• Where Have All The Babies Gone?Toward an Anthropology of Infants (and Their Caretakers)
Abstract

In much anthropological literature infants are frequently neglected as outside the scope of both the concept of culture and disciplinary methods. This article proposes six reasons for this exclusion of infants from anthropological discussse include the fieldworker's own memories and parental status, the problematic question of agency in infants and their presumed dependence on others, their routine attachment to women, their seeming inability to communicate, their inconvenient propensity to leak from a variety of orifices, and their apparently low quotient of rationality. Yet investigation of how infants are conceived of beyond the industrialized West can lead us to envision them far differently from how they are conceived in the West (including by anthropologists). Confronting such comparative data suggests the desirability of considering infants as both relevant and beneficial to the anthropological endeavor.

Keywords

babies/infants, childhood/youth, structure/agency, social theory, West Africa

Where Have All The Babies Gone?

Whatever their parenting skills at home, most contemporary cultural anthropologists do not seem to think analytically much about babies. Of course this does not mean that we do not like babies. But in our professional lives we have often ignored those small creatures, who do not seem to hold out much scholarly promise, as we have defined the ethnographic imagination. At a theoretical level babies constitute for most of us a non-subject, occupying negative space that is virtually impervious to the anthropological gaze. Moreover, those studies that do privilege infants have been sidelined from mainstream conversations in cultural anthropology. While a new body of interdisciplinary literature is now emerging on the cultural construction of childhood and youth and active negotiation of cultural life, infants occupy a marginal place even in that literature, which is itself only beginning to attract attention in cultural anthropology, especially under the rubrics of "cultural psychology" or "ethnopediatrics" (for example, Small 1998).

Earlier in this century scholars associated with the "Culture and Personality" school inaugurated by Margaret Mead turned their attention to children—though not necessarily infants. In the U.S. this perspective was quite influential during mid-century (Langness 1975). In some ways the work of Beatrice and John Whiting and those who published in their "Children of Six Cultures" series continued this tradition (for example, B. Whiting 1963).

Yet even in these writings infants received less attention than did older children. And critics have pointed out that the model typically overlooked variations in time (historical change) and space (ethnicity/race, class, religion, and gender). Moreover, a Freudian perspective precluded alternative interpretations that might be more appropriate in a given cultural setting. As Mead herself acknowledged in her later years (1963), Eurocentric assumptions underlie the Freudian model, with its culture-blind insistence on a few factors (such as toilet training) that we now know are interpreted variably in diverse cultural settings (for example, Wallace 1983: 213-217). These shortcomings continue to apply to more recent psychoanalytically oriented work on infants and children, though all these works are generally quite rich in data.1

In effect, the ethnography of infants is still, if you will, in its infancy. I have identified only two full-length ethnographies devoted to the infants of a single society (Hewlett 1991; LeVine et al. 1994). To date, no anthropological journal exists on infancy, and the first anthropological journal on childhood (based in the U.K.) is just now in the planning stage.2 One rare anthropologist teaching a course on infants reports a frustrating lack of information through the HRAF that hampered her students' work (Peters 1995). All this poses a stark contrast to our sister field of psychology, with its voluminous canon on infants, including a journal devoted to infancy, [End Page 121] and many others routinely featuring articles on them.3

Nevertheless, there has recently been a mini-upsurge of writings on children offered from a political economy perspective (for example, Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1998; Stephens 1995). Effects of the world economy are actively explored here so as to situate the lives of children in a realistically globalized context, including the daily world of labor (for a review, see Nieuwenhuys 1996). As the impact of the global economy and global culture more generally becomes documented in seemingly remote places (Appadurai 1996; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997; Dirks, Eley and Ortner 1993; Gupta and Ferguson 1997a, 1997b; Hannerz 1996; Piot 1999), the effort to include children in analyses that take into account international cultural and economic flows is welcome indeed.

Illuminating as are these works on children, they are limited in two ways from the standpoint of an anthropology of infancy. Empirically, most of these writings again focus on older children rather than infants. Theoretically, the political economy perspective itself has its limits. Most notably, a sense of the indigenous perspective of children's experiences and how these fit in with other cultural features of the social landscape—including religion and other ideological structures—is often absent in works espousing a political economy perspective. As with other ethnographies, finding the right balance between the global and the local, the political and the cultural, the social and the individual, is proving a challenge in many of these writings.

In recent years we have begun to see a few very promising examples of American scholars either trained in or influenced by anthropology focusing extensively on the lives of infants and young children and their parents, some of them working in collaboration with scholars in related fields (Harkness and Super 1983; Kilbride and Kilbride 1990; Lancy 1996; LeVine et al. 1994; Munroe and Munroe 1980; Riesman 1992; Super and Harkness 1980, 1986). In Europe, a parallel development is also occurring (Bonnet 1988; Erny 1988; Lallemand 1991; Lallemand and LeMoal 1981b; Toren 1988, 1993). These authors are notable for the extent to which they identify cultural factors affecting infant and child development from sophisticated perspectives.

Discussion of the social matrix of children's lives appears to be developing more rapidly in other beyond anthropology. From the early work of Ariès (1962) history and sociology are especially fertile grounds for emerging discussions of children as culturally situated (Davin 1997; Hunt 1997; Itoua et al. 1988). Indeed, considering the accumulating weight of this interdisciplinary work, two authors have recently suggested that "a new paradigm for the study of childhood is emerging" (James and Prout 1990:2). Even if this developing work tends to underrepresent the experiences of infants in comparison with those of older children, the scholarly development is notable. Together, these authors in anthropology and allied disciplines signal encouraging paths down which a developing anthropology of infancy may be heading.4

Thus far I have deployed rather uncritically the categories of "infant" and "infancy" as self-evident. Yet if cultural anthropology has taught us anything over the past century, it is that the most seemingly transparent of categories often turn out to be the most unexpectedly non-commensurable. This is so for categories as diverse as those relating to time, space, family relations, religion, political structure, and counting systems, among others. Thus what passes for a "week" may vary in traditional African societies from three to eight days (Zaslavsky 1973: 64-65). Or what looks like "politics" in one place—say, Western nations—looks suspiciously like religion elsewhere—as it does throughout much of Africa (Arens and Karp 1989). Even mathematical operations are subject to surprising redefinition—what appears to be "addition" to a Westerner may be interpreted as "subtraction" (and vice versa) among some native Brazilian groups (Ferreira 1997). A century of destabilizing revelations such as these should alert us to the non-transparent nature of many seemingingly transparent concepts. Why should the categories of "infant" and "infancy" be any less problematic?

