Fewer than a score of studies have looked specifically or closely at
early interaction in other cultures,specifying sequences and relative
amounts of smiling,vocalizing,head nodding,mutual gaze,and so forth
(Leiderman,Tulkin,and Rosenfeld 1977;Field et al.1981).It is not sur-
prising that they showed many variations on a basic theme.Although the
earliest behaviors of mothers to infants are most similar across cultures
(Lewis and Ban 1977) and prosodic modifications of motherese are
virtually universal (Fernald 1992:397),avoidance of face-to-face play,
absence of direct talking to babies,and general disinclination to stimu-
late infants in some cultures led researchers to question the universality
of attachment and,by extension,of early interactions.However,if one
considers evidence of sensitivity to temporal organization,cross-modal
and supramodal neural processing,and the importance of kinesics,the
present cross-cultural literature holds promise for discerning common
elements in early interactions.
Yet even in Western infants,matching of temporal patterns in kinesic
interactions,movements that occur specifically to changes of orientation,
gaze,and facial expression,is far more frequent than in vocal interac-
tions (Beebe and Lachman 1988b:318).Despite the research emphasis
on highly vocal,dramatic,American middle-class interactions of mothers
and infants,kinesics is the dominant interactive modality at four months.
Although there are no studies outside America and Europe of “inter-
actional synchrony,”I suspect that in less vocal or dramatic cultures
where stimulation and intensity are not developed,or in energetic but
nonverbal interactions,investigation and analysis would reveal that
mothers and infants nevertheless temporally and dynamically adjust
their behavior to one another in ways that escape direct observation in
real time,and thereby achieve individual and social adaptive benefits
derived from largely Western models of early interactions (e.g.,see
Dixon et al.1981;Martini and Kirkpatrick 1981).
Studies of infancy in contemporary hunter-gatherer societies such as
the !Kung (Konner 1977),Arnhemland Aborigines (Hamilton 1981),Efe
pygmies (Tronick et al.1987),and Aka pygmies (Hewlett 1991) unani-
mously reported that caretaker-infant association is vocally,visually,and
physically stimulating,giving plausibility to a hypothesis that such inter-
action may well be ancestral.Social Regulation and Emotional Conjoinment
Both mother-infant engagement and music are social behaviors,a resem-
blance we might overlook without the ethnomusicological observation
that people generally make music for and with other people (Feld
1974:207).Although our modern idea of musical experience tends to
regard it as made by or happening to an individual,and contributing to398 Ellen Dissanayake