Madison Martin
Professor Lee
Anthropology 201
17 September 2014
Family
Family is an important part of one’s life. However, the different aspects of family and what is held important varies and alters depending on different cultures in different geographic locations around the world. While the concept of family itself is considered universal, the small details that make up family could not be any more different with the changing of the cultures, such as the importance of children in families. The idea of children in different cultures is a vast and variable field. For the mothers of the Alto do Cruzeiro, children are as replaceable as dogs. Due to the circumstances of poverty, little to no health care, and impoverished farming land, the infant mortality rate in the Alto is thirty to forty percent. Most children do not survive past childhood, and this startling fact causes mothers to become entirely numb and indifferent to their children until they show significant promise of survival. When a child dies, a mother does not cry, in fact, if a child even shows the slightest bit of illness or “unwillingness to live” the mother will often times allow the baby to die of neglect. This however would not be the case in the Indian town of Ratakote. In which children are very valuable and are considered of high importance to parents. Parents in this town take very high care of their children out of love, but also out of the desire to one day, arrange for their child to be married to a successful partner, which they will not find unless the children themselves are also successful. Unlike in the Alto, woman in northern Nepal do not have the