祖母的重要

祖母的重要

　祖母，是一个伟大又变幻莫测的比喻！对孩子而言这个名词被化身为这样一种高尚伟岸的形象:怀揣着礼物认为如果我能够把鞋穿在该穿的脚上我就是一个天才，而且在父母回家时把我喂得饱饱的。
在新闻报导中，称一位妇女为“慈祥的”就是一种公式化的表达即“和善的，脆弱的，好心的，可胜任的家庭监护人。”这已是过去式了。
因为过去的人类学者和人种学者认为:祖母都是些干瘪老太婆，这就阻碍了人们对真相的调查。著名的人种学者查尔斯.威廉姆斯.莫顿哈特在20世纪20年代研究澳大利亚的猎人聚居地Tiwi.中所描述的一样 ：形容年老的女人就像讨厌的麻烦事，一种发自生理上的厌恶，有时，他苦恼地发现他们的行为不利于记录或分析诸如他所关注的男人，年轻女人甚至是孩子。
但是新一批的进化生物学家和文化人类学家声称：祖母是了解人类史前历史的关键，我们为什么会是现在的我们这样的细节问题以及逐渐长大并开始受教化，但是一旦我们功成名就，就会情感转移，像动物一样，家族聚集已是很难再现了，这也是灵长类动物的法则。
结果，生物学家，进化人类学家，社会学家和人口统计学家都开始关注祖母们：有关过去他们所做的一切，他们对家庭的幸福是否和如何产生影响以及对至今为止世界各地不同文化群体的取样。

在最近一个国际研讨会上，第一个致力于对祖母的研究，研究者得出一致结论，大家认为祖母是一个特殊群体，通常，人们会低估年长的母性亲属的能力并且对他们所持的观点在我们的进化传统中一直摇摆不定。研究者说，祖母处于一个独具特色的进化范畴。他们不再担负传宗接代的任务，就如同年长的男性或许他们还很强壮，常常还能安享晚年，延年益寿。 假设跨越人类的进化，更年期的妇女不再将他们强健的身体用于生产婴儿，他们很有可能正在将大量的精力用于什么别的地方。
比方说，跨越河流和穿越森林。那样将能解释孩子们对撒面粉和祖母或奶奶讲述过的神话中的人物的念念不忘。这次研讨会众多的与会者论证得出结论，无论是健在或已去逝的祖母在不同的传统生存文化当中常常会为孙子辈们书写下生和死的差异。事实上，拥有一个祖母随时在身边比父亲的健在能给孩子的远大前程以更深远的拓展。
伦敦一所大学人类学系的鲁斯.迈斯博士和丽贝卡.斯尔博士举例分析来自冈比亚农村的经收集自1950至1974年的有关人口统计学的信息表明：在这个地区儿童的死亡率很高,人类学家发现主要原因是让冈比亚蹒跚学步的孩子断奶，在他们尚未拥有强健的体魄和免疫力的时候，离开对他们来说具有保护性的和安慰性的母乳 ，而健在的祖母们却没有这样做，他们阻止了这种行为并且减少了一半的发生率。
“令我们惊讶的结果是如果父亲健在或者去逝并不关紧要”迈斯博士在电话访问中说：“如果祖母过逝，你就会救注重这件事，但如果是父亲，则不然。”
重要的是，这些善意的奶奶们的影响仅仅是出于他们作为祖母的母性－为人母之母。父亲般的祖母对孩子们来说并没有什么不同的结果。 （未完待续 资料来源：纽约时报　中华传媒网编译）
The Importance of Grandma
By NATALIE ANGIER
Grandma, what a big and fickle metaphor you can be! For children, the name translates as "the magnificent one with presents in her suitcase who thinks I'm a genius if I put my shoes on the right feet, and who stuffs me with cookies the moment my parents'　 backs are turned."
In news reports, to call a woman "grandmotherly" is for "kindly, frail, harmless, keeper of the family antimacassars, and operationally past tense."
For anthropologists and ethnographers of yore, grandmothers were crones, an impediment to "real" research. The renowned ethnographer Charles William Merton Hart, who in the 1920's studied the Tiwi hunter-gatherers of Australia, described the elder females there as "a terrible nuisance" and "physically quite revolting" and in whose company he was distressed to find himself on occasion, yet whose activities did not merit recording or analyzing with anything like the attention he paid the men, the young women, even the children.

   
祖母的重要 　
But for a growing number of evolutionary biologists and cultural anthropologists, grandmothers represent a key to understanding human prehistory, and the particulars of why we are as we are — slow to grow up and start breeding but remarkably fruitful once we get there, empathetic and generous as animals go, and family-focused to a degree hardly seen elsewhere in the primate order.
As a result, biologists, evolutionary anthropologists, sociologists and demographers are starting to pay more attention to grandmothers: what they did in the past, whether and how they made a difference to their families' welfare, and what they are up to now in a sampling of cultures around the world.
论文祖母的重要来自

At a recent international conference — the first devoted to grandmothers — researchers concluded with something approaching a consensus that grandmothers in particular, and elder female kin in general, have been an underrated source of power and sway in our evolutionary heritage. Grandmothers, they said, are in a distinctive evolutionary category. They are no longer reproductively active themselves, as older males may struggle to be, but they often have many hale years ahead of them; and as the existence of substantial proportions of older adults among even the most "primitive" cultures indicates, such durability is nothing new.
If, over the span of human evolution, postmenopausal women have not been using their stalwart bodies for bearing babies, they very likely have been directing their considerable energies elsewhere.
Say, over the river and through the woods. It turns out that there is a reason children are perpetually yearning for the flour-dusted, mythical figure called grandma or granny or oma or abuelita. As a number of participants at the conference demonstrated, the presence or absence of a grandmother often spelled the difference in traditional subsistence cultures between life or death for the grandchildren. In fact, having a grandmother around sometimes improved a child's prospects to a far greater extent than did the presence of a father.

   
祖母的重要 　
Dr. Ruth Mace and Dr. Rebecca Sear of the department of anthropology at University College in London, for example, analyzed demographic information from rural Gambia that was collected from 1950 to 1974, when child mortality rates in the area were so high that even minor discrepancies in care could be all too readily tallied. The anthropologists found that for Gambian toddlers, weaned from the protective balm of breast milk but not yet possessing strength and immune vigor of their own, the presence of a grandmother cut their chances of dying in half.
"The surprising result to us was that if the father was alive or dead didn't matter," Dr. Mace said in a telephone interview. "If the grandmother dies, you notice it; if the father does, you don't."
Importantly, this beneficent granny effect derived only from maternal grandmothers — the mother of one's mother. The paternal grandmothers made no difference to a child's outcome. (To be continued Source: New York Times)

   
祖母的重要

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