The Cultural Nature of Human Development
Barbara Rogoff
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Cultural Nature
of Human Development
Barbara Rogoff
Human Development
1 2003
1 Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2003 by Barbara Rogoff
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rogoff, Barbara. The cultural nature of human development / Barbara Rogoff.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-513133-9 1. Socialization. 2. Child development. 3. Cognition and culture. 4. Developmental psychology. I. Title. HM686 .R64 2003 305.231 — dc21 2002010393
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For Salem, Luisa, Valerie, and David
with appreciation for their companionship
and support all along the way.
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a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
I deeply appreciate the wisdom, support, and challenges of Beatrice Whit- ing , Lois and Ben Paul, Mike Cole, Sylvia Scribner, Shep White, Jerry Kagan, Roy Malpass, Marta Navichoc Cotuc, Encarnación Perez, Pablo Cox Bixcul, and the children and parents of San Pedro, who opened my eyes to patterns of culture and how to think about them.
I am grateful to the insightful discussions and questions of Cathy An- gelillo, Krystal Bellinger, Rosy Chang, Pablo Chavajay, Erica Coy, Julie Hollo- way, Afsaneh Kalantari, Ed Lopez, Eugene Matusov, Rebeca Mejía Arauz, Behnosh Najafi, Emily Parodi, Ari Taub, Araceli Valle, and my graduate and undergraduate students who helped me develop these ideas. I especially appreciate the suggestions of Debi Bolter, Maricela Correa-Chávez, Sally Duensing, Shari Ellis, Ray Gibbs, Giyoo Hatano, Carol Lee, Elizabeth Ma- garian, Ruth Paradise, Keiko Takahashi, Catherine Cooper, Marty Chemers, and Wendy Williams and the valuable assistance of Karrie André and Cindy White. The editorial advice of Jonathan Cobb, Elizabeth Knoll, Joan Bossert, and several anonymous reviewers greatly improved the book. I greatly appreciate the donors and UCSC colleagues who created the UCSC Foundation chair in psychology that supports my work.
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Orienting Concepts and Ways of Understanding the Cultural Nature of Human Development
Looking for Cultural Regularities One Set of Patterns: Children’s Age-Grading and Segregation
from Community Endeavors or Participation in Mature Activities
Other Patterns Orienting Concepts for Understanding Cultural Processes Moving Beyond Initial Assumptions
Beyond Ethnocentrism and Deficit Models Separating Value Judgments from Explanations
Diverse Goals of Development Ideas of Linear Cultural Evolution Moving Beyond Assumptions of a Single Goal of Human
Development Learning through Insider/Outsider Communication
Outsiders’ Position Insiders’ Position
Moving between Local and Global Understandings Revising Understanding in Derived Etic Approaches The Meaning of the “Same” Situation across Communities
Development as Transformation of Participation in Cultural Activities
A Logical Puzzle for Researchers An Example: “We always speak only of what we see” Researchers Questioning Assumptions
Concepts Relating Cultural and Individual Development Whiting and Whiting’s Psycho-Cultural Model Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological System Descendents Issues in Diagramming the Relation of Individual
and Cultural Processes Sociocultural-Historical Theory Development as Transformation of Participation
in Sociocultural Activity
Individuals, Generations, and Dynamic Cultural Communities
Humans Are Biologically Cultural Prepared Learning by Infants and Young Children Where Do Gender Differences Come From?
Participation in Dynamic Cultural Communities Culture as a Categorical Property of Individuals versus
a Process of Participation in Dynamically Related Cultural Communities
The Case of Middle-Class European American Cultural Communities
Conceiving of Communities across Generations
Child Rearing in Families and Communities
Family Composition and Governments Cultural Strategies for Child Survival and Care Infant-Caregiver Attachment
Maternal Attachment under Severe Conditions Infants’ Security of Attachment Attachment to Whom?
Family and Community Role Specializations Extended Families Differentiation of Caregiving, Companion, and Socializing Roles Sibling Caregiving and Peer Relations The Community as Caregiver
Children’s Participation in or Segregation from Mature Community Activities Access to Mature Community Activities
x C O N T E N T S
“Pitching in” from Early Childhood Excluding Children and Youth from Labor—
and from Productive Roles Adults “Preparing” Children or Children Joining Adults
Engaging in Groups or Dyads Infant Orientation: Face-to-Face with Caregiver versus Oriented
to the Group Dyadic versus Group Prototypes for Social Relations Dyadic versus Multiparty Group Relations in Schooling
Developmental Transitions in Individuals’ Roles in Their Communities
Age as a Cultural Metric for Development Developmental Transitions Marking Change in Relation to
the Community Rates of Passing Developmental “Milestones”
Age Timing of Learning Mental Testing Development as a Racetrack
According Infants a Unique Social Status Contrasting Treatment of Toddlers and Older Siblings Continuities and Discontinuities across Early Childhood
Responsible Roles in Childhood Onset of Responsibility at Age 5 to 7? Maturation and Experience
Adolescence as a Special Stage Initiation to Manhood and Womanhood Marriage and Parenthood as Markers of Adulthood Midlife in Relation to Maturation of the Next Generation Gender Roles
The Centrality of Child Rearing and Household Work in Gender Role Specializations
Sociohistorical Changes over Millennia in Mothers’ and Fathers’ Roles
Sociohistorical Changes in Recent Centuries in U.S. Mothers’ and Fathers’ Roles
Occupational Roles and Power of Men and Women Gender and Social Relations
Interdependence and Autonomy
Sleeping “Independently” Comfort from Bedtime Routines and Objects Social Relations in Cosleeping
C O N T E N T S xi
Independence versus Interdependence with Autonomy Individual Freedom of Choice in an Interdependent System Learning to Cooperate, with Freedom of Choice
Adult-Child Cooperation and Control Parental Discipline Teachers’ Discipline
Teasing and Shaming as Indirect Forms of Social Control Conceptions of Moral Relations
Moral Reasoning Morality as Individual Rights or Harmonious Social Order Learning the Local Moral Order Mandatory and Discretionary Concepts in Moral Codes
Cooperation and Competition Cooperative versus Competitive Behavior in Games Schooling and Competition
Thinking with the Tools and Institutions of Culture
Specific Contexts Rather Than General Ability: Piaget around the World
Schooling Practices in Cognitive Tests: Classification and Memory Classification Memory
Cultural Values of Intelligence and Maturity Familiarity with the Interpersonal Relations used in Tests Varying Definitions of Intelligence and Maturity
Generalizing Experience from One Situation to Another Learning to Fit Approaches Flexibly to Circumstances Cultural Tools for Thinking
Literacy Mathematics Other Conceptual Systems
Distributed Cognition in the Use of Cultural Tools for Thinking Cognition beyond the Skull Collaboration in Thinking across Time and Space Collaboration Hidden in the Design of Cognitive Tools and
Procedures An Example: Sociocultural Development in Writing Technologies and
Techniques Crediting the Cultural Tools and Practices We Think With
xii C O N T E N T S
8 Learning through Guided Participation in Cultural Endeavors
Basic Processes of Guided Participation Mutual Bridging of Meanings Mutual Structuring of Participation
Distinctive Forms of Guided Participation Academic Lessons in the Family Talk or Taciturnity, Gesture, and Gaze Intent Participation in Community Activities
9 Cultural Change and Relations among Communities
Living the Traditions of Multiple Communities Conflict among Cultural Groups Transformations through Cultural Contact across Human History
An Individual’s Experience of Uprooting Culture Contact Community Changes through Recent Cultural Contacts
Western Schooling as a Locus of Culture Change Schooling as a Foreign Mission Schooling as a Colonial Tool Schooling as a Tool of U.S. Western Expansion
The Persistence of Traditional Ways in Changing Cultural Systems Contrasting Ideas of Life Success Intervention in Cultural Organization of Community Life
Dynamic Cultural Processes: Building on More Than One Way Learning New Ways and Keeping Cultural Traditions in Communities
Where Schooling Has Not Been Prevalent Immigrant Families Borrowing New Practices to Build on Cultural
Traditions Learning New Ways and Keeping Cultural Traditions in Communities
Where Schooling Has Been Central Cultural Variety as an Opportunity for Learning—for Individuals and
Communities The Creative Process of Learning from Cultural Variation
A Few Regularities Concluding with a Return to the Orienting Concepts
References
Credits
Index
C O N T E N T S xiii
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The Cultural Nature
of Human Development
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1 Orienting Concepts
and Ways of Understanding
the Cultural Nature of Human Development
Human development is a cultural process. As a biological species, humans are defined in terms of our cultural participation. We are prepared by both our cultural and biological heritage to use language and other cultural tools and to learn from each other. Using such means as language and literacy, we can collectively remember events that we have not personally experienced —becoming involved vicariously in other people’s experience over many generations.
Being human involves constraints and possibilities stemming from long histories of human practices. At the same time, each generation continues to revise and adapt its human cultural and biological heritage in the face of current circumstances.
My aim in this book is to contribute to the understanding of cultural patterns of human development by examining the regularities that make sense of differences and similarities in communities’ practices and tradi- tions. In referring to cultural processes, I want to draw attention to the con- figurations of routine ways of doing things in any community’s approach to living. I focus on people’s participation in their communities’ cultural prac- tices and traditions, rather than equating culture with the nationality or ethnicity of individuals.
For understanding cultural aspects of human development, a primary goal of this book is to develop the stance that people develop as participants in cultural communities. Their development can be understood only in light of
3
the cultural practices and circumstances of their communities—which also change.
To date, the study of human development has been based largely on re- search and theory coming from middle-class communities in Europe and North America. Such research and theory often have been assumed to gen- eralize to all people. Indeed, many researchers make conclusions from work done in a single group in overly general terms, claiming that “the child does such-and-so” rather than “these children did such-and-so.”
For example, a great deal of research has attempted to determine at what age one should expect “the child” to be capable of certain skills. For the most part, the claims have been generic regarding the age at which chil- dren enter a stage or should be capable of a certain skill.
A cultural approach notes that different cultural communities may ex- pect children to engage in activities at vastly different times in childhood, and may regard “timetables” of development in other communities as surprising or even dangerous. Consider these questions of when children can begin to do certain things, and reports of cultural variations in when they do:
When does children’s intellectual development permit them to be responsible for others? When can they be trusted to take care of an infant?
In middle-class U.S. families, children are often not regarded as capable of caring for themselves or tending another child until perhaps age 10 (or later in some regions). In the U.K., it is an offense to leave a child under age 14 years without adult supervision (Subbotsky, 1995). However, in many other communities around the world, children begin to take on responsibility for tending other children at ages 5–7 (Rogoff et al., 1975; see figure 1.1), and in some places even younger children begin to assume this responsibility. For example, among the Kwara’ae of Oceania,
Three year olds are skilled workers in the gardens and household, excellent caregivers of their younger siblings, and accomplished at social interaction. Although young children also have time to play, many of the functions of play seem to be met by work. For both adults and children, work is accompanied by singing, joking, verbal play and entertaining conversation. Instead of playing with dolls, children care for real babies. In addition to working in the family gar- dens, young children have their own garden plots. The latter may seem like play, but by three or four years of age many children are taking produce they have grown themselves to the market to sell, thereby making a significant and valued contribution to the family income. (Watson-Gegeo, 1990, p. 87)
4 T H E C U L T U R A L N A T U R E O F H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T
Orienting Concepts 5
When do children’s judgment and coordination allow them to handle sharp knives safely?
Although U.S. middle-class adults often do not trust children below about age 5 with knives, among the Efe of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in- fants routinely use machetes safely (Wilkie, personal communication, 1989; see figure 1.2). Likewise, Fore (New Guinea) infants handle knives and fire safely by the time they are able to walk (Sorenson, 1979). Aka parents of Central Africa teach 8- to 10-month-old infants how to throw small spears and use small pointed digging sticks and miniature axes with sharp metal blades:
Training for autonomy begins in infancy. Infants are allowed to crawl or walk to whatever they want in camp and allowed to use knives, machetes, digging sticks, and clay pots around camp. Only if an infant begins to crawl into a fire or hits another child do parents or others interfere with the infant’s activity. It was not unusual, for in- stance, to see an eight month old with a six-inch knife chopping the branch frame of its family’s house. By three or four years of age chil- dren can cook themselves a meal on the fire, and by ten years of age Aka children know enough subsistence skills to live in the forest alone if need be. (Hewlett, 1991, p. 34)
f i g u r e 1 . 1
This 6-year-old Mayan (Guatemalan) girl is a skilled caregiver for her baby cousin.
So, at what age do children develop responsibility for others or suffi- cient skill and judgment to handle dangerous implements? “Ah! Of course, it depends,” readers may say, after making some guesses based on their own cultural experience.
Indeed. It depends. Variations in expectations for children make sense once we take into
account different circumstances and traditions. They make sense in the context of differences in what is involved in preparing “a meal” or “tending” a baby, what sources of support and danger are common, who else is nearby, what the roles of local adults are and how they live, what institutions peo- ple use to organize their lives, and what goals the community has for devel- opment to mature functioning in those institutions and cultural practices.
Whether the activity is an everyday chore or participation in a test or a laboratory experiment, people’s performance depends in large part on the circumstances that are routine in their community and on the cultural prac- tices they are used to. What they do depends in important ways on the cul- tural meaning given to the events and the social and institutional supports provided in their communities for learning and carrying out specific roles in the activities.
6
f i g u r e 1 . 2
An Efe baby of 11 months skillfully cuts a fruit with a machete, under the watchful eye of a relative (in the Ituri Forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo).
Cultural research has aided scholars in examining theories based on ob- servations in European and European American communities for their ap- plicability in other circumstances. Some of this work has provided crucial counterexamples demonstrating limitations or challenging basic assump- tions of a theory that was assumed to apply to all people everywhere. Ex- amples are Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1927) research questioning the Oedipal complex in Sigmund Freud’s theory and cross-cultural tests of cognitive de- velopment that led Jean Piaget to drop his claim that adolescents universally reach a “formal operational” stage of being able to systematically test hy- potheses (1972; see Dasen & Heron, 1981).
The importance of understanding cultural processes has become clear in recent years. This has been spurred by demographic changes throughout North America and Europe, which bring everyone more in contact with cultural traditions differing from their own. Scholars now recognize that understanding cultural aspects of human development is important for re- solving pressing practical problems as well as for progress in understanding the nature of human development in worldwide terms. Cultural research is necessary to move beyond overgeneralizations that assume that human development everywhere functions in the same ways as in researchers’ own communities, and to be able to account for both similarities and differences across communities.
Understanding regularities in the cultural nature of human develop- ment is a primary aim of this book. Observations made in Bora Bora or Cincinnati can form interesting cultural portraits and reveal intriguing dif- ferences in custom, but more important, they can help us to discern regu- larities in the diverse patterns of human development in different commu- nities.
Looking for Cultural Regularities
Beyond demonstrating that “culture matters,” my aim in this book is to in- tegrate the available ideas and research to contribute to a greater under- standing of how culture matters in human development. What regularities can help us make sense of the cultural aspects of human development? To understand the processes that characterize the dynamic development of in- dividual people as well as their changing cultural communities, we need to identify regularities that make sense of the variations across communities as well as the impressive commonalities across our human species. Although research on cultural aspects of human development is still relatively sparse, it is time to go beyond saying “It depends” to articulate patterns in the vari- ations and similarities of cultural practices.
Orienting Concepts 7
The process of looking across cultural traditions can help us become aware of cultural regularities in our own as well as other people’s lives, no matter which communities are most familiar to us. Cultural research can help us understand cultural aspects of our own lives that we take for granted as natural, as well as those that surprise us elsewhere.
For example, the importance given to paying attention to chronologi- cal age and age of developmental achievements is unquestioned by many who study human development. However, questions about age of transi- tions are themselves based on a cultural perspective. They fit with cultural institutions that use elapsed time since birth as a measure of development.
