A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Eight Societies

About Alma GottliebJudy S. DeLoache

Alma Gottlieb is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Visiting Scholar in Anthropology at Brown University. She conducted long-term fieldwork in Beng communities in Ivory Coast (197993) and now connects with young Beng people through social media. A full-length ethnography of Beng childrearing practices appeared as The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa (2004); she has also written the Beng-English Dictionary (with M. Lynne Murphy 1995) and Under the Kapok Tree: Identity and Difference in Beng Thought (1992). With proceeds from two memoirs of their lives with the Beng Parallel Worlds (1993) and Braided Worlds (2012) Gottlieb and fiction writer Philip Graham co-founded the Beng Community Fund a non-governmental organization that funds development projects in Beng villages. Judy DeLoache is the Kenan Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University of Virginia. She has published extensively on cognitive development in infants and young children. She has served as President of the Developmental Division of the American Psychological Association and as President of the Cognitive Development Society. Dr DeLoache's research was funded by a Scientific MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013 Dr DeLoache received the William James Award for Lifetime Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Science from the American Psychological Society as well as the Distinguished Research Contributions Award from the Society for Research on Child Development.