Early infanticidal childrearing is a term used in the study of psychohistory that refers to infanticide in paleolithic,[1][2] pre-historical, and historical hunter-gatherer tribes or societies. "Early" means early in history or in the cultural development of a society, not to the age of the child. "Infanticidal" refers to the high incidence of infants killed when compared to modern nations.[3] The model was developed by Lloyd deMause within the framework of psychohistory as part of a seven-stage sequence of childrearing modes that describe the development attitudes towards children in human cultures[4] The word "early" distinguishes the term from late infanticidal childrearing, identified by deMause in the more established, agricultural cultures up to the ancient world.
This model is a psychological concept that aims to understand anthropological data, especially from such societies as the Yolngu of Australia, the Gimi, Wogeo, Bena Bena, and Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea, the Raum, the Ok, and the Kwanga, based on observations by Géza Róheim,[5] Lia Leibowitz, Robert C. Suggs,[6]Milton Diamond, Herman Heinrich Ploss, Gilbert Herdt, Robert J. Stoller, L. L. Langness, and Fitz John Porter Poole, among others.[7] While anthropologists and psychohistorians do not dispute the data, they dispute its significance in terms of its importance, its meaning, and its interpretation.[7]
Supporters attempt to explain cultural history from a psycho-developmental point of view, and argue that cultural change can be assessed as "advancement" or "regression" based on the psychological consequences of various cultural practices.[8] While most anthropologists reject this approach and most theories of cultural evolution as ethnocentric, psychohistorians proclaim the independence of psychohistory and reject the mainstream Boasian view.
Pharaoh and the Midwives, James Tissot c. 1900. In Exodus 1:15–21, Puah and Shiphrah were commanded by Pharaoh to kill all of the newborn baby boys, but they disobeyed.
This "infanticidal" model makes several claims: that childrearing in tribal societies included child sacrifice or high infanticide rates, incest, body mutilation, child rape, and tortures, and that such activities were culturally acceptable.[9] Psychohistorians do not claim that each child was killed, only that in some societies there was (or is) a selection process that would vary from culture to culture. For example, there is a large jump in the mortality rate of Papua New Guinean children after they reach the weaning stage.[10] In the Solomon Islands some people reportedly kill their first-born child. In rural India, rural China, and other societies, some female babies have been exposed to death.[10] DeMause's argument is that the surviving siblings of the sacrificed child may become disturbed.[3]
According to deMause, in the most primitive mode of childrearing of the above-mentioned table, mothers use their children to project parts of their dissociated self onto their children. The infanticidal clinging of the symbiotic mother prevents individuation so that innovation and more complex political organization are inhibited.[3] On a second plane, deMause maintains that the attention paid by mothers of some contemporary societies to their children, such as sucking, fondling, and masturbating, is sexual according to an objective standard; and that this sexual attention is inordinate.[11]
The model is based on a reported lack of empathy by infanticidal parents, such as a lack of mutual gazes between parent and child, observed by Robert B. Edgerton, Maria Lepowsky, Bruce Knauft, John W. M. Whiting, and Margaret Mead, among others. Such mutual gazing is widely recognized in developmental psychology as crucial for proper bonding between mother and child.
Criticism
Nineteenth-century British anthropology advanced a lineal, evolutionary sequence in a given culture from savagery to civilization. Cultures were seen on a hierarchical ladder. James George Frazer posited a universal progress from magical thinking to science. Most anthropologists of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century studied primitive cultures outside Europe and North America. John Ferguson McLennan, Lewis Henry Morgan, and others argued that there was a parallel development in social institutions. In the 1950s, led by Leslie White, these evolutionist ideas gained influence in American anthropology.[12]
The German-born Franz Boas managed to shift the paradigm. His approach, later named cultural relativism, resists universal values of any kind. According to Boas's principle, which represents the mainstream school in contemporary anthropology, a culture's beliefs and activities should be interpreted in the context of its own culture. This principle has been established as axiomatic in contemporary anthropology. The Vietnam War consolidated the Boasian shift in American anthropology.[12]
Since the psychohistorians' model is analogous to the now discarded unilineal evolution theory, anthropologists have been critical of the negative value judgments, and the lineal progression, in the model currently advanced by psychohistorians as to what constitutes child abuse in primitive or non-Western cultures.[13]Melvin Konner wrote:
Lloyd deMause, then editor of the History of Childhood Quarterly, claimed that all past societies treated children brutally, and that all historical change in their treatment has been a fairly steady improvement toward the kind and gentle standards we now set and more or less meet. [...] Now anthropologists — and many historians as well — were slack-jawed and nearly speechless. [...] Serious students of the anthropology of childhood beginning with Margaret Mead have called attention to the pervasive love and care lavished on children in many traditional cultures.[14]
Psychohistorians accuse anthropologists and ethnologists of having avoided looking more closely at the evidence and having promulgated the myth of the noble savage.[15] They maintain that what constitutes child abuse is a matter of a general psychological law, it leaves its permanent marks on the human brain structure, post-traumatic stress disorder is not a culture dependent phenomenon or a matter of opinion, and that some of the practices that mainstream anthropologists do not focus on, such as beatings of newborn infants, result in brain lesions and other visible neurological and psychological damage.[7]
↑ Godwin, Robert (2004). One Cosmos under God. Omega Books. pp.166–174. ISBN978-1-55778-836-8.
