Abstract
Early research found commonalities across hunter-gatherer communities in regards to infant care. Infants were held frequently, spent most of the day and night in skin-to-skin contact, breastfed on demand, received intimate caregiving, and experienced low levels of distress. These shared infant care practices are assumed to have deep evolutionary roots and together serve as a defining characteristic of hunter-gatherer life. Yet, the degree to which hunter-gatherers are experiencing social, economic, and environmental change may have created conditions that alter these defining characteristics. In this chapter we explore infant care among the Aka foragers in the Central African Republic. We utilize naturalistic behavioral observations collected over almost 20 years to examine whether care patterns have persisted or changed over the course of a generational timespan. The Aka discussed in this chapter remain a mobile foraging population, but they have also experienced change at multiple levels. Whether or how these changes influence infant care has not yet been examined. Results indicate that Aka infant care patterns have persisted. Although some significant changes were noted, not all caregiving showed a decline, some increased and some changes were only limited to one age category. Additionally, the vast majority of caregiving practices remained constant across the periods. Cross-cultural data presented also support this finding. Aka infant care patterns are comparable to other hunter-gatherer populations and the frequency of care and interactions match or exceed most farming and Euro-American patterns. We argue that Aka infant care patterns have persisted because they are vertically transmitted and highly-conserved. Moreover, Aka infant care is indicative of a much larger cultural pattern of trust, intimacy and sharing, not immediately affected by outside influences.
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Acknowledgements
Material is based upon work supported by the NICHD (awarded to B. Hewlett) and the Leakey Foundation and the National Science Foundation (BCS-9055213) (awarded to C. Meehan). We thank Axel Schölmeric and Hillary Fouts for assistance with the NICHD databases. We offer special thanks to the Aka families who participated and the research teams in 1994–1996 and 2009–2013. We thank our research assistants and the Central African Republic Research Ministry.
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Meehan, C.L., Hagen, E.H., Hewlett, B.S. (2017). Persistence of Infant Care Patterns Among Aka Foragers. In: Reyes-García, V., Pyhälä, A. (eds) Hunter-gatherers in a Changing World. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42271-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42271-8_12
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