
exclusive breastfeeding |
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EBM |
expressed breast milk |
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EOF |
Eats on Feets |
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FB |
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FTT |
failure to thrive |
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HMBANA |
Human Milk Banking Association of North America |
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HM4HB |
Human Milk for Human Babies |
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HMF |
human milk fortifier |
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ILCA |
International Lactation Consultant Association |
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LLL |
La Leche League International |
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NEC |
necrotizing enterocolitis |
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NICU |
neonatal intensive care unit |
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oT |
occupational therapy |
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oTB |
Only The Breast |
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pM |
personal message |
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pop |
persistent organic pollutant |
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pDHM |
pasteurized donor human milk |
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PPACA |
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act |
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ppD |
postpartum depression |
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sAHM |
stay-at-home mom |
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sI |
Situationist International |
supplemental nursing system temporomandibular joint dysfunction Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children
SNS
TMJ
wic
White Gold
1. Lebbeus Woods, architect, American (1940-2012), Untitled (Lost and Found 5), 1973. Ink on paper, 10 x 16 inches. © Estate of Lebbeus Woods.
2. Lebbeus Woods, architect, American (1940-2012), Untitled (Lost and Found 6), 1973. Ink on paper, 10 x 16 inches. © Estate of Lebbeus Woods. Woods was a consummate thinker and draftsman. Present in these early drawings are ideational threads—conflict and transformation—that characterize his subsequent work.
WHITE GOLD
Women have been feeding babies at the breast for all of human history, although the particulars of feeding have varied across time and space regarding who fed the baby, when the baby was fed, when the baby was weaned, and when and what additional food was offered. In the United States fewer and fewer women breastfed their children following the introduction of synthetic milk, or “formula,” during the early twentieth century. As formula came to be seen as more convenient, more modern, and even better than human milk, breastfeeding continued to fall out of fashion until advocates and health officials started pushing for a reintroduction of breastfeeding during the last quarter of the century.
The powerful “breast milk is best” campaign advanced by the American Academy of Pediatrics (aap) and La Leche League International (lll) tells us that breast milk is superior to formula and by extension that making milk is a shining emblem of successful motherhood. However, many mothers find, to their own frustration if not sadness or shame, that they cannot produce milk or that they cannot produce enough. Adoptive parents, surrogate parents, grandparents, and foster parents may also want to provide breast milk to their children but cannot themselves produce it. And if you can’t make it yourself, there are very few options. Wet nurses are hard to find nowadays. You can purchase milk from a milk bank, but it requires a prescription and is very expensive. And unless your baby is born prematurely, meets the “very low birth weight” criterion, and/or is in a neonatal intensive care unit (nicu), it is almost impossible to access banked milk. The alternative? Acquire breast milk through direct, “peer-to-peer” exchange.
White Gold is an anthropological account of a breast milk sharing network in the southern United States. Contemporary forms of capitalism, motherhood, community, and risk reflect each other in this emerging practice that connects donors and recipients through digital social media. My research was partly autobiographical because of my own involvement with the network, but that was only the starting point. The center of this account is grounded in narratives gathered through formal interviews with donors, doulas, medical professionals, and other donees. I have worked to couch sharers’ stories within work by anthropologists who have studied breast milk from many angles, for example, as a biological (Sellen 2012) or biocultural substance (Fouts, Hewlett, and Lamb 2012; Van Esterik 1992, 2006), as a mode of feeding in developing countries (Van Esterik 1989; Van Hollen 2011; Kroeker and Beckwith 2011), as a medium for kinship (El Guindi 2011, 2012; Altorki 1980), as a nexus for negotiating gender (Gottschang 2007), as an index of environmental dynamics (Farmer 1988), and so forth. There is also a small but quickly expanding body of work by Beatriz Reyes-Foster, Aunchalee Palmquist, Katherine Carroll, and Tanya Cassidy, who use questionnaires, discourse analysis, and quantitative and qualitative methods to examine milk bank donation and informal sharing. White Gold adds to these studies in cleaving breast milk from breastfeeding to look at the meanings of shared milk as it is circulated and consumed, doing so through a regional ethnographic study launched from my own point of view.
Breast milk is conceptualized by sharers as “white gold”—a scarce, valuable, and even magical substance. This book shows that sharing it is a mode of enacting parenthood, cultural values, and care, all via a dynamic, decentered network. It is a fascinating example of need-based community making between strangers in the context of contemporary commodity capitalism. I have examined this phenomenon using several anthropological lenses, starting with kinship but then turning to exchange, agency, and infrastructure. This sequence made sense to me because mothers’ milk is being commodified at a very rapid clip.
Sharing
In my experience people are surprised to hear that strangers are sharing milk and that it is free. I myself recall being a little shocked to learn that doing so was even possible. Even after we started sharing, a friend confessed to me, “Now I’m used to it, but in the beginning it freaked me out to see all of those bags of milk in your fridge.” Claudia, another friend I interviewed, recalled how it seemed rather suspicious at first: “You know, the first time I heard about [sharing] from April, she was explaining to me how they did it—you know, how they did the exchange—and I thought it sounded like a drug run in the middle of the night. You know, ‘meet me on the bridge at 1:30 for the pickup’!” And frankly it does take on an underground, somewhat clandestine tang when described in those terms.