Developmental psychologists routinely define "infancy" rather strictly as the period encompassing birth to the onset of "toddlerhood," which in their definitions normatively begins at the age of two years. (For the sake of convenience, unless otherwise noted this is how I have used the term in this essay.) The transition from the end of the second year to the beginning of the third is taken by psychologists as a benchmark of the latest date at which the young (healthy and developmentally normal) child begins to understand and respond to linguistic communication, and can walk effectively without constantly falling. [End Page 122]

Yet this "rounding up" is not a biological certainty but a cultural convention premised on the Western calendar. The pinpointing of two years as the end of "infancy" is also premised on a cultural assumption that life stages ought to be defined by reference to absolute time spans rather than, say, to shifting activities (Evans-Pritchard 1940). Among young children there is of course wide variation in actual verbal and motor abilities at two years (Cole 1983). The indigenous understanding of a life stage will necessarily look different in societies that do not emphasize fixed calendrical points as determinative.

Indeed, rather than identifying an absolute calendrical termination to the stage of infancy, many non-Western peoples take a more contextual approach, dependent on the acquisition of a particular developmental skill (such as walking or talking) that is considered paramount, no matter when it is mastered by a given child. For example, the Lahu of southwest China assert that children inhabit the red-and-naked" stage (which we might translate loosely as "infancy") until they can walk confidently and, more importantly, speak with some degree of self-expression. But the Lahu acknowledge that this may occur at different times in different children and resist specifying a set duration of the "red-and-naked" stage (Du n.d.).

Even when an absolute age is accepted as a benchmark for the end of infancy, that age may be historically and cross-culturally variable. For example, the Puritans of New England ended infancy firmly at one year (rather than the two years of contemporary Western science), when (they claimed) the Devil begins to exert control. To counteract this influence, Puritan leaders urged parents to introduce strict discipline immediately following the first birthday (Reese 2000). By contrast, the Ifaluk of Micronesia prolong the period of infancy, using the demonstration of what developmental psychologists would call a moral sense as the benchmark for ending infancy. The Ifaluk maintain that young children remain mind-less (bush) for the first five or six years of their lives; they acquire intelligence (repiy) slowly from two or three years old but do not fully attain this until they reach childhood (sari) at five or six years old (Le 2000, Lutz 1988).

If the termination of "infancy" is variable cross-culturally, the same is true of its inception. Although birth may seem the common-sensical inauguration of this period, Geertz has taught us that what passes for common sense for some may be anything but that for others (1983). Thus some peoples locate the beginning of infancy in the womb, while others delay it until some time after the birth. In the contemporary U.S. this is a topic of much public debate among (largely secular) "pro-choice" and (largely religious) "pro-life" activists (Morgan 1996).

If the dominant secular Western model suggests that infancy begins immediately after birth, this may not be the case elsewhere. Some Muslim peoples hold a naming ritual after the sixth day; before the ritual, the "newborn" is not an infant at all, not yet having achieved any sense of personhood (D'Alisera 1998; Johnson 2000). Other groups delay the onset of "infancy" even longer. For example, Aboriginal Murngin people of Arnhem Land call newborns by the same term as the word for "fetus." Only when the newborn begins to smile—typically at three to six weeks—is it called a "child" . . . and this stage lasts until the youngster is nine to twelve years old (Hamilton 1981: 17). Elsewhere, there may be a more indeterminate conception of the onset of personhood itself. Among the Wari' of Brazil, for example, "personhood is acquired gradually, and it may be lost or attenuated under certain conditions . . . ," though in some sense it is initiated by the first act of breastfeeding (Conklin and Morgan 1996: 658, 678).

Is a stage of "infancy" even present in all current societies, or might a given society decline to single out the early months or years for special conceptual and/or ritual consideration (as appears to be the case in Arnhem Land)? The relative dearth of knowledge about the lives, habits, and conceptions of infants cross-culturally makes it difficult to answer this and related questions with certitude. While a good number of anthropologists have mentioned infants more or less in passing, few have taken infants seriously as the proper subject of developed anthropological inquiry.

Why is it that, to date, there is no systematic anthropology of infancy?

Why Have All The Babies Gone?

In this section I suggest six reasons to account for the relatively tiny space that infants occupy not only in the empirical world but also in the anthropological corpus.

Remembering Childhood, Imagining Parenthood?

Personal experience may interfere at two levels with the noticeable gap in anthropological discussion of [End Page 123] infants. First, although all adults were once infants, few if any of us remember the experience; this lack of memory (save what parents and others may implant after the fact) may disincline us toward considering an aspect of human experience that seems quite remote from our individual perspective.5

Moreover, many cultural anthropologists are relatively young—often in their late twenties—when they begin fieldwork, and are not (yet) parents. As such, they may be unaware of the challenges (emotional, medical, pragmatic, and theoretical alike) that infants pose. This ignorance may make it unlikely to envision an anthropological study of the subject. Later, for those do become (overworked) parents, we may not have the luxury of pursuing further fieldwork (on infants or anything else).

Is parenthood in fact a prerequisite for fieldwork on infants? In fact, one of the classic hallmarks of cultural anthropology is to study "the Other." Surely it is hard to imagine a more different "other" to an adult than an infant, no matter what the cultural background of both. Thus in theory parenthood should not be a prerequisite for studying children. Indeed, their "outsider" status could lend an analytical edge to non-parent-anthropologists investigating children's lives. Yet this analytical edge has not often been sharpened.6 Ironically, even parents, let alone non-parents, have rarely taken on the challenge of such an anthropological journey to life-cycle "otherness" despite our disciplinary mandate encouraging many to travel down just such an intellectual road. Why should that be?

The Missing Agency of Infants?

