Infanticide Explained

Infanticide, what a dreadful word! Most people from the Euro-American culture think about it with a mixture of abhorrence and scorn. Anthropologists, however, have a duty of suspending their preconceptions when studying phenomena from the native’s point of view. In most of the explanations analysed, rather than being a social pathology, infanticide appears to make the long-term goals possible, such as reproductive success or the maintenance of harmony within the community. An extensive presentation of various explanations of infanticide collected from anthropological literature is followed by a critical categorisation of these justifications. Most of the them draw from evolutionary biology, demography, economics, as well as psychology. It is curious to find that researchers lean towards naturalist explanations of the phenomenon, discounting the influence of culture as secondary – rather than parallel – to the mechanisms of nature. What this text offers is, on the one hand, an evaluative reading of descriptions of infanticide found in various cultures, and on the other, a suggestion that infanticide, just as many other phenomena, may not be as evil a behaviour it initially seems.