Reflective positionality and the environment of evolutionary adaptedness: Time for collaboration

This is a sequel to my articles "Enculturation, acculturation, positionality and power" (2023), and to "Boarding school syndrome: Reconsidered in social context and through the lens of attachment theory" (2021). It argues that the concepts of "positionality" and "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" overlap and complement each other in a way that has not so far been fully recognised and applied. It spells out positionality more fully, as developed in Britain by the feminist social anthropologist Judith Okely (1996, 2008, 2012). It recognises and confronts her objections to what she saw as Bowlby's patriarchal positioning of women as childcarers "in the home". I argue, with support from his co-researcher Mary Ainsworth (1965), that this was partly a misunderstanding based on Bowlby's early 1950s views before his ideas had fully matured. I re-examine Bowlby's foundational idea of the "environment of evolutionary adaptedness", now largely overlooked. I point out how this generates a radically challenging proposition: that our underlying neuro-biology is still grounded in our small group, pre-agricultural hunter–gatherer past, located some two million years ago— Bowlby's "primeval event" (see the Afterword for further elaboration). I argue that this is our primate species' "common position" despite the subsequent development of more "localised" environments of adaptedness. I draw on this to conclude that we must now definitively recognise our intrinsic, evolved need for early maternal or mother-figure nurture and concomitant security of attachment, or otherwise, as Bowlby says, psychosomatic pathology and trauma ensues. I end by highlighting that we ignore our ultimate dependence on nurturing Mother Earth at our peril.