Putting attachment in its place: Disciplinary and cultural contexts

Abstract

This paper examines the reception of John Bowlby’s and Mary Ainsworth’s ethological theory of attachment among anthropologists and cultural psychologists. First, it shows that from Margaret Mead’s criticisms in the mid 1950s to the present, many of them have challenged the main tenets of attachment theory but attachment theorists ignored those challenges. Second, it argues that we need to understand the different disciplinary goals of psychology and anthropology after WWII in order to illuminate the lack of attention to children’s cultural context in attachment research. The privileging within psychology of laboratory data over field observations supported the rise of attachment research focused on the strange situation procedure and contributed to the neglect of ethnographic data about children in their socio-cultural milieu. Recognizing the importance of studying children in context, however, recent studies by anthropologists and developmental psychologists sensitive to the power of culture have deepened the challenge to attachment theory.

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Putting attachment in its place: Disciplinary and
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Marga Vicedo
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contexts, European Journal of Developmental Psychology, DOI: 10.1080/17405629.2017.1289838
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EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2017.1289838
Putting attachment in its place: Disciplinary and
cultural contexts
Marga Vicedo
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, Toronto,
Canada
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the reception of John Bowlby’s and Mary Ainsworth’s
ethological theory of attachment among anthropologists and cultural
psychologists. First, it shows that from Margaret Mead’s criticisms in the mid 1950s
to the present, many of them have challenged the main tenets of attachment theory
but attachment theorists ignored those challenges. Second, it argues that we need
to understand the dierent disciplinary goals of psychology and anthropology
after WWII in order to illuminate the lack of attention to children’s cultural context
in attachment research. The privileging within psychology of laboratory data
over eld observations supported the rise of attachment research focused on
the strange situation procedure and contributed to the neglect of ethnographic
data about children in their socio-cultural milieu. Recognizing the importance
of studying children in context, however, recent studies by anthropologists and
developmental psychologists sensitive to the power of culture have deepened
the challenge to attachment theory.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 24 September 2016; Accepted 28 January 2017
KEYWORDS Attachment theory; strange situation; anthropology; ethnographic studies of childrearing;
cultural context of child development
Introduction
In 1951 British psychiatrist John Bowlby published a widely inuential report,
Maternal Care and Mental Health, for the World Health Organization. He asserted
that psychiatrists and psychologists had determined that maternal care and love
is essential for the proper emotional development of infants (Bowlby, 1951). In
the following years, Bowlby turned to animal studies to develop his ethological
attachment theory. According to this theory, evolution has designed a system
of attachment between mother and child; without that secure attachment, chil-
dren grow up emotionally scarred (Bowlby, 1969). Since American/Canadian
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Marga Vicedo marga.vicedo@utoronto.ca

