Abstract
Godparenthood is a distinctive form of ritual kinship associated with Christianity—most strongly developed in Catholic and Orthodox societies. There is general agreement among researchers that it is important both subjectively and practically. Nevertheless, the underlying logic of the system remains rather elusive—since the usual explanations, in terms of either patronage or religious belief, receive rather limited support from the data. Ethnographic evidence shows that the dyadic and triadic relationships of god(co)parenthood often involve neither practical patronage nor spiritual guidance. It is clear that a satisfactory explanation of godparenthood needs to go beyond these surface functions: the question is how? In this article, I argue that there are parallels between god(co)parenthood as it operates in Catholic Europe and the sacralization of kinship ties in segmentary lineage systems found in other parts of the world. In both cases, sacralized kinship ties link individuals to encompassing kinship categories which can also be localized in appropriate ways. I argue that this provides a cognitive framework in which kin-based and locally based cooperation can operate in a mutually sustaining fashion—and that the commitment to god(co)parenthood reflects the felt need for cooperation of this kind. To support this interpretation, I refer to fieldwork in northeast Italy. I also draw on historical and survey data to show that the interpretation is consistent with the history and geography of godparenthood within Europe.
The church in Ovasta, a village about 250 meters above the valley floor, has never had a baptismal font. Around 1950, births usually took place at home, attended by the local midwife. Her duties were not only medical. Within a few days of the birth, it was her task to carry the baby down the mountainside to Luincis, a village on the valley floor, in order to be baptized. Bringing a child into the world was thus the joint responsibility of two specialists, midwife and priest, one dealing with the corporeal and the other with the spiritual side of the process—co-involved in the rite of baptism. The importance of baptism in the public understanding of their roles was reflected in ways people referred to them. It was the custom for local children to address the priest as sior santul (sir godfather), while the midwife used to be (and often still is) referred to as the comari (comother—i.e., marriage witness, or godmother of one’s child).
Ovasta is in Carnia, a mountainous region in northeast Italy, where most people are bilingual in Italian and a local language that is related to Rhaeto-Romansch. Villages are nucleated and typically small, averaging fewer than 200 inhabitants nowadays. Even around 1950, when local population was at its height, few villages exceeded 400 inhabitants. Until the early 1970s, the economy centered on small-scale farming, forestry, and seasonal emigration. The major sources of employment now are construction, factory and office work, and services. The former farming and forestry-based economy involved a good deal of village-level cooperative management of activities and resources, the need for which is now much reduced. I carried out my main fieldwork in the area between 1989 and 1991, 1 and have returned for brief visits several times since, collecting much of the data on god(co)parenthood during a short visit in spring 2011.
The opening vignette is interesting because it shows that local villagers were playing symbolic riffs on some themes that have also figured prominently in academic analyses of spiritual kinship. First of these is of course the distinction between sexual procreation and spiritual rebirth—a distinction that is combined with complementarity: both are equally necessary to the birth of a social person. 2 Second is the sense that coparenthood is not just a relationship between the biological parents, their chosen coparents, and the child but is shared by the community as a whole, since many women will have been attended by the same midwife and many children baptized by the same priest. And finally, there is the implication that both physical reproduction and local community are encompassed by something wider—since the priest is also the representative of a notionally universal church conveying the promise of eternal life.
In this article, I will follow up the second and third of these points, focusing on the ways in which god(co)parental relationships structure and reinforce collective ties. The analysis will draw on analogies between god(co)parenthood as it operates in Catholic Europe and the sacralized forms of collective kinship that are found in many other parts of the world.
However, in order to ground the argument, I will start in a more conventional and parochial way—with a description of the words by which Carnians refer to dyadic god(co)parental relationships, and of their ritual and practical content.
The Types and Content of Dyadic God(co)parent Relationships in Carnia
There are two sets of terms for relations of spiritual kinship. One set of terms denotes the godparent/godchild relationship. The word for godparent in the local language is santul (male) or santula (female), while that for godchild is figlioç (male) and figlioça (female; plural: figliocj). The relationship is established either at baptism, for which the newborn child has both a santul and a santula, or at Cresima (confirmation), for which the adolescent has one santul/a—generally of the same sex as himself or herself. There are some other differences between the two occasions: baptism is performed by the local priest while Cresima is performed by the bishop, and while the child obviously has no role in choosing the baptismal santui (plural), who belong to its parental generation, the current procedure (dating, I was told, from the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s) is for the young person to choose their own santul/santula for Cresima, generally someone just a few years older than themself. The baptismal santul and santula are generally not married to each other; however, their married partners also count as santui to the godchild.
