Your first book is Jónína Einarsdóttir’s Tired of Weeping: Mother Love, Child Death, and Poverty in Guinea-Bissau.

In a context where a full third of children die before their fifth birthday, most of those in infancy, what do mothers feel when they lose a baby? This is the key question animating this ethnography. Einarsdóttir asks, when the calamity looms so large, when the likelihood of loss is so great, is there a numbing effect on the emotions? Do the mothers try less hard to save their babies when they know that so many die in infancy? The thesis had been argued over for decades in the field of history, but in anthropology the question is more recent and probably more fraught.

How does Einarsdóttir reflect that in this book?

She discusses the thesis of Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who argued that in northeast Brazil, where infants frequently die from the consequences of malnutrition and disease, their deaths are felt in a muted sort of way, tempered by the idea that many of them were not fully human at birth, that many lacked the knack to live and that they will become little angels in any case, which wasn’t a bad thing for them or their families. Einarsdóttir slowly builds her case that mothers in the Biombo region of Guinea-Bissau, the West African country, feel the loss of an infant intensely and do everything they can to prevent it.

The transatlantic dialogue raises many unsettling questions about our understanding of infant death. Einarsdóttir leaves us with the sense that having lived one tragedy does not prepare us for its reiteration. In the end it is hard to know what is worse, to become habituated to child death or to feel the same excruciating loss each time.

Very true. Much of your research has been carried out in Brazil. Did mothers have similar attitudes there?

What I encountered more frequently in northeast Brazil, since I was working with street children there and not with infants, was parents who had older children or adolescents. I met a mother who had lost each of her nine children, most of them to violence. There was nothing in the pain of those mothers that suggested to me that their loss was less acute by virtue of repetition.

How sad. Tell me about The Afterlife is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa by Alma Gottlieb.

This is perhaps the most ambitious ethnography of infants to date. The babies here, seen by adults as reincarnations of the dead, are players in their own right, endowed even with powers that adults lack, such as the ability to understand all languages. Meanwhile, religious beliefs condition the way babies are taught to crawl and walk, socialise and more. She studied the Beng of Côte d’Ivoire.

Though this is what you could call an infant-centred ethnography, even Gottlieb approaches babies largely through what adults and older children say about them and do with them. But “largely” is not exclusively and in this case the distinction is vital. Gottlieb’s ethnography would have been a book about adult beliefs and practices in relation to infants had the work not also been built around careful observation of babies.

What did she do?

She identified numerous instances in which the infants began to reveal how they act in culturally inflected ways, even well before they can speak. For instance, she writes, “I [once] left both a book and a video camera within reach of the babies… Both were unfamiliar objects that I expected to elicit much curiosity and exploration… But the babies saved their excitement for the older children and women who had gathered.” As this scene suggests, Beng babies seem to rate their relations with both older children and adults quite highly.