One Set of Patterns: Children’s Age-Grading and Segregation from Community Endeavors or Participation in Mature Activities
It was not until the last half of the 1800s in the United States and some other nations that age became a criterion for ordering lives, and this inten- sified in the early 1900s (Chudacoff, 1989). With the rise of industrializa- tion and efforts to systematize human services such as education and med- ical care, age became a measure of development and a criterion for sorting people. Specialized institutions were designed around age groups. Develop- mental psychology and pediatrics began at this time, along with old-age in- stitutions and age-graded schools.
Before then in the United States (and still, in many places), people rarely knew their age, and students advanced in their education as they learned. Both expert and popular writing in the United States rarely referred to spe- cific ages, although of course infancy, childhood, and adulthood were dis- tinguished. Over the past century and a half, the cultural concept of age and associated practices relying on age-grading have come to play a central, though often unnoticed role in ordering lives in some cultural communities —those of almost all contemporary readers of this book.
Age-grading accompanied the increasing segregation of children from the full range of activities in their community as school became compulsory and industrialization separated workplace from home. Instead of joining with the adult world, young children became more engaged in specialized child-focused institutions and practices, preparing children for later entry into the community.
I argue that child-focused settings and ways in which middle-class par- ents now interact with their children are closely connected with age-grading and segregation of children. Child-focused settings and middle-class child- rearing practices are also prominent in developmental psychology, connect- ing with ideas about stages of life, thinking and learning processes, motiva- tion, relations with peers and parents, disciplinary practices at home and
8 T H E C U L T U R A L N A T U R E O F H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T
school, competition and cooperation. I examine these cultural regularities throughout this book, as they are crucial to understanding development in many communities.
An alternative pattern involves integration of children in the everyday activities of their communities. This pattern involves very different con- cepts and cultural practices in human development (Rogoff, Paradise, Mejía Arauz, Correa-Chávez, & Angelillo, 2003). The opportunities to observe and pitch in allow children to learn through keen attention to ongoing ac- tivities, rather than relying on lessons out of the context of using the knowledge and skills taught. In this pattern, children’s relationships often involve multiparty collaboration in groups rather than interactions with one person at a time. I examine these and related regularities throughout this book.
Other Patterns
Because cultural research is still quite new, the work of figuring out what regularities can make sense of the similarities and variations across com- munities is not yet very far along. However, there are several other areas that appear to involve important regularities in cultural practices.
One set of regularities has to do with a pattern in which human rela- tions are assumed to require hierarchical organization, with someone in charge who controls the others. An alternative pattern is more horizontal in structure, with individuals being responsible together to the group. In this pattern, individuals are not controlled by others—individual autonomy of decision making is respected—but individuals are also expected to coordi- nate with the group direction. As I discuss in later chapters, issues of cul- tural differences in sleeping arrangements, discipline, cooperation, gender roles, moral development, and forms of assistance in learning all connect with this set of patterns.
Other patterns have to do with strategies for managing survival. Infant and adult mortality issues, shortage or abundance of food and other re- sources, and settled living or nomadic life seem to connect with cultural similarities and variations in infant care and attachment, family roles, stages and goals of development, children’s responsibilities, gender roles, cooper- ation and competition, and intellectual priorities.
I develop these suggestions of patterns of regularity and some others throughout the book. Although the search for regularities in cultural sys- tems has barely begun, it has great promise for helping us understand the surprising as well as the taken-for-granted ways of cultural communities worldwide, including one’s own.
To look for cultural patterns, it is important to examine how we can
Orienting Concepts 9
think about the roles of cultural processes and individual development. In the first three chapters, I focus on how we can conceptualize the interrelated roles of individual and cultural processes. In the next section of this chap- ter, I introduce some important orienting concepts for how we can think about the roles of cultural processes in human development.
Orienting Concepts for Understanding Cultural Processes
The orienting concepts for understanding cultural processes that I develop in this book stem from the sociocultural (or cultural-historical) perspective. This approach has become prominent in recent decades in the study of how cultural practices relate to the development of ways of thinking , remem- bering , reasoning , and solving problems (Rogoff & Chavajay, 1995). Lev Vygotsky, a leader of this approach from early in the twentieth century, pointed out that children in all communities are cultural participants, liv- ing in a particular community at a specific time in history. Vygotsky (1987) argued that rather than trying to “reveal the eternal child,” the goal is to dis- cover “the historical child.”
Understanding development from a sociocultural-historical perspective requires examination of the cultural nature of everyday life. This includes studying people’s use and transformation of cultural tools and technologies and their involvement in cultural traditions in the structures and institu- tions of family life and community practices.
A coherent understanding of the cultural, historical nature of human development is emerging from an interdisciplinary approach involving psy- chology, anthropology, history, sociolinguistics, education, sociology, and other fields. It builds on a variety of traditions of research, including par- ticipant observation of everyday life from an anthropological perspective, psychological research in naturalistic or constrained “laboratory” situations, historical accounts, and fine-grained analyses of videotaped events. To- gether, the research and scholarly traditions across fields are sparking a new conception of human development as a cultural process.
To understand regularities in the variations and similarities of cultural processes of human development across widespread communities it is im- portant to examine how we think about cultural processes and their relation to individual development. What do we mean by cultural processes? How do people come to understand their own as well as others’ cultural practices and traditions? How can we think about the ways that individuals both par- ticipate in and contribute to cultural processes? How do we approach un- derstanding the relation among cultural communities and how cultural communities themselves transform?
10 T H E C U L T U R A L N A T U R E O F H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T
This section outlines what I call orienting concepts for understanding cultural processes. These are concepts to guide thinking about how cultural processes contribute to human development.
The overarching orienting concept for understanding cultural processes is my version of the sociocultural-historical perspective:
Humans develop through their changing participation in the socio- cultural activities of their communities, which also change.
This overarching orienting concept provides the basis for the other orient- ing concepts for understanding cultural processes:
Culture isn’t just what other people do. It is common for people to think of themselves as having no culture (“Who, me? I don’t have an accent”) or to take for granted the circumstances of their his- torical period, unless they have contact with several cultural com- munities. Broad cultural experience gives us the opportunity to see the extent of cultural processes in everyday human activities and development, which relate to the technologies we use and our institutional and community values and traditions. The practices of researchers, students, journalists, and professors are cultural, as are the practices of oral historians, midwives, and shamans.
Understanding one’s own cultural heritage, as well as other cultural com- munities, requires taking the perspective of people of contrasting backgrounds. The most difficult cultural processes to examine are the ones that are based on confident and unquestioned assump- tions stemming from one’s own community’s practices. Cultural processes surround all of us and often involve subtle, tacit, taken-for-granted events and ways of doing things that require open eyes, ears, and minds to notice and understand. (Children are very alert to learning from these taken-for-granted ways of doing things.)
Cultural practices fit together and are connected. Each needs to be un- derstood in relation to other aspects of the cultural approach. Cultural processes involve multifaceted relations among many as- pects of community functioning; they are not just a collection of variables that operate independently. Rather, they vary together in patterned ways. Cultural processes have a coherence beyond “elements” such as economic resources, family size, moderniza- tion, and urbanization. It is impossible to reduce differences be- tween communities to a single variable or two (or even a dozen or two); to do so would destroy the coherence among the con- stellations of features that make it useful to refer to cultural
Orienting Concepts 11
processes. What is done one way in one community may be done another way in another community, with the same effect, and a practice done the same way in both communities may serve different ends. An understanding of how cultural practices fit together is essential.
Cultural communities continue to change, as do individuals. A commu- nity’s history and relations with other communities are part of cultural processes. In addition, variations among members of communities are to be expected, because individuals connect in various ways with other communities and experiences. Variation across and within communities is a resource for humanity, allow- ing us to be prepared for varied and unknowable futures.
There is not likely to be One Best Way. Understanding different cultural practices does not require determining which one way is “right” (which does not mean that all ways are fine). With an under- standing of what is done in different circumstances, we can be open to possibilities that do not necessarily exclude each other. Learning from other communities does not require giving up one’s own ways. It does require suspending one’s own assump- tions temporarily to consider others and carefully separating ef- forts to understand cultural phenomena from efforts to judge their value. It is essential to make some guesses as to what the patterns are, while continually testing and open-mindedly revis- ing one’s guesses. There is always more to learn.
The rest of this chapter examines how we can move beyond the in- evitable assumptions that we each bring from our own experience, to ex- pand our understanding of human development to encompass other cul- tural approaches. This process involves building on local perspectives to develop more informed ideas about regular patterns, by:
• Moving beyond ethnocentrism to consider different perspectives • Considering diverse goals of development • Recognizing the value of the knowledge of both insiders and out-
siders of specific cultural communities • Systematically and open-mindedly revising our inevitably local un-
derstandings so that they become more encompassing
The next two chapters take up related questions of ways to conceive of the relation between individual and cultural processes, the relation of cul- ture and biology (arguing that humans are biologically cultural), and how to think about participation in changing cultural communities.
12 T H E C U L T U R A L N A T U R E O F H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T
The remaining chapters examine regularities in the cultural nature of such aspects of development as children’s relations with other children and with parents, the development of thinking and remembering and reading skills, gender roles, and ways that communities arrange for children to learn. The research literature that I draw on in these chapters is wide-ranging, in- volving methods from psychology, anthropology, history, sociolinguistics, education, sociology, and related fields. The different research methods en- hance each other, helping us gain broader and deeper views of the cultural nature of human development. In choosing which research to include, I emphasize investigations that appear to be based on some close involvement with everyday life in the communities studied, to facilitate understanding phenomena as they play out.
The book’s concluding chapter focuses on the continually changing na- ture of cultural traditions as well as of people’s involvement in and creation of them. The chapter focuses particularly on changes related to Western schooling—increasingly pervasive in the lives of children and adults world- wide—to examine dynamic cultural processes that build new ways as well as building on cultural traditions.
Moving Beyond Initial Assumptions
It would hardly be fish who discovered the existence of water.
—Kluckhohn, 1949, p. 11
Like the fish that is unaware of water until it has left the water, people often take their own community’s ways of doing things for granted. Engaging with people whose practices differ from those of one’s own community can make one aware of aspects of human functioning that are not noticeable until they are missing or differently arranged (LeVine, 1966). “The most valuable part of comparative work in another culture [is] the chance to be shaken by it, and the experience of struggling to understand it” (Goldberg , 1977, p. 239).
People who have immersed themselves in communities other than their own frequently experience “culture shock.” Their new setting works in ways that conflict with what they have always assumed, and it may be unsettling to reflect on their own cultural ways as an option rather than the “natural” way. An essay on culture shock illustrates this notion by describ- ing discoveries of assumptions by travelers from the Northern Hemi- sphere:
Orienting Concepts 13
Assumptions are the things you don’t know you’re making, which is why it is so disorienting the first time you take the plug out of a washbasin in Australia and see the water spiraling down the hole the other way around. The very laws of physics are telling you how far you are from home.
In New Zealand even the telephone dials are numbered anti- clockwise. This has nothing to do with the laws of physics—they just do it differently there. The shock is that it had never occurred to you that there was any other way of doing it. In fact, you had never even thought about it at all, and suddenly here it is—different. The ground slips. (Adams & Carwardine, 1990, p. 141)
Even without being immersed in another cultural system, comparisons of cultural ways may create discomfort among people who have never be- fore considered the assumptions of their own cultural practices. Many in- dividuals feel that their own community’s ways are being questioned when they begin to learn about the diverse ways of other groups.
An indigenous American author pointed out that comparisons of cul- tural ways—necessary to achieve understanding of cultural processes— can be experienced as an uncomfortable challenge by people who are used to only one cultural system:
Such contrasts and comparisons tend to polarize people, making them feel either attacked or excluded, because all of us tend to think of comparisons as judgmental. . . . Comparisons are inevitable and so too is the important cultural bias that all of us foster as part of our heritage. (Highwater, 1995, p. 214)
One of my aims in this book is to separate value judgments from un- derstanding of the various ways that cultural processes function in human development. The need to avoid jumping to conclusions about the appro- priateness of other people’s ways has become quite clear in cultural research, and is the topic of the next section.
Suspending judgment is also often needed for understanding one’s own cultural ways. People sometimes assume that respect for other ways implies criticism of or problems with their own familiar ways. Therefore, I want to stress that the aim is to understand the patterns of different cultural com- munities, separating understanding of the patterns from judgments of their value. If judgments of value are necessary, as they often are, they will thereby be much better informed if they are suspended long enough to gain some understanding of the patterns involved in one’s own familiar ways as well as in the sometimes surprising ways of other communities.
14 T H E C U L T U R A L N A T U R E O F H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T
Beyond Ethnocentrism and Deficit Models
People often view the practices of other communities as barbaric. They as- sume that their community’s perspective on reality is the only proper or sensible or civilized one (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Campbell & LeVine, 1961; Jahoda & Krewer, 1997). For example, the ancient Greeks facilitated their own cultural identity by devaluing people with different languages, customs, and conceptions of human nature (Riegel, 1973). Indeed, the word barbarous derives from the Greek term for “foreign,” “rude,” and “ig- norant” (Skeat, 1974; it is also the derivation of the name Barbara!). The term barbarian was applied to neighboring tribes who spoke languages un- intelligible to the Greeks, who heard only “bar-bar” when they spoke:
Beyond the civilizational core areas lay the lands of the barbarians, clad in skins, rude in manner, gluttonous, unpredictable, and aggres- sive in disposition, unwilling to submit to law, rule, and religious guidance . . . not quite human because they did not live in cities, where the only true and beautiful life could be lived, and because they appeared to lack articulate language. They were barbaraphonoi, bar-bar-speakers [Homer, Iliad 2.867], and in Aristotle’s view this made them natural slaves and outcasts. (Wolf, 1994, p. 2)
To impose a value judgment from one’s own community on the cul- tural practices of another—without understanding how those practices make sense in that community—is ethnocentric. Ethnocentrism involves making judgments that another cultural community’s ways are immoral, unwise, or inappropriate based on one’s own cultural background without taking into account the meaning and circumstances of events in that commu- nity. Another community’s practices and beliefs are evaluated as inferior without considering their origins, meaning , and functions from the per- spective of that community. It is a question of prejudging without appro- priate knowledge.
For example, it is common to regard good parenting in terms deriving from the practices of one’s own cultural community. Carolyn Edwards char- acterized contemporary middle-class North American child-rearing values (of parents and child-rearing experts) in the following terms:
Hierarchy is anathema, bigger children emphatically should not be allowed to dominate smaller ones, verbal reasoning and negotiation should prevail, children should always be presented choices, and physical punishment is seen as the first step to child abuse. All of the ideas woven together represent a meaning system. (1994, p. 6)
Orienting Concepts 15
Edwards pointed out that in other communities, not all components of this meaning system are found. If a Kenyan mother says, “Stop doing that or I will beat you,” it does not mean the same thing as if the statement came from a middle-class European American mother. In an environment in which people need a certain physical and mental toughness to thrive (for heavy physical work, preparedness for warfare, long marches with cycles of hunger), the occasional use of physical discipline has a very different mean- ing than in an environment where physical comfort is often taken for granted. In contrast, a Kenyan mother would not consider withholding food from her children as punishment: “To her, what American mothers do (in the best interests of their children), namely, restrict children’s food intake and deprive them of delicious, available, wanted food, would be terrible, un- thinkable, the next thing to child abuse!” (pp. 6–7). Viewed from outside each system of meaning , both sets of practices might be judged as inap- propriate, whereas from within each system they make sense.
From the 1700s, scholars have oscillated between the deficit model— that “savages” are without reason and social order—and a romantic view of the “noble savage” living in a harmonious natural state unspoiled by the constraints of society ( Jahoda & Krewer, 1997). Both of these extremes treat people of cultural communities other than those of the observer as alien, to be reviled (or pitied) on the one hand, or to be wistfully revered on the other.