The other set of terms are comari (female) and copari (male). The coparent relationship is established on two occasions. One is at marriage—in which case the comari (chosen by the bride) and the copari (chosen by the bridegroom) are the witnesses at the wedding of the new married couple. The other occasion is baptism, in which case the individuals whom the parents choose as santul and santula of the infant also become their own copari and comari. Some people say that the copari and comari of the marriage should also be chosen for the baptism of the first child.
Asked about the duties of santui, people typically start by explaining their role in providing their godchildren with moral guidance and in looking after them should their parents die—answers that are in line with the official teaching of the Catholic church. However, if you ask people about their own experience, either as santui or as figliocj, it is clear that the role of moral guide is virtually never acted upon in a serious way. I can’t comment on the actual role of santui if the parents die while the child is still a minor—since such deaths are fairly rare, and no examples were brought forward in the interviews I conducted. What is clear is that the specifically spiritual part of the official role—providing moral guidance in accordance with Christian principles—is both firmly asserted and virtually ignored in practice. It seems to be meaningful, but not in a literal sense.
Another role that is mentioned frequently in the literature on godparenthood is the godparent’s role as a practical patron. 3 People did not volunteer this themselves as a key aspect of the santul/figlioç relationship. However, when I asked about it specifically, some people were happy to talk about it. An expression that can be used if someone manages to obtain an unexpectedly good job or some apparent favor from bureaucracy is that “he must have had a good santul.” However, people explained that this doesn’t literally mean that the actual santul would have helped to obtain the favor. The idea is rather that the fortunate individual must have used personal connections, and the word santul is used to stand for these connections in general. Although one or two people also said that parents were more likely to choose santui of relatively high status for their children—even mentioning one prominent local businessman who apparently has many figliocj—this does not seem to be the main pattern.
So, if neither the official nor the cynical view does much to explain the actual content of godparenthood relationships, is there anything definite that can be said about this topic? One aspect on which people did have definite views was the kind of relationship that a person should have with their copari or comari: it should be a relationship of spontaneous liking and sympathy. Beyond that, I didn’t hear of any formal obligations. This contrasts with the unequal relationship between santui and figliocj. Godchildren should show respect for their godparents—for instance, by addressing them as santul or santula, while the santui should take a firm but benevolent interest in their figliocj. As part of this, there is a specific kind of obligation that people say is actually carried out: santui give presents to their figliocj. These include major presents at first communion and marriage. They also include a small annual present for which there is a special word “sop”—which is mainly restricted to this context and one other, which I will discuss below.
A Free-floating System?—Kinship, Religion, and Community
The system just described has a curiously detached quality: though internally consistent, it seems to float free from the rest of social life—without having either obvious causes or consequences in the ongoing bustle of practical relationships. This poses a problem of interpretation—all the more so because a glance at the literature shows that the way the system operates in Carnia is by no means unusual.
In an overview of god(co)parenthood practices in Mediterranean Europe, Pitt-Rivers 4 also notes the lack of attention to the godparents’ roles as religious educators, the stress on gifts to godchildren, and the fact that the relationship between coparents can be, but usually isn’t, used as a way of expressing patronage relationships. Indeed, Pitt-Rivers argues that the relationship between coparents is ideally one of disinterested moral commitment which, though it implies mutual support, loses something of its true nature if it is entered into in a calculating way.
A number of other accounts make similar points. Although patronage is often mentioned as a possibility, studies which have collected statistics on the relative status of parents and godparents have found that most coparental ties are between people of equal status. 5 Nor can it be assumed that—whether or not the tie is between status equals—practical assistance, outside the ritual context, forms part of the relationship. As Vasile points out, 6 it is often unclear from ethnographic accounts of support between coparents whether idealized statements about what should happen have been checked by questions about what really occurs in practice. In Veraguas, Gudeman found that practical assistance between coparents is deliberately avoided to prevent the sacred bond between coparents from being disrupted by the quarrels that can easily arise in the course of practical cooperation. 7
Taken together, the evidence makes it unlikely that the importance attached to god(co)parenthood can be fully explained by the rather limited role it appears to play in the practical strategies of the individuals and families directly involved. So how should we understand it? I will briefly outline two different approaches, neither of which is entirely satisfactory on its own, but which may work better when combined.