Since the practice is not well known, I first describe the basics of how milk is shared. And since this project is somewhat unusual in that I began the study from my own experience, I dedicate some time to explaining my research methods. I have many roles: wife, mother, sister, daughter, friend, and teacher, but I am also an anthropologist, whether I’m at the hardware store or a birthday party, in a swimming pool or reading blogs on the Internet. Given this identity, I was automatically positioned as a participant-observer within the sharing network, and several things both surprised and excited the anthropologist in me right from the get-go. And while I had no plans to write about milk sharing at first, when my youngest child transitioned off of milk I found myself thinking about all the women I had met and how these sharing relationships were embedded in the world. Over time I began to see sharing as a refusal to abdicate competency to institutionalized authority. But I am getting way ahead of myself. Let me back up and start with the basic matter of feeding babies.
Promising Evidence
What is the best source of nutrition for babies? Americans hear in the media and from doctors that breast milk is best, but is there really a meaningful difference between breastfeeding and formula feeding? Is formula bad for us? Are brands of formula significantly different from one another? To answer these questions I, like many other parents, had done some sleuthing on the Internet. A mountain of materials advanced the “breast is best” narrative, but some, such as “The Case against BreastFeeding” in the Atlantic, questioned whether the pressure to breastfeed was more helpful than harmful given some of the “murky correlations” between breastfeeding and long-term health (Rosin 2009). More recently a New York Times article, “Overselling Breastfeeding” (Jung 2015), bemoaned the “righteous zeal” expressed by advocates against the fact that studies show only a modest benefit. Like others I spoke with, I found all of the information confusing: I concluded that there was promising evidence but not absolute proof that breast milk was better than formula for infant health but also that formula would not harm children.
So I was open to formula in principle. I thought, “Heck, I was raised on formula! And I seem to be okay.” Frankly until having my own children I never gave the milk versus formula debate a single thought. But given a choice I preferred to give breast milk to my own babies. After all, like other Americans, I had been told by doctors, lactation consultants, family members, and other mothers that breast milk is better than formula, and I had sensed the underlying implication that good motherhood is synonymous with breastfeeding. Rhonda Shaw (2010) has argued that this marketing goes even further in portraying the breastfeeding mother as good, while those who use formula are stigmatized as noncompliant. At times I heard mothers in my own community echoing this sentiment.
Admittedly in the beginning I was not particularly critical of the “breast milk is best” idea since it just seemed logical to me that mothers’ milk, which had evolved over millions of years to nourish infants, would be superior to a manufactured substitute produced by profit-seeking companies using sophisticated marketing campaigns to sell the idea of formula as superior. Companies have managed to insert themselves into hospital swag bags: materials given to new mothers often contain coupons for or samples of formula.
We gave our son hospital-provided formula when he was born. It turned out that he had an allergic reaction to the first product, which had cow’s milk as a base. A hospital pediatrician then suggested we try a soy-based variety once we got home. But when I read the ingredients on the labels of several brand-name formulas, I thought, I wouldn’t drink that, why would I ask my baby to? Take a look at the list of ingredients in Similac’s Go & Grow Soy-Based Early Shield Powder:
Corn Syrup (38%), Soy Protein Isolate (16%), High Oleic Safflower
Oil (11%), Sugar (10%), Soy Oil (8%), Coconut Oil (7%), Calcium
Phosphate (3%). Less than 2% of the following: C. Cohnii Oil, M.
Alpina Oil, Beta-Carotene, Lutein, Lycopene, Fructooligosaccharides,
Potassium Citrate, Salt, Magnesium Chloride, Ascorbic Acid, L-Me-thionine, Potassium Chloride, Choline Chloride, Taurine, Ferrous Sulfate, Ascorbyl Palmitate, m-Inositol, Mixed Tocopherols, Zinc Sulfate, d-Alpha-tocopheryl Acetate, L-Carnitine, Niacinamide, Calcium Carbonate, Calcium Pantothenate, Cupric Sulfate, Thiamine Chloride Hydrochloride, Vitamin A Palmitate, Riboflavin, Pyridox-ine Hydrochloride, Folic Acid, Potassium Iodide, Phylloquinone, Biotin, Vitamin D3, Cyanocobalamin, Sodium Selenate, and Potassium Hydroxide.
Now, breast milk does taste sweet, but I was taken aback when I saw this list, and I was not at all thrilled with the idea of giving a baby something that was made with 38 percent corn syrup. But because almost everyone assumed that we, as adoptive parents, would use formula, the only real question was what brand, so we tried to find one that had less corn syrup. It was only when I encountered the midwife-doula-“lactivist” circuit that I learned of any alternatives.
Several doulas suggested that I could try to induce breast milk production using a combination of hormone therapy and pumping. Every mother has different goals and needs, and this treatment was more than I was willing to try, but I also learned much to my surprise that some men were also attempting this, so great was their desire to breastfeed. I learned from Jared Diamond (1995) that anthropologists have “known for some time that many male mammals, including some men, can undergo breast development and lactate under special conditions.”
I also discovered that when milk induction is unsuccessful or milk production is inadequate, parents will sometimes feed an infant formula or breast milk through a small tube taped to the breast using a simulated nursing system, with the idea that this activity will encourage both bonding and lactation. After seeing my friends and sister breastfeed their children, I could certainly understand the desire to connect with a child in this way. I was drawn to the possibility of celebrating the togetherness that comes from feeding and to the idea of using breast milk for food. And so that is just what we did, through milk sharing. Once we started looking, we were able to feed our children donated milk, all obtained via the sharing group, without supplementing with formula.