The younger the child, the more dependent s/he is on others for basic biological sustenance: by anthropological standards, babies simply look boring. They seem so much at the mercy of others that there does not appear to be any of that push-and-pull between two individuals, or between individual and society at large, that makes for such interesting scholarly consideration. Related to this is the fact that infants in most if not all societies are classified as minors. Unable to testify in court, they have no legal effect on others. Given the legalist foundation to much of our discipline's (British/functionalist) heritage—especially in Africa—the legacy of such a legally inconsequential positioning of infants seems relevant even today and may unconsciously serve as another factor dooming babies to their ethnographic invisibility. More generally, infants' opinions seem irrelevant in making life decisions about others. This does not seem to make for promising material as informants.

Yet as any new parent knows, passivity is far from a complete description of a newborn's life. Right from the start, infants demand to be accounted for . . . though adults may not interpret those demands accurately. The anthropologist of infants is much like the parent, seeking to learn a new language that has neither a ready-made dictionary nor a published grammar but for which there are undoubtedly hidden rules, if only they can be unearthed—(or, as some developmental psychologists would say, mutually created (see, for example, Lewis and Rosenblum 1974).

Furthermore, members of particular societies may have their own ideas about infant volition and desire distinct from the model of infant passivity just outlined. In some views, infants may be considered determinative of the lives around them. In the course of fieldwork in Côte d'Ivoire the more I investigated the lives of Beng adults and older children involved in infant care, the more I discovered that the preponderance of their day-to-day decisions were made in relation to infants (cf. Weisner and Gallimore 1977). Beng adults maintain that infants are reincarnations of ancestors, so for their first few years in this life, babies remember with longing their previous existence in the "afterlife" (Gottlieb 1998, 2000, n.d.). A major duty of Beng parents is to discern (via diviners) the desires that their infants are said to retain from their previous incarnation, then grant those desires. In this model Beng infants are far from helpless creatures with no opinions or impact on the world. For the Beng, as for many non-Western peoples, the supposedly complete dependence of infants, as it is widely if unconsciously assumed by Western-trained anthropologists, is a non-issue—thus challenging our implicit ideology of infant-as-passive creature, which has foreclosed the possibility of privileging babies as legitimate sites, let alone active producers, of culture.

Babies and Women

Infants in most societies spend much of their time attached to women—frequently though not necessarily their mothers7—and until the past two decades women themselves were neglected as social subjects by many anthropologists. Even many feminists have tended to privilege the easily studied—and theoretically safer—"public" domains of women's lives, which most approximate men's "public" lives—women's [End Page 124] involvements in the economy, in social networks, and in political structures. The maternal work that women traditionally do around the world has long remained in the shadows, relegated to the so-called "domestic" sphere (Stack and Burton 1994). Even as we have begun to pay attention to women's reproductive lives, the products of all that reproduction—babies themselves—remain in the background.

Happily, feminist anthropologists have re-oriented discussions of women's seemingly private involvements—including the arena defined commonly as domestic—as fully cultural, with a direct impact on "public" events. At a theoretical level the conceptual boundary between public and private, so long transparent, is now being challenged, disturbing the definition of categories that lie at the heart of much of our discipline (Comaroff 1987; Lugo and Maurer 2000). The study of babies ought to profit from such a theoretical shakeup.

Can Babies Communicate?

Babies are—or at least appear—incapable of speaking. Most of us treasure the proposition that language signals the presence of culture. If infants cannot communicate their wishes and views in a way that anthropologists feel proficient in interpreting, how can we admit these small creatures into our cherished domain of "culture"? Even if we suppose that infants lead secretly cultural lives, how would an anthropologist go about understanding the world of these non-linguistic humans?

First, the various noises that even young babies make—often dismissed as meaningless babble by Western observers—may be seen as meaningful in some places. Paying attention to the sounds that infants make, and if and how these are interpreted by those around them, should produce an intellectually productive inquiry.

Moreover, even if babies' babble is locally considered meaningless, the obstacle posed by infants' lack of speech competence to achieving a sense of Verstehen may not be as formidable as it appears. The impediments to achieving rapport even with adults are now well known. Field memoirs abound demonstrating that full empathy with and understanding of another human being—even one within one's own cultural tradition (however defined)—is at best difficult, perhaps impossible to attain. Nevertheless, most cultural anthropologists would assert that the effort to reach some level of empathy for, and understanding of, a given group of Others lies at the heart of the ethnographic enterprise. Accordingly, most of us seem to operate with the hope that a partial realization of this lofty but elusive goal is possible. The situation with infants may not be much different.

However, to achieve rapport we may need to adjust our field methods. Students of language are now suggesting that the classic criterion for identifying a "text"—the presence of an alphabetic or ideographic system of writing—may be too narrow. Other communication systems—clothing and adornment, games, table manners, and so on—may be productively analyzed as semiotic texts.8 I suggest that it likewise makes sense to consider infants' lives as texts to be read, though possibly with a new set of glasses.

We would need to inquire how local adults say their babies communicate—and to whom. During my fieldwork Beng adults told me that babies are indeed driven to communicate, but that adults are too unenlightened to understand those attempts. Therefore, Beng parents are urged to consult diviners, who speak the language of babies through spirit intermediaries living in the "afterlife" from which infants are said to have just (partly) emerged. The babies enunciate their wishes, which diviners interpret to parents; in turn, the parents are obliged to fulfill these desires, often by adorning the babies with various items of jewelry (Gottlieb 1998). With such an ideology the methodological imperative for me during fieldwork was to consult with diviners and attend their baby "seance" sessions as often as possible. Privileging communication with spirits via diviners is not something that we are normally trained to undertake. Nevertheless, we owe it to our infant informants to follow wherever their culturally mediated attempts at communication lead us—whether that be to the spirit world, or to some other unexpected but culturally meaningful space—including the body.

The dominance of verbal communication with adult humans to the exclusion of other forms of communication is now beginning to be questioned in some recent writings. Stoller (1997), Farnell (1994), and others have urged us to seek data in modes of sensory communication other than verbal language. Local interpretations of how infants communicate may lead us far afield from our verbal models. Studying infants should enable us to take seriously the theoretical imperative to somatize our methods that these studies are now urging. [End Page 125]

Babies' Bodies, Babies' Leaks

What they lack in verbal skills, babies make up for in somatic communications. Infants are messy—the younger, the messier. They spend much time engaging in bodily processes rather than intellectual pursuits. Many of those processes involve the expulsion of products that are devalued in Western society (Bakhtin 1968)—tears, urine, feces, spit-up. As intellectuals, anthropologists are not trained to view such exuviae as appropriate sites for scholarly research, despite Mary Douglas' fertile model for analyzing leaks and "matter out of place" (1966).