In a pioneering article, Mintz and Wolf 8 distinguished between communities in which many coparental relationships tended to be hierarchical, and those in which coparents were generally status equals. They noted that the latter, egalitarian, pattern was typical of corporate peasant communities, in which local people cooperated in collective agricultural work and also in political resistance to the potential dominance of outsiders. They concluded that egalitarian god(co)parenthood played an important role in strengthening overall solidarity—but explained this in terms of the strategic use that people made of dyadic ties. Since we have just seen that most people do not use coparental ties in a strategic way, the explanation is not entirely convincing.
Gudeman 9 on the other hand argued that the apparent autonomy of the god(co)parental system ought to be taken seriously—and that it should be viewed principally as the acting out of a religious ideology, based in Catholic theology but partially reshaped by local people themselves. Although Gudeman’s argument is appealing, it too faces some difficulties. Before being fixed at the Council of Trent, the doctrines of godparenthood had a long evolution, from the middle of the first millennium onward, in which developments seem mainly to have arisen in the sphere of religious practice, only later being codified as theological doctrines. 10 This suggests that in the long term, we should mainly be focusing on the implicit schemas of popular culture rather than explicit doctrines of theological writers. Secondly, the inattention to the religious duties of godparenthood on the part of Carnian informants is not an isolated phenomenon but part of what seems to be a nearly universal pattern, apparent in ethnographic accounts, 11 and confirmed by both historical and social survey data. 12 This raises the question of why one part of Catholic doctrine (the need for baptism) is taken seriously, while another (the godparents’ educational role) is, in practice at least, largely ignored.
This is not to say that the religious character of spiritual kinship is an illusion, but we need to look more closely at its relationship with local conceptions of social unity and natural kinship ties. How does the sacralization of kinship ties affect the meaning of kinship as a whole? The key point, I will argue, is that sacralized ties are not simply seen as additions to the network of dyadic relationships, but as connections which directly link individuals to collective social units. This is a theme which has been much discussed in the context of descent systems in Africa and other parts of the world—so I will give a brief overview of the relevant “descent theory” literature, before returning to Europe and discussing its applicability to the theme of godparenthood.
Fortes, 13 writing of the West African Tallensi, described “the web of kinship,” the ego-centered networks of bilateral descent and marriage that link each individual to a range of other individuals to whom they owe obligations and on whom they can draw for social support. But this is not the only way that parent–child ties link individual Tallensi into the social system: they are also the basis on which each individual is assigned to a patrilineal clan—a social group or category based on shared descent, with some presumption of collective solidarity, linked religiously to shared ancestors and to a number of localities, associated with those ancestors, in which its members have priority (though not exclusive) rights to residence and land. Thus, in terms of the individual’s relation to society at large, parent–child ties operate in two quite distinct ways, as personal links into an ego-centered network or web and as sacred links to a permanent semilocalized social category.
Systems in which particular parent–child ties (generally emphasized by some form of ancestor worship) link the child to a localized category with collective rights and duties—usually referred to in the literature as a “clan” or “lineage”—are very widespread, being the standard form of local organization in many parts of the world. In these systems, as described by Fortes 14 and other writers, each clan often has what is known as a segmentary structure. The maximal clan—that is, the group of people who acknowledge a (possibly mythical) common ancestor—may be very large and also geographically scattered. However, the maximal clan can often be divided into a series of segments, in which people who share descent from a more recent ancestor are felt to belong together. Each segment can in turn be subdivided, forming a nested structure in which there may possibly be several different levels of segmentation. The minimal segment, of people claiming descent from a very recent ancestor and often managing some land or other resources in common, is the effective local unit which can mobilize people for joint action. Higher levels of segmentation are less important for day-to-day activities but provide a way of thinking about the relationship between the local group and the wider society, and are a potential basis for wider solidarity.
