Sara asks if anyone knows this book:

Feeding Our Babies: Exploring Traditions of Breastfeeding and Infant
Nutrition (Paperback)
Priya Vincent

I know this book very well.  I reviewed it for JHL about two years ago.  The
author, who is from India and is a medical doctor (if I recall properly)
read a handful of mostly anthropological journal articles about this topic,
and then plagiarized the heck out of them.  Many passages of this book,
presented as though written by Vincent, are word-for-word,
sentence-for-sentence, plagiarized from the original source.  When she
describes my research on age at weaning, it is presented as though she did
the research.

I urge people not to support this practice.  Please don't buy this book.  If
you are interested in the original information, read the original articles.
Most of them were published in the journal "Social Science and Medicine" in
the 1980s.  Other anthropologists whose work is highly plagiarized (in
addition to mine) are Ann Millard and Catherine Panter-Brick.  I contacted
the publisher of "Feeding Our Babies" and asked them to stop publication and
distribution of the book, but they declined.  I contacted the publisher of
"Social Science and Medicine" with multiple examples of the original
passages and the plagiarized parts of the book (since they own the
copyrights), and they referred the matter to their legal department, which
responded that it wasn't worth pursuing a lawsuit because the book probably
wouldn't sell many copies.

Dr. Vincent was contacted by her publisher about my complaints and sent me
an email saying she didn't view what she had done as plagiarism.  Ha!  My
Hindu friend (also a Ph.D. academic, though not an anthropologist), the same
one who is made nauseous by the smell of bar-be-que, told me that plagiarism
is rampant in some parts of India, and that people will even take a well
known book and reprint it with their own name as author.  She says India
copywright law is very lax and no one punishes plagiarists.

So -- for all of these reasons, I urge people to make the extra effort to go
read the original articles.

Kathy Dettwyler

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