Attachment reconsidered : cultural perspectives on a western theory / edited by Naomi Quinn and Jeannette Marie Mageo.

"Attachment theory has massively influenced contemporary psychology, primarily from an American perspective. However, the anthropological criticism of ethnocentrism has wider implications for the discipline of psychology, which often unintentionally introduces psychologists' culturally biased assumptions into theory intended to be general, and is so devoted to culturally decontextualized experimental procedures that fail to challenge this ethnocentrism. Thus the current volume is not only challenge to attachment theorists, but also an object lesson for psychologists of many other stripes. Beyond simply a Euro-American perspective, attachment theory must be contextualized by examining it through local meanings and childrearing practices, along with cultural models of virtue and psychodynamics, all of which are best discovered through ethnography. The contributors expand this critique beyond questions of classification and measurement, to question the cultural assumptions and extend this line of questioning to other ethnocentric concepts"-- Provided by publisher.