Not everyone can breastfeed or chooses to breastfeed or use donated milk, and formula is a convenient, workable alternative or, as Joan Wolf describes it, a “remarkable example of human ingenuity” (2013, 150). I fully recognize that breastfeeding makes substantial demands on mothers’ time, psyche, and energy, and I have no interest in questioning or criticizing those who make the choice to use formula either some or all of the time. So while I do track the outlines of the “breast is best” campaign as it relates to sharing, I do not directly enter into ongoing disputes— scientific, moral, or otherwise—about the value of formula versus breastfeeding. The women and men that I interacted with and interviewed, for the most part, took it as a given that, if and when possible, infants should consume human milk rather than formula. As a mother I felt the same way, but I also wondered about the source of this preference. To explore, I could not help but to activate my identity as an anthropologist. I found myself doing ethnography at home in the most literal of ways.
Anthropology at Home
Following the critiques of “armchair” anthropology by both W. H. R. Rivers (1913) and Bronislaw Malinowski ([1922] 1984), researchers stopped relying on travelers’ notebooks and began conducting fieldwork themselves, staying in the field for extended periods of time, learning local languages, taking copious notes on both everyday and extraordinary events, and, in accordance with Malinowski’s mandate, “putting aside camera, note book and pencil, to join in himself in what is going on. He can take part in the natives’ games, he can follow them on their visits and walks, sit down and listen and share in their conversations” ([1922] 1984, 21). Doing so would help one “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world,” Malinowski adds (25).
These new guidelines produced different kinds of materials. You would note upon reading reflections on fieldwork by both Rivers and Malinowski an assumption that the ethnographer is working among “savages” or “natives” and living at a distance from the metropole, geographically, culturally, and otherwise. Anthropological studies in the early twentieth century were undertaken in foreign locales with people who were considered, if not exotic, then at least “other.” It would be decades before many anthropologists would specialize in Western societies, even though early founders of the field, such as Margaret Mead and Franz Boas, promoted the study of American society as not only a worthwhile but also an imperative endeavor.
Many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropologists working in the United States focused on Native American populations, sometimes in the form of critiques of governmental policy. Others conducted research with African Americans, white urbanites, and ethnic minorities. These studies continue to shape the central concerns of anthropological research in the United States.
Some midcentury work would become classic: W. Lloyd Warner’s (1941) work on Yankee City provided a model for work on race, class, industrial relations, and local politics in complex urban centers. Other work was simply ahead of its time. Hortense Powdermaker (1950), for example, conducted an innovative study of Hollywood’s film industry, a topic that would have raised eyebrows well into the 1990s. And while what Powdermaker and contemporaries such as Zora Neale Hurston and Melville Herskovits were doing was not called “anthropology at home,” that’s exactly what it was (see Peirano 1998). Other terms created to describe conducting anthropological research in one’s own society include “native ethnography,” “indigenous anthropology,” “introspective research,” and so forth.
These neologisms struggle to describe something that differs from traditional studies of foreign colonial or postcolonial others, and they point to a disciplinary state of affairs in which anthropologists have had to justify the United States as an area of investigation. And while many scholars now conduct fieldwork “at home” (especially after they have proven their chops working abroad), it is instructive to note that the Society for the Anthropology of North America, now a mid-sized section of the larger American Anthropological Association, was founded in the early 1980s by Ida Susser and Maria Vesperi.
Today anthropologists examining life in the United States work in urban centers and suburban neighborhoods, as well in small rural communities, at a wide range of sites and with all kinds of people; park designers, grassroots organizers, galleristas, animal sanctuary workers, nongovernmental organization officers, corporate managers, scientists, and tour guides are just a few examples. A great deal of this work focuses
on issues related to race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity, but others study immigration, education, militarization, the prison-industrial complex, deindustrialization, indigeneity, social movements, disability studies, the New Right, science and technology, labor, the arts, food and the body, and more. As Ida Susser (2001) has pointed out, as global interrelationships and the glaring inequalities that accompany them intensify, studying American society and power will continue to have major ramifications for our understandings of events and experiences in other national contexts.
Complicating the notion of doing anthropology at home today is the fact that people are moving around like never before. The rise of mul-ticulturalism and identity politics in this context can make the categories of “home” and “abroad” redundant, irrelevant, or even confusing: just where does an Indian-American immigrant living in Buenos Aires do “anthropology at home”? Are anthropological studies of virtual communities “at home”? Does doing anthropology at home imply studying a giant imagined national community? Or does “home” more accurately describe a subculture? What is home, exactly?
Taking the notion of “at home” literally, the authors of Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century (Arnold et al. 2012) use a combination archaeological and material culture approach to explore middle-class consumerism in Los Angeles, while David Halle’s Inside Culture: Art and Class in the American Home (1994) examines how people exhibit and interpret aesthetic objects. Both books draw fascinating conclusions about contemporary American life, which the authors gleaned by interviewing residents and documenting their interior living spaces, but neither book depicts the homes of the author or authors. These studies at home, in homes, are excellent examples of how images can be used in life and in ethnographic texts but are not particularly reflexive in terms of exploring the intimate lives of authors.
Since scholars started calling attention to issues of identity, positionality, partiality, and power inherent in the act of (mostly first-world elites) representing others (particularly colonial, postcolonial, or minority others), anthropologists have struggled to find new ways to become more reflexive (Asad 1973). This means taking stock of the ways in which one’s own nationality, race, class, gender, sexuality, or even personality may impact field site selection, experience, and analysis. Being explicit about one’s own identity contextualizes and can even strengthen the arguments one makes.
