Amalan Peribumi

Amalan tradisi penyusuan ibu di kalangan peribumi.

“There are gatherer/hunter women living today and some of them are more 'liberated' than most women in industrialised society. Many so-called primitive people are not worn down with overwork as so many peasants and urban workers are. A gathering and hunting community will search out the food they need for the present and then relax and play. They do not acquire surpluses, because they have the skills to find food whenever they need it and if they are nomadic there is a disadvantage in carrying too many stores. They may be vulnerable to accident, a snakebite or other hazards of nature, but as long as they can move freely in their accustomed environment their food is all around them and cannot be stolen by other people. Their food is also adapted to the environment and unlike most agricultural crops cannot be destroyed by drought or pest.
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Gatherer/hunters, though sometimes slightly undernourised, are rarely malnourished; vitamin or other specific nutrient deficiencies are rare. The customary diet of the !Kung of the Kalahari desert consisted of eighty-five species of food plant, including thirty roots and bulbs, as well as fifty-four species of animals and they only needed to work a two-and-a-half-day week (of six hours work a day) to provide themselves with an excellent balanced diet. If this is an example of desert dwellers, consider how bountiful was the environment and provision for those living in more fertile regions of the world, which were the very areas to be appropriated by colonial invaders. The nutritionist A.S. Truswell found that the !Kung were healthier than people in industrialised countries, with no dental caries, no high blood pressure, obesity or heart disease. Anaemia was rare and the majority, including the women, had adequate iron intakes. Anaemia is the scourge of women in both peasant and industralised soceties resulting in some cases in more or less permanent exhaustion, as well as poor growth and development in children. It is often perceived as an inevitable state for menstruating or pregnant women. A gatherer/hunter women might be protected form anaemia by several factors. Firstly, her way of breastfeeding would prevent menstruation and the contraceptive effect would protect her from blood-depleting miscarriages as well as pregnancies. Secondly, her varied diet would provide many sources of iron which would be well absorbed because of the high doses of vitamin C she gained from all the fresh fruits and roots she ate. If she were nomadic, this mode of life would prevent faecally spread parasites like hookworm from invading her environment. Lastly, she would not drink tea, coffee or milk with food, which all significantly reduce the absorption of dietary iron. Of course all these factors are rapidly disappearing as conact with 'civilised man' dismantles these ways of life.”

(Sumber: Gabrielle Palmer, 1988. The Politics of Breastfeeding, m.s. 131-132).

“Though there might be a period of dependency on other women for food immediately after childbirth, during her everyday life a gatherer woman is self-sufficient and well able to support her own children. In most gatherer/hunter groups children are well cared for both physically and psychologically and are fully integrated into everyday life, unlike our own children who are segregated so carefully. Children may be breastfed and stay close to their mothers in the first two to three years, but after this phase they rapidly become very independent, learning all the skills necessary for survival and participation in their own society at a rate which puts our own ponderous educational methods to shame. For example, 4-year-olds in Papua New Guinea skilfully catch and roast insects which provide and important contribution to their diet.
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Lactation failure is unknown in Hadza society and breastfeeding is gradually supplemented by nutritious foods such as bone marrow, soft fat and ground baobab berries. When the baby develops teeth, mothers pre-chew meat for them, which may have an added advantage in that the salivary glands are linked into the immunological system, which may give further protection against disease. Hadza children are healthier than those in other societies where medical services are non-existent ot inadequate. Derrick Jelliffe and his colleagues found few of the usual problems of rural and urban chidren in tropical countries. There was no kwashiorkor, marasmus, anaemia or other nutritional deficiency and no ascaris, the round worms which are so common in most 'poor' societies and which add to the risk of malnutrition.

Childcare is a straightforward matter in this society and does not conflict with a woman 'earning' her living, indeed it is integrated effortlessly with the educational and economic system. Suckling a baby is easy when you can do it while you work or can pause whenever it suits you because you are the one in control of your own work, welfare and survival.”

(Sumber: Gabrielle Palmer, 1988. The Politics of Breastfeeding, m.s. 134-135).

