Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Harvard University Press)
What explains the human capacity for empathy? Evolutionists have long assumed that the capacity to monitor the feelings of others is an adaptation that allows one group to cooperate in the defense of itself from another group. Hrdy, a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California at Davis, offers an alternative explanation: cooperative and emotional skills emerged to meet the challenge of successfully raising a child.
Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America, by Rebecca Jo Plant (University of Chicago Press)
In the early 20th century, most Americans viewed motherhood as a full-time, morally endowed, and all-encompassing role; by the 1960s, that view had fallen out of favor. Plant, an assistant professor of history at the University of California at San Diego, traces the causes and consequences of the redefinition of motherhood as one component of modern women’s multifaceted identities.
The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion, edited by Richard A. Shweder et al. (University of Chicago Press)
An interdisciplinary reference work consisting of 529 alphabetically arranged entries—from “abandonment and infanticide” to “youth movements"—that distill the latest insights from the field of childhood studies. As Shweder, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago, notes in the introduction, scholars have abandoned the comprehensive theories about child development that once dominated the field. “We live in a post-grand-universal-theory age, and there are many stories to tell about childhood and the successful mental, social, spiritual, and even biological development of children.”
Formative Experiences: The Interaction of Caregiving, Culture, and Developmental Psychobiology, edited by Carol M. Worthman, Paul M. Plotsky, Daniel S. Schechter, Constance A. Cummings (Cambridge University Press)
Writings by biological anthropologists, psychobiologists, neuroscientists, and others on the life-long consequences of early-life—and even prenatal—experiences; contributors emphasize the interactive relationship between experience and the plasticity of the brain. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, contributes a foreword. He writes, “The brain is always developing, and at any given point in life, the brain has been sculpted by all that came before it, even by things long, long before.”