So how are field sites typically selected? In the United States graduate students are encouraged to study abroad so that they will learn how to navigate a radically “other” milieu. Some anthropologists even argue that you must do ethnographic work abroad if you are to be a real anthropologist, because only then are you sufficiently equipped to do work in the United States. Even when studying centers of global capital junior researchers may confront the perception that doing research “at home” does not sufficiently train them to negotiate cultural difference and to reevaluate ethnocentric and atheoretical approaches to society (Susser 2001, 7-8). But Susser points out that crossing class boundaries, for example, can lead to cultural dissonance as challenging and illuminating as crossing national or ethnic boundaries (8). I would add that encountering other styles, values, or aesthetic preferences can have a similarly illuminating effect. Even taking the self as a subject of ethnographic study can be productive in this sense.
Moving about as far away as you can get from studying a foreign, exotic other is the practice of undertaking research on your own community, with yourself as the primary informant, as Kathleen Stewart and Randol Contreras have done. Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2008) tracks the identity, observations, and everyday experiences of the author through a series of (rather poetic) vignettes. The entire text can be read as an exercise in phenomenological anthropology and as a commentary on the politics of race, class, and gender under the conditions of globalized neoliberal governmentality.
While Stewart presents herself in the third person, Contreras tells a first-person version of his life growing up in the South Bronx in The Stickup Kids: Race, Violence, and the American Dream (2012). In his account of “gangsta’ life” Contreras helpfully addresses his own struggle with issues of objectivity; he had to debate, for example, what to tell and what to hold back, imagining how his friends might feel about how he was telling their stories. He also had to consider how his tenure committee might reframe their understanding of a colleague who they would now discover had participated in a life of crime.
I have tried to learn from these examples how to remain both true to and critically aware of my own subject position as a relatively well off, educated white woman, born and raised in the South, who has lived a substantial portion of my adult life exploring the lives and practices of people in other places. My identity in this project, postmodern as this may sound, is one of multiple perspectives. I could not help but to tack back and forth between being a mother and an anthropologist as I made new friends and learned the ropes of breast milk sharing.
Biases inevitably pervade the material I collected, but having initially participated in sharing as a donee allowed me to understand what’s at stake, perhaps even better than someone discovering this practice more “objectively,” from the outside. My perspectives as a mother and as an anthropologist are complementary (see Chang 2008; Ellis and Bochner 2000): as a mother, I experienced an affective understanding of the various potencies of milk sharing that might have otherwise remained obscured (see Jones 2005; Cassidy 2012), and, as an anthropologist, I was attuned to theory playing in the everyday.
Augmenting my efforts to account for my own subject position was my reading about autoethnography (Kelley and Betsalel 2004; Ellis 2004; Hayano 1979; Marechal 2010; Hunt and Junco 2006). I have attempted to avoid presenting work that is overly subjective by satisfying conditions defined by Anderson (2006, 373): autoethnographers should be a “complete member of the social world under study,” engage reflectively on themselves, be visibly and actively present in the text, include other informants in similar situations, and be committed to theoretical analysis. Thus, the evidence marshaled for this book is a combination of autoethnographic study with established techniques of investigation such as interviewing, analyzing documents, historical research, and contextualization (Buzard 2003; Ellingson and Ellis 2008; Reed-Danahay 1997). I was especially energized by Heewon Chang’s Autoethnography as Method (2008), which provides step-by-step guidelines for mining experience and reinforced my own impulses to avoid an excessive focus on myself. So while I have developed theoretical explanations of social phenomena from my own experience, mine is not the only voice, nor is it the focus of this work (Ellington and Ellis 2008, 445; see also Denzin and Lincoln 1994; Ellis 2004; and Sparkes 2000). My work on White Gold extends well beyond my own involvement through interviews I conducted with donees, husbands, doulas, lactation consultants, medical professionals, and donors. I can only hope that I struck a decent balance.
Finding the Subject in Self and Substance
Joslyn was a far more typical donor than Anuka (the Egyptian architect described in the preface). She is culturally conservative. Her working-class husband is in law enforcement. Joslyn cared for their three boys, making cloth diapers and attending an evangelical church, sometimes dropping off her donation on her way to a part-time job at a children’s clothing shop at the mall. We found ways to give Joslyn tokens of appreciation, such as Christmas tree ornaments or a pair of grab-proof earrings. When I went to her house, she usually invited me to sit down and offered me a beverage. Sometimes we put the babies down on the floor and let them look at each other and laugh. We talked about parenting or our babies’ new skills. The exchange was often a social occasion, although there were times that I simply picked up bags of milk, threw them in a cooler with a hunk of dry ice, and drove away—sometimes feeling a little like something was missing and sometimes not.
All told, we had well more than fifty donors. I was fascinated by the stories that people were telling me, and I had kept notes all along, but when we began breast milk sharing with our second child and I was (slightly) less overwhelmed, I began looking at sharing from a different, decidedly more anthropological, perspective. I read oft-cited work related to milk, such as Mothers and Medicine (Apple 1987), The Anthropology of Breast-feeding (Maher 1992), and GivingBreastmilk (Shaw and Bartlett 2010). Each of these works in its own way examines the practice of breastfeeding as intertwined with constructions of nature, gender, and appropriate mothering. I also explored lesser-known materials; my reading of Banking on the Body (2014) by the legal scholar Kara Swanson not only helped me understand the early history of milk banking but also provided a lawyerly take on commodification, especially with regard to the delineation between private versus civic property.