Yet elsewhere, babies' leaks may be culturally significant. Among the Senufo of northern Cô te d'Ivoire and southern Burkina Faso, for example, urine is a gift from an infant, a means to establish a relationship with whoever is holding the baby (Lamissa Bangali, personal communication). This bodily-based model of communication challenges the prevalent Western models of establishing social relationships, which privilege verbal interchange. Shifting the theoretical axis from the vocal cords to the urinary tract would unsettle our language-based model of communication at the same time that it may violate our own notions of bodily pollution.

Another aspect of babies' bodies that can reveal culturally rich data is infants' motor development—long seen by psychologists as somewhat invariable in healthy babies. Paying attention to how Baganda adults in Uganda sit one- to three-month olds on their laps and prop up three- to four-month olds on mats to train them to sit independently and smile, the Kilbrides (1975) have demonstrated that healthy Baganda infants typically sit independently by the age of four months—a third of a lifetime earlier than most infants from Euroamerican, middle-class families sit. The reason is eminently cultural: sitting up and smiling allow an infant to communicate with those around her—a valuable asset in the insistently face-to-face Baganda kingdom. Reclaiming the realm of motor development, which we have largely left to the developmental psychologists as biologically determined, may yield surprises of interest to members of both disciplines, showing this aspect of development to be overdetermined by a variety of forces.

An equally promising line of research concerns an activity babies do quite a lot of: sleeping. Anthropologists have been collecting material for some time indicating that co-sleeping—usually but not always with the mother—is prevalent for infants and young children beyond industrialized societies (Crawford 1994; for a review, see Small 1998: 109-137). An ethnography of slumbering babies might ask: Do babies sleep upright or horizontally, stretched out (as on a Native American cradle board) or curled up (as in a Central American hammock)? How much time are they sleeping in a quiet vs. noisy place? For how long do they sleep without waking—during the day, and at night? And how do local ideologies concerning babies' sleep needs interact with local practices? In other words, what cultural sense do such patterns make? Paying attention to the cultural shaping of somatic practices such as sleep may entail adapting the time sampling method that is well developed for the study of adult lives (for example, Gross 1984). The activities of infants from day to day might be compared to gain a sense of both the breadth and the limits to variation in babies' experiences.

Answers to these questions may reveal significant variations not only interculturally but even intraculturally. Even among babies of the same age, significant differences may be accounted for by such factors as family structure, income level, and religious orientation. To psychologists, such studies may ultimately demonstrate that developmentalists must be wary of making cross-cultural generalizations about infant development and behavior based on culturally limited studies. To anthropologists, they may demonstrate that the bodies of babies are significant markers pointing to critical cultural values; at a more theoretical level they further strengthen the case for cultural relativity even as it pertains to the seemingly impregnable bastion of biological development.

Are Babies Rational?

Finally, bodily events have long been assumed by Westerners to represent our closest ties to a biological nature, hence more impervious to cultural influence than are other aspects of our lives. No wonder that babies, with their overwhelming involvement in the body, get defined as precultural, what I have come to think of as a "biobundle."

Nowadays, however, such biologically influenced processes as sexuality (Caplan 1987), pregnancy and childbirth (Jordan 1993), breastfeeding (Maher 1992), menstruation (Buckley and Gottlieb 1988), and eating (Counihan and Van Esterik 1997) have been identified as appropriate subjects for the cultural anthropological gaze. Indeed, the notion of the senses and the body in general as culturally constructed [End Page 126] is a serious proposition (Classen 1992; Lock 1993; Strathern 1997). In keeping with these theoretical shifts, it is time for the somatic statements of infants to be taken seriously by our discipline. Is the prevalent Western model of infant-as-biobundle really applicable universally? The Beng vision of infants as recent exiles from the reincarnated world of wrugbe—a model that is replicated elsewhere—suggests otherwise. While seemingly helpless and all body, in the Beng model of the life cycle infants actually lead a rich inner life. Our own, often unconscious assumptions about babies may prevent us from seeing such alien ideologies simply because we do not bother to interrogate the world of babies.

Indeed, if Westerners define rational processes by reference to intellectual capacities—the ability to communicate via speech, to construct complex social ties and institutions, to organize our surroundings, to plan for the future—where does that leave the infant—who apparently specializes in creaturely processes of eating, sleeping and eliminating? Recently Emily Martin (1999) has pointed out the extent to which anthropologists privilege rational systems of thought over other modes of experiencing life. Martin's insight might be applied to the case of infants. Whatever logic they may exhibit, it appears distant from the standards of rationality as enunciated by two thousand years of formal Western thought. With such an intellectually problematic profile, any inclination toward serious anthropological study of such creatures is understandably low (Peters 1995: 14).

Toward an Anthropology of Infants (and Their Caretakers)

Can infants contribute to social theory? Two "big picture" issues might be productively illuminated. The first concerns relations between structure and agency. Ironically, the tendency for anthropologists to emphasize individual agency has intensified at the same time that the discipline has embraced a discussion of historical and global processes that can easily overpower individual agency at the analytic level. Thus we have seen a spate of biographies of individuals and families (Briggs 1998; Crapanzano 1980; Ottenberg 1996; Shostak 1981; Werbner 1991); accounts of social life co-authored with informants and local scholars (for example, Fischer and Abedi 1990; Gudeman and Rivera 1990; Whitten, Whitten, and Chango 1997); and reflexive, theoretical or programmatic calls for privileging the voices of our "informants." At the same time, we see analyses of social life grounded in the effects of a historicized and globalized political economy (Mintz 1985; Roseberry 1989). The divergent directions of these two bodies of literature is a peculiar feature of the scholarly landscape of the past two decades. Can an anthropology of infants and infancy avoid crashing into either the Scylla of pure structure on one shore or the Charybdis of pure agency on the other?

