Universality Without Uniformity: A Culturally Inclusive Approach to Sensitive Responsiveness in Infant Caregiving.

Do caregivers in non-Western communities adapt their behaviors to the needs of infants? This question reflects one of the most long-standing debates on the universality versus culture-specificity of caregiver-infant interactions in general and sensitive responsiveness to infants in particular. In this article, an integration of both points of view is presented, based on the theoretical origins of the sensitive responsiveness construct combined with the ethnographic literature on caregivers and infants in different parts of the world. This integration advocates universality without uniformity, and calls for multidisciplinary collaborations to investigate the complexities and nuances of caregiver-infant interactions in different cultures. Salient issues are illustrated with observations of infants (ages 7-31 months) in Mali, the Republic of Congo, and the Philippines.

Hunter-gatherer health and development policy: How the promotion of sedentism worsens the Agta's health outcomes.

Many hunter-gatherer groups live on the outskirts of wider society, experiencing poor health outcomes with little access to medical care. From a development perspective, key interventions include the sedentarisation of these mobile peoples into camps nearby larger towns with sanitation infrastructure and medical care, as increased access to services is assumed to improve outcomes. However, recent research in the Agta (Philippine foragers from North-east Luzon) has demonstrated that individuals residing in more 'developed' communities suffer from increased morbidity and mortality. Here, using quantitative and ethnographic data on health collected between 2002 and 2014, we explore why this trend occurs by examining the relationship between key development initiatives with self-reported illness and the uptake of medical interventions with 415 Agta men, women and children. We demonstrate that health outcomes worsen as sedentarisation progresses, despite some increases in medical access. We argue this is because the development paradigm is not evidence-based, but rather stems from an ideological dislike of mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Compounded by cultural insensitivity and daily discrimination, current interventions are ill-suited to the unique needs of hunter-gatherers, and thus ineffective. Based on our findings we offer future short and long-term policy suggestions which seek to reduce the Agta's vulnerability, rather than increase it.

Received sensitivity: adapting Ainsworth's scale to capture sensitivity in a multiple-caregiver context.

A network of multiple caregivers contributing to the care of an infant is the norm in many non-Western cultural contexts. Current observational measures of caregiver sensitive responsiveness to infant signals focus on single caregivers, failing to capture the total experience of the infant when it comes to the sensitive responsiveness received from multiple sources. The current paper aims to introduce the construct of received sensitivity that captures the sensitivity that an infant experiences from multiple sources in cultural contexts where simultaneous multiple caregiving is common. The paper further presents an adaptation of Ainsworth's Sensitivity versus Insensitivity observation scale to allow for the assessment of sensitivity as received by the infant regardless of who is providing the sensitive responses to its signals. The potential usefulness of the Received Sensitivity scale is illustrated by two case studies of infants from an Agta forager community in the Philippines where infants are routinely taken care of by multiple caregivers. The case studies show that the infants' total experience of being responded to sensitively cannot be simply derived from the sum of individual caregiver sensitivity scores, demonstrating the potential added value of the new Received Sensitivity observation measure.

Limits to Indigenous Participation: The Agta and the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park, the Philippines.

Increased attention for indigenous rights in relation to nature conservation has in the Philippines resulted in legislation formalizing indigenous peoples' participation in protected area management. We discuss the implementation of this legislation, based on the case of the Agta inhabiting the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park. The Agta are hunter-gatherers who settle along the coasts and rivers of northeast Luzon. Being indigenous to the park, they hold one third of the seats in its management board. However, our content analysis of this management board's meetings, combined with qualitative observations of the Agta's position in the park, show that their participation in its management is hampered by socio-cultural, practical, financial and political barriers. We demonstrate that formalizing indigenous participation in protected area management is not enough to break through existing power structures that inhibit marginalized stakeholders to defense of their interests in natural resources against those of more powerful actors.