Asef Bayat’s (2000, 2010) work on ordinary people’s responses to the crush of neoliberal governance in the Middle East helped me to think about milk sharing as a form of agency. The comments that informants made during formal interviews led me to still other texts, and I followed those leads, albeit in a rather creative, perhaps somewhat idiosyncratic way. Doing so took me to biological and medical research on milk itself (of which there is a great deal), popular press on contemporary forms of milk sharing (of which there is little), and articles on the phenomenal growth of the for-profit human milk industry.
In the end I conducted formal interviews with more than forty participants who were involved in breast milk sharing (a few were our donors, but most were not). I focused on donors and donees, but I also talked with doulas, nurses, and doctors, many of whom I located using a snowball technique. Since most informants either knew me or knew of me through the local network, I was in an excellent position to pose a loose set of questions that allowed them to talk about their experiences, motivations, and broader life histories. I allowed people a great deal of latitude to discuss how and why they become involved, as well as to comment on their expectations, hopes, and disappointments. I did not directly ask about political affiliations or economic standing but allowed these to emerge obliquely. I explained to participants that the intention of my study was to learn more about how milk sharing was practiced as part of my research for a book I was writing, and I took handwritten notes during interviews (largely editing out “ums” and “ahs”). I remained as true as I could to informants’ voices, both in my fieldnotes and in this book, but in order to protect the privacy of participants I followed the standard ethnographic practice of changing names and identifying details. I have also taken the liberty of combining or splitting identities where necessary to protect privacy.
Issues of class and race figure prominently in studies of breastfeeding and indeed in my own sharing experience. As Avishai (2011) points out, even though the percentages of mothers breastfeeding had rebounded to 70 percent by the mid-2ooos in response to the push by the American Academy of Pediatrics, it is hardly surprising, given that breastfeeding requires access to resources, nourishment, and a relaxing (and possibly private) environment, that white, middle-class, educated, heterosexually paired, older mothers who stay at home are much more likely than other women to initiate breastfeeding, to continue beyond the first few days, and to keep feeding their children breast milk when and if they return to work.
Echoing this statistic, the vast majority our donors, and the donors and donees I interviewed, were like Joslyn: middle-class, married, white mothers. Many had graduated from college or had some college-level education, but there were a few who had not had any college coursework and others who had postgraduate degrees. Many donors were stay-at-home moms living in detached houses, with husbands who worked as police officers, small business owners, sales agents, real-estate agents, professors, managers, lawyers, and so forth. There are several large military bases nearby, and several husbands worked for the military. Some donors were themselves enlisted. Women who worked either before or after giving birth were employed as school counselors, retail sales clerks, schoolteachers, personal trainers, doctors, architects, farmers, and so forth, though a few worked directly with women as doulas or midwives.
After completing the interviews I coded my notes to manage them with greater ease. Interviews are odd social interactions. People are indexing (or pointing to) who they are and who they think the interviewer is, performing identities threaded with ideas about aesthetics, race, and class, and creating or disarticulating a power-rife relationship with the interviewer (Crapanzano 1985). My process of coding was therefore sensitive to the indexical properties of interviews when I could determine that these dynamics were at play. Coding also helped alleviate biases that inevitably pervaded my own autobiographical material, which resulted from having participated initially as an extremely naive new parent. Some of the most salient variables that emerged included instinct, modernity, community, risk, mothering, altruism, gender, and medical expertise. The same practice was applied to the academic literature I studied, as well as to material obtained via social media. I focused on the website MilkShare and state-specific Facebook sites in my own region (Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida), looking for both conformity and outliers. This focus allowed me to locate overlaps within different levels of discourse (personal, academic, and popular).
Mine is not a quantitative study based on a large-scale questionnaire but rather an interpretive analysis of qualitative research. Data collected in interviews are not representative, nor have I used the data with the intention of enumerating frequencies or making statistical claims (Yin 1989). Instead the data were taken as a pool of narratives. Studying these narratives helped me to draw conclusions about communal responses to social and political forces, in the context of capitalism, that are taking place via the use of social media technology. I recognize moreover that parents involved with milk sharing represent a small minority (some researchers estimate that less that 1 percent of women who express milk share with another family [Stevens and Keim 2015]) and that my study is regional—conditions that impinge upon the gen-eralizability of my findings. Further research will be needed to reveal how the findings about my own network can be applied elsewhere.
Organizing the Body Politic
This book could have been put together in a number of different ways because asking what breast milk sharing is, as a first step, leads to a several intriguing pathways. I could open, for example, with the nature of milk itself, the management of risk, ideas about childrearing and parenthood, the aversion to the abject, or how milk sharing resists authoritative institutions that are opposed to it. Milk sharing can be treated as a network, as a kinship practice, as dissent, as a form of biocapitalism, as affective labor, as cyborgian, as a heterarchy, as a show of agency, or as a thrilling performance of trust. As a profoundly historical contingency—unimaginable in its current form without the rise of digital technology, consumer capitalism, road and postal setups, risk society, modernity, biopolitics, and so forth—milk sharing is all of these things and none alone.
