Childrearing: Starting at the Top, or the Bottom

Children are highly valued in Saami society, and they almost raise themselves while im­mersed in a permissive social environment. The physical environment exerts more limits than the social, at least traditionally.

Boy babies earlier than girl babies become impatient with being swaddled and toted around by handy humans, and the virtual infants manage to walk independently at an early age. In some houses and tents, crawling is not an option. I was alert for any conse­quence of these infants skipping the crawling stage and noticed nothing alarming.

Once mobile, there is no stopping these children, born into a very mobile and even nomadic culture. Children wander at will outdoors, without going beyond some con-

stantly enlarging familiar perimeter. Saami activities calling for skill are not the subject of didactics, but rather of individual initiative—of the child. The child may fail the first few tries in executing a task, but the effort will be socially rewarded regardless, even when the failure entails material loss to the family or group, or even injury to the child (Anderson 2000).

People find the mobility of toddlers exceedingly amusing, and the same is true about the activities of the elderly. Occasionally, every individual will have to push her own physical limits in a life-and-death situation, and seeing babies, older folks, and other creatures doing this of their own volition is reassuring, even inspiring. To be sure, if peo­ple move about, they are also transporting things, and at every scale the built environ­ment moves, from furniture to houses.

However much children are indulged in Saami society, infanticide and abortion have always been known to occur. Infanticide often boils down to accident or extenuating cir­cumstances extrinsic to the mother, such as blizzard conditions at the time of birth. Infan­ticide victims return as ghosts on occasion, voicing themselves on the tundra and in school dormitory bathrooms. These locations correspond to the places where infanticide might most likely have occurred. The noises made by these ghosts would be frightening, were people not able to recognize them as little souls asking to be baptized and named. That's what people do, verbally giving each ghost the names of both Adam and Eve, names not otherwise used in the community. Actual infanticide these days would be rare, while abortion, usually a medical procedure, is more commonplace without being fre­quent and carries minimal stigma. Basically, the Saami are pragmatists and accept mat­ters as they happen. Suicide is still less frequent than abortion and infanticide; not well comprehended, the puzzle of suicide is more apt to foster stories, often about the model suicide being young, male, and disappointed in love. Being young and male are also fea­tures characterizing most accidental deaths. As discussed later in the epilogue to this vol­ume, traditional infanticide in most cultures does not bear the signs of being violent at all, nor does abortion or suicide, and none of these practices appears so among the Saami. That is, these infrequent acts are neither aggressively motivated nor carried out with rage. Certain classes of accidental death, though, can arise through abuse of vehicles and/or al­cohol, which practices constitute a fuzzier sort of violence.