Since the late 1970s and early 1980s the concept of resistance has become ubiquitous within contemporary cultural anthropology. Theorizing resistance, however, has been problematic from the start and, as I shall argue, a significant part of the problem resides in the anti-psychological position taken by most cultural anthropologists. How can actors protest and resist hegemonic powers if they are not endowed with internalized cultural understandings that motivate such actions? This article briefly reviews some of the resistance literature in cultural anthropology and then focuses upon three ethnographies of resistance, representing three different decades of research and three different theoretical approaches within resistance studies, to demonstrate how different branches of psychological anthropology can enhance our understanding of some of the behaviors that have been labeled ‘resistance’.

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Multiple caretaking of infants and young children, although nearly universal, remains controversial in the United States. Why? This article addresses that question by first reviewing some of the pertinent cross‐cultural record on multiple child care and then by drawing on my own and others' research in India as a case study. The article critiques some of the Western developmental and psychoanalytic assumptions that underlie beliefs that exclusive mothering is essential to a child's well‐being and argues that a feminist psychological anthropology is required to address these important issues about child care in American society and to help normalize multiple child care in both practice and theory.

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