These models are still with us. An illustration of the deficit model ap- pears in a report based on one week of fieldwork among the Yolngu, an Abo- riginal community in Australia, which concluded:
Humans can continue to exist at very low levels of cognitive de- velopment. All they have to do is reproduce. The Yolngu are, self evi- dently to me, not a terribly advanced group.
But there is not much question that Euro-American culture is vastly superior in its flexibility, tolerance for variety, scientific thought and interest in emergent possibilities from any primitive society extant. (Hippler, quoted and critiqued by Reser, 1982, p. 403)
For many years, researchers have compared U.S. people of color with European American people using a deficit model in which European Amer- ican skills and upbringing have been considered “normal.” Variations in other communities have been considered aberrations or deficits, and inter- vention programs have been designed to compensate for the children’s “cul- tural deprivation.” (See discussions of these issues in Cole & Bruner, 1971; Cole & Means, 1981; Deyhle & Swisher, 1997; García Coll, Lamberty, Jen- kins, McAdoo, Crnic, Wasik, & García, 1996; Hays & Mindel, 1973; Hilliard & Vaughn-Scott, 1982; Howard & Scott, 1981; McLoyd & Ran-
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dolph, 1985; McShane & Berry, 1986; Moreno, 1991; Ogbu, 1982; Valentine, 1971.)
Children and adolescents of color have often been portrayed as “problems” which we dissect and analyze using the purportedly ob- jective and dispassionate tools of our trade. . . . With a white sample serving as the “control,” [the research] proceeds to conducting com- parative analyses. . . . Beginning with the assumption of a problem, we search for differences, which, when found, serve as proof that the problem exists. (Cauce & Gonzales, 1993, p. 8)
Separating Value Judgments from Explanations
To understand development, it is helpful to separate value judgments from observations of events. It is important to examine the meaning and func- tion of events for the local cultural framework and goals, conscientiously avoiding the arbitrary imposition of one’s own values on another group.
Interpreting the activity of people without regard for their meaning system and goals renders observations meaningless. We need to understand the coherence of what people from different communities do, rather than simply determining that some other group of people do not do what “we” do, or do not do it as well or in the way that we do it, or jumping to con- clusions that their practices are barbaric.
Reducing ethnocentrism does not require avoidance of (informed) value judgments or efforts to make changes. It does not require us to give up our own ways to become like people in another community, nor imply a need to protect communities from change. If we can get beyond the idea that one way is necessarily best, we can consider the possibilities of other ways, seeking to understand how they work and respecting them in their time and place. This does not imply that all ways are fine—many commu- nity practices are objectionable. My point is that value judgments should be well informed.
Ordinary people are constantly making decisions that impact others; if they come from different communities it is essential for judgment to be informed by the meaning of people’s actions within their own community’s goals and practices. A tragic example of the consequences of ethnocentric misunderstanding—making uninformed judgments—is provided in an account of the medical ordeal of a Hmong child in California, when the as- sumptions and communication patterns of the U.S. health system were in- compatible with those of the family and their familiar community (Fadi- man, 1997). The unquestioned cultural assumptions of the health workers contributed to the deteriorating care of the child.
Orienting Concepts 17
The diversity of cultural ways within a nation and around the world is a resource for the creativity and future of humanity. As with the impor- tance of supporting species diversity for the continued adaptation of life to changing circumstances, the diversity of cultural ways is a resource pro- tecting humanity from rigidity of practices that could jeopardize the species in the future (see Cajete, 1994). We are unable to foresee the issues that humanity must face in the future, so we cannot be certain that any one way of approaching human issues will continue to be effective. Within the practices and worldviews of different communities are ideas and prac- tices that may be important for dealing with the challenges ahead. A uni- form human culture would limit the possibilities for effectively addressing future needs. Just as the cure for some dread disease may lie in a concoc- tion made with leaves in a rain forest, the knowledge and skills of a small community far away (or next door) may provide a solution to other ills of the present or future. Although bureaucracies are challenged by variety and comfortable with uniformity, life and learning rely on the presence of di- verse improvisations.
Diverse Goals of Development
Key to moving beyond one’s own system of assumptions is recognizing that goals of human development—what is regarded as mature or desirable— vary considerably according to the cultural traditions and circumstances of different communities.
Theories and research in human development commonly reveal an as- sumption that development proceeds (and should proceed) toward a unique desirable endpoint of maturity. Almost all of the well-known “grand theo- ries” of development have specified a single developmental trajectory, mov- ing toward a pinnacle that resembles the values of the theorist’s own com- munity or indeed of the theorist’s own life course. For example, theorists who are extremely literate and have spent many years in school often regard literacy and Euro-American school ways of thinking and acting as central to the goals of successful development, and even as defining “higher” cultural evolution of whole societies.
Ideas of Linear Cultural Evolution
The idea that societies develop along a dimension from primitive to “us” has long plagued thinking regarding cultural processes. A clear example ap- pears in a letter to a friend that Thomas Jefferson wrote in the early 1800s:
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Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our sea-coast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subsisting and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of cre- ation to the present day. (Pearce, quoted in Adams, 1996, p. 41)
The assumption that societal evolution progresses toward increasing differentiation of social life—from the “backward” simplicity of “primi- tive” peoples—is the legacy of the intellectual thought of the late 1800s and early 1900s (Cole, 1996; Jahoda, 2000; Shore, 1996). For example, in 1877, cultural evolutionist Lewis Henry Morgan proposed seven stages of human progress: lower savagery, middle savagery, upper savagery, lower bar- barism, middle barbarism, upper barbarism, and civilization. Societies were placed on the scale according to a variety of attributes. Especially important to his idea of the path to civilization were monogamy and the nuclear fam- ily, agriculture, and private property as the basis of economic and social or- ganization (Adams, 1996).
The scholarly elaboration of the idea of linear cultural evolution oc- curred during the same era that the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history arose, subdividing the topics of the broader inquiry. As Michael Cole (1996) noted, it was also the period in which large bu- reaucratic structures were growing to handle education (in schools) and economic activity (in factories and industrial organizations). Also during this time, European influence was at its peak in Africa, Asia, and South Amer- ica; in North America, large influxes of immigrants from Europe inundated the growing cities, fleeing poverty in their homelands and joining rural Americans seeking the promises of U.S. cities.
The European-based system of formal “Western” schooling was seen as a key tool for civilizing those who had not yet “progressed to this stage.” Politicians spoke of school as a way to hasten the evolutionary process (Adams, 1996). In the words of U.S. Commissioner of Education William Torrey Harris in the 1890s:
But shall we say to the tribal people that they shall not come to these higher things unless they pass through all the intermediate stages, or can we teach them directly these higher things, and save them from
Orienting Concepts 19
the slow progress of the ages? In the light of Christian civilization we say there is a method of rapid progress. Education has become of great potency in our hands, and we believe that we can now vicari- ously save them very much that the white race has had to go through. Look at feudalism. Look at the village community stage. . . . We have had our tribulation with them. But we say to lower races: we can help you out of these things. We can help you avoid the imperfect stages that follow them on the way to our level. Give us your children and we will educate them in the Kindergarten and in the schools. We will give them letters, and make them acquainted with the printed page. (quoted in Adams, 1996, p. 43)
The assumption that societies develop along one dimension from primitive to advanced survived into the second half of the 1900s (Cole, 1996; see also Latouche, 1996). When, after World War II, the United Na- tions planned economic and political “development” for newly independ- ent colonial empires, the goal was to make them more “developed” (in a unidirectional sense, like earlier attempts to make them more “civilized”). Formal schooling was a key tool. Schooling modeled on European or North American schools spread throughout the former colonial empires to “raise” people out of poverty and ignorance and bring them into “modern” ways.
Moving Beyond Assumptions of a Single Goal of Human Development
Assumptions based on one’s own life about what is desirable for human de- velopment have been very difficult for researchers and theorists to detect be- cause of their similarity of backgrounds (being , until recently, almost ex- clusively highly schooled men from Europe and North America). As Ulric Neisser pointed out, self-centered definitions of intelligence form the basis of intelligence tests:
Academic people are among the stoutest defenders of the notion of intelligence . . . the tests seem so obviously valid to us who are mem- bers of the academic community. . . . There is no doubt that Aca- demic Intelligence is really important for the kind of work that we do. We readily slip into believing that it is important for every kind of significant work. . . . Thus, academic people are in the position of having focused their professional activities around a particular per- sonal quality, as instantiated in a certain set of skills. We have then gone on to define the quality in terms of this skill set, and ended by asserting that persons who lack these special skills are unintelligent al- together. (1976, p. 138)
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f i g u r e 1 . 3
Eastern European Jewish teacher and young students examining a religious text.
Forays of researchers and theorists outside their own cultural commu- nities and growing communication among individuals raised with more than one community’s traditions have helped the field move beyond these ethnocentric assumptions. Research and theory now pay closer attention to the ways that distinct community goals relate to ideals for the development of children (see Super & Harkness, 1997).
For example, cultural research has drawn attention to variations in the relevance of literacy and preliteracy skills in different communities. In a community in which literacy is key to communication and economic suc- cess in adulthood, preschoolers may need to learn to distinguish between the colors and shapes of small ink marks. However, if literacy is not central in a community’s practices, young children’s skill in detecting variations in ink squiggles might have little import.
Similarly, if literacy serves important religious functions, adults may impress its importance on young children (see figure 1.3). For example, in Jewish communities of early twentieth-century Europe, a boy’s first day at school involved a major ceremony that communicated the holiness and at- tractiveness of studying (Wozniak, 1993). The boy’s father would carry him to school covered by a prayer shawl so that he would not see anything un- holy along the way, and at school the rabbi would write the alphabet in honey on a slate while other adults showered the boy with candies, telling him that angels threw them down so that he would want to study.
Orienting Concepts 21
School-like ways of speaking are valued in some communities but not others, and children become skilled in using the narrative style valued in their community (Minami & McCabe, 1995; Mistry, 1993a; Scollon & Scol- lon, 1981; Wolf & Heath, 1992). For example, the narrative style used in “sharing time” (show-and-tell) by African American children often involves developing themes in connected episodes, whereas the narrative style used by European American children may employ tightly structured accounts centered on a single topic, which more closely resemble the literate styles that U.S. teachers aim to foster (Michaels & Cazden, 1986). When pre- sented with narratives from which information regarding children’s group membership was removed, European American adults judged the European American children’s style as more skillful and indicating a greater chance of success in reading. In contrast, African American adults found the African American children’s narratives to be better formed and indicating language skill and likelihood of success in reading. The adults’ judgments reflected their appreciation of the children’s use of shared cultural scripts that spec- ify what is interesting to tell and how to structure it (Michaels & Cazden, 1986).
A focus on literacy or on the discourse styles promoted in schools may not hold such importance in some cultural settings, where it may be more important for young children to learn to attend to the nuances of weather patterns or of social cues of people around them, to use words cleverly to joust, or to understand the relation between human and supernatural events. The reply of the Indians of the Five Nations to an invitation in 1744 by the commissioners from Virginia to send boys to William and Mary College il- lustrates the differences in their goals:
You who are wise must know, that different nations have different conceptions of things; and you will therefore not take it amiss, if our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same with yours. We have had some experience of it: several of our young people were formerly brought up at the colleges of the northern provinces; they were instructed in all your sciences; but when they came back to us . . . [they were] ignorant of every means of living in the woods . . . neither fit for hunters, warriors, or counsellors; they were totally good for nothing. We are, however, not the less obliged by your kind offer . . . and to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care of their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them. (quoted in Drake, 1834)
A more contemporary example of differences in goals comes from West African mothers who had recently immigrated to Paris. They criti-
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cized the French use of toys to get infants to learn something for the future as tiring out the babies, and preferred to just let babies play without fatigu- ing them (Rabain Jamin, 1994). Part of their criticism also related to a con- cern that such focus on objects may lead to impoverished communication and isolation (in much the same way that a U.S. middle-class parent might express concern about the negative impact of video games). These African mothers seemed to prioritize social intelligence over technological intelli- gence (Rabain Jamin, 1994). They more often responded to their 10- to 15- month-old infants’ social action and were less responsive to the infants’ ini- tiatives regarding objects than were French mothers. The African mothers often structured interaction with their infants around other people, whereas the French mothers often focused interaction on exploration of inanimate objects (see also Seymour, 1999). When interactions did focus on objects, the African mothers stressed the social functions of the objects, such as en- hancement of social relationships through sharing , rather than object use or action schemes.
Prioritization of social relationships also occurs in Appalachian com- munities in the United States, where commitments to other people fre- quently take precedence over completion of schooling. When hard times arise for family members or neighbors, Appalachian youth often leave jun- ior high or high school to help hold things together (Timm & Borman, 1997). Social solidarity is valued above individual accomplishment. The pull of kin and neighbors generally prevails, and has for generations.
In each community, human development is guided by local goals, which prioritize learning to function within the community’s cultural in- stitutions and technologies. Adults prioritize the adult roles and practices of their communities, or of the communities they foresee in the future, and the personal characteristics regarded as befitting mature roles (Ogbu, 1982). (Of course, different groups may benefit from learning from each other, and often people participate in more than one cultural community—topics taken up later in this book.)
Although cultural variation in goals of development needs to be rec- ognized, this does not mean that each community has a unique set of val- ues and goals. There are regularities among the variations. My point is that the idea of a single desirable “outcome” of development needs to be dis- carded as ethnocentric.
Indeed, the idea of an “outcome” of development comes from a par- ticular way of viewing childhood: as preparation for life. It may relate to the separation of children from the important activities of their community, which has occurred since industrialization in some societies (discussed in later chapters). The treatment of childhood as a time of preparation for life differs from ways of communities in which children participate in the local
Orienting Concepts 23
mature activities, not segregated from adult life and placed in specialized preparatory settings such as schools.
To learn from and about communities other than our own, we need to go beyond the ethnocentric assumptions from which we each begin. Often, the first and most difficult step is to recognize that our original views are generally a function of our own cultural experience, rather than the only right or possible way. This can be an uncomfortable realization, because people sometimes assume that a respectful understanding of others’ ways implies criticism of their own ways. A learning attitude, with suspended judgment of one’s own as well as others’ ways, is necessary for coming to understand how people both at home and elsewhere function in their local traditions and circumstances and for developing a general understanding of human development, with universal features built on local variations. The prospects of learning in cultural research are enhanced by communication between insiders and outsiders of particular communities, which I address in the next section.
Learning through Insider/Outsider Communication
To move our understanding of human development beyond assumptions and include the perspective of other communities, communication be- tween community “insiders” and “outsiders” is essential. It is not a matter of which perspective is correct—both have an angle on the phenomena that helps to build understanding.
However, social science discussions often question whether the insider’s or the outsider’s perspective should be taken as representing the truth (see Clifford, 1988; LeVine, 1966). Arguments involve whether insiders or out- siders of particular communities have exclusive access to understanding, or whether the views of insiders or of outsiders are more trustworthy (Merton, 1972; Paul, 1953; Wilson, 1974).
Some have even argued that, given the variety of perspectives, there is no such thing as truth, so we should give up the effort to understand social life. But this view seems too pessimistic to me. If we adopted it, we would be paralyzed not only in social science research but in daily life, where such understanding is constantly required.
The argument that only members of a community have access to the real meaning of events in that community, so outsiders’ opinions should be discarded, runs into difficulty when one notes the great variations in opin- ions among members of a community and the difficulties in determining who is qualified to represent the group. In addition, members of a com- munity often have difficulty noticing their own practices because they take their own ways for granted, like the fish not being aware of the water.
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f i g u r e 1 . 4
Leonor, Virginia, and Angelica Lozano (left to right), seated around the family’s first television in their home, about 1953 (Mexican American).