From the beginning, there has been a tension in the theory of segmentary descent groups between writers, such as Fortes and Freedman, 15 who depicted descent systems as sets of legally binding rules that specified exactly the membership of corporate groups and their relationship to shared property in land and other goods—and others who followed Evans-Pritchard’s 16 original description of the Nuer system as essentially a cognitive model that enabled local people to achieve an understanding of the connections between kinship and locality, which could guide shared action without actually crystalizing into a set of formal rules. This view of the matter was later reasserted by Bourdieu 17 and has been preferred by a number of subsequent writers. 18 In his later work, Fortes 19 himself had moved some way toward this position, arguing that descent rituals evoke an innate sense of solidarity (the “axiom of amity”) and indicate the social groups to which that solidarity applies. In this way, systems of sacralized kinship provide background support to more explicit systems of practical authority and cooperation.
The essence of my argument in this article is that we can understand the importance of godparenthood in Carnia (and by extension in much of Catholic Europe) most clearly by seeing it primarily as the defining link in a system of collective categories which connect kinship to a sense of locality—thus reinforcing both kinship and local relationships—in almost the same way as is done by segmentary descent systems in other parts of the world. The key differences are (i) that the maximal collectivity is not seen as a genealogical descent group but rather as the ritual kinship group constituted by the universal “family” of Christian believers, represented at the local level by the village as an ongoing biological and religious community and (ii) that the link between the child and this collectivity goes through the godparents and not simply through successive generations of biological parents. These are the crucial differences: once they are allowed for, everything else operates—as nearly as possible—as in other segmentary kinship systems.
Collective Aspects of God(co)parent Relationships in Carnia
This view of things is strongly confirmed by the ritual aspects of godparenthood. Some of these refer to features of ritual and church organization that apply throughout Catholic Europe. Baptism quite explicitly connects the mortal individual concerned to the eternal community of Christian believers. There is also an analogy between church organization and segmentary lineage structures. The place of the local church in a wider geographical and spiritual hierarchy is made plain by the existence of standardized ritual forms that apply to the Catholic world as a whole, and by the involvement of different levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy on different occasions (as we saw, the local priest officiates at baptisms, but the bishop is required to solemnize the ritual of confirmation at Cresima). As with descent systems, kinship plays a central role. The church is explicitly understood as a universal family. The fact that ties of god(co)parenthood arise almost simultaneously with ties of kinship itself, at marriage and shortly after birth, shows how close the connection between physical and spiritual kinship is felt to be. Indeed, since the godparents are chosen by the biological parents, the spiritual link of the child to the local Christian community can be seen to proceed via the parent–child tie.
So the structural analogy is clear. But what evidence is there for a functional analogy—that is, that god(co)parental links promote local cooperation? For this, we need to look at evidence of what is done at local level, starting with the ethnographic data on Carnia. Several things point to a certain congruence between village solidarity and godkinship ties.
One indication concerns the emotional tone of ritual and cooperative ties. Until the early 1970s, Carnian villages were important units of practical cooperation, for clearing roads and paths, managing collective stalls and dairies and (in some cases) village woods and pastures. So a readiness to cooperate with fellow villagers used to be practically important, and it is not surprising that in 1989–1991, when I carried out my own main fieldwork in the valley, people still stressed the importance of village unity. Although practical help was an important part of this, the near unanimous view was that practical help would not have been possible without the right attitudes: namely, spontaneous sympathy between members of the same generation and respect for the members of older generations. People were not of course so naive as to ignore rivalry and quarrels and their potentially damaging consequences. It was all the more important to reinforce the relationships of spontaneous sympathy and of respect for seniors which, as we have seen, are precisely those that are stressed in the context of relations between coparis and between figliocj and santui.
Another factor is that some rules regarding choice of baptismal santui would tend to favor the selection of fellow villagers. The rules in question are firstly that it is impossible to turn down a request and secondly that either side can make the request, either the parents of the child or the would-be santul or santula. This obviously makes it harder for parents to choose the santui on strategic grounds. It also makes it easy for friendly neighbors who know that a baby is on the way to propose themselves as santui. The effect of these rules would be to concentrate these positive relationships within the village community.
Finally, there are customs which indicate that—even though any particular baptism creates dyadic (and triadic) ties between a specific set of individuals—the sentiments involved extend to the whole village. One such custom was alluded to at the beginning of this article—namely, the identification of the priest and midwife as santul and comari to the community as a whole.