It might be tempting at a methodological level to allow others to speak for infants entirely—to allow an anthropology of infants to become anthropology of infancy as seen by others. This would assume that infants are completely subject to structures imagined by adults, incapable of asserting any subjectivity. Yet this is precisely what we need to eschew if an anthropology of infancy is to include not only a consideration of others' perspectives of infants, but equally importantly, an anthropology of infants themselves—premised on a notion that infants may themselves be social actors (Morton 1996), albeit ones who may utilize exotic modes of communication. I have already hinted at some methodological shifts that a fully developed anthropology of infants might necessitate—including becoming attuned to somatic modes of communication, and to local theories of infant communication, as well as to acknowledging that infants, like adults, are part of a cybernetic system in which identity is defined as constitutive of society (Derné 1992; Shweder and Bourne 1984).

Infants might indeed provide us with a median course to chart between the shores of structure and agency precisely insofar as they embody an extreme "test case." In the common Western view infants appear to be the most dependent of creatures exhibiting the least initiative of any humans. If, elsewhere, infants are held responsible for their actions even in the face of dependence on others, that would be a significant check in the "agency" column. I have briefly given hints of such a scenario based on my own fieldwork; there are signs from other societies that the Beng model of infancy may be replicated (with local variations) fairly broadly outside the Western world.9 Indeed, some developmental psychologists and psychoanalysts (Fogel 1993; Stern 1985) now embrace a model of infant behavior that is more interactive, accommodating infants' social lives, and willing to acknowledge agency even during the earliest days of extra-uterine human life, than characterized the dominant model constructed by earlier researchers. If even infants actively shape the [End Page 127] lives of those around them, contributing to the constitution of their social worlds, surely there is a lesson for us as analysts understanding social life in general. Yet investigating the ways in which infants are enmeshed in the lives of their relatives (Harkness and Super 1996; LeVine, Miller and West 1988) and in broader institutions—both local and global—should also be a significant check in the "structure" column. If we pay sufficient attention to indigenous ideologies regarding infants as well as to their day-to-day lives, infants may steer us toward the balanced assessment of structure and agency that so many of us crave.

An adequate assessment of infants cross-culturally may also help us overcome our own assumptions about the nature of nature and the nature of culture. Is some/most/all of what we humans do forged by immutable biological structures rooted in genetic configurations that we are only beginning to chart? Or is human behavior shaped by flexible cultural structures that are far more variable than biologistic models suggest? If the often-appealing compromise position—Stop, it's both!—wins out, what proportion is each contribution responsible for, and how do we know?

Westerners tend to assume that the younger the individual, the more dependent on biology is the child, and the more biologically oriented the decisions of her caretakers. Yet developmental norms been constructed on an overwhelming base of Euro-American, middle-class children, leaving the world's majority of children unstudied, and the so-called "norms" vulnerable to recasting. We have seen that the age at which infants sit independently is variable to some extent, signaling that the timing of this motor achievement is more flexible than heretofore considered. On the other hand, four months seems to be the earliest that this ability can be mastered. If we can document upper and lower ends of the spectrum for the normal achievement of such early motor tasks, we will be in a better position to assess the role of cultural practices in accelerating or delaying their mastery.

The same may apply to social development. For example, developmental psychologists have long posited that "separation anxiety" is a universal stage of infants from about seven to twelve months. Beng infants occasionally exhibit this behavior at precisely the same stage in their first year that Western infants do. But far from being common as it is in Western infants, in Beng infants it is rare, and actively disapproved of—perhaps because extended families allow for highly flexible caretaking arrangements for a given infant from day to day. Here, the interaction of biological timetable and cultural practices appears delicate but critical.

As these examples suggest, once we begin to study systematically the lives of infants and young children in other cultural settings, we should be able to transcend polemics and assess more realistically the relative contributions of culture and biology to cognitive, emotional, social, and even motor development at the earliest stages of post-uterine life. Thus an anthropology of infants (and their caretakers) should contribute to enduring social and philosophical debates about the role of nurture in shaping human lives. As has been noted before (Lallemand and LeMoal 1981a: 5), children have long figured actively in such conversations, but more as ideological than ethnographic markers. A fieldwork-informed ethnography of infants may contribute significantly to this ongoing conversation.

Alma Gottlieb
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Acknowledgments

I presented earlier versions of this article at the Annual Meeting of the American Ethnological Society (March 1997, Seattle), the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (December 1998, Philadelphia), the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am grateful to members of all these audiences, as well as to Deborah Durham, Philip Graham, Simon Ottenberg, and two anonymous readers for this journal, for astute comments on earlier versions, and to Judy DeLoache for many conversations about infants. A somewhat different version of this article appears (with permission) as Gottlieb (1999).

This article is based most directly on three months of research in summer 1993, when I was aided by five Beng assistants, to whom I express my enduring gratitude: Véronique Amenan Akpoueh, Bertin Kouadio Kouakou, Yacoubah Kouadio Bah, Dieudonné Kwame Kouakou, and Augustin Kouakou Yao. I remain deeply grateful to the many infants and caretakers who shared their opinions and lives with me that summer. My 1993 research was supported by the following: National Endowment for the Humanities; Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; and International Programs and Studies (for a William and Flora Hewlett Faculty Award) and the Center for African Studies, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Previous research among the Beng (1979-80, 1985) on related topics was supported by the Social Science Research Council, American Association of University Women, and Woodrow Wilson Foundation (Women's Studies Program). The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study at my university have recently provided the luxury of time off from teaching to write. To all, I express my appreciation.

Finally, I thank my son Nathaniel, who inaugurated me in my ethnographic encounter with childhood in his own delightful way, and my daughter Hannah, who has continued to inspire my wonder at the grandeur of infancy. For creating and raising those [End Page 128] wondrous not-babies-any-more with me and continually sharing thoughts about Bengland, I am also deeply grateful to Philip Graham.

Notes

1. See, for example, Parin, Morgenthaler and Parin-Matthèy (1980). Aside from the Meadian perspective, a few other anthropologists' writings from mid-century also reveal some interest in the lives of children. For example, several late essays by Fortes (1987) contain scattered but rich material on children and religion. But aside from such exceptions and the Cultural and Personality school, children, especially infants, generally retained a low profile through much of mainstream cultural anthropology in mid-century.