2 M. VICEDO
psychologist Mary Ainsworth presented empirical work to support Bowlby’s
views, today they are considered the co-founders of the ethological attachment
theory, which has become an inuential paradigm in child-socialization.
Yet, numerous critics have pointed out substantial aws in attachment theory.
My historical examination of the development and reception of Bowlby’s and
Ainsworth’s views from the 1950s to the 1980s showed that they ignored the
criticisms (Vicedo, 2013). In this book, I focused on Bowlby’s appeal to animal
research in order to support his theory.
Here, I want to show how many anthropologists and cultural psychologists
have also challenged attachment theory from its inception. First, I present
Margaret Mead’s views. Mead noted that her own studies in non-Western soci-
eties revealed the existence of a greater diversity of behavior than Bowlby’s
theory acknowledged. However, Bowlby and Ainsworth ignored the call to
recognize the diversity of child rearing patterns uncovered by ethnographic
studies. Second, I analyze how the strange situation, a laboratory procedure
to evaluate attachment patterns developed by Ainsworth, contributed to the
success of attachment theory. I argue that the rise of attachment theory, despite
the glaring omission of data about a variety of cultures, was enabled in part by
the focus of psychologists on laboratory procedures. This methodological pref-
erence contributed to the study of children in isolation from their socio-cultural
contexts. Nevertheless, from the 1980s on, ethnographic work about mothers,
children, and families in their socio-cultural contexts has deepened the chal-
lenges to central tenets of the ethological theory of attachment behavior and
to the primacy of the laboratory over eldwork in studies of human behavior
and emotions.
Mead: Variability in the eld
Margaret Mead was among the rst anthropologists who paid serious attention
to childhood in her work about Samoan society and her photographic study
of children in Balinese culture (Bateson & Mead, 1942). She became one of the
leaders of the Culture and Personality movement, which aimed to study the
eects of childrearing on individual personality and larger social structures.
With the rise of interest in children’s emotional development after WWII, Mead
became a prominent participant in interdisciplinary discussions about this topic.
Mead expressed her concern about growing trends in child development
research around mid-century. Commenting on Bowlby’s (1951) WHO report and
other studies that also emphasized the detrimental eects of maternal sepa-
ration, she deplored the inated statements about the role of a single factor in
child rearing and the ‘exaggerated and poorly supported claims of the impor-
tance of the mother as a single gure in the infant’s life’ (Mead, 1954, p. 476).
Contrary to Bowlby and other researchers who focused almost exclusively on
the role of mothers, Mead maintained that ‘the character formation of the child

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 3
represents the child’s total environmental situation as it is responded to and
introcepted by that child in terms of its constitution and individual life history’
(Mead, 1954, p. 474). In her opinion, many authors overstated the damaging
eects on children of separation – even for brief times – from their mothers.
Mead pointed out that there was no anthropological evidence to support ‘the
value of such an accentuation of the tie between mother and child. On the con-
trary, cross-cultural studies suggest that adjustment is most facilitated if the
child is cared for by many warm, friendly people’ (Mead, 1954, p. 477, my empha-
sis). Bowlby, however, continued to focus on the tie between mother and child.
Ignoring Mead’s criticisms, Bowlby tellingly entitled his rst presentation
of his ethological theory of attachment, ‘The nature of the child’s tie to his
mother.’ In this classic paper, Bowlby did not review data from dierent cul-
tures. Nevertheless, he postulated a biological basis for the bond between a
mother and her child and argued that a secure bond is necessary for a child’s
adequate psychological development (Bowlby, 1958). However, many scholars
criticized the data Bowlby was relying upon, and in 1962 the WHO published
a reassessment of its 1951 report (WHO, 1962). Although this publication is
rarely cited, in contrast to the 1951 WHO report this volume included articles
by major researchers who criticized the conclusions Bowlby drew from existing
studies about maternal separation. Among many methodological aws that they
criticized were his extrapolations from studies about maternal deprivation in
extreme circumstances to the everyday relations between mothers and children
in regular households. Bowlby declined an opportunity to reply to his critics.
But he supervised the reply oered by Ainsworth in this volume (see Vicedo,
2013 for further details).
Mead penned one of papers in that 1962 volume, and again pointed out the
existence of dierent types of families and child rearing practices. In her view,
Bowlby wrongly assumed that childcare could ‘not be safely distributed among
several gures,’ and that all separations from mother were ‘necessarily harmful
in character, emotionally damaging, if not completely lethal’ (Mead, 1962, p. 55).
Mead claimed that studies of other cultures, including her own work in Samoa,
showed that children who were cared for by dierent people grew up to be
well-adjusted individuals. She concluded that by giving the mores of his own
culture the status of universal behavior and positing a biological underpinning,
Bowlby had committed the sin of ‘reication’ (Mead, 1962, p. 58).
Mead and other anthropologists in this period emphasized the need to con-
duct further cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies before making any asser-
tions about the universality of behavior and emotions. Those studies showed
an enormous diversity of practices and beliefs about childrearing in diverse
societies (Mead, 1954, 1955; Whiting & Child, 1953; on culture and personality
studies, see Levine, 2001).
In contrast, Bowlby appealed to studies of animal behavior to support his
views. Building upon his 1958 paper, in his inuential 1969 book Attachment he