Furthermore, as I discuss more fully in Chapter 3, individuals often par- ticipate simultaneously in several different communities. Increasingly, the boundaries between inside and outside are blurred as people spend time in various communities (see Clifford, 1997; Walker, 2001). For example, people of Mexican descent living in what is now the United States are not entirely outsiders to European American communities; the practices and policies of the two communities interrelate. Similarly, an anthropologist who spends 10 or 50 years working in a community participates in some manner and gains some local understanding. Youngsters who grow up in a family with several cultural heritages, as is increasingly common, have some insider and some outsider understandings of each of their communities. Overlaps across com- munities also come from the media, daily contacts, and shared endeavors— collaborative, complementary, or contested (see figure 1.4).
Hence, it is often a simplification to refer to individuals as being “in” or
Orienting Concepts 25
“out” of particular communities; many communities do not have strict boundaries or homogeneity that clearly allow determination of what it takes to be “in” or “out” of them. (In Chapter 3, I argue that we need to go beyond thinking solely of membership in a single static group and instead focus on people’s participation in cultural practices of dynamically related communities whose salience to participants may vary.)
To come to a greater understanding of human functioning, people fa- miliar with different communities need to combine their varied observa- tions. What is referred to as “truth” is simply our current agreement on what seems to be a useful way to understand things; it is always under re- vision. These revisions of understanding build on constructive exchanges between people with different perspectives. Progress in understanding, then, is a matter of continually attempting to make sense of the different per- spectives, taking into account the backgrounds and positions of the viewers.
Differences in perspective are necessary for seeing and for understand- ing. Visual perception requires imperceptible movements of the eyes rela- tive to the image. If the image moves in coordination with the eye move- ments, the resulting uniformity of position makes it so the image cannot be seen. Likewise, if we close one eye and thus lose the second viewpoint sup- plied by binocular vision, our depth perception is dramatically reduced. In the same way, both people with intense identification within a community (insiders) and those with little contact in a community (outsiders) run into difficulties in making and interpreting observations. However, working to- gether, insiders and outsiders can contribute to a more edifying account than either perspective would allow by itself.
Outsiders’ Position
In seeking to understand a community’s practices, outsiders encounter dif- ficulties due to people’s reactions to their presence (fear, interest, politeness) as well as their own unfamiliarity with the local web of meaning of events. Outsiders are newcomers to the meaning system, with limited understand- ing of how practices fit together and how they have developed from prior events. At the same time, they are faced with the assumptions of commu- nity members who invariably attempt to figure out what the outsider’s role is in the community, using their everyday categories of how to treat the newcomer.
The outsider’s identity is not neutral; it allows access to only some sit- uations and elicits specific reactions when the outsider is present. For ex- ample, among the Zinacantecos, a Mayan group in Mexico, Berry Brazel- ton (1977) noted fear of observers among both adults and infants in his study of infant development: “We were automatically endowed with ‘the
26 T H E C U L T U R A L N A T U R E O F H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T
evil eye’ . . . the effects of stranger anxiety in the baby were powerfully re- inforced by his parents’ constant anxiety about our presence. We were un- able to relate to babies after nine months of age because the effect was so powerful” (p. 174).
On the other hand, an observer may elicit interest and hospitality, which may be more comfortable but also becomes a part of the events ob- served. Ruth Munroe and Lee Munroe (1971) reported that in Logoli house- holds in Africa, as soon as an observer arrived to study everyday caregiving practices with infants, the infant was readied for display. The Logoli moth- ers were very cooperative, picking up their infants and bringing them to the observer for inspection. Under such circumstances, observations would have to be interpreted as an aspect of a public greeting. Similarly, Mary Ainsworth (1977) reported that she was categorized as a visitor among the Ganda of Uganda; the mothers insisted that she observe during the after- noon, a time generally allocated to leisure and entertaining visitors.
In a study in four different communities, parents varied in their per- ception of the purpose of a home visit interview and observation of mother- toddler interactions (Rogoff, Mistry, Göncü, & Mosier, 1993). In some communities, parents saw it as a friendly visit of an acquaintance interested in child development and skills; in others, it was a pleasant social obligation to help the local schoolteacher or the researcher by answering questions or an opportunity to show off their children’s skills and newest clothes. With humor in her voice, one Turkish woman asked the researcher, who had grown up locally but studied abroad, “This is an international contest . . . Isn’t it?”
Issues of how to interpret observations are connected with restrictions in outsiders’ access. For example:
Among Hausa mothers, the custom is not to show affection for their infants in public. Now those psychologists who are concerned with nurturance and dependency will go astray on their frequency counts if they do not realize this. A casual [observer] is likely to witness only public interaction; only when much further inquiry is made is the ab- sence of the event put into its proper perspective. (Price-Williams, 1975, p. 17)
There are only a few situations in which the presence of outside ob- servers does not transform ongoing events into public ones: if the event is already public, if their presence is undetected, or if they are so familiar that their presence goes without note. Of course, their presence as a familiar member of a household would require interpretation in that light, just as the presence of other familiar people would be necessary to consider in in- terpreting the scene.
Orienting Concepts 27
Insiders’ Position
The issues faced by both insiders and outsiders have to do with the fact that people are always functioning in a sociocultural context. One’s interpreta- tion of the situation is necessarily that of a person from a particular time and constellation of background experiences. And if one’s presence is de- tected in a situation, one is a participant. There is no escape from interpre- tation and social presentation.
Differences in how people act when they think they are being observed or not illustrate how the simple presence of an observer (or a video camera) influences behavior. For example, U.S. middle-class mothers varied their in- teractions with their toddlers when they thought they were being observed in a research study (video equipment was conspicuously running) versus when they thought they were simply waiting in an observation room (re- pairs were “being made” on the video equipment, but observers watched from behind a one-way mirror). The mothers’ behavior when they thought they were being observed reflected middle-class U.S. concepts of “good mothering” (Graves & Glick, 1978). The amount of speech to their chil- dren doubled, and they used more indirect requests, engaged in more nam- ing and action routines, and asked more questions than when they thought they were not being observed.
Insiders also may have limited access to situations on the basis of their social identity. For example, their family’s standing in the community and their personal reputation are not matters that are easily suspended. When entering others’ homes, insiders carry with them the roles that they and their family customarily play. It may be difficult for people of one gender to enter situations that are customary for the other gender without arousing suspicions. A person’s marital status often makes a difference in the situa- tions and manner in which he or she engages with other people. For exam- ple, it could be complicated for a local young man to interview a family if he used to be a suitor of one of the daughters in the family, or if the grand- father in the family long ago was accused of cheating the young man’s grandfather out of some property. An insider, like an outsider, has far from a neutral position in the community.
In addition, an insider in a relatively homogeneous community is un- likely to have reflected on or even noticed phenomena that would be of in- terest to an outsider. As was mentioned in the section on ethnocentrism, people with experience in only one community often assume that the way things are done in their own community is the only reasonable way. This is such a deep assumption that we are often unaware of our own practices un- less we have the opportunity to see that others do things differently. Even if contrasting practices have raised insiders’ awareness of their own prac-
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tices, they still may interpret them in ways that fit with unquestioned assumptions:
We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worthwhile and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking and decide our con- clusions. And these habitudes which lie below the level of reflection are just those which have been formed in the constant give and take of relationship with others. (Dewey, 1916, p. 22)
The next section examines how varying interpretations can be used and then modified in the effort to reach more satisfactory accounts of human development in different cultural communities. Understanding across cul- tural groups requires adopting
a mode of encounter that I call learning for self-transformation: that is, to place oneself and the other in a privileged space of learning, where the desire [is] not just to acquire “information” or to “repre- sent,” but to recognize and welcome transformation in the inner self through the encounter. While Geertz claims that it’s not necessary (or even possible) to adopt the other’s world view in order to understand it . . . I also think that authentic understanding must be grounded in the sense of genuine humility that being a learner requires: the sense that what’s going on with the other has, perhaps, some lessons for me. (Hoffman, 1997, p. 17)
Moving between Local and Global Understandings
Researchers working as outsiders to the community they are studying have grappled with how they can make inferences based on what they observe. (The concepts cultural researchers have developed are important for any re- search in which an investigator is attempting to make sense of people dif- ferent from themselves, including work with people of an age or gender different from the researcher’s.) The dilemma is that for research to be valu- able, it needs both to reflect the phenomena from a perspective that makes sense locally and to go beyond simply presenting the details of a particular locale. The issue is one of effectively combining depth of understanding of the people and settings studied and going beyond the particularities to make a more general statement about the phenomena. Two approaches to move from local to more global understandings are discussed next. The first
Orienting Concepts 29
distinguishes rounds of interpretation that seek open-minded improvement of understanding. The second considers the role of meaning in attempts to compare “similar” situations across communities.
Revising Understanding in Derived Etic Approaches
The process of carefully testing assumptions and open-mindedly revising one’s understanding in the light of new information is essential for learning about cultural ways. The distinctions offered by John Berry (1969; 1999) among emic, imposed etic, and derived etic approaches to cultural research are useful for thinking about this process of revision.
In an emic approach, an investigator attempts to represent cultural in- siders’ perspective on a particular community, usually by means of extensive observation and participation in the activities of the community. Emic re- search produces in-depth analyses of one community and can often be use- ful as such.
The imposed and derived etic approaches attempt to generalize or compare beyond one group and differ in their sensitivity to emic informa- tion. The imposed etic approach can be seen as a preliminary step on the way to a more adequate derived etic understanding.
In an imposed etic approach, an investigator makes general statements about human functioning across communities based on imposing a cul- turally inappropriate understanding. This involves uncritically applying theory, assumptions, and measures from research or everyday life from the researcher’s own community. The ideas and procedures are not suffi- ciently adapted to the community or phenomenon being studied, and al- though the researcher may “get data,” the results are not interpreted in a way that is sufficiently congruent with the situation in the community being studied.
For example, an imposed etic approach could involve administering questionnaires, coding behavior, or testing people without considering the need to modify the procedures or their interpretation to fit the perspective of the research participants. An imposed etic approach proceeds without sufficient evidence that the phenomenon is being interpreted as the re- searcher assumes. Even when a researcher is interested in studying some- thing that seems very concrete and involves very little inference (such as whether people are touching), some understanding of local practices and meanings is necessary to decide when and where to observe and how to in- terpret the behavior (for example, whether to consider touching as evidence of stimulation or sensitivity to an infant). Mary Ainsworth critiqued the use of preconceived variables in imposed etic research: “Let us not blind
30 T H E C U L T U R A L N A T U R E O F H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T
ourselves to the unusual features of the unfamiliar society by limiting our- selves to variables or to procedures based on the familiar society—our own” (1977, p. 145).
In a derived etic approach, the researcher adapts ways of questioning , observing , and interpreting to fit the perspective of the participants. The resulting research is informed by emic approaches in each group studied and by seeking to understand the meaning of phenomena to the research participants.
Cultural researchers usually aspire to use both the emic and the derived etic approaches. They seek to understand the communities studied, adapt procedures and interpretations in light of what they learn, and modify the- ories to reflect the similarities and variations sensitively observed. The de- rived etic approach is essential to discerning cultural patterns in the variety of human practices and traditions.
It may be helpful to think of the starting point of any attempt to un- derstand something new as stemming from an imposed etic approach. We all start with what we know already. If this is informed by emic observations accompanied by efforts to move beyond the starting assumptions, we may move closer to derived etic understanding. But derived etic understanding is a continually moving target: The new understanding becomes the current imposed etic understanding that forms the starting point of the next line of study, in a process of continual refinement and revision.
Because observations can never be freed from the observers’ assump- tions, interests, and perspective, some scholars conclude that there should be no attempt to understand cross-community regularities of phenomena. However, with sensitive observation and interpretation, we can come to a more satisfactory understanding of the phenomena that interest us, which can help guide our actions with each other. That this process of learning never ends is not a reason to avoid it.
Indeed, the process of trying to understand other people is essential for daily functioning as well as for scholarly work. The different perspectives brought to bear on interpreting phenomena by different observers are of in- terest in their own right, particularly now that research participants in many parts of the world contribute to the design and interpretation of research, not just responding to the questionnaires or tests of foreign visitors.
Research on issues of culture inherently requires an effort to examine the meaning of one system in terms of another. Some research is explicitly comparative across cultural communities. But even in emic research, in which the aim is to describe the ways of a cultural community in its own terms, a description that makes sense to people within the community needs to be stated in terms that also make sense outside the system. Often,
Orienting Concepts 31
descriptions are in a language different from that of the community mem- bers, whether the shift is from one national language to another or from folk terms to academic terms. All languages refer to concepts of local im- portance in ways somewhat different from others, reflecting cultural con- cepts in the effort to communicate. Therefore, the issue of “translation”— and consideration of the meaning and comparability of situations and ideas across communities—is inescapable.
The Meaning of the “Same” Situation across Communities
An issue for any comparison or discussion across communities is the simi- larity of meaning or the comparability of the situations observed (Cole & Means, 1981). Simply ensuring that the same categories of people are pres- ent or the same instructions used does not ensure comparability, because the meaning of the particular cast of characters or instructions is likely to vary across communities.
For example, in collecting data with American and Micronesian care- givers and infants, researchers had a difficult choice. They could examine caregiver-infant interactions in the most prevalent social context in which caregivers and infants are found in each community: The American care- givers and children were usually alone with each other; the Micronesian caregivers and infants were usually in the presence of a group. Or they could hold social context constant in the two communities (Sostek et al., 1981). The researchers decided to observe in both circumstances and com- pare the findings; they found that the social context of their observations differentiated caregiver-infant interaction in each community.
Following identical procedures in two communities, such as limiting observations to times that mothers and infants are alone together, clearly does not ensure comparability of observations. Studies examining mother- infant interaction across communities need to reflect the varying prevalence of this situation. For example, several decades ago in a study in the United States, 92% of mothers usually or always cared for their infants, whereas in an East African agricultural society, 38% of mothers were the usual care- givers (Leiderman & Leiderman, 1974). A study that compared mother- child interactions in these two cultural communities would need to inter- pret the findings in the light of the different purposes and prevalence of mother-child interaction in each.
In addition to considering who is present, comparisons need to attend to what people are doing together, for what purposes, and how their activ- ity fits with the practices and traditions of their community. Inevitably, the meaning of what is observed must be considered.
Serious doubts have been raised as to whether situations are ever strictly
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comparable in cross-cultural research, as the idea of comparability may as- sume that everything except the aspect of interest is held constant. In an evaluation of personality research, Rick Shweder (1979) concluded that sit- uations cannot be comparable across cultural communities:
To talk of personality differences one must observe behavior differ- ences in equivalent situations. . . . The crucial question then be- comes, How are we to decide that the differential responses we ob- serve are in fact differential responses to an equivalent set of stimuli. . . . With respect to which particular descriptive components must stimuli (situations, contexts, environments) be shown to be equivalent? . . . A situation (environment, context, setting) is more than its physical properties as defined by an outside observer. . . . It is a situated activ- ity defined in part by its goal from the point of view of the actor. “What any rational person would do under the circumstances” de- pends upon what the person is trying to accomplish. (pp. 282–284)
Shweder argued that because local norms for the appropriate means of reaching a goal must be written into the very definition of the behavioral situation, “two actors are in ‘comparable’ or ‘equivalent’ situations only to the extent that they are members of the same culture!” (p. 285).
Perhaps the most crucial issue in the question of comparability is de- ciding how to interpret what is observed. It cannot be assumed that the same behavior has identical meaning in different communities. For exam- ple, native Hawaiian children were observed to make fewer verbal requests for help than Caucasian children in Hawaiian classrooms (Gallimore, Boggs, & Jordan, 1974; cited in Price-Williams, 1975). However, before con- cluding that this group was making fewer requests for assistance, the re- searchers considered the possibility that the children made requests for as- sistance differently. Indeed, they discovered that the Hawaiian children were requesting assistance nonverbally: steadily watching the teacher from a distance or approaching, standing nearby, or briefly touching her. These nonverbal requests may be directly related to the cultural background of the children, in which verbal requests for help from adults are considered inap- propriate but nonverbal requests are acceptable.
