You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
First published twelve years ago, this book was reissued in a revised version by Penguin Books last year and many readers may by now be familiar with it, even if only by hearsay. Jean Liedloff, from 21/2 years spent living with the Yequana tribe, in South America, a non-aggressive tribe of “Stone Age” Indians, attempts to extrapolate from what she observed there a universal philosophy of life with far-reaching implications for bringing up children, and to apply it to present-day Western society.
I shall first try to convey something of what Ms Liedloff means by the continuum concept. For some two million years humankind functioned in harmony with nature with an instinctive sense of the Tightness of things, a Tightness which was handed down over time, thus forming a continuum. She therefore sees Western culture as a deviant aberration over a relatively short period of time so that we are still born with this knowledge within ourselves and we would be able to return to this.
She spells out some of what follows from this sense of Tightness. From birth onwards a baby needs (total) skin contact, and is in torment if she does not have this twenty-four hours a day; this includes bathing with her mother and sleeping with the parents even during lovemaking. She is thus happily in the midst of constant activity without artificially being the centre of attention. This period of in-arms experience would usually last for about 6-8 months, by which time the infant would be ready to begin moving away from her mother. Her mother would be there in the background if the infant needed her but she would provide the minimum of supervision, trusting the infant's judgement not to hurt herself, say, on the numerous machetes which are lying around. Children are seen as inherently social, inherently wanting to comply with society's expectation of them and are allowed to make many of their own decisions to a staggering degree from toddlerhood onwards. Ms Liedloff's vision of perfect harmony depi