4 M. VICEDO
claimed that the attachment between mother and child is an adaptation forged
by natural selection in the ancestral environment of human evolution. Further,
deviations from the mother-child patterns already set in that environment
would lead to child pathologies and imperil human survival. Again, although
he postulated a theory of child development of universal character, Bowlby did
not review the existing ethnographic literature on children. He mentioned Mead
only once in a footnote, just to state briey she had misunderstood him (Bowlby,
1969, p. 303). However, he oered no explanation or rebuttal of her arguments.
Bowlby’s reliance on animal studies (the work of Konrad Lorenz, Niko
Tinbergen, and Harry Harlow) and his claim that attachment was an adaptation
became central to the success of his ethological theory of attachment. First, his
book came out during a period of unprecedented interest in animal behavior
during the late 1960s and 1970s; as evidence suce it to note that Lorenz and
Tinbergen won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1973. Second,
by appealing to the higher authority of biology Bowlby’s views on attachment
benetted from a halo eect. However, I have argued elsewhere that Bowlby
selectively referred to those studies supporting his positions while ignoring
other studies that did not support his views (Vicedo, 2013; for a critical rebuttal
of attachment theorists’ appeal to evolution and animal studies, see Vicedo,
2017a). Yet, as important as Bowlby’s appeal to biology was, it is doubtful that
his theory would have become widespread were it not for the development of a
laboratory tool that allowed attachment researchers to operationalize the study
of attachment relations. American/Canadian psychologist Mary Ainsworth car-
ried out the work that according to attachment scholars provided the empirical
support for Bowlby’s theory.
Ainsworth: Uniformity in the laboratory
During 1954–1955, Ainsworth studied infant care practices among the Ganda
people of central Africa. For a period of 7months, she conducted home visits
to about 20 Ugandan households to observe the interaction between mothers
and 28 infants. After moving to Johns Hopkins University in the United States
in 1955, Ainsworth conducted another observational study of 26 White, mid-
dle-class mother-infant pairs in Baltimore.
Neither of these studies included in-depth ethnographic information about
the socio-economic or cultural context of the families and about their goals and
beliefs about childrearing. Ainsworth’s aim was not to understand childrear-
ing practices in their socio-cultural context. Consonant with the psychological
tradition in which she was trained and the universal aspirations of attachment
theory, she aimed to discover universal patterns of behavior and their causes.
In 1967 Ainsworth published Infancy in Uganda. To assess attachment, she
focused on three aspects of an infant’s behavior: the use of mother as a secure
base for exploration; the infant’s distress during brief separations from mother;

