Commentaries on Premastication: the second arm of infant and young child feeding for health and survival? By Gretel Pelto Yuanyuan Zhang Jean‐Pierre Habicht

摘要

The paper on premastication by Pelto, Yuanyuan and Habicht published in this volume raises important issues for all readers and editors who work across disciplines. Often, we only pay lip service to disciplines other than our own. I am certainly guilty of this; my orientation has always been anthropological. When I move outside this disciplinary framework, reviewers notice, and I receive ‘revise and resubmit’ instructions with great regularity. But lodged as I am in anthropology, I have a certain advantage over those in nutrition, epidemiology or public health. Anthropology, in its mandate to understand the human condition, past and present, must embrace biological, cultural and historical evidence. Failure to do so encourages the narrow specialization that makes it ever more difficult to talk to one another. Our discipline fights this battle at annual meetings, as it herds archaeologists, linguists, biological and cultural anthropologists into a single gigantic conference, struggling to find themes that speak to all subfields. Sit in the wrong salon, and you may as well be in a meeting of epidemiologists (the specialty I find most difficult to understand).