Indigenous cultures vary widely rather than being uniformly gentle with children
Evidence
But the rhetorical move — the move from “the !Kung San do less corporal punishment” to “indigenous people, in general, are gentler with their children than industrial moderns are” — is the noble-savage trope all over again. And it is no more reliable now than it was in Tacitus’s hands. … The anthropological reality — as careful contemporary anthropologists like Carolina Izquierdo, Karen Kramer, Robert LeVine document — is that traditional, non-industrial, indigenous, and pre-modern societies vary enormously among themselves on the use of corporal punishment. Some are significantly less corporal than industrial society. Some are significantly more. Most are somewhere in the middle. There is no clean categorical contrast between “industrial moderns who hit” and “primitives who don’t.” That contrast is a Western literary trope, not an empirical generalization. — , The Rod and the Child, 1265
Categorization
- XREF: Directly corrects the pop-culture ‘gentle parenting from indigenous cultures’ narrative circulating in modern parenting discourse. — connects to: Eastern and Southeast Woodland peoples all shared matrilineal communal non-corporal child-raising — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 5103; Corporal punishment of Māori children is a colonial inheritance, not an indigenous practice. — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 10061
- SEED: Essay angle: the noble-savage trope persists in modern parenting culture as ‘recovering’ vs ‘constructing’ gentle parenting.