Lisa Marasco writes:

 In traditional
>cultures, as I understand it, the whole family may share in the care of
>the baby, and thus many people will be accepted early on. "Strangers", I
>would hazard to guess, were probably few by definition. Would you agree,
>however, Katherine, that our isolated nuclear families make for a
>different environment with different results? The Ezzo's expect babies to
>go to *anyone*, most especially the true stranger, without a complaint.
>In the context of American culture and childraising, I find that our
>expectations of child development can and probably should apply, though
>their universal application is certainly in doubt. If I'm missing
>something, feel free to chime in again!

Well, certainly the expectation that a baby should go to *anyone* is
ludicrous.  Sorry if I went off the deep end about psychology, but it's one
of my pet peeves, and something I constantly have to deal with in my
classes, where students have learned about "human" behavior in their
psychology courses, only to find out in my class that most of the world
doesn't act that way.  Their initial response is often to classify members
of other cultures then as inferior, sub-human, not really civilized human,
etc.  Even anthropologists fail to recognize this sometimes, like when they
talk about how "humans" are monogamous by nature, or have face-to-face
intercourse by nature -- both of these are cultural, of course, not
biological.  And look in the index of any developmental child psychology
textbook and see if you can find any discussion of breastfeeding (usually
none at all, all babies are assumed to be naturally/normally bottle-fed) and
any discussion of where babies sleep (usually none at all, all babies are
assumed to be sleeping in their own crib in a separate room).  IMHO this
makes much of what we think we know about "normal human development" highly
suspect.  Of course, I also think Freud's and Piaget's theories are full of
holes, so what do I know?