祖母的重要

　祖母，是一個偉大又變幻莫測的比喻！對孩子而言這個名詞被化身為這樣一種高尚偉岸的形象:懷揣著禮物認為如果我能夠把鞋穿在該穿的腳上我就是一個天才，而且在父母回家時把我喂得飽飽的。
在新聞報導中，稱一位婦女為“慈祥的”就是一種公式化的表達即“和善的，脆弱的，好心的，可勝任的家庭監(jiān)護人�！边@已是過去式了。
因為過去的人類學者和人種學者認為:祖母都是些干癟老太婆，這就阻礙了人們對真相的調查。著名的人種學者查爾斯.威廉姆斯.莫頓哈特在20世紀20年代研究澳大利亞的獵人聚居地Tiwi.中所描述的一樣 ：形容年老的女人就像討厭的麻煩事，一種發(fā)自生理上的厭惡，有時，他苦惱地發(fā)現(xiàn)他們的行為不利于記錄或分析諸如他所關注的男人，年輕女人甚至是孩子。
但是新一批的進化生物學家和文化人類學家聲稱：祖母是了解人類史前歷史的關鍵，我們?yōu)槭裁磿�是現(xiàn)在的我們這樣的細節(jié)問題以及逐漸長大并開始受教化，但是一旦我們功成名就，就會情感轉移，像動物一樣，家族聚集已是很難再現(xiàn)了，這也是靈長類動物的法則。
結果，生物學家，進化人類學家，社會學家和人口統(tǒng)計學家都開始關注祖母們：有關過去他們所做的一切，他們對家庭的幸福是否和如何產生影響以及對至今為止世界各地不同文化群體的取樣。

在最近一個國際研討會上，第一個致力于對祖母的研究，研究者得出一致結論，大家認為祖母是一個特殊群體，通常，人們會低估年長的母性親屬的能力并且對他們所持的觀點在我們的進化傳統(tǒng)中一直搖擺不定。研究者說，祖母處于一個獨具特色的進化范疇。他們不再擔負傳宗接代的任務，就如同年長的男性或許他們還很強壯，常常還能安享晚年，延年益壽。 假設跨越人類的進化，更年期的婦女不再將他們強健的身體用于生產嬰兒，他們很有可能正在將大量的精力用于什么別的地方。
比方說，跨越河流和穿越森林。那樣將能解釋孩子們對撒面粉和祖母或奶奶講述過的神話中的人物的念念不忘。這次研討會眾多的與會者論證得出結論，無論是健在或已去逝的祖母在不同的傳統(tǒng)生存文化當中常常會為孫子輩們書寫下生和死的差異。事實上，擁有一個祖母隨時在身邊比父親的健在能給孩子的遠大前程以更深遠的拓展。
倫敦一所大學人類學系的魯斯.邁斯博士和麗貝卡.斯爾博士舉例分析來自岡比亞農村的經收集自1950至1974年的有關人口統(tǒng)計學的信息表明：在這個地區(qū)兒童的死亡率很高,人類學家發(fā)現(xiàn)主要原因是讓岡比亞蹣跚學步的孩子斷奶，在他們尚未擁有強健的體魄和免疫力的時候，離開對他們來說具有保護性的和安慰性的母乳 ，而健在的祖母們卻沒有這樣做，他們阻止了這種行為并且減少了一半的發(fā)生率。
“令我們驚訝的結果是如果父親健在或者去逝并不關緊要”邁斯博士在電話訪問中說：“如果祖母過逝，你就會救注重這件事，但如果是父親，則不然�！�
重要的是，這些善意的奶奶們的影響僅僅是出于他們作為祖母的母性－為人母之母。父親般的祖母對孩子們來說并沒有什么不同的結果。 （未完待續(xù) 資料來源：紐約時報　中華傳媒網編譯）
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.
論文祖母的重要來自

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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