Open and Closed Knowledge Systems, the Four Stages of Cognition, and the Cultural Management of Birth: Part 1

To better understand both the resistance to and the acceptance of pre- and perinatal psychology and other ways of thinking about birth, Part One of this article describes four stages of cognition and their anthropological equivalents. I correlate Stage 1—closed, rigid thinking —with naïve realism (“our way is the only way”), fundamentalism (“our way is the only right way”), and fanaticism (“our way is so right that all others should be assimilated or eliminated”). Stage 2, ethnocentrism, insists “our way is best.” More open and fluid are Stage 3, cultural relativism, and Stage 4, global humanism.