The Gay Uncle read two interesting details in a recent magazine article about traditional clans in New Guinea. He’s not sure yet how to put them together into his typical scathing indictment of contemporary American parenting, but they were just too juicy to let fly past without note, so he decided to post them here. Think of this as a kind of deep storage room for metaphors.
1) In the New Guinea Highlands, uncles play an extremely important role in raising children, so much so that nephews often don’t differentiate between them and their biological fathers. When an uncle is killed, his death is strongly mourned, and must be avenged.
2) In this same culture, pigs are important representations of status and wealth, so much so that when a new piglet is born, it is given an individual name, and sometimes allowed to suckle at a woman’s free breast when she’s nursing her own infant.
If you have any anecdotes that might fit with either of these bits–revered uncles, unexpected forms of breastfeeding, revered uncles unexpectedly breastfeeding–let fly in Comments below. Maybe it can be like one of those vocabulary assignments G.U. used to receive from his seventh grade English teacher (name: Eddie Eugene Elgoode, he kids you not) in which he’d have to merge a list of unrelated words into some kind of cohesive narrative. Could be fun!
i think i had a dream similar to this pig-suckling phenomenon. but now i think maybe it was a memory of a past life.