Identical behavior may have different connotations and functions in different communities (Frijda & Jahoda, 1966). Some researchers have pro- posed that phenomena be compared in terms of what people are trying to accomplish rather than in terms of specific behaviors. Robert Sears (1961) argued for distinguishing goals or motives (such as help seeking in the Hawaiian study) from instrumental means used to reach the goals (such as whether children request assistance verbally or nonverbally). In his view, although instrumental means vary across communities, goals themselves
Orienting Concepts 33
may be considered transcultural. John Berry proposed that aspects of be- havior be compared “only when they can be shown to be functionally equivalent, in the sense that the aspect of behavior in question is an at- tempted solution” to a recurrent problem shared by the different groups (1969, p. 122; see figure 1.5).
A focus on the function (or purpose or goal) of people’s behavior facil- itates understanding how different ways of doing things may be used to accomplish similar goals, or how similar ways of doing things may serve different goals. Although all cultural communities address issues that are common to human development worldwide, due to our specieswide cul- tural and biological heritage, different communities may apply similar means to different goals and different means to similar goals.
The next two chapters focus in more depth on how we can conceive of the cultural nature of human development. They examine the idea that human development is biologically cultural and discuss ways of thinking
34 T H E C U L T U R A L N A T U R E O F H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T
f i g u r e 1 . 5
John Collier and Malcolm Collier suggested that family mealtimes could provide a basis for comparisons that would help define relationships within families in different communities. The first picture shows an evening meal in a home in Vicos, Peru; the second shows supper in a Spanish American home in New Mexico; the third picture shows breakfast in the home of an advertising executive’s family in Connecticut.
about similarities and differences across cultural communities in how peo- ple learn and develop. They discuss concepts to relate individual and cul- tural processes, expanding on the overarching orienting concept: that hu- mans develop through their changing participation in the sociocultural activities of their communities, which also change.
36 T H E C U L T U R A L N A T U R E O F H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T
2 Development as
Transformation of Participation
in Cultural Activities
Some decades ago, psychologists interested in how cultural processes con- tributed to human thinking were puzzled by what they observed. Their puz- zlement came from trying to make sense of the everyday lives of the peo- ple they visited by using the prevailing concepts of human development and culture. Many of these researchers began to search for more useful ways to think about the relation of culture and individual functioning.
In this chapter, I discuss why then-current ideas of the relation be- tween individual and cultural processes made these researchers’ observa- tions puzzling. A key issue was that “the individual” was assumed to be separate from the world, equipped with basic, general characteristics that might be secondarily “influenced” by culture. An accompanying problem was that “culture” was often thought of as a static collection of charac- teristics. After examining these assumptions, I discuss the cultural-historical theory that helped to resolve the researchers’ puzzle, focusing on my own version of it. In my view, human development is a process in which peo- ple transform through their ongoing participation in cultural activities, which in turn contribute to changes in their cultural communities across generations.
Together, Chapters 2 and 3 argue for conceiving of people and cultural communities as mutually creating each other. Chapter 2 focuses on con- cepts for relating cultural processes to the development of individuals. Chapter 3 addresses the companion issue of how we can think of cultural
37
communities as changing with the contributions of successive generations of people.
A Logical Puzzle for Researchers
North American and European cross-cultural psychologists of the 1960s and 1970s brought tests of children’s cognitive development from the United States and Europe to foreign places. These tests were often derived from Jean Piaget’s stage theory or were tests of classification, logic, and memory.
The aim was to use measures of thinking that bore little obvious rela- tion to people’s everyday lives, to examine their ability independent of their background experience. So researchers asked people to say whether quan- tities of water changed when poured into different-shaped beakers, to sort unfamiliar figures into categories, to solve logic problems that could only be solved with the stated premises rather than using real-world knowledge, and to remember lists of nonsense syllables or unrelated words.
The idea was that people’s “true” competence, which was assumed to underlie their everyday performances, could be discerned using novel prob- lems that no one had been taught how to solve. People’s level of compe- tence was regarded as a general personal characteristic underlying widely different aspects of their behavior without variation across situations. The tests sought to determine general stages of thinking or general ability to classify, think logically, and remember. Some individuals (or groups) were expected to be at “higher” stages or to have better classification, logical, and memory abilities—in general—than other people. Cross-cultural research was used to examine, under widely varying circumstances, what environ- mental factors produced greater “competence.”
The puzzle was that the same people who performed poorly on the re- searchers’ tests showed impressive skill in reasoning or remembering (or other cognitive skills that the tests were supposed to measure) outside of the test situation. For example, Michael Cole noted that in a community in which people had great difficulty with mathematical tests, great skill was apparent in the marketplace and other local settings: “On taxi-buses I was often outbargained by the cabbies, who seemed to have no difficulty calcu- lating miles, road quality, quality of the car’s tires, number of passengers, and distance” (1996, p. 74).
With the assumption that cognition is a general competence charac- terizing individuals across situations, such unevenness of performance was puzzling. To try to resolve the difference in apparent “ability” across situa- tions, researchers first tried making the content and format of the tests
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more familiar, to find “truer” measures of underlying competence. Researchers also tried parceling competence into smaller “domains,” such as biological knowledge and physical knowledge or verbal and nonverbal skills, so that the discrepancies across situations were not as great. (This remains an active approach in the field of cognitive development.)
Researchers also began to notice that although the tests were not supposed to relate to specific aspects of people’s experience, there were links between performance on the tests and the extent of experience with Western schools and literacy. It was tempting to conclude that school or literacy makes people smarter, but the researchers’ everyday observations challenged that interpretation. Instead, researchers such as Sylvia Scrib- ner and Michael Cole and their colleagues began to study the specific connections between performance on tests and experience in school. (In Chapter 7, on culture and thinking , I focus in more detail on this re- search and the findings.)
An Example: “We always speak only of what we see”
An example of a logical problem will serve to illustrate the connection be- tween schooling and test performance. A common test of logical thinking is the syllogism, like those employed during the 1930s by Alexander Luria. In Luria’s study, an interviewer presented the following syllogism to Central Asian adults varying in literacy and schooling:
In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What color are the bears there?
Luria reported that when asked to make inferences on the basis of the premises of syllogisms, literate interviewees solved the problems in the de- sired manner. However, many nonliterate interviewees did not. Here is the response of a nonliterate Central Asian peasant who did not treat the syl- logism as though the premises constituted a logical relation allowing an inference:
“We always speak only of what we see; we don’t talk about what we haven’t seen.”
[The interviewer probes:] But what do my words imply? [The syllo- gism is repeated.]
“Well, it’s like this: our tsar isn’t like yours, and yours isn’t like ours. Your words can be answered only by someone who was there, and if a person wasn’t there he can’t say anything on the basis of your words.”
Development as Participation 39
[The interviewer continues:] But on the basis of my words—in the North, where there is always snow, the bears are white, can you gather what kind of bears there are in Novaya Zemlya?
“If a man was sixty or eighty and had seen a white bear and had told about it, he could be believed, but I’ve never seen one and hence I can’t say. That’s my last word. Those who saw can tell, and those who didn’t see can’t say anything!” (At this point a younger man volunteered, “From your words it means that bears there are white.”)
[Interviewer:] Well, which of you is right? “What the cock knows how to do, he does. What I know, I say, and nothing beyond that!” (1976, pp. 108–109)
This peasant and the interviewer disagreed about what kind of evidence is acceptable as truth. The peasant insisted on firsthand knowledge, perhaps trusting the word of a reliable, experienced person. But the interviewer tried to induce the peasant to play a game involving examination of the truth value of the words alone. The nonliterate peasant argued that because he had not personally seen the event, he did not have adequate evidence, and implied that he did not think that the interviewer had adequate evi- dence either. When the schooled young man made a conclusion on the basis of the unverified premises stated in the problem, the nonliterate man implied that the younger man had no business jumping to conclusions.
Like this peasant, many other nonliterate interviewees refused to accept that the major premise is a “given” and protested that they “could only judge what they had seen” or “didn’t want to lie.” (This pattern has been replicated in other places by Cole, Gay, Glick, & Sharp, 1971; Fobih, 1979; Scribner, 1975, 1977; Sharp, Cole, & Lave, 1979; and Tulviste, 1991.) If non- literate interviewees were not required to state the conclusion, but were asked instead to evaluate whether the hypothetical premises and a conclu- sion stated by the researcher fit logically, then they were willing to consider such problems as self-contained logical units (Cole et al., 1971).
The argument of the nonliterate peasant studied by Luria shows quite ab- stract reasoning regarding what one can use as evidence. Indeed, Luria noted that nonliterate people’s reasoning and deduction followed the rules when dealing with immediate practical experience; they made excellent judgments and drew the implied conclusions. Their unwillingness to treat syllogisms as logical problems is not a failure to think hypothetically. An interviewee ex- plained his reasoning for not answering a hypothetical question: “If you know a person, if a question comes up about him, you are able to answer” (Scribner, 1975, 1977). He reasoned hypothetically in denying the possibility of reasoning hypothetically about information of which he had no experience.
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Syllogisms represent a specialized language genre that becomes easier to handle with practice with this specialized form of problem (Scribner, 1977). In school, people may become familiar with this genre through experience with story problems in which the answer must be derived from the state- ments in the problem. Students are supposed not to question the truth of the premises but to answer on the basis of the stated “facts.”
Being willing to accept a premise that one cannot verify, and reasoning from there, is characteristic of schooling and literacy. This commonly used test of logical “ability” thus reflects rather specific training in a language format that researchers are likely to take for granted, as highly schooled in- dividuals themselves. The puzzles questioned assumptions of generality.
Researchers Questioning Assumptions
Cultural researchers sought alternative ways to think about the relationship of individual development and cultural processes. The assumption that the characteristics of both children and cultures were general seemed to be part of the problem.
The researchers became suspicious of the idea that children progress through monolithic, general stages of development. They noted that peo- ple’s ways of thinking and of relating to other people are in fact not broadly applied in varying circumstances.
Researchers also noticed similar shortcomings in treating culture as a monolithic entity. The effect of being a “member of a culture” had been as- sumed to be uniform across both the members and the situations in which they functioned. For example, whole cultural groups were sometimes char- acterized as oral, complex, or interdependent (in different research tradi- tions). When researchers saw that members of a community often differed from each other on such dimensions and that the dimensions seemed to apply more in some circumstances than others, this called into question the whole business of trying to discern the “essence” of a culture.
Currently, scholars think about the relation of individual development and cultural processes in a variety of ways that try to look more specifically at individual and cultural attributes. Our understanding has benefited from attempts to make more fine-grained analyses of individual characteristics, domains of thinking, and cultural attributes.
However, I believe that some of the problems that remain require re- thinking our basic ideas about the relation between individuals and cultural communities. I argue against the still common approach of treating indi- viduals as entities separate from cultural processes, existing independently of their cultural communities. Such approaches look for how “culture” ex- erts “influence” on the otherwise generic “child.”
Development as Participation 41
The remainder of this chapter focuses on how we can conceptualize human development as a cultural process in which all children develop as participants in their cultural communities. First I present several approaches that have been quite influential and helpful: the work of Mead, the Whit- ings, and Bronfenbrenner. Then I argue that we can solve some problems by discarding the often unspoken assumption that individual and culture are separate entities, with the characteristics of culture “influencing” the characteristics of individuals.
Many researchers, including myself, have found the cultural-historical theory proposed by Lev Vygotsky to be quite helpful, and in recent decades many scholars have built on his theory. Vygotsky’s influential book Mind in Society (1978) was introduced to the English-speaking world by some of the same researchers (including Cole and Scribner) who struggled with the puz- zle of people’s varied performance on cognitive tests and everyday cognitive activities. Vygotsky’s theory helped connect individuals’ thinking with cul- tural traditions such as schooling and literacy.
In the last part of this chapter, I describe my approach, which builds on the prior work. I conceive of development as transformation of people’s participation in ongoing sociocultural activities, which themselves change with the involvement of individuals in successive generations.
Concepts Relating Cultural and Individual Development
Margaret Mead’s pioneering work demonstrated how passing moments of shared activity, which may or may not have explicit lessons for children, are the material of development. Her careful observations of filmed everyday events, long before the introduction of portable videotape technology, helped to reveal cultural aspects of individual acts and interactions. Several related lines of investigation have provided models to help researchers think about the relation of individual development and cultural processes.
Two key approaches, Whiting and Whiting’s psycho-cultural model and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological system, will serve the purpose of describ- ing how the relationship has been conceptualized. Several other current ap- proaches, including cultural-historical perspectives, build on the work of these pioneers. In this section, I describe some of the ideas offered by these models. They have provided key concepts and sparked pathbreaking re- search. However, I want to raise a concern that the ways the models have di- agrammed the relation between the individual and the world lead us, perhaps unintentionally, to a limiting view of individual and cultural processes—as
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Development as Participation 43
separate entities. My concern is relevant to most diagrams relating individ- ual and cultural processes throughout the social sciences.
Whiting and Whiting’s Psycho-Cultural Model
Beatrice Whiting and John Whiting (1975) provided a “psycho-cultural model” of the relations between the development of individuals and fea- tures of their immediate environments, social partners, and institutional and cultural systems and values. This perspective stresses that understanding human development requires detailed understanding of the situations in which people develop—the immediate situations as well as the less imme- diate cultural processes in which children and their partners (and their an- cestors) participate.
The Whitings urged a deeper understanding of cultural processes than is often the case in studies that simply relate children’s development to broad categories such as culture, social class, and gender. Beatrice Whiting (1976) pressed scholars to “unpackage” these variables rather than treating them as broad packages of unanalyzed “independent variables.” She emphasized that the cast of characters and settings in which children act are extremely influential in determining their course of development.
Whiting and Whiting’s model (see figure 2.1) presented human devel-
f i g u r e 2 . 1
Whiting and Whiting’s model for psycho-cultural research (1975).
opment as the product of a chain of social and cultural circumstances sur- rounding the child. The chain began with the environment (including the climate, flora and fauna, and terrain) and led to the history (including migrations, borrowings, and inventions). This in turn led to the group’s maintenance systems (subsistence patterns, means of production, settlement patterns, social structure, systems of defense, law and social control, and di- vision of labor). This led to the child’s learning environment, which con- sisted of their routine settings, caretakers and teachers, tasks assigned, and mother’s workload. Then the chain arrived at the individual, including the innate needs, drives, and capacities of the infant as well as learned behav- ioral styles, skills, value priorities, conflicts, and defenses.
The Whitings’ model contained a set of assumptions regarding the un- derlying direction of causality, with arrows leading from the environment and history to the child’s learning environment to the individual’s development. Whiting and Whiting (1975) assumed that maintenance systems determine to a large extent the learning environment in which a child grows up, and the learning environment influences the child’s behavior and development.
These assumptions provided Whiting and Whiting and their research team with a framework that allowed important advances in understanding culture and child development in their landmark Six Cultures Study (1975). Their focus on the child’s learning environment produced key research findings in the study of the cultural aspects of human development. My own work has been heavily influenced by the Whitings’ ideas, and their re- search can be seen throughout this book.
However, the form of their diagram carries implicit assumptions that tend to constrain how we think about the relation of individuals and cul- tural practices, in unintended ways. The categories composing the chain are treated as independent entities, and the arrows indicate that one entity causes the next. Thus individual and cultural processes are treated “as if ” they exist independently of each other, with individual characteristics cre- ated by cultural characteristics.
Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological System
Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological perspective has also contributed impor- tant ideas and research on cultural aspects of human development. Bron- fenbrenner’s model takes a different form from that of Whiting and Whit- ing , but it raises similar questions about treating individual and cultural processes as separate entities.