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 5
and the infant’s fear when encountering strangers. She classied the infants she
had observed in three groups: secure-attached, insecure-attached, and non-at-
tached. Ainsworth identied several factors as signicant for the development of
infant-mother attachment, but she concluded that the determinant ones were
the conduct and the feelings of the mother, mainly her sensitivity in responding
to her baby’s signals (Ainsworth, 1967, p. 400).
In the Baltimore home study, Ainsworth could not observe the attachment
behaviors she had identied in her Ugandan study. But Ainsworth did not see
those negative results as evidence for the diversity of children’s behaviors in
dierent cultures. Rather than interpreting those observations as a challenge to
the universality of attachment responses, she devised a procedure to try to elicit
the behaviors she had observed in Uganda: the Strange Situation Procedure
(SSP). This 20-min laboratory experiment comprised 7 episodes of 3min each.
Twenty-three of the infants from the Baltimore study, ranging in age from 9 to
24months, were tested to see how they reacted when their mothers left them in
an unfamiliar environment alone, with a stranger, and also how they responded
upon being reunited with their mothers.
The alleged power of the SSP grew quickly. In a short period, researchers went
from presenting it as a tool used to elicit children’s behaviors to accepting it as
a reliable test used to categorize infants. They moved from justifying its use as
a hypothesis-generating procedure to claiming that it was a method capable of
establishing causal relations. In 1970 Ainsworth and Bell (1970, p. 52) put forward
the SSP as a tool ‘to illustrate’ children’s attachment and exploratory behav-
iors in a ‘laboratory microcosm.’ But in 1978 Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall
(1978) presented the SSP as a reliable test for categorizing not only behaviors,
but also children and their mothers. Depending mainly on the infant’s behav-
ior upon the mother’s return, the infants were classied as securely attached,
anxious-avoidant, and anxious-resistant (1978, p. xi). Since the authors claimed
that maternal sensitivity is the main factor shaping the attachment, the cate-
gorization of children automatically entailed a categorization of the mothers
as well. As they put it:
… the ndings here reported suggest that one can establish a fair basis for predict-
ing strange-situation behavior from home behavior and, perhaps more important,
that one can assess certain general aspects of the infant’s characteristic relation-
ship with his mother from his behavior in the strange situation. (Ainsworth et al.,
1978, p. 135)
Thus, according to these attachment theorists, a twenty-minute laboratory
procedure suced to establish causal relations between a mother’s care and
her child’s personality. Furthermore, Ainsworth et al. argued that their ndings
were normative and supported Bowlby’s theory of attachment (Ainsworth et
al., 1978, p. 95).
In my view, the SSP procedure played a crucial part in the advancement of
Bowlby’s theory among American researchers because it tted well within the

6 M. VICEDO
dominant vision of science that psychologists defended. Psychology is a large
eld that embraces many dierent approaches. But, as historians of science have
documented (Herman, 1995; Solovey, 2013), after WWII a large number of psy-
chologists and social scientists increasingly turned towards a model of science
that aimed to emulate the natural sciences in their reliance on experiments,
predictions, and universal generalizations. Developmental psychologists criti-
cal of triumphalist narratives of their eld have also noted this scientistic turn.
Moving away from its interdisciplinary beginnings, child development studies
focused increasingly on psychology and on ‘one conception of that discipline
– as an experimental laboratory endeavor seeking universal generalizations
and principles along the lines of the physical and biological sciences,’ as Kessel
(2009, p. 830) noted.
In addition, attachment theory supported a particular vision of children that
gained currency after WWII. Mayes and Lassonde (2014, p. 6) have identied
several dening features in the American postwar developmental paradigm,
including ‘a declining faith in children’s innate resiliency and preprogrammed
constitutional strength in favor of a view of children as fragile and highly sen-
sitive to their environments; a scheme of children’s development as stage-like
with consequential outcomes,’ and the stress on ‘the inuence of parental care.’
For Bowlby and Ainsworth, a secure attachment between mother and child has
to develop early on in order for emotional development to proceed in the right
way. They also saw children as possessing no resilience to overcome the lack of
sensitive parenting. Thus, their views about infants and about the signicance
or parental care tted well within the postwar developmental paradigm.
However, towards the end of the 1970s, several prominent child psycholo-
gists criticized the vision of science and of children supported by attachment
theory as atomistic and reductionistic. In direct reference to SSP studies, Urie
Bronfenbrenner (1977, p. 513) minced no words: ‘Much of contemporary devel-
opmental psychology is the science of the strange behavior of children in
strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time.’
In ‘The American child and other cultural inventions’ William Kessen criticized the
universalistic aspirations of contemporary developmental psychology by calling
attention to the dierent conceptions of childhood and of science existing in
dierent times and places. Kessen found especially problematic the belief in a
‘free standing’ and ‘self-contained’ child with its instincts, traits, and attachments
as essential components of its nature. Not only was it empirically incorrect, but
that vision also enabled psychologists to take the child as the unit of study rather
than considering the child as part of a more complex system of relations and
network of inuences. Thus, the conception of the ‘isolable’ child had important
and troubling methodological consequences: ‘Basically, we have observed those
parts of development that the child could readily transport to our laboratories
or to our testing sites’ (Kessen, 1979, p. 819). In sum, critical voices pointed out
that the reliance on laboratory experiments led developmental psychologists