Breast milk thus presents a semiotic problem. What is milk? What is milk sharing? In following Charles Sanders Peirce’s (1931-58, 2:228) dictum that a sign is something that means something to somebody, I have tried to tease apart what milk sharing “means” from various points of view. Taking what Jules David Prown (2001, 235-37) calls a “hard” approach, or seeking systematic information about the “reality of the object itself,” I can examine milk, for example, through the lens of anthropology’s sister sciences, such as biology, physiology, and chemistry. Conversely a “soft” approach would focus on milk’s cultural and symbolic dimensions, “as part of a language through which culture speaks its mind” (Prown 2001, 237). Milk’s special and mundane physical qualities (from sugar content to antibody load) are made visible using a hard approach, while a soft approach shows milk articulating ideas about nutrition, motherhood, nature, and so forth.
As I have shown in my work on diamonds (Falls 2008), milk can be understood as a duality: it is both cultural material and material culture. We can cleave the idea or concept of breast milk as cultural material from any particular example of it as material culture. What I have found useful in doing this is what Charles Sanders Peirce called a type/token distinction (Peirce 1931-58, 4:537). Types have “a definite identity, though usually admitting a great variety of appearances” (8:334). The identity of breast milk as type, for example, might be associated with how it is produced, what is in it, and its range of colors (including white, blue, or orange) and textures (viscous or thin). We might think of the type as cultural material.
Any specific instance of breast milk is a token, an exemplification of the type. Here it is material culture. We expect tokens to share some, maybe most, but not necessarily all of the qualities identified within the type “breast milk.” And while types and tokens have different ontological registers, they are intimately related. Recognizing the type as abstract category and the token as a material instantiation can help us track breast milk as an agent in world-making (a point to which I return).
The type/token (or cultural material/material culture) lens allows us (indeed tells us) to take instances of breast milk as historically sited, as events that emerge and occur in time and space, refracting cultural, political, and economic dynamics. The type to which a token is attached does its work in what Law (2009) calls “mattering,” in a different register. This lens encourages us to attend to historical and cultural circumstances that make milk look to us in a particular way. Then we can focus on what milk means and what it does.
Within this framework breast milk becomes understood as complicated cultural material or material culture that is entangled with patterns of circulation, agency, political economy, technology, and risk. One way to begin analyzing breast milk in this way is to recognize that it materializes or becomes an object between people, and in this sense it is relational. The mother::child dyad is one site of emergence, but milk also materializes within partnerships by people who define its use, meaning, and efficacy for other kinds of activities that may or may not align with “best practices” promoted by institutional authorities.
Constructed by sharers as “white gold,” milk as a type operates as a natural foil to chemical formulas that simulate women’s bodily fluid under the profit logic of capitalism. Milk as token, however, is personal, temporal, and situated. The circulation of milk, its pathway, depends upon intersecting political, economic, and cultural configurations, such as laws governing bodily fluids, commodification pushing against donor networks, and values promoted by the natural birth community. Technology—from milk-pumping-and-storing tools, to social media sites, to pharmaceuticals and drug tests, to scientific and medical practice— also shapes milk sharing.
As sharing has grown in popularity, milk has materialized as a fundable object of scientific investigation. Resulting scientific knowledge is of course then implicated in the production, maintenance, and contestation of social practices. In the scientific community milk sharing might be (and often is) viewed as “too risky” (Akre 2011). Interestingly, as milk sharing became more visible in my area between 2010 and 2014 (the same period in which scientific interest was growing), I noticed that more donors and donees were willing to, or wanted to participate in, shares that bioscience would almost certainly view as unsafe—meaning that, for example, donors did not disclose documentation regarding their hiv status and donees accepted milk from donors “no questions asked.” My research traces how the relational, circulatory, and technological aspects of sharing are mobilized by participants to negotiate perceptions of risk. Mothers I spoke with appealed to forms of decision making that lie outside the parameters of rational scientific methods (which are always incomplete) to guide choices about whom to donate to or accept milk from: these forms of knowledge included instinct, women’s work, group consciousness, and feelings of trust.
But what does all of this have to do with the notion of agency or worldmaking, as mentioned above? The issue of agency is important in anthropology because, among other things, it is future oriented. People can have agency, and the kind of agency people express has implications for progressive social action, for notions of responsibility, for consciousness. Within anthropology there has been a notable discussion about the agency of things. As a thing, milk certainly does things. It is matter that can matter. As an event, breast milk is a magnetic hub for strangers who might not and probably would not otherwise have ever come together to practice trusting one other. This stranger convergence constitutes collaborative world-making.
Knowing the history of ideas and attitudes about milk is important, but I am interested in a more pragmatic question: How and why do tokens of “liquid gold” matter? And how do they affect participants? For example, donating allows lactating women to perform an identity as a community member. By receiving milk, donees can perform a style of parenting. Values are expressed, refined, and negotiated during the talk that surrounds the exchange. For example, I saw sharers negotiating a “we-them” critique of medical and pharmaceutical policy, as reflected in one donor’s description of the profit-driven formula industry: “they don’t have our best interests at heart.”
We intend ourselves into the world through material culture. We can’t even imagine existing without it. So while breast milk as a type has a history (or histories) within which some core aspects of its identity are fairly persistent, owing to the fact that it is a fluid emitted from a biological organism, tokens of shared milk must be understood in their own (and usually short-lived) trajectory, with a finer level of detail, embedded in and contributing to a body politic. This is where an ethnographic approach is useful.
Ethno-graphing
So with an eye toward presenting an analysis of a relatively underresearched globalized practice from a local and somewhat personal standpoint, I begin White Gold with an overview of sharing. Subsequent chapters highlight different aspects of the practice: Who is involved? What are their motivations? I thus explore how milk moves, what it does, and what we can learn by looking at it ethnographically.
