A．by the absence of the motherB．by the negligence of th……
TEXT E
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 shorthand 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 to the men, the young women, even the children.
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.
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 h 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.
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% outcome.
The study of Dr. Ruth Mace and Dr. Rebecca Sear shows that a child% growth may be affected ______.
A．by the absence of the mother
B．by the negligence of the father
C．by the death of the grandmother
D．by the death of the grandfather