Bronfenbrenner stressed the interactions of a changing organism in a changing environment. In his view, the environment is composed of one’s
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f i g u r e 2 . 2 a
Bronfenbrenner likened his ecological system to Russian nesting dolls.
immediate settings as well as the social and cultural contexts of relations among different settings, such as home, school, and workplace. Bronfen- brenner was interested in specifying the properties and conditions of the so- cial and physical environments that foster or undermine development within people’s “ecological niches.” He defined the ecology of human development as involving
the progressive, mutual accommodation between an active, growing human being and the changing properties of the immediate settings in which the developing person lives, as this process is affected by re- lations between these settings, and by the larger contexts in which the settings are embedded. (1979, p. 21)
Although this definition states that the person and the settings are mu- tually involved, elsewhere individuals are treated as products of their im- mediate settings and “larger” contexts. Bronfenbrenner described his eco- logical system as being composed of concentric circles, like Russian nesting dolls in which a small figure nests inside a larger one inside a still larger one, and so on (see figure 2.2a).
Like the diagram in Figure 2.1 of categories connected by arrows, Bron- fenbrenner’s proposal of concentric circles carries the same implicit assump- tions about the relation of individual and cultural processes: Individual and “larger” contexts are conceived as existing separately, definable independ-
Development as Participation 45
f i g u r e 2 . 2 b
Bronfenbrenner’s nested ecological system as interpreted in Michael and Sheila Cole’s 1996 textbook.
46 T H E C U L T U R A L N A T U R E O F H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T
ently of each other, related in a hierarchical fashion as the “larger” contexts affect the “smaller” ones, which in turn affect the developing person.
In Bronfenbrenner’s system, the smallest, central circle is closest to the individual’s immediate experiences (see figure 2.2b). Outer circles refer to settings that exert an influence less directly (through their impact on oth- ers), without the individual’s direct participation in them. The system is divided into four aspects of the ecology in which individuals function: mi- crosystems, mesosystems, exosystems, and macrosystems. Although I am concerned with how the four systems relate, Bronfenbrenner’s articulation of each of these systems is a valuable contribution:
Microsystems, according to Bronfenbrenner, are the individual’s imme-
diate experiences—the settings containing the child and others, such as home and school. One of the basic units at the level of microsystems is the dyad (that is, the pair); dyads in turn relate to larger interpersonal structures such as triads (three-person systems, such as mother-father-baby). Even in the most immediate settings, individuals and dyads are crucially dependent on third parties and larger groups.
Mesosystems, in Bronfenbrenner’s approach, are the relations among the microsystems in which an individual is involved, for example, the comple- mentary or conflicting practices of home and school. Mesosystems involve relations between and among systems—two or three or more in relation. Bronfenbrenner made the very important point that any one setting (such as the home) involves relations with others (such as school or a religious in- stitution). He emphasized the overlaps and communication between set- tings and information in each setting about the other. The analysis of meso- systems gives importance to questions such as whether a young person enters a new situation (such as school or camp) alone or in the company of familiar companions, and whether the young person and companions have advance information about the new setting before they enter. Bronfen- brenner stressed the importance of ecological transitions as people shift roles or settings (for example, with the arrival of a new sibling , entry into school, graduating, finding a job, and marrying).
Exosystems relate the microsystems in which children are involved to settings in which children do not directly participate, such as parents’ work- places if children do not go there. Although children’s immediate environ- ments, in which they participate directly, are especially potent in influenc- ing their development, Bronfenbrenner argued that settings that children do not experience directly are also very influential. He referred especially to the role of parents’ work and the community’s organization: Whether par- ents can perform effectively within the family depends on the demands, stresses, and supports of the workplace and extended family. The direct im- pact on children of parents’ child-rearing roles is influenced by such indi- rect factors as flexibility of parents’ work schedules, adequacy of child care arrangements, the help of friends and family, the quality of health and so- cial services, and neighborhood safety. Aspects as removed as public policies affect all these factors and are part of the exosystem of human development.
Macrosystems are the ideology and organization of pervasive social in- stitutions of the culture or subculture. Referring to macrosystems, Bron- fenbrenner stated:
Within any culture or subculture, settings of a given kind—such as homes, streets, or offices—tend to be very much alike, whereas be-
Development as Participation 47
tween cultures they are distinctly different. It is as if within each soci- ety or subculture there existed a blueprint for the organization of every type of setting. Furthermore, the blueprint can be changed, with the result that the structure of the settings in a society can become markedly altered and produce corresponding changes in be- havior and development. (1979, p. 4)
Bronfenbrenner’s approach makes several key contributions; in partic- ular, it emphasizes studying the relations among the multiple settings in which children and their families are directly and indirectly involved. The idea of examining how children and families make transitions among their different ecological settings is also extremely important. Nonetheless, the separation into nested systems constrains ideas of the relations between in- dividual and cultural processes.
Descendents
The ideas and research of the Whitings and Bronfenbrenner have provided very important guidance for the whole field of work on culture and human development. My own research and ideas are direct descendents from this family of work, intermarried with cultural-historical ideas.
Several other approaches, influenced by the ideas of the Whitings, Bronfenbrenner, and others, focus on ecological niches as a way of thinking about the relation of individuals and communities. Tom Weisner, Ron Gal- limore, and Cathie Jordan (1988) emphasized important features of chil- dren’s daily routines for understanding cultural influences:
The personnel who are available and interacting with children The motivations of the people involved Cultural “scripts” used by people to guide the way they do things The type and frequency of tasks and activities in daily routines The cultural goals and beliefs of the people involved
Charles Super and Sara Harkness (1997) focused on the relations among children’s dispositions and three subsystems of the developmental niche:
The physical and social settings in which the child lives The culturally regulated customs of child care and child rearing The psychology of the caregivers (including parental beliefs regarding
the nature and needs of children, goals for rearing, and shared understandings about effective rearing techniques)
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Issues in Diagramming the Relation of Individual and Cultural Processes
In textbooks and scholarly treatises in a number of social science fields, the relation between individual and cultural processes is still commonly dia- grammed using entities connected by arrows or contained in concentric cir- cles (like figures 2.1 and 2.2).
These ways of sketching ideas are so familiar that social scientists may not question the assumptions they embody. Visual tools for communicat- ing theoretical ideas constrain our ideas, often without our noticing the constraints. I think it is important to revise the diagrams to be able to rep- resent the idea that cultural and personal processes create each other.
Boxes-and-arrows or nested-circles diagrams constrain our concepts by separating person and culture into stand-alone entities, with culture influ- encing the person (or, in some models, with the two entities interacting). Figures 2.1 and 2.2 portray the individual as separate from the environment (and therefore “subject” to its influences). The separation appears in the unidirectional causal chains between prior and later variables in the Whit- ings’ model and in the hierarchical nesting of the inner system, dependent on those outside it, in Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory.
Behavior (or thought) is often treated as the “outcome” of independent cultural variables. The “influence” of culture on individuals has frequently been studied by “measuring” some characteristics of culture (such as the complexity of social organization in the society) and some characteristics of individuals (such as personality characteristics or measures of intelligence), and then correlating them. This contrasts with approaches that examine the contributions of individuals and cultural practices as they function together in mutually defining processes.
Diagrams separating the individual and the world are so pervasive in the social sciences that we have difficulty finding other ways to represent our ideas. The Whitings and Bronfenbrenner may not themselves have been tightly wedded to the ideas that I suggest are implied by the forms of the diagrams. In a later work, Whiting and Edwards (1988) referred less to causal chains than in the 1975 work in examining associations between gen- der differences and the company children keep, though still with an aim of determining how settings influence individual development. Similarly, Bron- fenbrenner’s nesting-doll image was accompanied by the statement that in- dividuals and their settings are related through progressive, mutual accom- modation.
Because I am interested in visual representations as tools for thought, I am seeking other ways to portray the mutual relationship of culture
Development as Participation 49
and human development, avoiding the idea that either occurs alone (without the contributions of the other) or that one produces the other. After describing the ways that sociocultural-historical theory treats the relation of individual and cultural processes, I provide some diagrams to portray development as a process of changing participation in sociocultural activities.
Sociocultural-Historical Theory
Many researchers interested in culture and development found in the writ- ings of Lev Vygotsky and his colleagues a theory that laid the groundwork to help integrate individual development in social, cultural, and historical context. In contrast to theories of development that focus on the individual and the social or cultural context as separate entities (adding or multiplying one and the other), the cultural-historical approach assumes that individual development must be understood in, and cannot be separated from, its so- cial and cultural-historical context.1 According to Vygotsky’s theory, the ef- forts of individuals are not separate from the kinds of activities in which they engage and the kinds of institutions of which they are a part.
Vygotsky focused on cognitive skills and their reliance on cultural in- ventions such as literacy, mathematics, mnemonic skills, and approaches to problem solving and reasoning (Laboratory of Comparative Human Cog- nition, 1983; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1979). In this view, thinking involves learning to use symbolic and material cultural tools in ways that are specific to their use. This was exemplified by work demonstrating that experience with literacy promoted particular skills in its use, rather than promoting general cognitive advances (Scribner & Cole, 1981).
Vygotsky argued that children learn to use the tools for thinking pro- vided by culture through their interactions with more skilled partners in the zone of proximal development. Through engaging with others in complex thinking that makes use of cultural tools of thought, children become able to carry out such thinking independently, transforming the cultural tools of thought to their own purposes. Interactions in the zone of proximal devel- opment allow children to participate in activities that would be impossible
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1This approach is referred to interchangeably as the sociocultural, sociohistorical, or cultural- historical approach. Active scholarly work continues to examine and extend the early twentieth- century insights of Vygotsky, Luria, Leont’ev, and other Soviet scholars such as Bakhtin and Ilyenkov. See especially Bakhurst, 1995; Cole, 1995, 1996; Kozulin, 1990; van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991; Wertsch, 1991, 1998.
for them alone, using cultural tools that themselves must be adapted to the specific activity at hand.
Cultural tools thus are both inherited and transformed by successive generations. Culture is not static; it is formed from the efforts of people working together, using and adapting material and symbolic tools provided by predecessors and in the process creating new ones.
Development over the life span is inherently involved with historical developments of both the species and cultural communities, developments that occur in everyday moment-by-moment learning opportunities. Devel- opment occurs in different time frames—at the pace of species change, community historical change, individual lifetimes, and individual learning moments (Scribner, 1985; Wertsch, 1985). These four developmental levels, at different grains of analysis, provide a helpful way of thinking about the mutually constituting nature of cultural and biological processes and the changing nature of culture, discussed in more depth in the next chapter.
Scholars are working on a coherent family of sociocultural-historical research programs and theories inspired by Vygotskian cultural-historical theory, along with related ideas emerging from several other theoretical tra- ditions (see Goodnow, 1993; Rogoff & Chavajay, 1995). The theory of John Dewey (1916) also complements Vygotskian ideas and has helped a number of sociocultural scholars to further develop these ideas. In addition, work on communication in everyday lives in different communities has con- tributed important concepts for thinking about individual and cultural as- pects of development (Erickson & Mohatt, 1982; Goodwin, 1990; Heath, 1983, 1989a, 1991; Mehan, 1979; Miller, 1982; Ochs, 1988, 1996; Rogoff et al., 1993; Schieffelin, 1991; Watson-Gegeo & Gegeo, 1986b).
The related proposals for sociocultural theory represent a general agree- ment that individual development constitutes and is constituted by social and cultural-historical activities and practices. In the emerging sociocultural perspective, culture is not an entity that influences individuals. Instead, peo- ple contribute to the creation of cultural processes and cultural processes contribute to the creation of people. Thus, individual and cultural processes are mutually constituting rather than defined separately from each other.2
Development as Participation 51
2Related though heterogeneous sociocultural proposals include the work of Bruner, 1990; Cole, 1990, 1996; Engeström, 1990; Goodnow, 1990; Heath, 1983; Hutchins, 1991; John-Steiner, 1985; Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 1983; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Miller & Good- now, 1995; Ochs, 1988, 1996; Rogoff, 1990, 1998; Schieffelin, 1991; Scribner, 1985, 1997; Serpell, 1993; Shweder, 1991; Shweder, Goodnow, Hatano, LeVine, Markus, & Miller, 1998; Valsiner, 1987, 1994, 2000; Wenger, 1999; Wertsch, 1991. (See also the journals Mind, Culture, and Activity and Culture & Psycholog y.) Although my version of the sociocultural perspective has a great deal in common with other versions, there are also important differences that are beyond the scope of this overview.
Development as Transformation of Participation in Sociocultural Activity
In my own work, I emphasize that human development is a process of peo- ple’s changing participation in sociocultural activities of their communities. People contribute to the processes involved in sociocultural activities at the same time that they inherit practices invented by others (Rogoff, 1990, 1998).
Rather than individual development being influenced by (and influ- encing) culture, from my perspective, people develop as they participate in and contribute to cultural activities that themselves develop with the in- volvement of people in successive generations. People of each generation, as they engage in sociocultural endeavors with other people, make use of and extend cultural tools and practices inherited from previous generations. As people develop through their shared use of cultural tools and practices, they simultaneously contribute to the transformation of cultural tools, practices, and institutions.
To clarify these ideas, I have been developing a series of images that aim to move beyond boxes-and-arrows and nested-circles ways of portray- ing cultural influences. In Figure 2.3a–g , I offer images of a sociocultural “transformation of participation perspective” in which personal, interper- sonal, and cultural aspects of human activity are conceived as different an- alytic views of ongoing, mutually constituted processes.
In the next chapter I discuss in more depth what I mean by cultural communities. For examining the images in Figure 2.3, it may be sufficient to note that in my view, cultural processes are not the same as member- ship in national or ethnic groups, and that individuals are often partici- pants in more than one community’s cultural practices, traditions, and institutions.
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Development as Participation 53
f i g u r e 2 . 3 a
This image portrays the object of study that has been traditional in developmental psychology: the solitary individual. Information about relations with other people and the purpose and setting of the activity is removed. When I ask people to guess what this child is doing, their speculations are hesitant and vague: “Thinking?” “Being punished?” “Reading?”
f i g u r e 2 . 3 b
Of course, the roles of other people—parents, peers, teachers, and so on— are recognized as relevant. This image portrays how social relations have often been investigated—by studying “the child” apart from other people, who are studied separately even when they are engaging in the same event. Then the “social influences” are examined through correlating the characteristics or actions of the separate entities.3 (Sometimes, analyses include bidirectional arrows to try to include an effect of the active child on the other people.) When I ask people to make further guesses about what the child is doing, given information about “social influences,” their hypotheses are not much more specific than for the solitary individual in Figure 2.3a.
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3Vygotskian scholars complain that frequently Vygotsky’s idea of the zone of proximal de- velopment is reduced to this sort of analysis of social influences, overlooking his emphasis on cul- tural processes.
f i g u r e 2 . 3 c
This figure, like the two previous, is based on the boxes-with-arrows diagrams of the relation of culture and human development. When “cultural influences” are added (represented by the book and the cupboard), the child remains separate from them, “subject” to the effects of cultural characteristics. The individual and the rest are taken apart from each other, analyzed without regard for what they are doing together in sociocultural activities. With this portrayal of “cultural influences” information, people’s guesses about what this child is doing are still not very specific, though some become more certain that the child is reading.
Development as Participation 55
56 T H E C U L T U R A L N A T U R E O F H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T
f i g u r e 2 . 3 d
This image focuses on the same child from the transformation-of-participation perspective. The child is foregrounded, with information about him as an individual as the focus of analysis. At the same time, interpersonal and cultural-institutional information is available in the background. A general sense of interpersonal and cultural-institutional information is necessary to understand what this child is doing, although it does not need to be attended to in the same detail as the child’s efforts. When I show people this image, their guesses about what the child is doing become much more specific: “Playing a game . . . Oh, it’s Scrabble . . . He’s thinking about his next turn . . . It’s in a classroom . . .”
Development as Participation 57
58 T H E C U L T U R A L N A T U R E O F H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T
f i g u r e 2 . 3 e
If, instead of wanting to study the development of that particular child, we were interested in the relationships among that child and the people beside him, we could focus on what they are doing together. This would involve an interpersonal focus of analysis. We would be interested in knowing that the three people are playing Scrabble as a spelling activity organized by the adult; the adult is a parent volunteer helping this child check a word in the dictionary under her elbow while his classmate works on a word for his own next turn; and they are engaging in a friendly form of competition, helping each other as they play.