As a more poetic counterpoint to this fairly straightforward organization, Apollonian in its linear and disciplined argumentation, I have inserted a series of images that operate like the dithyramb sung by the chorus in a Greek tragedy. (A dithyramb works as an ode to Dionysus, meant to offer background, insight, and commentary to the main narrative but in a style that is adventurous, disorderly, poetic, and evocative.) These visual vignettes are not meant to stand alone as a parallel interbook, nor are they to be read as literal illustrations of material presented in neighboring chapters. They are bridges between the chapters and between what is said and what is not said. They are like dreams between days. They are meant to offer provocations for thinking about what milk and milk sharing are, have been, and indeed can be.
The placement of images between each chapter is different from the ethnographic exposition some readers may have learned to expect. Most anthropological books that do contain images (often photographs taken during the course of fieldwork) use them in a supporting role, as straightforward illustrations of people, places, or objects. But there are other ways that images can be used. Images created by authors or curated from art history, cinema studies, design handbooks, or even found footage can be placed to challenge, juxtapose, or even contradict prose in ways that intensify our engagement with it. Even the seeming non sequi-tur that presents an interpretive challenge can add an additional layer of interpretation to expository text. There is a long literary, artistic, and cinematic tradition of using visuals in what we might call purposeful interruption. I found Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1994), Michael Taussig’s I Swear I Saw This (2011), John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), Todd Haynes’s film Poison (1991), and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1930) to be especially helpful in understanding how the use of images or collage can work in counterpoint.
Ethnographic exposition is typically linear, and because of this quality it can flatten cultural and historical contexts (which are by their nature ambiguous, ephemeral, and contradictory). The images in White Gold invite the reader to engage his or her poetic self in developing a semantic ambience surrounding my more traditional style of argumentation. The images are meant to prime you to sense and to explore connections and characteristics that are not explicitly stated. While this strategy may present an unfamiliar or even uncomfortable challenge, I can only hope that the effort will be worth it.
I have provided more scaffolding for readers in the first few sets of images, but as the reading progresses I leave readers to their own devices. This strategy aligns with what I understand Roland Barthes (1973) to be up to when he identifies the Usable, the readerly text, that is here working in tandem with a scriptable, or a writerly text (a collage of images and narration). Thinking more broadly, I hope that this strategy will contribute to our collective toolkit for presenting ethnographic material.
Following the vignette entitled “Ethno-Graphics,” chapter one describes how milk moves by discussing its material and medical aspects, as well as how supposed benefits and dangers of sharing intersect with trust and risk. This chapter also describes the compound infrastructure through which milk moves and around which the modern network of sharers coalesces.
One of the most unexpected features of my experience with sharers was the general trend toward political conservatism in the donor community. Many of the families were conservative and Christian, prizing stay-at-home motherhood and homeschooling. Many were suspicious of the medical system as it relates to motherhood; they had natural childbirth at home or in natural birthing centers, designed homemade diapers, promoted slowed vaccination schedules or none at all, and of course celebrated and promoted breastfeeding. I connected with mothers with whom I might not otherwise have expected to have much in common. But the meaning of the share varied a great deal from one individual to another. Focusing on donors, chapter two explores how and why people became involved, explaining how this group, with all of its internal idiosyncrasies, operates like a counterpublic or as what I call a “counternetwork.”
Taking up the theme of experience and motivations, chapter three presents donee stories. Accounts by donees reflect a palimpsest of shared values, as well as unique desires and strategies. While the metaphor of the network connotes horizontality, there are important differences not only in participants’ ability to “hook in” to the infrastructure of distribution but also in their ability to shape how the practice looks and works. The counternetwork that coalesces around an infrastructure of distribution and information exchange can be described therefore as “heterarchical,” that is to say, as a form of social organization that is flexible and adaptive, in which relationships shift with context, and where power is contextual. Here people participate in a self-regulating whole by choosing to engage one another, but social actors besides donors and donees also contribute to the viability of milk sharing. The flexibility and adaptability of the heterarchy make it extremely effective. As we might expect in any social organization characterized by heterarchy (“which is both a structure and a condition” [Crumley 1995, 4]), people occupy different roles over time: a donor or donee may be or become a web page administrator, doula, or lactation activist and, by extension, affect breast milk as type.
In their constructions of breast milk as type, the medical community, the Food and Drug Administration (fda), the aap, La Leche League International, and milk banks acknowledge that there are questions about milk exchange with regard to disease, chemical or drug exposure, and contamination that have to be navigated, and they draw the conclusion that sharing is too risky. The fda recommends against feeding babies with milk acquired through sharing. The aap discourages the use of unscreened donors (by which they mean screened in the way that milk banks screen donors). The Canadian Pediatric Society and the aap also recommend against using donor milk. Banks affiliated with the Human Milk Banking Association of North America take the position that the risks of using shared milk remain so great as to make it an untenable option, and they do not support it.
