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Babies Aren’T Persons:” A Survey Of Delayed Personhood., David F. Lancy

David Lancy

To better understand attachment from a cross-cultural and historical perspective, I have amassed over 200 cases from the ethnographic and archaeological records that reveal cultural models (D'Andrade and Strauss 1992) of infancy. The 200 cases represent all areas of the world, historical epochs from the Mesolithic to the present and all types of subsistence patterns (Appendix 1). The approach is inductive where cases with similar models of infancy are clustered into archetypes. My principal finding from this analysis is that, in the broadest overview, infants are, effectively, placed on probation and not immediately integrated into the society. Attachment failure is …