One of my favourite works of anthropology is a study of infancy among the Beng of Cote d’Ivoire. For people in this West African community, children are understood to come from the Afterlife. In their way of thinking, people’s spirits enter a sort of limbo when they die. When babies are born, they gain passage back into life.

Babies are welcomed home, cared for and venerated partly because they are recognized as the reincarnations of dead ancestors. [1]

There’s truth in the Beng way of thinking, because in a real (biological) sense children are the reincarnations of ancestors.

Michael Jackson (of Harvard’s Divinity School) used this as an example of alternative ways of conceiving of time, in a lecture at the ASA conference in Durham last year.

I cast my mind back to it recently in a reflection on the relationship between an aunt of mine who died six years ago and my daughter, who’s not yet six months old.

Reference

[1] Alma Gottlieb.The Afterlife Is Where We Come From.  University of Chicago Press (2004).