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<p>For decades, scholars have critiqued the universalizing assumptions of classic attachment theory—particularly the work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth—arguing for more culturally specific and historically situated frameworks of childhood development. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic research with mental health professionals in peri-urban Cape Town, South Africa, this article shows how classic attachment theory affects clinical attention in a context of distributed caregiving practices shaped by racialized dispossession, displacement, and economic precarity. The article identifies two modes of attention: a clinical one and a decolonial one. The clinical mode, grounded in classic attachment theory, narrows attention around maternal absence and sensitivity, frames distributed caregiving as deficient, localizes blame in individual caregivers, and produces racialized representations of black communities&#xa0;as inherently “dysfunctional.” The decolonial mode, practiced by counselors who shared their clients’ history of displacement and dispossession, foregrounds structural context as an organizing frame, refuses individualized blame while acknowledging harm, and holds the complexities of endurance alongside generational grief. Because modes of attention are cultivated rather than fixed, tracking them opens a different question: not who to blame, but how one might attend differently.</p>

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Decolonial Modes of Attention: Classic Attachment Theory, Structural Racism, and Caregiving Practices in the Aftermath of Apartheid

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月23日

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  • Stephen Steph McIsaac

摘要

For decades, scholars have critiqued the universalizing assumptions of classic attachment theory—particularly the work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth—arguing for more culturally specific and historically situated frameworks of childhood development. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic research with mental health professionals in peri-urban Cape Town, South Africa, this article shows how classic attachment theory affects clinical attention in a context of distributed caregiving practices shaped by racialized dispossession, displacement, and economic precarity. The article identifies two modes of attention: a clinical one and a decolonial one. The clinical mode, grounded in classic attachment theory, narrows attention around maternal absence and sensitivity, frames distributed caregiving as deficient, localizes blame in individual caregivers, and produces racialized representations of black communities as inherently “dysfunctional.” The decolonial mode, practiced by counselors who shared their clients’ history of displacement and dispossession, foregrounds structural context as an organizing frame, refuses individualized blame while acknowledging harm, and holds the complexities of endurance alongside generational grief. Because modes of attention are cultivated rather than fixed, tracking them opens a different question: not who to blame, but how one might attend differently.