The second custom involves the alternative meaning of the word sop, whose first meaning, mentioned above, refers to an annual gift from santul to figlioç. On the last day of the year, children aged about six to ten years old go round to each house in the village asking for sops. These days, they are given small amounts of money, though in earlier decades it would have been something to eat. They make their request by reciting a little rhyme which, translated, goes “Sops, sops, nuts and wild apples. Whether or not you give us anything, may you go to paradise.” The word itself, and the vaguely religious reference, suggest the underlying idea that all the village adults are quasi-santui to all the village children. However, although the double significance of the word sop was pointed out to me by a local friend, and one or two other people agreed with this interpretation, most appeared not to have made an explicit connection between this second use of sop and the idea of godparenthood. Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that in both cases, the word sop stands for a religiously tinged gift that expresses a positive social relationship—and that this can be either between specific santui and figliocj or between village adults and village children collectively.
Indeed, the idea that the essential function of sacralized kinship is to provide a link to the community as a whole, provides an explanation of one of the apparent paradoxes noted earlier in this article. If it is the link as such that matters, rather than any particular religious content, it is easy to see why local people emphasize the spiritual guidance role of santui (which implies that santui really do connect their figliocj to the Christian community), but concentrate their practical interactions instead on giving presents, which keep the link in being.
Wider Implications—History, Geography, and Contemporary Change
The view of godparenthood as a functional equivalent to lineage ties fits well with some features of its historical development and geographic spread. It emerged in the middle of the first millennium at about the same time that the former system of Latin kinship terms was giving way to the bilateral “Eskimo” system which now characterizes most of Europe. The former terminology was of a kind that is more compatible with unilineal descent systems and, although the direct evidence concerning descent institutions in the ancient world is hard to interpret, the change in terminology does suggest that former lineage institutions had declined and that godparent ties—and more generally the idea of the Christian church as a quasi-kinship institution—could have provided a way of replacing an earlier lineage-based sense of community. 20
The interpretation of godparenthood as the central link in a system that aligns kinship and local identities is also consistent with evidence that geographical differences in the degree of commitment to godparenthood are paralleled by similar differences in the importance attached to local kinship ties. This evidence comes both from historical accounts and from recent survey data relating to the 1990s and 2000s.
To start with the survey data, recent figures from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and from the European-Union–sponsored Kinship and Social Security project (KASS) confirm that kinship ties tend to be spatially more concentrated and also stronger in southern and eastern Europe than they are in the northwest. 21 According to the hypothesis we would therefore expect that godparental ties would also be strongest in the South and East but would tend to be less emphasized in northwest Europe. This is confirmed by recent figures from the World Values Survey regarding the importance of religious services at birth, 22 cited in a statistical study by Alfani et al., which show a similar geographic distinction between Protestant and Catholic countries—with the former attaching less importance to infant baptism. Church statistics on baptisms during the last five decades show a gently declining trend in several Catholic countries, with a sharper decline starting from a lower level in France—a country whose spatial kinship patterns resemble the weaker more scattered networks of Protestant northwest Europe. 23
There is a good deal of historical evidence that these differences in the strength of local kinship ties go back several centuries 24 —and so, according to our hypothesis, the differences in the strength of godparenthood ties should also be observable from historical data. In this case too, there is some confirmatory evidence, though its strength is more dependent on interpretation. For example, Goody argues that godparenthood ties have always been less strongly felt in northwestern Europe than in other parts of the continent. In support of this, he cites some letters from a mid-first-millennium church leader in northwest Europe querying the marriage restrictions associated with godparenthood, and the fact that about eight centuries later these restrictions—and payments necessary to gain dispensation from them—were prominent among the complaints raised by Luther and fellow Protestant reformers. 25 As against this, Alfani et al. 26 point out that Protestant reformers’ attempts to abolish godparenthood encountered powerful popular opposition and had to be abandoned. However, taking each society as a whole—including both reformers and conservatives—it can be argued that countries where the status of godparenthood was disputed should be counted as less strongly committed than those where its continuation was never called into question in the first place.