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 7
to a distorted vision of children because it ignored the role of context in child
development.
The need to study children in context became a recurrent theme in discus-
sions about the state of developmental psychology. In the 1979 special issue
of American Psychologist that the APA dedicated to ‘Psychology and Children’
Brofenbrenner pointed to the ‘missing data’ on contexts of child reading in
studies of human development, and called for explorations of how ecologi-
cal contexts aect the course of psychological growth (Bronfenbrenner, 1979,
p. 844). Michael Cole and his collaborators at the Laboratory of Comparative
Human Cognition at UC-San Diego criticized developmental research that did
not acknowledge what anthropologist Franz Boas had stated as early as 1911:
‘The existence of a mind absolutely independent of conditions of life is unthink-
able.’ They argued that taking this insight seriously ‘would entail recognizing
that laboratory tasks cannot stand alone as a privileged means for discovering
psychological principles.’ And they concluded: ‘Cross-cultural psychology has
forced upon us the recognition that interplay between laboratory and obser-
vational research is a necessity if we are to understand how experience aects
our minds’ (LCHC, 1979, pp. 829, 832). Schwartz wrote that developmental psy-
chology had ‘largely missed the opportunity to consider the child in the cultural
milieu, which is the sine qua non of the developmental completion of a human
nature’ (1981, pp. 11, 12). Super and Harkness (1986) also criticized the focus
on the universal and decontextualized child and put forward the concept of
the ‘developmental niche’ to include an individual’s experience of culture and
environmental inuences.
Despite the fact that these and other researchers from anthropology and
cultural psychology continued to call for a better integration of ethnographic
insights obtained in the eld with the knowledge gained via experimental and
observational studies in the lab, some researchers remained pessimistic. Gustav
Jahoda lamented that, despite the rise of cross-cultural developmental studies,
developmental psychology remained ‘unduly parochial’ because major areas
were not taking cultural diversity seriously (Jahoda, 1986, p. 417). Still, he saw
the cross-cultural study of emotional development as a promising and exciting
eld. The cross-cultural study of the emotions would indeed blossom in the
late 1980s. But this rich work on diverse communities and time periods did not
become integrated with attachment research.
Most attachment researchers continued to focus on using the SSP proce-
dure to study children in the lab, despite the challenges mentioned above to
this approach as well as the mounting critiques to the procedure itself. In the
mid-eighties, several researchers disputed the SSP’s validity and reliability in
the Baltimore study (Kagan, 1984; Lamb et al., 1984). In addition, other scholars
have pointed out that the SSP embeds Western cultural assumptions and thus
cannot be used to study children in non-Western cultures (Levine & Miller, 1990;
Meehan & Hawks, 2013; Rothbaum, Weisz, Pott, Miyke, & Morelli, 2000; see also

8 M. VICEDO
Vicedo, 2013 for a critique of the view that the SSP results provide evidence for
Bowlby’s views).
Yet, the SSP’s ability to operationalize research on attachment facilitated an
explosion of work. To put it plainly, administering a 20-min test in the connes
of a laboratory is a much easier, faster, and cheaper method to obtain fast results
and publications than conducting a eld ethnographic study away from your
own home and oce. A comparison of citations of Ainsworth’s books, Patterns
of Attachment and Infancy in Uganda illustrates the prominence of the SSP, and
shows how the laboratory instrument achieved far greater prominence than her
observational study. Patterns of Attachment (Figure 1(a)) has been cited between
ten and fteen times more often than Infancy in Uganda (Figure 1(b)).
Figure 1.(a) Publications citing Patterns of Attachment (1978) (from Scopus), (b) Publications
citing Infancy in Uganda (1967) (from Scopus).

