As the reincarnation of a specific ancestor, a Beng baby of the Côte d'Ivoire is enticed into staying alive by virtue of the mother's care in looking after it and especially in keeping it clean and fed and beautified with bracelets and skin paint; by these means the infant is persuaded to detach itself from the invisible ancestral realm and recognize its kinship with the living. Infants are understood to desire to return to the ancestral realm, so it is not until a child is walking and speaking that it is known to be surely desirous of remaining with the living – a desire that is only fully accomplished when, at the age of six or seven, the child is able to understand and express in speech its knowledge of the difference between dreaming and waking or of death. This brief and unexamined example suggests the possibility that people's ideas of themselves, of kinship, of bodily substance, of what a child is and can be, may be manifold and varied. As indeed they are. Thus a child of the Amazonian Araweté is solely the product of its father's semen for which the mother is the receptacle, but children of the same mother assert their closeness to one another as successive occupants of the same place.