Finally, there is the evidence from more recent history. Starting about two centuries ago, and accelerating rapidly during the twentieth century, the spread of the modern industrial and service economies and the accompanying increase in state provision of education and welfare have greatly widened the geographical scope of practical relationships—while reducing the proportion of the population who are involved in agriculture and the intense local relationships which it typically entails. In Carnia at least, the result has been a change in the geographical scope of social relationships—measurable in much reduced levels of local endogamy. There were also, during the late 1960s and 1970s, moves to abandon a number of village rituals, including the children’s quest for sops on the last day of the year. The abandonment was only temporary, but there is now a sense that these rituals are somewhat fragile and need to be consciously conserved. 27 As my data on godparenthood in Carnia are not quantitative, I cannot tell whether there have been accompanying shifts in the choice of godparents, but in the light of what follows, it may be significant that I was told that it is fine for parents to select their own siblings as santui for their children—since brothers and sisters can be expected to have the feelings of mutual sympathy that are required between coparis.
The impression that modern economic developments have tended to undermine local kinship ties is confirmed by KASS results which show that, throughout Europe, the populations of urban areas have higher levels of geographic mobility, and greater geographic dispersion of kinship ties, than is the case for rural areas—while within rural areas, mobility is lowest and the concentration of kinship ties highest, among families who are involved in agriculture. 28 This general weakening of the association between kinship and local ties would reduce the need for rituals which align the two kinds of connection and so, if it is correct that the fundamental role of godparenthood is to align kinship and local identities, it should also reduce the commitment to godparenthood as such. How far is this prediction borne out by the facts?
Certainly, there has been a change in the kind of people who are chosen as godparents: Alfani et al. record a Europe-wide shift toward choosing close relatives, which started about two centuries ago and now appears to have reached the point where, in some countries, most godparents are relatives. 29 This suggests that godparenthood is no longer being used to align kinship and local identities but simply as a way of strengthening kinship ties—which is broadly consistent with the hypothesis presented here but does not in itself indicate a weakening of the attachment to godparenthood. However, Alfani et al. also present some data that suggest the absorption of godparenthood by kinship may be a step on the way to the abandonment of godparenthood as such. The first part of these data consists of answers to survey questions, in which some respondents said that the fact that a particular relative was also a godparent made no specific difference to the kin relationship. 30 The second part consists of the downward trend in baptisms noted earlier—and the fact that this was most marked in France, a country where the practice of choosing relatives as godparents appears to have been established earlier than elsewhere. 31
Thus, the view of godparenthood as essentially a link in the segmentary alignment of kinship and local identities is consistent both with its symbolic elaboration at local level and with long-term historical and geographical trends. The story started with the late classical context of its inception and has culminated during recent decades in what appears to be a historic decline—associated with the dissolution of local social and kinship networks that has accompanied economic “modernization.”
Conclusion
None of the above is intended to belittle the importance of the moral commitment that a godparent makes as an individual to both the child and its biological parents. The essential point is that in helping to baptize the infant, the godparent is also performing a collective role, connecting the child to an imagined kinship group which includes, most directly, the local community and ultimately the worldwide family of the Christian church. In this way, the reproduction of each individual family is seen to be intrinsically connected to the reproduction of the community as a whole. Nothing approaching a contract is involved, but the overall effect of repeated participation in baptismal ceremonies is that people’s understanding of kinship and local attachments becomes integrated in a way that favors participation in collective action. The moral importance attached to the relationships between coparents and between godparents and godchildren, reflects the practical importance of collective action in the economic and political life of the local community.
In performing this function, godparenthood draws on a symbolic repertoire which is common to many systems of sacralized kinship. The challenge for research is to understand why the symbolism has taken this particular form in Catholic Europe and different forms in the lineage systems found in other continents. Answering this question should deepen our understanding of specific features of Catholic godparenthood itself. 32 It might also contribute to our understanding of those Balkan systems of godparenthood which appear to stand midway between the Catholic system and the multiple lineage systems found in other parts of the world. 33
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
This article has grown from an earlier paper presented at a conference on godparenthood at MPI Halle in autumn 2011. I would like to thank the conference organizers and participants for the stimulating discussion and for specific comments and encouragement. I am particularly grateful to Bea Vidacs and Jennifer Cash for close critical readings of successive versions of this article and to Monica Vasile for being a perceptive and patient editor. Naturally, the responsibility for the views expressed here is mine alone.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.