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Child Survival

Anthropological Perspectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children

  • Book
  • © 1987

Overview

Editors:
  1. Nancy Scheper-Hughes

    1. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, USA

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Part of the book series: Culture, Illness and Healing (CIHE, volume 11)

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Table of contents (19 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-ix
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  2. The Cultural Politics of Child Survival

    1. The Cultural Politics of Child Survival

      • Nancy Scheper-Hughes
      Pages 1-29

  3. Population, Fertility, and Child Survival

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 31-31
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    2. Birth Planning in Rural China: A Cultural Account

      • Sulamith Heins Potter
      Pages 33-58

    3. Fertility Change, Child Survival, and Child Development: Observations on a Rural Kenyan Community

      • Sara Harkness, Charles M. Super
      Pages 59-70

    4. Food Taboos and Child Survival: A Case Study from the Coral Sea

      • Maria Lepowsky
      Pages 71-92

  4. Infanticide: Culturally Sanctioned Child Abuse

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 93-93
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    2. Female Infanticide and Child Neglect in Rural North India

      • Barbara D. Miller
      Pages 95-112

    3. Infanticide Among the Tarahumara of the Mexican Sierra Madre

      • Dorothy S. Mull, J. Dennis Mull
      Pages 113-132

  5. Social Trauma: The Effects of Poverty, Social Disruption, and Catastrophe on Child Treatment

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 133-133
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    2. Fitness and Survival

      • Lucile F. Newman
      Pages 135-143

    3. External Pressure/Internal Change: Child Neglect on the Navajo Reservation

      • Lizabeth Hauswald
      Pages 145-164

    4. Cry Babies, Culture, and Catastrophe: Infant Temperament Among the Masai

      • M. W. de Vries
      Pages 165-185

    5. Culture, Scarcity, and Maternal Thinking: Mother Love and Child Death in Northeast Brazil

      • Nancy Scheper-Hughes
      Pages 187-208

  6. Child Abuse: Deviant and Idiosyncratic Child Maltreatment

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 209-209
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    2. Severe Child Abuse Among the Canadian Inuit

      • Nelson H. H. Graburn
      Pages 211-225

    3. The Treatment of Children in the “Dirty War”: Ideology, State Terrorism and the Abuse of Children in Argentina

      • Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco
      Pages 227-246

    4. Child Sexual Abuse: Implications from the Cross-Cultural Record

      • Jill E. Korbin
      Pages 247-265

    5. Preliminary Remarks on a Study of Incest In England

      • J. S. La Fontaine
      Pages 267-290

  7. Child Saving: Problems and Dilemmas in Social Intervention

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 291-291
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Reviews

`Broadly ranging and often provocative, this volume is a notable attempt to draw together explanations for childhood death. It will stimulate thinking on the levels of child wastage tolerated and accommodated by whole societies and at the same time offerperspectives on the complex casuality of criminal deaths to individual children. The collection provides a new measure of pluralistic and interdisciplinary consideration that should influence future research on child survival issues.'
Odile Frank, Associate Center for Policy Studies, The Population Council
`A powerful and tragic expose of child abuse as an epidemic of the modern world. How aggressive policies against maltreatment mask collective social responsibility.'
Carol B. Stack, Duke University
`This is a well-edited book that offers some compelling, intellectually provocative insights for clinicians and social scientists alike ... Although it clearly qualifies as a textbook and a reference book, it contains several chapters that will strongly interest the clinician.'
The New England Journal of Medicine (1988)

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, USA

    Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Child Survival

  • Book Subtitle: Anthropological Perspectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children

  • Editors: Nancy Scheper-Hughes

  • Series Title: Culture, Illness and Healing

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3393-4

  • Publisher: Springer Dordrecht

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

  • Copyright Information: D. Reidel Publishing Company 1987

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-55608-028-9Published: 31 October 1987

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-1-55608-029-6Published: 31 October 1987

  • eBook ISBN: 978-94-009-3393-4Published: 06 December 2012

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: IX, 397

  • Topics: Medicine/Public Health, general

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