Even La Leche League, the organization perhaps most often associated with the promotion of breastfeeding, does not support milk sharing. When I attempted to interview Ida, my local lll representative, about it, she explained in an email that as a representative of lll she was happy to share information about breastfeeding but could not speak specifically to milk sharing. Making three main points, she explained that lll “has chosen to neither condemn nor condone this practice except to say that mothers should use caution when accepting human milk donations from outside a milk bank environment,” that mothers “breastfeeding babies under six months should be cautious of the priority of their own baby’s needs if they intend to donate milk and may want to speak to an lll leader about balancing those needs,” and that lll leaders should not “initiate the suggestion of an informal milk-donation arrangement or act as an intermediary in such a situation, but can only provide unbiased information about the risks and benefits of such an arrangement.” She directed me to consult the lll website if I had further questions.
As with lll, “lactivists” promote the value of milk for infant health and development (Faircloth 2009, 2013; Lunceford 2012). Chapter four examines sharing as a form of ideologically powered community work, situated within a larger institutional context that finds milk sharing too risky. Ideas about self-sufficiency, a desire to avoid the commercialism associated with babies, a mistrust of pharmaceutical and food industries and the governmental bodies that regulate them, and the desire to promote “women’s knowledge” and labor, as well as heartfelt commitments to support local communities, were motivations that lactivists described. As with other issues, activism around the politics of milk, including sharing, is diverse, taking place at many levels and with varying degrees of consciousness or strategizing: some simply participate in sharing, acting as a model that others may or may not follow in what I would call microactivism, while at the other extreme advocate-lactivists may demand that children receive breast milk no matter what, even if it means overriding a mother’s wishes. I would argue that the microactivism that introduces milk sharing to the family and friends of sharers is a more private but crucial flip side to the ways in which more visible lactivists are shaping milk as type and, therefore, cultural attitudes about milk sharing (though these of course do not go uncontested).
As the benefits of milk are promoted and interest in the circulation of milk grows, milk is acquiring commercial value. Since capitalism always seeks new markets and new commodities and finds new ways to extract value from life itself, milk sharing (along with the infrastructure and counternetwork surrounding it) has been identified as an attractive frontier for entrepreneurial biocapitalism. Frictions and convergences between sharers and biocapitalists expose the political and economic tenets that structure everyday life. Focusing on the monetization of milk, chapter five examines how commercialism, kinship, and religion converge around milk sharing. There is, perhaps not surprisingly, increasing pressure to commoditize milk as the practice becomes more mainstream, and this is happening in a technologizing, political environment. Modern technologies associated with pumping, community making, body modification (changes in breast size, for example), and reproduction (such as surrogacy and in vitro fertilization) also have an impact on the intersection of capital and sharing (Griswold 2005; Steiner 2013).
A refusal to participate in the commodification of breast milk using an unregulated sharing infrastructure is a way of refusing to reduce life to capital, and I cannot help but to wonder what legal, cultural, or economic techniques might soon make informal sharing more difficult. As an emergent and rapidly changing practice, breast milk sharing has an uncertain future. What might this look like in five or ten years, or even further out? How might it align with other experimental modes of dissent?
Disciplines outside of anthropology offer different paradigms of looking, helping us to imagine what milk sharing might inform, critique, or become. To deal with these important questions, in the last chapter I draw upon the work of the late architect Lebbeus Woods to discover what milk sharing means in terms of imaginaries, strategies, and practices that shape and are shaped by future realities. Occupying what Woods calls a “free space,” milk sharing is a unique informal economy formed not solely out of necessity but as a counternetwork that functions as political-economic critique, asset-based community building, and resistance, even as it unwittingly supports, or even reproduces, some of the very conditions sharers seek to disrupt.
Ultimately this book is about an evanescent, alternative practice of people responding to problems posed by social and institutional forces. Alliances between families of the Left and the Right, making an “end run” around powerful commercial industries, functioning largely through social media, represent a distinctly contemporary form of community making, one that is taking place in the throes of what Ranciere (2010) calls dissensus. Milk sharing is a model for the circulation of material culture and ideas of many kinds, and it lends texture to the body politic as a surprising, empowering, and diverse form of civil society.
Meanwhile, for most people milk sharing is still relatively under the radar. My sister reminded me one day when we were talking on the phone that
it probably does not enter most peoples’ minds to do this. And a few people I know have adopted: one friend, they were maybe a little younger than us, had two open adoptions, and so they were there at the birth and everything, and they were just handed the baby and a bottle, and they never went outside of that. So, I just think that unless you have a doula or midwife who is really open-minded and knows, your pediatrician is definitely not going to tell you about this. Even a forward-thinking pediatrician is going to say, “Formula!” I mean after six months, they ask you how the breastfeeding is going, and if you say “good,” they encourage you to continue, but if you are having issues, they will suggest working to find an appropriate formula. I have never heard anyone say that their pediatrician suggested milk sharing.
While this book is unlikely to be handed out by pediatricians, some readers may hear from a friend that she is a donor or receives milk, or perhaps lactating readers may consider donating milk. I hope that White Gold will help people to understand and evaluate this practice for themselves.
Thinking more broadly, we need to find better ways to live together as we struggle with the increasingly serious environmental, political, and economic challenges posed by life in the Anthropocene. I am arguing here that milk sharing, as a counternetwork of strange bedfellows coalescing around an infrastructure in the context of commodity capitalism, shows us one such better way to live together. If we are to survive as a species, the knowledge and ability to successfully trust each other and feed infants without the help of institutional authorities must be maintained. Breast milk sharing is just a small piece of the solution, but this book will be a success if it inspires readers to imagine other ways of sharing in other free spaces that may exist just beyond the horizon, allowing us to practice alternative modes of exchange and community making that operate not just as an implicit critique of exiting realities but that, even more significantly, bring different people together in new ways.