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 9
It is worth pointing out the irony in attachment researchers’ reliance on the
SSP procedure while ignoring observational studies of children in dierent con-
texts. Bowlby and Ainsworth emphasized their ethological approach in all their
writings. However, ethologists Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen had made
observation in natural environments the rallying call of their new approach
to study behavior in an objective manner. As a corollary, ethologists sharply
criticized the behaviorists’ analysis of animal behavior in the laboratory. For
them, the articial conditions of the laboratory distorted the natural behavior
of animals. Furthermore, for them, experiments were always secondary to eld
observation. One had to rst observe animals in their ecological context. Only
after having a thorough knowledge of an animal’s behavioral patterns in his
natural habitat should an ethologist turn to laboratory or experimental studies.
Indeed, Tinbergen privately expressed his shock upon discovering that Bowlby
had not carried out observational studies of children in order to develop his
views about child development (Vicedo, 2017b).
Contrary to the ethological approach in which context is integral to under-
standing behavior, the bulk of attachment research has relied on the SSP, a
cheap, quick, and simple laboratory procedure, has focused on testing a single
variable (security), and has appealed to a single explanatory factor (maternal
sensitivity). Mead’s fears that child development research often isolated one
single factor and that factor was usually the mother have remained pertinent
in the eld of attachment.
In recent decades, however, anthropologists have challenged the universal-
istic claims of attachment theory again on the basis of extensive research on
diverse cultural settings.
Anthropology re-dux: Infants and mothers in context
A full account of ethnographic studies of childhood is beyond the scope of this
paper. But a brief overview of some recent work about mothers and children
reveals how the diversity uncovered calls into question basic tenets of attach-
ment theory.
In an inuential study, Death Without Weeping, Nancy Scheper-Hughes
showed how the socio-economic context inuences maternal attitudes and
emotions. She followed three generations of mothers living in the slums of
Brazil where the average woman had 9.5 pregnancies, 8 births, and 3.5 infant
deaths. Aware that their babies may not survive, the mothers did not imme-
diately ‘personalize’ their infants, did not name them right after birth, and did
not mourn their deaths as is common in Western culture. Scheper-Hughes con-
cluded that mother love is not a uniform, universal, and naturally monolithic
aect. Challenging attachment theory, she called for recognizing that mother
love ‘represents a matrix of images, meanings, sentiments, and practices that