In the current era some writings on child-rearing and/or the broader span of the life cycle from a non-Freudian perspective may address the socialization of infants in a chapter (or section) on infants (for example, Morton 1996). Likewise, several works looking specifically at rituals pertaining to the life cycle include discussions of young childhood and sometimes infancy (LaFontaine 1985; Ottenberg 1989). Looking farther afield, one finds a large number of general ethnographies may contain chapters or, more likely, short sections devoted to the period of infancy (often combined with a consideration of toddlerhood). But usually these occur in the course of a discussion of issues relevant to that society, rather than constituting a focus on children in and of themselves (W. James 1979; Seremetakis 1991). Provocative though they may be, all these discussions inevitably lack the depth and nuance that only a full-length study can provide.

In addition to these works I note a growing literature among scholars treating a range of issues concerning reproduction. One subgroup subtly explores the cultural imagining of the fetus and the processes involved in procreation more generally (Héritier 1994, 1996; Jorgensen 1983; Morgan 1997); another important investigates the range of reproductive strategies and decisions available to women in a variety of cultural settings (for a review, see Ginsburg and Rapp 1991; more recent works include Davis-Floyd and Sargent 1997; Franklin and Ragoné 1998; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995). Together, these varied works speak indirectly to the lives of infants and might be brought into play more directly to illuminate a developing anthropology of infants.

2. Tentatively titled Child, Culture and Society, this new journal will be based at the Department of Human Sciences/Centre for Child-Focused Anthropological Research, Brunel University. Another internationally oriented, multidisciplinary journal, Childhood (begun in 1994), includes some anthropological discussion of children but focuses on contemporary social problems rather than an academic approach per se.

3. However, psychologists specializing in infants have tended overwhelmingly to concentrate their research on a very narrow spectrum of the world's babies—those belonging to Euro-American families of the middle class (DeLoache 1992). Moreover, the overwhelming majority of psychological studies is based on observations of infants in laboratories, far from babies' daily lives (cf. Goldberg 1977).

4. While I focus here on cultural anthropology, I note that of the four subfields of anthropology, it is probably linguistic anthropologists who have paid the most attention to children's worlds (Heath 1983; Schieffelin 1990; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986b; for an overview, Schieffelin and Ochs 1986a), though Goodwin (1997) has recently pointed out how much still remains to be researched concerning children's language. It is also worth noting that in the related field of biological anthropology, there is a corresponding lack of scholarly consideration of infant and child anatomy (except for the fetal period). A short article by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1996) is one of the few recent pieces to consider the subject (Stephen Leigh, personal communication). For their part, few archaeologists have been able to contribute significant amounts of scholarship toward understanding the lives of infants and young children in the recent or distant past (Silverman 1998).

5. I am indebted to Simon Ottenberg for this insight (personal communication, 15 January 1999).

6. For two notable exceptions, see Briggs (1998) and Ottenberg (1989).

7. For a case of fathers routinely carrying their babies, see Hewlett (1991).

8. For a classic example, see Barthes (1972); for a theoretically oriented review of the issues involved, see Hanks (1989).

9. In West Africa the notion is fairly common, for example, among the Ijaw of Nigeria (Leis 1982), the Bobo of Burkina Faso (LeMoal 1981), the Yoruba and Igbo of Nigeria, and many others.