“Evidence indicates that many gatherer/hunters had better-quality diets and a less pathogenic environment and enjoyed better health than agriculturalists. Historians look at the evolution of agriculture as though it only happened because it was a 'good thing'. This theory that all development or evoution is due to the purpose of the final cause is known as teleology. … In our hierarchical mode of thinking, the idea of agriculture being 'superior' to gathering and hunting, and of course the idea of industrialisation being another step 'forward' is teleological. Just because it happened does not mean that it was necessarily advantageous, nor that it was entirely without benefits.” (Gabrielle Palmer, 1988. The Politics of Breastfeeding, m.s. 137).

“The Usino in Papua New Guinea could not comprehend the idea of lactation failure, … everyone believed that a baby must never cry and breasts were as much used to comfort as to feed. In our own modern society women who want to breasteed and earn a wage are often regarded as over-demanding and unrealistic. Babies are the investment in the future, but such is our obsession with the quick return and our ignorance of the real value of breastfeeding that we lack a truly social attitude to childcare, involving as it would compromises with other forms of productivity.” (Gabrielle Palmer, 1988. The Politics of Breastfeeding, m.s. 140).

“In pre-industrial Europe a child would have grown up seeing her mother both working and rearing babies. Most children would have handled and played with several babies before experiencing the responsibility of their own. A girl would have learned how to position the baby on the breast by seeing it done a thousand and one times, just as she learned how to stack a corn stook. By the time she had a child of her own she would have been as confident of mothering skills as she would of gleaning or spinning. … A mother had learned throughout her life about the practicalities, rhythms, crises and overall management of the production process and also the same of childcare. Not being able to breastfeed a child or time the harvest would be as incredible as someone from our own society being unable to switch on a television.” (Gabrielle Palmer, 1988. The Politics of Breastfeeding, m.s. 158).

“Carol Laderman's work (1983, 1987), based on ethnographic research undertaken in Trengganu in the 1970s, documents the 'traditional' management of pregnancy, birth and the puerperium, and in so doing draws attention to the social importance of midwives and healers in Malay society and clarifies the reluctance of women, at the time of her writing and much earlier, to present to clinics and hospitals for maternal care. … Among Malay women, the puerperium is especially elaborated and involves mother-roasting (bersalin), smoke baths and dietary regulation to ensure return to equilibrium of humoural balance, to revert the uterus and tone the vagina, and ensure continuing health, while also providing the mother with time to adjust to the newborn and to establish breast-feeding. Among Chinese and Indian women similar observances, usually for a slightly shorter period, pertain. This is a period largely ignored by early and much more recent obstetric services where the emphasis has been on pregnancy and labour, and the delivery of a live infant is the primary and final attainment.” (Lenore Manderson, 1998: Maternities and Modernities: “Shaping reproduction: maternity in early twentieth-century Malaya”, m.s.32).

Antara rekod terawal amalan ibu susuan di rantau ini dapat ditemui dalam ukiran di Candi Prambanan (abad ke-9) di Jogjakarta, Jawa Tengah:-

“Since the Mataram era, Javanese culture has been an important part of Javanese life. One of the main characteristics of the culture that is inherent in the lives of Javanese people is Inya. Inya is the term for the nurse or mother of the king's baby who is considered a symbol of the fame of the Islamic Mataram kingdom. ….. The practice of Inya in Java itself has existed since the time of the Hindu kingdom. This is evidenced by the depiction of the story of the birth of Lawa and Kusa in the reliefs of the Prambanan temple. The baby was born by Sita while in exile in the forest. Inya takes care of the baby until it grows up (Creese, 2015, p. 76). The relief found in Prambanan Temple does not provide a detailed story about breastfeeding for babies who are being cared for (wet nursing) (Figure 1).”

Ukiran ibu susuan di Candi Prambanan: “Figure 1: A temple relief that tells the story of the birth of Lawa and Kusa. Sita, exiled to the forest, gives birth to Rama's sons Lara and Kusa in a hermitage. A nanny holds one of the babies and becomes his nurse (breastfeeding mother). Source: Brahma Temple, Prambanan, Central Java (Creese 2015, p. 76).”

(Sumber: S. Sumarno, I. Fibiona, dan S. N. Lestari, Indonesian Historical Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 26-39, Aug. 2024: |"Inya: Wet Nurse and Succesful Regeneration of the Mataram Islamic Court Authorities in the Past", m.s. 1, 28-29).

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