Consequences of dysfunctional enculturation

This happened a day or so ago, in New Jersey.  A woman was brutally beaten in public by a MacDonald's coworker, her 2-year old son tries to stop it, and the adults stand around taking video.  Welcome to America.

And then, on CNN's New Day (Saturday) the hosts interviewed a "licensed psychologist" about this, and he actually came scarily close to explaining it, but without the anthropological insight (shouldn't psychologists, almost by definition, have to know some anthropology?).  Anyway, the CNN guys asked how this could happen, and the psychologist pointed out that the adults had been socialized (we would say enculturated) into being witnesses, bystanders, not participants; the 2-year old, on the other hand, was not "socialized" and thus didn't know he was supposed to just watch or try to film it.

If only this psychologist had known about psychological anthropologist Francis Hsu, who wrote about a thing called Independence Training way back in the 50s.  Independence Training, in the extreme form we see in America, turns us into unempathetic, socially irresponsible psychopaths: she's not beating me, what's the problem?  I'll be writing an email as soon as I get his name...

More thoughts on Memorial Day

The parades, concerts, and other activities associated with Memorial Day in the United States can be loosely grouped under what some anthropologists refer to as rites of intensification.  A typical definition of these rites is that they are "rituals intended either to bolster a natural process necessary to survival or to reaffirm the society's commitment to a particular set of values and beliefs" [my emphasis].

What are the "values and beliefs" that we reaffirm on Memorial Day?  To answer this question, we have to make a distinction between folk (or, roughly, emic) and analytic (roughly, etic) ideas.   The folk model answer must include values such as patriotism, freedom, democracy, glorification of military service, the extension of that service to all parts of the world, and, especially, the honoring of those who have lost their lives in that service.  The omnipresent symbol that represents all this is the national flag, visible through the window as I write this, flying in a warm breeze in front of both our neighbor's houses.

But there is a dark side to all this, and the dark side is our national war addiction. We are so addicted to the warm, fuzzy feelings invoked by the parades, the hot dogs and hamburgers and apple pie,  the returning military people surprising their families with an unexpected homecoming, the Skype calls between wives and husbands, and so on, that we are compelled to sacrifice our people and wealth to satisfy this addiction by the almost uninterrupted perpetration of violence in far-off places.  We are not a happy people unless we are at war.

What, you say?  How can this be?  Have a look at Wikipedia's listing of US military operations from 1775 to the present.  Or, if you don't trust Wikipedia, check out this chronicle of military interventions since 1890.

One important thing to notice on both of these listings (there are many others, just Google "us military interventions" is that it really is hard to find a stretch of time lasting more than a year or so when the US has not been engaged militarily, either domestically or internationally. If we focus on just the period between the end of WWI and the start of WWII, we find these :

1919   Honduras
1919   Yugoslavia
1920   Guatemala
1920-21   West Virginia
1922   Turkey
1922-34   China
1924-25   Honduras
1925   Panama
1932   El Salvador
1932   Washington, DC

Several of these, in particular in Guatemala, West Virginia, Honduras, and Panama, involved the use of troops against unionized workers or workers attempting to unionize.  Others involved the suppression of popular revolts against autocratic leaders.

How weak are the folk values of "freedom" and "democracy" in which we are supposedly enculturated.

Co-sleeping: It's a mammal thing

In a web article at Slate.com, posted in February 2009, pediatrician Sydney Spiesel discusses the pros of cons of allowing infants to sleep with their parents. The overall tone of the article is to discourage parents from allowing infants to sleep with them; Dr. Spiesel's conclusion, based on research reported in the journal Pediatrics, is summed up as follows:

Not only are there no good data to support [alleged benefits of co-sleeping], but a new study supports what most pediatricians have been saying all along: There is substantial risk in infant-parent bed sharing, and parents should be aware of this risk before bringing babies to bed to sleep with them.

There are several points to be made about this from an anthropological perspective:

• Humans are mammals. All or nearly all (I can't think of any counter-examples) mammalian young sleep in contact with their mothers and/or other members of the family group. This allows them to nurse on demand, keeps them warm, and helps protect them from potential predators. If co-sleeping were significantly risky, mammals probably would have gone the way of the dinosaurs, or evolved into something else.
  
  
• In most human cultures, infants co-sleep with their parents. Most of the time, there's no other choice; there's simply no other place for them to sleep. And again, if co-sleeping carried a significant risk for humans, we likely wouldn't be here to discuss it.
  
  
• The idea that infants should sleep apart from their parents is a value specific to some cultures, not a cultural universal. Where this value is strong, as in the USA, Independence Training is implicated. This value is so strong in US culture that infants are even given their own rooms, rooms that are prepared for them (e.g. painted pink or blue, etc.) before they are born.
  
  
• Some infant deaths that appear to be caused by co-sleeping are actually instances of neglect, abuse, or worse. As a colleague points out, parents may be too whacked out on alcohol or other drugs to have a normal level of awareness. And more than a few such cases are instances of outright infanticide that are reported as accidents.
  

So, from the evolutionary and cross-cultural perspective of anthropology, infant co-sleeping (like nursing in public) appears to be the usual, or as we say in linguistics, unmarked, practice. And judging from a real weighing of the benefits and risks, co-sleeping is better for infants and parents than not co-sleeping. Arguments to the contrary are generally informed more by ethnocentrism than by truly sound research.

For a good summary of this issue by an anthropologist who specializes in research on this topic, see James McKenna's article Cosleeping and Biological Imperatives: Why Human Babies Do Not and Should Not Sleep Alone.