The fact that this is in a classroom setting matters, but we would not be analyzing in detail how such an activity fits with the culture of this school or this community (for that, see figure 2.3f ). A general sense of individual and cultural information is important as background, to understand what the people are doing.
Together, the interpersonal, personal, and cultural-institutional aspects of the event constitute the activity. No aspect exists or can be studied in isolation from the others. An observer’s relative focus on one or the other aspect can be changed, but they do not exist apart from each other. Analysis of interpersonal arrangements could not occur without background understanding of community processes (such as the historical and cultural roles and changing practices of schools and families). At the same time, analysis requires some attention to personal processes (such as efforts to learn through observation and participation in ongoing activities).
The hand holding the analytic lens is also important, indicating that we, as observers or researchers, construct the focus of analysis. The focus of analysis stems from what we as observers choose to examine—in the case of Figure 2.3e, the relationships among these three people. It is a particular view of the event and focuses on some information as more important to us, keeping other information less distinct, as background. It is usually necessary to foreground some aspects of phenomena and background others simply because no one can study everything at once. However, the distinctions between what is in the foreground and what is in the background lie in our analysis and are not assumed to be separate entities in reality. (In contrast, the boxes-and-arrows and nested-circles approaches often treat the diagrammed entities as existing separately in reality.)
Development as Participation 59
60 T H E C U L T U R A L N A T U R E O F H U M A N D E V E L O P M E N T
f i g u r e 2 . 3 f
Some studies (or some lines of investigation, or some disciplines) need a cultural-institutional focus of analysis, backgrounding the details regarding the particular people and their relations with each other. In this scene, we might be interested in studying such cultural-institutional processes as how this particular school has developed practices in which parent volunteers are routinely in the classroom, helping children learn by devising “fun educational” activities; how the community of this school revises its practices as new generations of families join in; and how the practices in this school connect with the culture and history of schooling in other innovative schools as well as in traditional schools and with national and educational policies (such an analysis is available in Rogoff, Goodman Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001; Rogoff, 1994).
With the focus of Figure 2.3f, we see a glimpse of a moving picture involving the history of the activities and the transformations toward the future in which people and their communities engage.
Development as Participation 61
f i g u r e 2 . 3 g
This figure portrays a problem that sometimes occurs if researchers recognize the importance of culture but leave out the equally important role of the people who constitute cultural activities. This figure is as difficult to understand as Figure 2.3a. It does not make sense to try to study cultural processes without considering the contributions of the people involved, keeping them in the background of a focus on cultural, institutional community processes.
I believe that this approach will facilitate progress in coordinating infor- mation across studies and across disciplines to develop more complete under- standing of the phenomena that interest us. Keeping our focus of analysis in- formed by background information makes it easier to align the understanding gained across studies or disciplines that employ different focuses. Instead of being competing ways to examine phenomena, each focus informs the others.
Although I concentrate in this book on questions of personal, inter- personal, and cultural processes, biological aspects of the activity shown in Figure 2.3d–f could be the focus of analysis in other related research. For example, studies could focus on neuronal, hormonal, or genetic processes, with personal, interpersonal, and cultural information in the background. In this way, biological, sociocultural, and individual aspects of human func- tioning can all be seen as contributing to the overall process, rather than as rivals, trying to cut each other out of the picture. (In the next chapter, I dis- cuss the relation of biological and cultural processes.)
Key to my approach is an emphasis on the processes involved in human activity. The static nature of Figure 2.3d–f does not capture this well, how- ever; the medium of the printed page constrains the representation of dy- namic processes. If you can imagine the image as a glance at a moment in a moving picture, it would do more justice to the idea of the dynamic and mutually constituting nature of individual, interpersonal, and cultural-in- stitutional processes.
The next chapter examines concepts for thinking about cultural processes. The ways that scholars and policymakers have often thought of culture are tied to the separation of individual and culture in the box-and-arrow or nesting-circles diagrams. Culture has been treated as an outside “influence” on individual characteristics, often thought of as providing a flavor to oth- erwise vanilla individuals. As I explain in the next chapter, from my trans- formation-of-participation view, all people participate in continually changing cultural communities. Individuals and generations shape prac- tices, traditions, and institutions at the same time that they build on what they inherit in their moment in history.
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3 Individuals, Generations,
and Dynamic Cultural Communities
Each of us lives out our species nature only in a specific local manifestation . . .
our cultural and historical peculiarity is an essential part of that nature.
—Shore, 1988, p. 19
Scholars and census takers alike struggle with how to think about the rela- tion of individuals and cultural communities. This chapter focuses on how we can conceive of cultural processes and communities if we consider de- velopment to be a process of changing participation in dynamic cultural communities.
Two major challenges in trying to characterize people’s cultural heritage are the focus of this chapter. The first challenge is moving beyond a pair of long-standing related dichotomies: cultural versus biological heritage and similarities versus differences. The second challenge is how to think of cul- tural processes as dynamic properties of overlapping human communities rather than treating culture as a static social address carried by individuals.
Humans Are Biologically Cultural
The well-known nature/nurture debate places culture and biology in oppo- sition. Proponents argue that if something is cultural, it is not biological, and if something is biological, it is not cultural. In particular, psychologists have spent a long time trying to figure out what percentage of a person’s characteristics is biological and what percentage is cultural or environmen- tal. This artificial separation treats biology and culture as independent en- tities rather than viewing humans as biologically cultural.
63
The nature/nurture debate often attributes differences between com- munities to culture and similarities to biology. The debate sometimes as- sumes that basic human processes (such as learning language) exist in a cul- ture-free biological form, and then contact with a particular culture induces superficial variations (such as which particular language a person speaks).
However, it is false to assume that universals are biological and varia- tions are cultural. All humans have a great deal in common due to the bio- logical and cultural heritage that we share as a species: We all walk on two legs, communicate with language, need protection as infants, organize in groups, and use tools. Our shared ecological constraints, such as regular day-night cycles, often lead to common adaptations (biological and cul- tural). Each of us also varies because of differences in our biological and cultural circumstances, yielding different visual acuity, strength, family arrangements, means of making a living, and familiarity with specific lan- guages. Similarities and differences across communities do not divide phe- nomena into biological and cultural.
The defining features of the human species—such as using language and passing on inventions and adaptations to subsequent generations—are our cultural heritage. Part of our species’ biological heritage is wide flexi- bility as well as similarities in cultural arrangements that characterize dif- ferent human communities (see Heath, 1989a; Ochs, 1996).
Cultural differences are generally variations on themes of universal im- port, with differing emphasis or value placed on particular practices rather than all-or-none differences. For example, children’s ways of learning vary across communities, such as in formal schooling, apprenticeships, or help- ing on the farm. At the same time, however, all children learn from obser- vation and participation in some kind of community activities.
Accounting for cultural aspects of both widespread and diverse human practices will enable our understanding of the regularities within the diverse patterns that characterize human functioning. Breast-feeding provides a good example of widespread as well as diverse practices. Before baby bot- tles, nursing was practically essential to human survival—and virtually uni- versal (Trevathan & McKenna, 1994). At the same time, communities vary widely in how long nursing continues. In a study in Kansas City, researchers found that the older a baby is when nursing stops, the greater the associated distress (Sears & Wise, 1950, reported in Whiting & Child, 1953). However, by worldwide standards, Kansas City babies were weaned very early; only 5 out of 70 children were still nursing at the age of 7 months. In a worldwide sample of 52 societies, the age at weaning ranged from 6 months to 5½ years, with a median of 2½ years (Whiting & Child, 1953). With the world- wide sample, as with the Kansas City study, the older the baby was, up to age 13 to 18 months, the more distress accompanied weaning. But after this
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peak, weaning became easier with age; older children frequently weaned themselves. The worldwide variety in weaning practices led to a more com- prehensive view of regularities in the relation between age and distress at weaning.
To understand development, it is essential to figure out in what ways human development in different communities is alike, and in what ways it differs. We can leave behind the unproductive either/or thinking that asks whether human development is more similar or different across communi- ties and whether culture or biology has more effect. The either/or questions are as pointless as asking whether people rely more on their right leg or their left leg for walking. I consider biological aspects to function in concert with cultural aspects.
Vygotsky provided a useful framework for thinking about the inte- grated, dynamic nature of individual, cultural, and species development. He proposed the study of four interrelated levels of development involving the individual and the environment in different time frames: microgenetic, ontogenetic, phylogenetic, and cultural-historical development (Scribner, 1985; Wertsch, 1985; Zinchenko, 1985). Developmental psychologists tradi- tionally deal with ontogenetic development, which occurs in the time frame of the individual life span, such as across the years of childhood. This is merely a different time frame from the other three developmental levels. Phylogenetic development is the slowly changing species history that leaves a legacy for the individual in the form of genes, transforming over centuries or millennia. Cultural-historical development changes across decades and centuries, leaving a legacy for individuals in the form of symbolic and ma- terial technologies (such as literacy, number systems, and computers) as well as value systems, scripts, and norms. Microgenetic development is the mo- ment-to-moment learning of individuals in particular contexts, built on the individual’s genetic and cultural-historical background.
These levels of analysis of development are inseparable: The efforts of individuals constitute cultural practices that further organize individuals’ development. Similarly, human biological development works together with the cultural institutions and practices that characterize humanity. De- velopment over the life course takes place within both the course of cultural history and the course of phylogenetic history.
Human development necessarily builds on the historical endowment with which humans are born both as members of their species and as mem- bers of their communities. Thus, it is a false dichotomy to focus on “nature” and “nurture” as separable influences on human development. Babies enter the world equipped with patterns of action as well as preferences and biases in learning , based on their individual and specieswide genes and prenatal experience. They also come equipped with caregivers who structure their bi-
Individuals, Generations, Communities 65
ological and social worlds in ways deriving from their own and their ances- tors’ phylogenetic and cultural history (Hatano & Inagaki, 2000; Rogoff, 1990; Trevathan & McKenna, 1994).
At the same time, of course, new generations transform cultural insti- tutions and practices and contribute to biological evolution. Birth itself in- volves cultural practices surrounding labor and delivery, such as the use of drugs for the mother, variations in her position (squatting, lying), and the kind of support she receives (alone or with other people, in a hospital or outdoors). The obstetric techniques of a community, such as drugs and herbal remedies, cesarean section and external version, are cultural inven- tions (see figure 3.1).
Such cultural inventions may shape the biological characteristics of the species (and biological changes also contribute to cultural practices). For ex- ample, cesarean sections are often performed to save infants whose heads are too big for their mothers’ birth canals. Survival of such infants passes on genes for large heads and, over generations, might allow evolution of larger heads among human populations with access to cesarean sections. The ce- sarean section is one of many cultural technologies that contribute to the
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f i g u r e 3 . 1
An Armenian family gathered at the bedside of a mother and newborn infant.
nature of the human species and the nature of our descendants. The bio- logical changes that could result from such cultural practices may in turn contribute to changing cultural possibilities. Thus biological and cultural processes continually operate in tandem.
Infant breathing also illustrates how cultural and biological processes function together. Around the world, there are differences in whether chil- dren sleep with other people and in whether infants are expected to sleep for long stretches (as in the U.S. the developmental goal for infants to sleep for eight uninterrupted hours by 4 to 6 months of age). In some commu- nities, infants wake and feed about every four hours around the clock for at least the first eight months of life (Super, 1981; Super & Harkness, 1982). They often sleep with their mother and nurse on demand, with minimal disturbance of adult sleep. Mothers continue to sleep as their child nurses, or waken to feed and be sociable with the infant and others and then go back to sleep. In such arrangements, there is little parental motivation to enforce “sleeping through the night.”
Some researchers speculate that encouraging infants to sleep all night may strain their immature neurological system to maintain itself over this long sleep period (McKenna, 1986; Trevathan & McKenna, 1994). In mid- dle-class European American communities, babies are not only expected to sleep long stretches but are usually required to do it alone (Morelli, Rogoff, Oppenheim, & Goldsmith, 1992). Some research suggests that if infants sleep beside somebody rather than alone, their breathing may be supported by following the regular breathing pattern of the person beside them. Cul- tural differences in infant sleeping arrangements (sleeping eight hours at a stretch, alone, or following “expert” advice to place babies on their back to sleep) might have an impact on whether some vulnerable infants keep breathing or suffer Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (McKenna & Mosko, 1993; Trevathan & McKenna, 1994). In any case, cultural practices are clearly connected with biological processes from the beginning of life.
Two lines of research in human development illustrate especially well the mutually constituting nature of biological and cultural processes. One is infants’ preparation to learn from other people, and another is explana- tions of gender differences. In both of these, discussed next, we can recog- nize cultural as well as biological roles in specieswide regularities as well as common patterns in the differences among communities.
Prepared Learning by Infants and Young Children
Infants are born ready to learn the ways of those around them. In either/or thinking, some scholars downplay the extent to which infants are born pre- pared to learn human ways, preferring to credit development to the envi-
Individuals, Generations, Communities 67
ronment. However, inheritance from thousands of years of human history provides each new generation with genes and inborn processes that prepare them for joining human life. Such inheritance contributes to infants’ readi- ness to learn to balance on two feet, to use objects as tools, and to attract the care of adults. It probably underlies observations across cultural communi- ties of close similarities in the sequence and timing of some infant devel- opmental milestones and in the onset of smiling and distress over separa- tion from an attachment figure (Gewirtz, 1965; Goldberg , 1972; Konner, 1972; Super, 1981).
Human infants are prepared to learn language, a skill they have inher- ited from their ancestors. The stages of language learning appear in a con- stant order across a large variety of communities (Bowerman, 1981; Slobin, 1973). Infants’ preparation to learn language includes a propensity to learn from cultural processes, which have also been inherited from ancestors (by means of contact between the generations, not just genes).
Human learning is facilitated by an especially long infancy compared with many other animal species. Many other species are born able to do things that humans cannot, such as walking and feeding themselves. Long infancy may be responsible for our flexibility as a species in learning to use language and other cultural inventions. In this protracted early human de- velopment, children can flexibly learn the ways of any community: “Hu- mans are born with a self-regulating strategy for getting knowledge by human negotiation and co-operative action. . . . Thus socialisation is as nat- ural, innate or ‘biological’ for a human brain as breathing or walking” (Tre- varthen, 1988, p. 39).
In fact, humans learn from their cultural community even before birth. Experience as a fetus allows newborns to recognize many aspects of their prenatal life. They recognize their own mother’s voice; they distinguish un- familiar from familiar stories that they heard repeatedly in their last weeks before birth (whether spoken by their mother or by another woman); and they even discriminate between an unfamiliar language and their “mother tongue” (Cooper & Aslin, 1989; DeCasper & Fifer, 1980; DeCasper & Spence, 1986; Mehler et al., 1988).
Infants’ rapid language development relies on both their ability to de- tect language distinctions and their experience with the distinctions used in the language they hear ( Jusczyk, 1997; Werker & Desjardins, 1995). Over the first year, their sensitivity declines for distinctions between sounds that they seldom hear, as they tune their ear and their vocalizations to common features of the language that surrounds them. Around the world, infants’ babbling has the same sounds—the sounds of all languages—up through about 6 months of age. But sometime between 6 months and 1 year of age, children specialize in their mother tongue—they start dropping out the
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sounds that are not used in the language around them. For example, in Spanish, the letter “b” and the letter “v” are often heard as the same, with- out the auditory boundary between the “b” and the “v” as in English. Small babies in a Spanish-speaking environment initially distinguish between what English speakers call “b” and “v,” but as the babies get older, that dis- tinction drops out; “volleyball” sounds the same as “bolleyvall.”