References Cited

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Arens, William and Ivan Karp, eds. 1989. Creativity of powerCosmology and action in African societies. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Ariès, Philippe. 1962 [1960]. Centuries of childhood: A social history of family life. Transl. by Robert Baldick. London: Jonathan Cape.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968 [1965]. Rabelais and his world. Transl. by Hélène Ifwolsky. Cambridge MA: M.I.T. Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1972 [1957]. Mythologies. Transl. by Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday Press.
Bonnet, Doris. 1988. Corps biologique, corps social: Procréation et maladies de l'enfant en pays Mossi, Burkina Faso. Paris: ORSTOM.
Briggs, Jean L. 1998. Inuit morality play: The emotional education of a three-year-old. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.
Buckley, Thomas and Alma Gottlieb, eds. 1988. Blood magic: The anthropology of menstruation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Caplan, Pat, ed. 1987. The cultural construction of sexuality. London: Tavistock.
Classen, Constance. 1992. The odor of the other: Olfactory symbolism and cultural categories. Ethos 20(2): 133-166.
Cole, Michael. 1983. Society, mind, and development. In The child and other cultural inventions, ed. Frank Kessel and Alex Siegel. New York: Praeger.
Comaroff, Jean and Jean Comaroff. 1991. Of revelation and revolution, vol. 1. Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Africa. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1997. Of revelation and revolution, vol. 2. The dialectics of modernity on a South African frontier. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. [End Page 129]
Comaroff, John. 1987. Sui genderis: Feminism, kinship theory, and structural "domains." In Gender and kinship: Toward a unified analysis, ed. Jane Collier and Sylvia Yanagisako. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.
Conklin, Beth A. and Lynn M. Morgan. 1996. Babies, bodies, and the production of personhood in North America and a Native Amazonian society. Ethos 24(4): 657-694.
Counihan, Carole and Penny Van Esterik, eds. 1997. Food and culture: A reader. New York: Routledge.
Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Berkeley: University of Chicago Press.
Crawford, C. Joanne. 1994. Parenting practices in the Basque country: Implications of infant and childhood sleeping location for personality development. Ethos 22(1): 42-82.
D'Alisera, JoAnn. 1998. Born in the USA: Naming ceremonies of infants among Sierra Leoneans in the American capital. Anthropology Today 14(1): 16-18.
Davin, Anna. 1997. Imperialism and motherhood. In Tensions of empire: Colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Davis-Floyd, Robbie E. and Carolyn F. Sargent, eds. 1997. Childbirth and authoritative knowledge: Cross-cultural perspectives. Berkeley: University of California Press.
DeLoache, Judy. 1992. Perspectives on infant development. Lecture presented to Psych 318, September, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Derné, Steve. 1992. Beyond institutional and impulsive conceptions of self: Family structure and the socially anchored real self. Ethos 20(3): 259-288.
Dirks, Nicholas, Geoffrey Eley and Sherry Ortner, eds. 1993. Culture, power, history. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and danger. New York: Praeger.
Du, Shanshan. n.d. "Chopsticks always work in pairs": Gender unity and gender equality. New York: Columbia University Press. Forthcoming.
Erny, Pierre. 1988. Les premiers pas dans la vie de l'enfant d'Afrique noire: Naissance et première enfance. Paris: L'Harmattan.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1940. The Nuer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Farnell, Brenda. 1994. Ethno-graphics and the moving body. Man 29(4): 929-974.
Ferreira, Mariana Kawall Leal. 1997. When 1 + 1 ≠ 2: Making mathematics in central Brazil. American Ethnologist 24(1): 132-147.
Fischer, Michael and Mehdi Abedi. 1990. Debating Muslims: Cultural dialogues in postmodernity and traditions. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Fogel, Alan. 1993. Developing through relationships: Origins of communication, self, and culture. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Fortes, Meyer. 1987. Religion, morality and the person: Essays on Tallensi religion, ed. Jack Goody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Franklin, Sarah and Helena Ragoné, eds. 1998. Reproducing reproduction: Kinship, power, and technological innovation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1983 [1975]. Common sense as a cultural system. In Local knowledge, Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books.
Ginsburg, Faye and Rayna Rapp. 1991. The politics of reproduction. Annual Review of Anthropology 20: 311-343.
———, eds. 1995. Conceiving the new world order: The global politics of reproduction. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goldberg, Susan. 1977. Ethics, politics, and multi-cultural research. In Culture and infancy: Variations in the human experience, ed. P. Herbert Leiderman, Steven R. Tulkin, and Anne Rosenfeld. New York: Academic Press.
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. 1997. Children's linguistic and social worlds. Anthropology Newsletter 38(4): 1, 4-5.
Gottlieb, Alma. 1998. Do infants have religion? The spiritual lives of Beng babies (Côte d'Ivoire). American Anthropologist 100(1): 122-135.
———. 1999. Où sont partis les bébés? Pour une anthropologie du nourisson. In En substances : Systèmes, pratiques et symboliques Textes pour Françoise Héritier, ed. Emmanuel Terray, Jean-Luc Jamard, and Margarita Xanthakou. Paris: Fayard.
———. 2000. Luring your child into this life: A Beng path for infant care (Côte d'Ivoire). In A world of babies: Imagined childcare guides for seven societies, ed. Judy S. DeLoache and Alma Gottlieb. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. n.d. The afterlife is where we come from: Infants and infant care in West Africa. Book manuscript in preparation.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1996. Triumph of the root-heads: We undervalue an organism—and misread evolution—when we consider only adult anatomy. Natural History January: 10-17.
Gross, Daniel R. 1984. Time allocation: A tool for the study of cultural behavior. Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 519-558.
Gudeman, Stephen and Alberto Rivera. 1990. Conversations in Colombia: The domestic economy in life and text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson, eds. 1997a. Anthropological locations: Boundaries and grounds of a field science. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———, eds. 1997b. Culture, power, place: Explorations in critical anthropology. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Hamilton, Annette. 1981. Nature and nurture: Aboriginal child-rearing in North-Central Arnhem Land. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.
Hanks, W. F. 1989. Texts and textuality. Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 95-127.
Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational connections: Culture, people, places. New York: Routledge.
Harkness, Sarah and Charles Super. 1983. The cultural construction of child development: A framework for the socialization of affect. Ethos 11(4): 221-232.
———, eds. 1996. Parents' cultural belief systems: Their origins, expressions, and consequences. New York: Guilford Press.
Heath, Shirley Brice. 1983. Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [End Page 130]
Héritier, Françoise. 1994. Les deux soeurs et leur mère. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob.
———. 1996. Masculin/féminin: La pensée de la differénce. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob.
Hewlett, Barry. 1991. Intimate fathers: The nature and context of Aka Pygmy paternal infant care. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hunt, Nancy Rose. 1997. "Le bébé en brousse": European women, African birth spacing, and colonial intervention in breast feeding in the Belgian Congo. In Tensions of empire: Colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Itoua, François, D.A. Tettekpoe, Aminata Traoré, Manga Békombo, Thérèse Keita, Milick M'Bay, Essome Kotto, Mouvement International ATD-Quart Monde, A.K.B. Tay, G. De Coulomme Labarthe. 1988. Famille, enfant et développement en Afrique. Paris: UNESCO.
James, Allison and Alan Prout. 1990. Introduction. In Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood, ed. Allison James and Alan Prout. London: Falmer Press.
James, Wendy. 1979. 'Kwanim Pa: The making of the Uduk people. An ethnographic study of survival in the Sudan-Ethiopian borderlands. Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.
