Main Article Content
Clinical Perspectives
Culture and infancy: a critical examination
Abstract
Over 90% of infants born in the world live in low-income countries,
but most scholarly knowledge about infancy is produced in wealthy countries.
More knowledge is consequently needed about infancy throughout the world.
There are logistical and cultural difficulties associated with gaining this
information, but in this paper I focus on the broader ideological context
of knowledge production about infancy world-wide. Using a recently published
volume, A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Seven Societies (DeLoache
and Gottlieb 2000) as an exemplar, I will show that the representation of
infancy as an ideology-free or even romanticised zone may do little to forward
our understanding of infancy and culture.
Journal of Child and
Adolescent Mental Health 2003, 15(1): 45-48
but most scholarly knowledge about infancy is produced in wealthy countries.
More knowledge is consequently needed about infancy throughout the world.
There are logistical and cultural difficulties associated with gaining this
information, but in this paper I focus on the broader ideological context
of knowledge production about infancy world-wide. Using a recently published
volume, A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Seven Societies (DeLoache
and Gottlieb 2000) as an exemplar, I will show that the representation of
infancy as an ideology-free or even romanticised zone may do little to forward
our understanding of infancy and culture.
Journal of Child and
Adolescent Mental Health 2003, 15(1): 45-48
