Child Survival: Anthropological Perspectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children (Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics)

of older children, adults, and the family unit as a whole. These moral evaluations are, in turn, influenced by such external contingencies as popula­ tion demography, social and economic factors, subsistence strategies, house­ hold composition, and by cultural ideas concerning the nature of infancy and childhood, definitions of personhood, and beliefs about the soul and its immortality. MOTHER LOVE AND CHILD DEATH Of all the many factors that endanger the lives of young children, by far the most difficult to examine with any degree of dispassionate objectivity is the quality of parenting. Historians and social scientists, no less than the public at large, are influenced by old cultural myths about childhood inno­ cence and mother love as well as their opposites. The terrible power and significance attributed to maternal behavior (in particular) is a commonsense perception based on the observation that the human infant (specialized as it is for prematurity and prolonged dependency) simply cannot survive for very long without considerable maternal love and care. The infant's life depends, to a very great extent, on the good will of others, but most especially, of course, that of the mother. Consequently, it has been the fate of mothers throughout history to appear in strange and distorted forms. They may appear as larger than life or as invisible; as all-powerful and destructive; or as helpless and angelic. Myths of the maternal instinct compete, historically, witli -myths of a universal infanticidal impulse. Front Matter....Pages i-ix The Cultural Politics of Child Survival....Pages 1-29 Front Matter....Pages 31-31 Birth Planning in Rural China: A Cultural Account....Pages 33-58 Fertility Change, Child Survival, and Child Development: Observations on a Rural Kenyan Community....Pages 59-70 Food Taboos and Child Survival: A Case Study from the Coral Sea....Pages 71-92 Front Matter....Pages 93-93 Female Infanticide and Child Neglect in Rural North India....Pages 95-112 Infanticide Among the Tarahumara of the Mexican Sierra Madre....Pages 113-132 Front Matter....Pages 133-133 Fitness and Survival....Pages 135-143 External Pressure/Internal Change: Child Neglect on the Navajo Reservation....Pages 145-164 Cry Babies, Culture, and Catastrophe: Infant Temperament Among the Masai....Pages 165-185 Culture, Scarcity, and Maternal Thinking: Mother Love and Child Death in Northeast Brazil....Pages 187-208 Front Matter....Pages 209-209 Severe Child Abuse Among the Canadian Inuit....Pages 211-225 The Treatment of Children in the “Dirty War”: Ideology, State Terrorism and the Abuse of Children in Argentina....Pages 227-246 Child Sexual Abuse: Implications from the Cross-Cultural Record....Pages 247-265 Preliminary Remarks on a Study of Incest In England....Pages 267-290 Front Matter....Pages 291-291 World-View Conflict and Toddler Malnutrition: Change Agent Dilemmas....Pages 293-324 Traditional Medicine as ‘Medical Neglect’: Dilemmas in the Case Management of a Samoan Teenager with Diabetes....Pages 325-337 Child Abuse and the Unconscious in American Popular Culture....Pages 339-358 Bureaucracy and the Maltreatment of the Child: Interpretive and Structural Implications....Pages 359-376 When Cultural Rights Conflict with the “Best Interests of the Child”: A View from Inside the Child Welfare System....Pages 377-387 Back Matter....Pages 389-397