Early Infanticidal Childrearing - Criticism

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.

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' principle, which represents the mainstream school in contemporary anthropology, a culture's beliefs and activities should be interpreted in terms of its own culture. This principle has been established as axiomatic in contemporary anthropology. The Vietnam War consolidated the Boasian shift in American anthropology.

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. 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.

Psychohistorians accuse anthropologists and ethnologists of having avoided looking more closely at the evidence and having promulgated the myth of the noble savage. 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.