10 M. VICEDO
are everywhere socially and culturally produced’ (Scheper-Hughes, 1992, p. 341;
see also Scheper-Hughes, 2014).
Other anthropologists demonstrated that socio-cultural contexts inuence
parents’ goals in childrearing and, consequently, their practices, including their
emotional involvement with their infants. Levine et al. (1994) found that Kenyan
Gusii mothers, who bear an average of 10 children, focus rst on their survival
and then on teaching them compliance, contrary to mothers in the U.S. who do
not aim for compliance in childrearing. In her studies of Samoan family relations,
Mageo (2013) found that socialization is not oriented to develop feelings of secu-
rity, but to encourage separation. Since mothers have diverse goals depending
on their socio-economic conditions, cultural traditions, and social class, they also
assess children’s behavior dierently. For example, Harwood, Miller, and Irizarry
(1995) discovered that U.S. mothers in the Anglo and Puerto Rican communities
of Connecticut have dierent conceptions of what a ‘good child’ is, and these
aected their assessment of their children’s behavior in a simulated strange situ-
ation. Some mothers disapproved of ‘secure’ behavior and approved of behavior
that would be classied as ‘insecure.’ Weisner (2005) also reported that some U.S.
mothers were happy to see their child behave in an ‘independent’ way, though
that behavior corresponded to the ‘avoidant’ category in the attachment clas-
sication system. Thus, even in middle-class US groups, parents may not desire
the behavior that attachment scholars consider both natural and ideal.
Cross-cultural studies have also made clear that, contrary to attachment the-
ory’s focus on the mother-infant dyad, childrearing is often a cooperative enter-
prise. As Mead pointed out in her criticisms of Bowlby’s views in the mid-fties,
distributed care is quite common. In many societies, mothers are not the only
ones taking care of children: siblings, fathers, aunts, grandparents, and other
members of the community are involved in dierent ways. Developmental psy-
chology has been slow in acknowledging this fact and its signicance. Weisner
and Gallimore (1977) pointed out that the 1969 Handbook of Socialization Theory
and Research included practically no one but parents as caretakers in its 1182
pages. However, their review of anthropological studies showed the importance
of children as caretakers of their siblings. More recent ethnographic work has
conrmed that children and other family and community members are an intrin-
sic part of caretaking networks in many societies. Among the Beng people of
West Africa, for example, a mother returns to work in the elds when her child
is between 2 and 4months old. During most of the day, diverse sitters carry the
baby on their back from 5 to 20min at a time. The comings and goings of chil-
dren among caretakers are not perceived as a risk; on the contrary, they convey
a feeling of safety to children (Gottlieb, 2004). For other studies of societies with
distributive care (see Keller & Chaudhary, 2017; Meehan & Hawks, 2013; Morelli
et al., 2017; Rogo, 2003; Seymor, 2013; Weisner, 2014).
Finally, contrary to what attachment theory considers normative, parents
in many communities try to avoid attaching to their infants right away. For

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 11
example, in The afterlife is where we come from: The culture of infancy in West
Africa, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb reports that some Beng mothers intention-
ally break the gaze of their infants to their own eyes in order to decrease their
children’s emotional attachment to them (Gottlieb, 2004, p. 161). Anthropologist
David Lancy reviewed over 200 ethnographic and archaeological records from
a variety of geographical areas and historical periods and found that in many
societies infants are not given status as persons at birth and parents resist attach-
ing to them. He concluded that these ndings contradict the universal claims
of attachment theorists (Lancy, 2015). In his view:
‘Attachment theory’ and its descendants have created a narrative of infants ‘at risk’
of emotional maladjustment. In this survey of sources from cultural anthropology,
history, and archeology this perceived risk is absent … . The survey also reveals
that an alternate narrative identies attachment rather than attachment failure as
the risk. A strong, emotional bond is seen as impeding a process whereby infants
are pragmatically sorted into categories of wanted versus unwanted, timely ver-
sus untimely, legitimate versus illegitimate, strong ghters versus sickly ghosts,
and innocent versus demonized, leading to sustained nurturance or extinction.
(Lancy, 2014, p. 89)
Clearly, if mothers have a biological instinct for attachment, as Bowlby claimed,
this innate impulse has been overridden by cultural beliefs and practices in
these communities that delay forming emotional bonds with infants until their
status is evaluated.
Furthermore, all these studies show that infants can thrive in a number of
dierent environments and within diverse systems of child-care. As two more
recent books also make clear (Gottlieb & DeLoache, 2016; Levine & Levine, 2016),
children across the world are raised in many dierent ways. In many societies,
multiple care is a widespread and normal practice.
In sum, ethnographic studies of child-rearing beliefs, goals, and practices
in dierent societies have challenged the universalistic claims of attachment
theory and its focus on the mother-infant dyad. In addition, regardless of the
accuracy of any particular study or the validity of any specic insight, the anthro-
pological work has made clear that context matters when studying child-rear-
ing practices, child development, and emotions in human societies. To explain
behavior and aects, researchers must understand the meanings they acquire
within a particular culture. As both anthropological and historical works have
shown, child rearing practices depend on conceptions of the self, personhood,
and the social good that vary among dierent societies and that have changed
over time (Koops, 2003; Morelli et al., 2017).
Conclusion
In this paper I have examined some powerful criticisms that anthropologists
and cultural psychologists leveled against attachment theory from its inception
to the present. From Mead to current researchers cross-cultural investigations

