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Attachment Reconsidered pp 33–64Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Puzzle of Attachment: Unscrambling Maturational and Cultural Contributions to the Development of Early Emotional Bonds

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Part of the book series: Culture, Mind, and Society ((CMAS))

Abstract

There is a tension that exists over the maturational and cultural contributions to the development of attachment bonds in infants. This chapter first lays out the general puzzle of how to resolve that tension and describes how it has been characterized in the formative work on attachment. Next, that discussion will be extended by reviewing the issues raised by the existing research on attachment in other cultures and discussing what these issues mean for defining the level of cultural analysis needed. Then, attachment is put into developmental (maturational) perspective by placing it in the context of a broader set of infant capacities that develop around the time that attachment also first presents itself. It will be argued that this set of new capacities sets the stage for infants to enter and to begin to make sense of their culturally organized social worlds. The fourth section of the chapter illustrates how complex that entry and sense making is, by providing concrete examples of cultural understandings and practices that influence specific attachment behaviors as they are negotiated by infants and caregivers. The chapter ends with a proposal of how to solve the puzzle of attachment, by working iteratively, and open-mindedly, between a universal theoretical concept and the complex facts on the ground.

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  1. Suzanne Gaskins
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Naomi Quinn Jeannette Marie Mageo

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© 2013 Naomi Quinn and Jeannette Marie Mageo

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Gaskins, S. (2013). The Puzzle of Attachment: Unscrambling Maturational and Cultural Contributions to the Development of Early Emotional Bonds. In: Quinn, N., Mageo, J.M. (eds) Attachment Reconsidered. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137386724_2

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