Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Chapter 1. The Riddle of Nurturance Chapter 3 Chapter 2. Bowlby's Account of Attachment and Caregiving Chapter 4 Chapter 3. The Evolution of Caregiving and Attachment Chapter 5 Chapter 4. The Neurobiology of Caregiving and Attachment Chapter 6 Chapter 5. Caregiving Chapter 7 Chapter 6. Attachment Chapter 8 Chapter 7. Interconnections Chapter 9 Chapter 8. A Connection Theory of Adult Relationship Formation Chapter 10 Chapter 9. Reconsidering Families
David C. Bell is professor of sociology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
This is a wonderful book that begins with the riddle of nurturance
and Bowlby's famous account of attachment and care-giving, but it
is what the author does in the next seven chapters that is even
more remarkable. He traces the evolution of care-giving from
reptiles to mammals to humans, and then he explores the
neurological underpinnings of care-giving and attachment, offers a
theory of care-giving and attachment, develops a model of
relationship formation, and finally, outlines the nature of
familial attachment In this book, Bell provides a model for
exploring the evolution of biological propensities underlying
fundamental social processes. This is not naïve sociobiology or
even evolutionary psychology; it is what I term evolutionary
sociology at its very best because it does not reduce sociology to
biology but shows how analysis of biology and evolution can make
sociology a more robust and interesting discipline. This book, I
hope, represents a harbinger of good things to come as sociology
ends its century-long boycott of biology and, in so doing, becomes
a more mature explanatory science.
*Jonathan H. Turner, Distinguished Professor of Sociology,
University of California, Riverside*
Bell provides an unusually rich, conceptually deep,
multidisciplinary perspective on attachment and caregiving. His
analysis is strikingly novel in many respects yet firmly rooted in
the extensive literature on these topics. Bell's query begins with
his personal experiences, as a husband, parent, and initially alien
yet very close observer of Japanese family relationships. Trained
as a sociologist, he nevertheless focuses on personal feelings,
especially the feeling of caring, and pursues 'love' from the level
of sociology and culture to the level of neuroscience and
evolutionary biology. The book is extremely engaging, although
intellectually demanding, and it is beautifully written throughout.
It offers a great deal to think about if you are interested in the
biology, psychology, or anthropology of human emotions and
relationships.
*Phillip R. Shaver, UC Davis, co-editor of the Handbook of
Attachment*
This ambitious merger of sociology, biology, and psychology finds
that the human experience of "attachment" is neither
deterministically evolutionary nor altogether socially constructed,
but rather a function of varieties of nurturance in dyadic
parent-to-child and child-to-parent
interactions....Recommended.
*CHOICE*
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