12 M. VICEDO
have demonstrated the existence of various visions of children and develop-
ment. As Levine and Norman have put it: ‘there is a wider range of pathways to
normal emotional development than has been imagined in attachment theory’
(2008, p. 139). Anthropologists have revealed the variability and diversity in
conceptions of childhood and practices of childcare by studying children in
context. On the basis of that work, many researchers have criticized the failure
of attachment theorists to take culture seriously (Gottlieb, 2014; Keller & Bard,
2017; Lancy, 2014; Levine, 2014; Morelli et al., 2017; Otto & Keller, 2014; Quinn
& Mageo, 2013; Weisner, 2014).
By showing the need to study children in context, cross-cultural studies
have also challenged psychologists’ reliance on laboratory experiments as the
primary methodological tool for uncovering universal behaviors and emotions.
In the case of attachment theory, I have argued that the alleged uniformity of
attachment behaviors was not discovered in the eld but constructed in the
laboratory in problematic ways. Based on studies of isolated children, attach-
ment theorists postulated the existence of universal patterns of attachment.
But children do not grow up in isolation. Thus, the evidence collected in the
lab always needs to be assessed in relation to the observations collected in
eld studies.
If children’s development needs to be understood in context, so does the
development of a scientic theory. Here, I have argued that the rise of attach-
ment studies owes much to the disciplinary goals of psychological research.
Riding upon the coattails of the natural sciences, psychology after WWII aimed
to develop universal laws of human behavior that could be tested in the labo-
ratory. In that context, Ainsworth’s strange situation procedure became instru-
mental in the growth of attachment theory, despite the numerous criticisms of
its application and its interpretation. Anthropologists of childhood, in contrast,
emphasized the need for ethnographic observational studies of childrearing
practices in order to understand the diversity of human experiences.
For several decades scholars have noted that dierent visions of science
created a rift between psychology and anthropology (Edgerton, 1974; Price-
Williams, 1974; Super & Harkness, 1986). Tensions between the two elds con-
tinue to exist in the area of child development as a consequence of their dierent
epistemological and methodological commitments. As long as mainstream psy-
chology remains committed to a model focused on ‘revealing universal laws
about human experience, personality, social life, and subjectivity’ (Herman,
1995, p. 12), it is hard to see how it can accept the claim that ‘there is no one
human psychology and no one pathway of development’ (Keller, 2007, p. 270).
In the recent past, however, many psychologists have also recognized the need
to study children in their socio-cultural milieu, which requires careful analy-
sis of social networks (Lewis, 2005) and cultural contexts (Cole, 1996). Others
have emphasized the need for a new framework of ‘developmental contextu-
alism’ to understand the complex and changing relations aecting children’s

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 13
development across the lifespan (Lamb, 2005, p. 110). More and more psycholo-
gists now believe that ‘human development is a cultural process’ (Rogo, 2003,
p. 3).
Yet, neither the extensive anthropological literature nor the critical psycho-
logical literature have been integrated within attachment research. Thus, the
challenges reviewed here have not been answered.
But we must end on an optimistic note. Recently, there has been a growing
concern that many claims about behavior have been based mostly on data
obtained about people from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich,
and Democratic) societies (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Historians have
also been accumulating evidence that cultural practices of childrearing and
the meaning of emotions have changed through time (Mintz, 2009; Stearns,
2003). If cultural psychologists and anthropologists are right that ‘culture and
psyche make each other up’ (Shweder & Sullivan, 1993, p. 498), the joint eorts
of psychologists, anthropologists, and historians will be necessary to illumi-
nate the co-evolution of cultural contexts and children’s development. As Mead
stressed half a century ago, understanding childhood requires interdisciplinary,
cross-cultural studies of children in context.
Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.
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