Paper short abstract:

Based on an ethnohistory study in Southern Europe, the goal of this paper is to analize the possible double symbolic dimensions of milk: as food, because of our conditions as mammals, and as a bodily fluid able to construct kinship relations, known as milk kinship or milk tie, when milk is shared.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this paper is to expose that maybe, as Anthropologists, we have been too reductionists in our analythical categories and theoretical approaches, due to our bio-genetic reproductive theory of kinship, that we have not considered enough the existence of other types of kinship in some societies, in the past as in present times, than those coming only from sharing blood and genes, what about milk? can we consider human milk in a double symbolic dimension: as food, because of our conditions as mammals, and as a bodily fluid able to construct kinship relations when shared (it could be through the fact of breastfeeding by a woman, not the biological mother, known as a wet nurse, or just from the fact of accepting milk from from milk banks when a woman is not able to breastfeed her own child.

In this paper we will analize the role of domestic wet nurses in the construction of milk kinship in XIX-XX Spain. Rural peasant women that emigrated for more than a century to different cities in order to breastfeed babies of the upper classes: aristocracy, burgeoise and the Royal family. We will analyze how we moved from the vocabulary of market, when hiring a domestic wet nurse in order to get a service, the nursing of a baby not her own, to the vocabulary of kinship (milk brother/milk sister, milk mother.) and, what did it really mean, specially for the poorest and more needed involved in this new relationship, in this case the peasantry.