Related Research Articles
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. A portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions.
Franz Uri Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical particularism and cultural relativism.
Infanticide is the intentional killing of infants or offspring. Infanticide was a widespread practice throughout human history that was mainly used to dispose of unwanted children, its main purpose being the prevention of resources being spent on weak or disabled offspring. Unwanted infants were usually abandoned to die of exposure, but in some societies they were deliberately killed. Infanticide is broadly illegal, but in some places the practice is tolerated, or the prohibition is not strictly enforced.
Psychohistory is an amalgam of psychology, history, and related social sciences and the humanities. Its proponents claim to examine the "why" of history, especially the difference between stated intention and actual behavior. It works to combine the insights of psychology, especially psychoanalysis, with the research methodology of the social sciences and humanities to understand the emotional origin of the behavior of individuals, groups and nations, past and present. Work in the field has been done in the areas of childhood, creativity, dreams, family dynamics, overcoming adversity, personality, political and presidential psychobiography. There are major psychohistorical studies of anthropology, art, ethnology, history, politics and political science, and much else.
Lloyd deMause was an American lay psychoanalyst and social historian, best known for his pioneering work in the field of psychohistory.
Cultural relativism is the position that there is no universal standard to measure cultures by, and that all cultural values and beliefs must be understood relative to their cultural context, and not judged based on outside norms and values. Proponents of cultural relativism also tend to argue that the norms and values of one culture should not be evaluated using the norms and values of another.
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor was an English anthropologist, and professor of anthropology.
Robert Harry Lowie was an Austrian-born American anthropologist. An expert on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, he was instrumental in the development of modern anthropology and has been described as "one of the key figures in the history of anthropology".
Boasian anthropology was a school within American anthropology founded by Franz Boas in the late 19th century.
Géza Róheim was a Hungarian psychoanalyst and anthropologist.
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, or Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, is a 1913 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which the author applies his work to the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and the study of religion. It is a collection of four essays inspired by the work of Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Jung and first published in the journal Imago (1912–13): "The Horror of Incest", "Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence", "Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts", and "The Return of Totemism in Childhood".
The Journal of Psychohistory is a journal established in 1973 in the field of psychohistory, edited by Lloyd deMause and published by the Institute for Psychohistory (IP). The journal has been originally published as History of Childhood Quarterly and since 1976 as The Journal of Psychohistory.
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes. Each school within psychological anthropology has its own approach.
Historical particularism is widely considered the first American anthropological school of thought.
Religious abuse is abuse administered through religion, including harassment or humiliation that may result in psychological trauma. Religious abuse may also include the misuse of religion for selfish, secular, or ideological ends, such as the abuse of a clerical position.
Alexander Lesser (1902–1982) was an American anthropologist. Working in the Boasian tradition of American cultural anthropology, he adopted critical stances of several ideas of his fellow Boasians, and became known as an original and critical thinker, pioneering several ideas that later became widely accepted within anthropology.
American anthropology has culture as its central and unifying concept. This most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture:
biological anthropology
linguistic anthropology
cultural anthropology
archaeology
Robert Alan Levine was an American anthropologist best known for his multidisciplinary and cross-cultural work on child development. He spent much of his academic career at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he had been an emeritus professor since 1998.
The archaeology of childhood is an emerging field of study within archaeology that applied anthropology, ethnography, history, sociology, osteology and biological anthropology to the study of the development and lives of juvenile human individuals (children) in past societies from a material perspective.
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