The nucleotide sequence of the xfp-gene region in six known and two unknown species of Bifidobacterium was determined and compared with the published sequences of B. animalis subsp. lactis DSM10140 and B. longum biovar longum NCC2705. The xfp coding sequences were 73% identical and coded for 825 amino acids in all 10 sequences. Partial sequences of an adjacent gene, guaA, were 61% identical in six sequences for which data were available. The region between xfp and guaA was variable in both length and sequence. Oligonucleotide sequences from the conserved and variable xfp regions were used as PCR primers, in combinations of appropriate specificity, for the detection and identification of Bifidobacterium isolates.

This special issue demonstrates the value of close examinations of mothering as actually practiced by particular mothers in particular circumstances. The articles in this issue analyze instances of mothering in Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, China, and the United States and are followed by commentary from leaders in the field about what might be learned by attending to such everyday practices. These ethnographic studies extend lines of research within psychological anthropology that have focused on mothers as socializers, by drawing on contemporary developments, including those concerned with schema theory, psychodynamic and intersubjective processes, the interpenetrations of political‐economies and domestic relations, feminist perspectives, and questions of agency in the lives of women and children. This examination of projects, processes, and practices of mothering affords insights into a range of related questions concerning human nature, processes of enculturation and socialization, individual agency and lived worlds, cultural patterning and change. [mothering, practice, child socialization, cross‐cultural child development, psychological anthropology]

We interpret material culture using a Bakhtinian model of dialogicality. Metaphoric differences in male and female perspectives of the building rites and iconography of premodern Murik outrigger canoes are adduced. Men view the vehicle in terms of initiation and their war cult while women view it in physiological images of pregnancy, birth, and nurture, as well as in terms of the seductive powers conferred upon female‐cult initiates. We take these two points of view to constitute a contrapuntal dialogue about gender and agency in the reproduction of Murik society.

Despite ongoing debates about family, work, and the characteristics of good mothers, cultural and disciplinary biases have led many anthropologists and psychologists to ignore cultural aspects of mothering. Feminists and others have questioned the lack of agency for women in dominant psychological theories and the relative absence in psychoanalytic theory of mothers as subject persons. On the basis of data from the Murik of Papua New Guinea, in which mothering is conceptualized as a template for many kinds of social relationships and as a source of power, I argue that a holistic and relational view of mothering in social and cultural context is needed to restore subjectivity and agency to women as mothers and to understand mothering as a dynamic and culturally informed process.

Issues of mothering and work, though often spoken about in practical terms, express deeper concerns about the transmission and acquisition of cultural values and the part mothering plays in the creation of the self in society. Based on a case study of the Murik of Papua New Guinea and recent insights into intersubjectivity and recognition of the motherchild relationship, I argue that Murik mothers deploy their capacity for subject‐subject interaction in ways that teach children crucial cultural schemas related to work, food, and recognition. In negotiating intersubjectivity, mother and child establish the broad outlines of a competent self in a cultural world.