Breastfeeding and culture

I've been thinking about this a lot lately as Joseph continues to grow: how long will I keep breastfeeding him?

There have been several incidences when I was thinking about not continuing anymore (ex: two days ago when the teething monster reappeared and bit me several times! tears and stress my friends.) but if I take things on a day-by-day basis these kinks tend to work themselves out and we've been doing really well overall.

However, will I keep breastfeeding once he is 1 year old? How about 14 months? 2 years? (Of course, this will depend on him too - if he self-weans I'm not going to keep pumping or try to get him interested in starting up again.)

One of the things I've been thinking about in conjunction with this is the cultural taboo of breastfeeding once your baby can walk/talk/reach your breast without aid. Girls in my eighth grade class used to share stories of a little girl called 'B' who was 4 or 5 and would ask her mom for milk in public. The negative connotations were obvious: ewww that's gross! She's too big to breastfeed! And ewww moms are old and shouldn't be sharing their boobs in public!

Now that I'm grown-up (and I do use the term loosely ;) I have a much different perspective. I think breastfeeding is the best for a variety of reasons, but I still find that I have an aversion to older kids breastfeeding. I watched the movie Babies when it came to the Little and was rather shocked at the nonchalant way in which the African mothers would hold out a breast to their kids (and possibly others' kids too?) of various ages. (Of course, there may be economic reasons for continuing to breastfeed too, but I think it's more cultural than anything else.)

I had another shock when I attended a La Leche League meeting and saw a mother with two kids tandem feeding - on one side was the 2-year old (or maybe older?), standing up and suckling, and on the other side was the 3-month old baby. That weirded me out! (Plus the older kid was sort of jealously staring at the baby while nursing.) And of course there is the obvious reference to the Grown-Ups movie with the "48-month old" demanding milk from his mom.

So is this merely the by-product of the culturally ingrained prejudice against breastfeeding for longer than 1 year? Or is it just weird? Tell me what you think.