Conflicting Theories/ideas/myths About Milk Kinship
One particular theory mentioned by Peter Parkes is an Arab folk-analogy that breast milk is supposed to be “transformed male semen” that arises from Hertiers Somatic Scheme. There is no evidence that Arabs ever considered a mothers milk to be ‘transformed sperm’. Another suggested analogy is that breast milk was a refinement of uterine blood. It is also suggested since that milk is of the woman, her moods and dispositions are transferred through the breast milk. Peter Parkes mentions that milk-kinship was “further endorsed as a canonical impediment to marriage by several eastern Christian churches”. This gives us evidence that this was widely practiced among numerous religious communities, and not just Islamic communities, in the early modern Mediterranean.
Hertiers Somatic Scheme
Hertiers Somatic Scheme states that marriage between milk kin is forbidden because ‘the milk is from the man’. However, the rules of Sunni marital incest show that this is in fact incorrect as these rules apply through a standard of adoptive kin relations. Hertiers Somatic Scheme is where the misconception that milk is considered transformed sperm comes from. This idea is incorrect, and was deduced generally from an Arab saying that the milk is from the man.
Read more about this topic: Milk Kinship
Famous quotes containing the words conflicting, theories, ideas, myths, milk and/or kinship:
“Compromise. Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
“Whatever practical people may say, this world is, after all, absolutely governed by ideas, and very often by the wildest and most hypothetical ideas. It is a matter of the very greatest importance that our theories of things that seem a long way apart from our daily lives, should be as far as possible true, and as far as possible removed from error.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Unlike Freud, Jung did not believe that a dream is a mask for a meaning already known but deceitfully withheld from the conscious mind. In his view, dreams were communication, ideas expressed not always straightforwardly, but in the best way possible within the limits of the medium. Dreaming, in Jung’s psychology, is a constructive process.”
—Jeremy Campbell (b. 1931)
“... the first reason for psychology’s failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology’s failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.”
—Naomi Weisstein (b. 1939)
“Mother,
strange goddess face
above my milk home,
that delicate asylum,
I ate you up.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The spiritual kinship between Lincoln and Whitman was founded upon their Americanism, their essential Westernism. Whitman had grown up without much formal education; Lincoln had scarcely any education. One had become the notable poet of the day; one the orator of the Gettsyburg Address. It was inevitable that Whitman as a poet should turn with a feeling of kinship to Lincoln, and even without any association or contact feel that Lincoln was his.”
—Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950)