Johnson, Michelle. 2000. A passport to Alijana (the next world): Raising Mandinga children in Lisbon, Portugal. Paper presented at the conference on Mothering in the African Diaspora (Association for Research on Mothering), February, Toronto.
Jordan, Brigitte. 1993 [1978]. Birth in four cultures: A cross-cultural investigation of childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden and the United States, 4th ed. Prospect Heights IL: Waveland Press.
Jorgensen, Dan, ed. 1983. Concepts of conception: Procreation ideologies in Papua New Guinea. Mankind 14(1).
Kilbride, Janet E. and Philip L. Kilbride. 1975. Sitting and smiling behavior of Baganda infants: The influence of culturally constituted experience. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 6(1): 88-107.
Kilbride, Philip L. and Janet E. Kilbride. 1990. Changing family life in East Africa: Women and children at risk. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press.
LaFontaine, J.S. 1985. Initiation: Ritual drama and secret knowledge across the world. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lallemand, Suzanne, ed. 1991. Grossesse et petite enfance en Afrique de l'ouest et à Madagascar. Paris: L'Harmattan.
Lallemand, Suzanne and Guy LeMoal. 1981a. Un petit sujet. Journal des Africanistes 51(1-2): 5-21.
Lallemand, Suzanne and Guy LeMoal, eds. 1981b. Journal des Africanistes [Special issue on childhood.] 51(1-2).
Lancy, David. 1996. Playing on the mother-ground: Cultural routines for children's development. New York: Guilford.
Langness, L.L. 1975. Margaret Mead and the study of socialization. Ethos 3(2): 97-112.
Le, Huynh-Nhu. 2000. Never leave your little one alone: Raising an Ifaluk child. In A world of babies: Imagined childcare guides for seven societies, ed. Judy S. DeLoache and Alma Gottlieb. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Leis, Nancy. 1982. The not-so-supernatural power of Ijaw children. In African religious groups and beliefs: Papers in honor of William R. Bascom, ed. Simon Ottenberg. Berkeley: Folklore Institute and Meerut, India: Archana Publications.
LeMoal, Guy. 1981. Les activités religieuses des jeunes enfants chez les Bobo. Journal des Africanistes 5(1-2): 235-250.
LeVine, Robert A., Suzanne Dixon, Sarah Levine, Amy Richman, P. Herbert Leiderman, Constance H. Keefer, and T. Berry Brazelton. 1994. Child care and culture: Lessons from Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press.
LeVine, Robert A., Patrice M. Miller, and Mary Maxwell West, eds. 1988. Parental behavior in diverse societies. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Lewis, Michael and Leonard A. Rosenblum, eds. 1974. The effect of the infant on its caregiver. New York: John Wiley.
Lock, Margaret. 1993. Cultivating the body: Anthropology and epistemologies of bodily practice and knowledge. Annual Review of Anthropology 22: 133-155.
Lugo, Alejandro and Bill Maurer, eds. 2000. Gender matters: Rereading Michelle Z. Rosaldo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Lutz, Catherine. 1988. Unnatural emotions: Everyday sentiments on a Micronesian atoll and their challenge to Western theory. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Maher, Vanessa, ed. 1992. The anthropology of breast-feeding: Natural law or social construct. Oxford: Berg.
Martin, Emily. 1999. Flexible survivors. Anthropology News 40(6): 5-6.
Mead, Margaret. 1963. Socialization and enculturation. Current Anthropology 4(2): 184-207.
Mintz, Sidney. 1985. Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history. New York: Viking Press.
Morgan, Lynn M. 1996. Fetal relationality in feminist philosophy: An anthropological critique. Hypatia 11(3): 47-70.
———. 1997. Imagining the unborn in the Ecuadoran Andes. Feminist Studies 23(2): 323-350.
Morton, Helen. 1996. Becoming Tongan: An ethnography of childhood. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Munroe, Ruth H. and Robert L. Munroe. 1980. Infant experience and childhood affect among the Logoli: A longitudinal study. Ethos 8(4): 295-315.
Nieuwenhuys, Olga. 1996. The paradox of child labor and anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 237-251.
Ottenberg, Simon. 1989. Boyhood rituals in an African society: An interpretation. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
———. 1996. Seeing with music: The lives of three blind African musicians. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Parin, Paul, Fritz Morgenthaler and Goldy Parin-Matthey. 1980. Fear thy neighbor as thyself: Psychoanalysis and society among the Anyi of west Africa. Transl. by Patricia Klamerth. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Peters, Elizabeth. 1995. The benefits of teaching a course on infancy. General Anthropology 2(1): 14-15.
Piot, Charles. 1999. Remotely global: Village modernity in West Africa. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Reese, Debbie. 2000. A parenting manual: With words of advice for Puritan mothers in New England, wherein is contained a discourse and description of pregnancy and practical & spiritual concerns of parenting. In A world of babies: Imagined childcare guides for seven societies, ed. Judy DeLoache and Alma Gottlieb. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Riesman, Paul. 1992. First find yourself a good mother: The construction of self in two African American communities, ed. D. Szanton, [End Page 131] L. Abu-Lughod, S. Hutchinson, P. Stoller and C. Trosset. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Roseberry, William. 1989. Anthropologies and histories: Essays in culture, history, and political economy. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Carolyn Sargent, eds. 1998. Small wars: The cultural politics of childhood. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schieffelin, Bambi. 1990. The give and take of everyday life: Language socialization of Kaluli children. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schieffelin, Bambi and Elinor Ochs. 1986a. Language socialization. Annual Review of Anthropology 15:163-246.
Schieffelin, Bambi and Elinor Ochs, eds. 1986b. Language socialization across cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Seremetakis, C. Nadia. 1991. The last word: Women, death, and divination in inner Mani. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Shostak, Marjorie. 1981. Nisa: The life and words of a !Kung woman. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Shweder, Richard A. and Edmund J. Bourne. 1984. Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally? In Culture theory, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Silverman, Helaine. 1998. The spiritual lives of children in the archaeological record of ancient Peru. Lecture presented to the Champaign Urbana Ministerial Association, May, Urbana IL.
Small, Meredith. 1998. Our babies, ourselves: How biology and culture shape the way we parent. New York: Doubleday.
Stack, Carol and Linda M. Burton. 1994. Kinscripts: Reflections on family, generation, and culture. In Mothering: Ideology, experience, and agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey. New York: Routledge.
Stephens, Sharon, ed. 1995. Children and the politics of culture. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Stern, Daniel N. 1985. The interpersonal world of the infant: A view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. New York: Basic Books.
Stoller, Paul. 1997. Sensuous scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Strathern, Andrew J. 1997. Body thoughts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Super, Charles and Sara Harkness. 1986. The developmental niche: A conceptualization at the interface of child and culture. International Journal of Behavior Development 9: 1-25.
Super, Charles and Sara Harkness, eds. 1980. Anthropological perspectives on child development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Toren, Christina. 1988. Children's perceptions of gender and hierarchy in Fiji. In Acquiring culture: Cross-cultural studies in child development, ed. Gustav Jahoda and I.M. Lewis. London: Croom Helm.
———. 1993. Making history: The significance of childhood for a comparative anthropology of mind. Man 28: 461-478.
Wallace, Edwin R. IV. 1983. Freud and anthropology: A history and reappraisal. New York: International Universities Press.
Weisner, Thomas and R. Gallimore. 1977. My brother's keeper: Child and sibling caretaking. Current Anthropology 18(2): 169-190.
Werbner, Richard. 1991. Tears of the dead: The social biography of an African family. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Whiting, Beatrice, ed. 1963. Six cultures: Studies of child rearing. New York: Wiley.
Whitten, Norman E. Jr., Dorothea Scott Whitten, and Alfonso Chango. 1997. Return of the Yumbo: The indigenous caminata from Amazonia to Andean Quito. American Ethnologist 24 (2): 355-391.
Zaslavsky, Claude. 1973. Africa counts: Number and pattern in African culture. Westport CT: Lawrence Hill. [End Page 132]

Share