The origins of infants’ predisposition to attend to language distinctions have likely arisen through both biological and sociocultural processes across the history of the human species. Undoubtedly, our ancestors experimented with ways to communicate during common efforts to survive. Those who succeeded were likely to have passed on both their genes and their practices to the next generations, contributing to this key biologically cultural feature of our species.
Language learning is also supported by biological and cultural features of human life that give infants opportunities to hear their native language and to begin to communicate with those who use it. Healthy human in- fants appear to come equipped with ways of achieving proximity to and in- volvement with other members of society, such as imitating others and protesting being left alone. Infants’ efforts appear similar to those appro- priate for anyone learning in an unfamiliar cultural setting: stay near trusted guides, watch their activities and get involved when possible, and attend to any instruction the guides provide.
Infants’ efforts are accompanied by biological and cultural features of caregiver-child relationships and cultural practices that encourage involve- ment of children in the activities of their community. Whether or not they regard themselves as explicitly teaching young children, caregivers routinely model mature performance during joint endeavors, adjust their interaction, and structure children’s environments and activities in ways that support local forms of learning (Rogoff, 1990).
Throughout childhood, children increasingly participate in and begin to manage the cultural activities that surround them, with the guidance of caregivers and companions (Fortes, 1938/1970). They learn the skills and practices of their community by engaging with others who may contribute to structuring the process to be learned, provide guidance during joint ac- tivity, and help adjust participation according to proficiency (see figure 3.2). For example, Mayan mothers from Guatemala assist their daughters in learning to weave by segmenting the process into steps, providing guidance in the context of joint participation, and adjusting the daughter’s partici- pation in weaving according to her increasing skill and interest (Rogoff, 1986). Similar processes occur in weaving in Mexico and tailoring in Liberia (Greenfield, 1984; Greenfield & Lave, 1982).
Children everywhere learn skills in the context of their use and with
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f i g u r e 3 . 2
A European American middle-class 6-year-old learns to sew with the aid and pointers provided by her grandmother, an expert seamstress.
the aid of those around them. This is how toddlers in India learn at an early age to distinguish the use of their right and left hands (a difficult distinction for many older children in other communities). The right hand is the “clean” hand used for eating and the left one is the “dirty” hand used for cleaning oneself after defecation:
If a child did not learn to eat with the right hand by participation and observation, a mother or older sister would manipulate the right hand and restrain the left until the child understood and did what was required. One of the earliest lessons taught a child of one-and-a- half to two years of age was to distinguish between the right and left hand and their distinctly separate usages. . . . Although we judged that the Indian style of eating required considerable manipulative skill, we observed a girl, not quite two, tear her chapati solely with her right hand and pick up her vegetable with the piece of chapati held in the right hand. (Freed & Freed, 1981, p. 60)
Similarly, European American caregivers often help infants attend to what the caregivers want them to see. If infants appear not to understand a
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pointing gesture, the mothers may help by touching the indicated object (Lempers, 1979). With infants as young as 3 months, these mothers attempt to achieve joint attention by following their infant’s direction of gaze or by putting an object between themselves and their baby and shaking the object (Bruner, 1983; Schaffer, 1984).
Local versions of these sorts of interpersonal supports for learning are provided by a long biological and cultural history. In our species, each gen- eration comes prepared to learn to participate in the practices and traditions of their elders, aided by shared engagement in valued and routine cultural activities. This may account for children’s rapid development as participants in the practices and understandings of their community—whether learn- ing to weave or to read, tend livestock or young children, do schoolwork, or behave according to the specific gender roles prescribed in their community. The biologically cultural nature of human development is also well illus- trated by gender role development.
Where Do Gender Differences Come From?
Active debate swarms around the question of whether gender differences are biologically inevitable or culturally malleable. From the discussion above, it should be clear that I favor a view that gender differences are based on both biological and cultural heritage. Information about biological as well as cultural contributions to the patterns we observe, and about cultural sim- ilarities as well as variations, can aid us in deciding whether the observed patterns are ones that we want to continue.
The two common accounts of gender role differences, often assumed to be competing explanations, both contribute to the discussion. The bio- logical account argues that humans and other animals are biologically pre- pared for gender differences, especially through their differing reproductive roles. This is often treated as being in opposition to gender role “training” that occurs through instruction and experience with a gender-structured world (Draper, 1985; Eagly & Wood, 1999). The two views are often treated in an either/or manner, with strong feelings about allegiance to one “side” or the other, in an unfortunate oversimplification (see also Miller & Keller, 2000).
Biological Preparation of Gender Roles
The biological preparation argument holds that male and female procre- ation involve very different reproductive strategies, which extend to many other aspects of life. According to this perspective, a major motive of ani- mal (including human) behavior is the drive to ensure survival of one’s own genes. Gender differences would stem from the fact that women have to in-
Individuals, Generations, Communities 71
vest heavily in each child to reproduce their genes, whereas men need invest little time and effort.
To get one child who is liable to grow up and keep on reproducing, women spend nine months pregnant, two to three years nursing (in histori- cal worldwide averages), and more years protecting and teaching the child to be able to survive. In contrast, men can father as many children as women will allow them access to do, with very little time invested. Men can help to ensure that their genes survive by assisting women in raising the children, providing resources and protection. Such assistance is sometimes a condition for allowing men the opportunity to procreate. A creation story told among the Navajo illustrates these aspects of the biological preparation argument:
Á́ltsé hastiin the First Man became a great hunter in the fourth world. So he was able to provide his wife Á́ltsé asdzą́ą́ the First Woman with plenty to eat. . . . Now one day he brought home a fine, fleshy deer. His wife boiled some of it, and together they had themselves a hearty meal. When she had finished eating, Á́ltsé asdzą́ą́ the First Woman wiped her greasy hands on her sheath. She belched deeply. And she had this to say:
“Thank you shijóózh my vagina,” she said, “Thank you for that delicious dinner.”
To which Á́ltsé hastiin the First Man replied this way: “Why do you say that?” he replied. “Why not thank me? Was it not I who killed the deer whose flesh you have just feasted on? Was it not I who carried it here for you to eat? Was it not I who skinned it? Who made it ready for you to boil? Is nijóózh your vagina the great hunter, that you should thank it and not me?”
To which Á́ltsé asdzą́ą́ offered this answer: “As a matter of fact, she is,” offered she. “In a manner of speaking it is jóósh the vagina who hunts. Were it not for jóósh you would not have killed that deer. Were it not for her you would not have carried it here. You would not have skinned it. You lazy men would do nothing around here were it not for jóósh. In truth jóósh the vagina does all the work around here.” (Zolbrod, 1984, pp. 58–59, brought to my attention by Deyhle & Margonis, 1995)
According to the biological preparation argument, one difficulty for men attempting to assist in raising their children is that men cannot be sure that a child is theirs. (In contrast, women do know that a child is theirs.) To invest in a particular child, so the argument goes, men want some assurance of their fatherhood. This is used to account for the double standard for vir- ginity and sexual activity.
At the same time, females control access to the males’ ability to con-
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tribute genes to the next generation. To gain access, males may need to en- gage in deeds of daring or convince females that they can provide greater re- sources and protection than other males. This, in the biological preparation argument, accounts for competition among males and greater unevenness of skills among males than females.
Explanations of how gender differences arise are quite controversial. Many heated arguments are based on peoples’ views of how things should be as well as on observations of existing gender differences. Although the biological preparation argument and the gender role training argument are often put in opposition, they need not be. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that they do not operate in concert in some way.
Gender Role Training
The gender role training view argues that children develop the distinctive gender roles of their community from models presented in daily life and the encouragement or discouragement of gender-related activities (see fig- ure 3.3).
An example of discouragement of gender-“inappropriate” activity is the commonly observed restriction of U.S. girls’ level of activity through requirements to stay clean and protect pretty clothes. Girls in a number of
f i g u r e 3 . 3
A little one attempts to assume the position of gender role models, Sarasota, FL, ca. 1950.
f i g u r e 3 . 4
Gender information is pervasive in the everyday arrangements of children and families, as can be seen in this portrait in 19th-century France, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Madame Georges Charpentier was the wife of a prominent publisher. Her daughter sits on the family dog and her son, Paul, sits beside her, dressed in girl’s clothing because he is not yet 5 years old.
societies receive more training for proper social behavior than do boys (Whiting & Edwards, 1988; see figure 3.4). A nursery rhyme from Latin America illustrates this type of sex role training:
Chiquita Bonita Pretty Little Girl
Soy chiquita, soy bonita. I am small, I am pretty. Soy la perla de mamá. I am my mother’s pearl. Si me ensucio el vestido, If I soil my dress, Garrotazos me dará. She will beat me.
(Griego, Bucks, Gilbert, & Kimball, 1981, p. 6)
Gender differences appear to be nurtured by differences in the tasks usually assigned girls and boys. Beatrice Whiting emphasized that the way
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children learn to treat other people is aligned with the cast of characters with whom they routinely engage, especially with the gender and age of their companions:
The power of parents and other agents of socialization is in their as- signment of children to specific settings. Whether it is caring for an infant sibling, working around the house in the company of adult fe- males, working on the farm with adults and siblings, playing outside with neighborhood children, hunting with adult males, or attending school with age mates, the daily assignment of a child to one or an- other of these settings has important consequences on the develop- ment of habits of interpersonal behavior, consequences that may not be recognized by the socializers who make the assignments. (1980, p. 111)
In the Six Cultures study, Whiting and Whiting (1975) and their col- leagues observed the interactions of children who were in the company of older, same-age, and younger children. Those who commonly spent time with younger children generally behaved in a more nurturant fashion. In the varying cultural communities that Beatrice Whiting and Carolyn Ed- wards (1973, 1988) studied, nurturance of the older girls appeared to be re- lated to the fact that they were far more likely to be assigned infant care than were boys. Girls of all ages were assigned chores near or inside the home, requiring compliance to their mother, whereas boys were allowed to play or work farther from home and in the company of peers. In addition, girls were assigned chores at a younger age than boys.
The impact of assignment to infant care was examined in a Luo com- munity in Kenya (Ember, 1973). Luo mothers usually assigned girls and boys chores that were culturally defined as gender-appropriate. However, the absence of an older sister in some homes required boys to do some of the female chores. Luo boys who were assigned female work in the home, especially infant care, were less aggressive and more prosocial than boys who did not have these task assignments. Moreover, the nurturance of Luo boys with experience tending infants generalized to their interactions with other individuals.
Children look for regularities in behavior based on salient categories in their community. Gender is invariably a salient category (Whiting & Ed- wards, 1988). Children themselves are often more conservative about gender differences than are the adults around them. They look for rules, and if they think they have found one, they are more narrow about its application than their elders, often overlooking examples to the contrary. For example, when one of my daughters was about 2, we watched a show on TV where two ge- ologists dressed in suits were speaking. My daughter asked who they were,
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and I told her they were professors. She said, “They can’t be professors, they’re mans.” She knew one professor, who was a woman, so she inferred that no men could be professors. She had developed a rule and applied it strictly.
Gender information surrounds children, providing the opportunity for them to learn about their community’s gender roles from parents, siblings and peers, and teachers and from other sources such as television, books, and other media. For example, many children’s books and television shows in the United States give stereotyped views of what boys and men do and what girls and women do: Women characters often have stereotypically fe- male occupations; the protagonists are generally male; if women or girls are present they tend to be in the background; and males have the adventures (Spicher & Hudak, 1997).
Subtle information about gender in young children’s daily lives may be especially likely to be accepted because it is taken for granted. Lee Munroe and Ruth Munroe (1997) suggested that patterns that are perceived without conscious awareness or without being pointed out are especially likely to be regarded subsequently as preferable and more pleasant. They predicted that for this reason, gender roles would be quite resilient and slow to change.
Thus, the gender role training argument notes that information about gender role expectations is pervasive and is not just in the form of pur- poseful lessons or regulations but is conveyed also in differential treatment of boys and girls, men and women. This argument prioritizes the social and cultural contributions to children’s development of gender roles. (Chapter 5 takes a closer look at patterns of gender roles in different cultural com- munities. The aim here is simply to argue that gender roles can be seen as si- multaneously biologically and culturally formed; we do not need to treat bi- ology and culture as competing forces.)
We can look at biological preparation and social learning of gender roles as involving the same processes viewed in different time frames. In Vy- gotsky’s terms, evolutionary (biological) preparedness of gender roles in- volves phylogenetic development, and social learning of gender roles involves microgenetic and ontogenetic development of the current era’s gender roles during the time frame of cultural-historical development. Biological prepa- ration is thus a record of the customs and arrangements that developed from the distant past of the species. At the same time, individuals learn their part in (and revise) the customs and practices of their community’s current and recent gender role distributions and societal structure.
From a sociocultural perspective, studying biological and cultural processes as they together contribute to changing human practices across generations will improve understanding of the preparedness of infants to learn, the origins of gender differences, and other aspects of human devel-
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opment. A generational approach is also central to making progress in how we think about the relation of individual cultural participation and chang- ing cultural communities, as I argue in the next section.
Participation in Dynamic Cultural Communities
When identifying people’s connections with communities, there is a wide- spread tendency to use a single category, often ethnic or racial, to categorize an individual. This results in the “box problem”: Which box on a ques- tionnaire do you check as your ethnic identity? Individuals categorized in the same box are assumed to be mostly alike and to differ in essential ways from individuals categorized in other boxes. (Discussions of the issues sur- rounding the use of ethnicity and nationality as discrete categories appear in Ferdman, 2000; Gjerde & Onishi, 2000; Hoffman, 1997; Nagel, 1994; Phinney, 1996; Rogoff & Angelillo, 2002; Verdery, 1994; Waldron, 1996; and Wolf, 1994, 1997.)
In the next section, I discuss the problem of treating culture primarily as a category of individual identity. I suggest instead that cultural processes can be thought of as practices and traditions of dynamically related cultural communities in which individuals participate and to which they contribute across generations. I then consider the unique case of middle-class Euro- pean American communities, in which people are often unaware of their own cultural participation. Then I explore a way of thinking about com- munities across generations, as new generations carry on and revise the cul- tural practices of those who raised them.
Culture as a Categorical Property of Individuals versus a Process of Participation in Dynamically Related Cultural Communities
People’s cultural participation is often discussed in terms of cultural or eth- nic “identity,” asking Who are you? or What are you? This categorization approach is based on the idea that cultural aspects of individual lives are fixed in “social address” categories such as race, ethnicity, and socioeco- nomic class.1 Such social addresses are important for the study of how peo- ple categorize themselves and other individuals, but equating them with culture is problematic in ways that I discuss in this section.
1With the prevailing focus on individual classification, ethnic or “cultural” identity is some- times viewed as an individual biological inheritance. Although some individual features connected with one’s ancestors’ community membership can be genetically inherited by individuals—such as nose shape, hair texture, salt metabolism, and propensity for certain diseases—these markers are far from central to the examination of cultural processes (see Wolf, 1994).
Instead of using a categorical approach to thinking about culture, I prefer to focus on people’s involvement in their communities, to address the dynamic, generative nature of both individual lives and community prac- tices. With cultural participation as the focus, the question for examining an individual’s cultural involvement becomes What cultural practices are fa- miliar to you? or What cultural practices have you made use of? For exam- ining communities’ cultural practices, the question becomes What ways of doing things are customary? or What sorts of everyday approaches do peo- ple usually expect? Cultural practices—such as home language(s), religion, government and legal systems, ways of teaching and learning, gender roles, skills with specific tools and technologies, and attitudes toward other groups —are central to both individual and community functioning as people build on and contribute to community cultural traditions.
Moving from considering culture as “social address” boxes or identity categories to an examination of participation in cultural communities would solve some problems that currently perplex us. Conceptualizing cul- ture as a categorical variable of individual identity creates issues of variabil- ity within groups, overlapping involvements in different communities, and the complexities of subdividing categorization systems.
Problems of variability, overlap, and subgroups in categorical approaches to culture
Identity categories often focus on one’s ancestral nation (or continent!), overlooking important variations within nations. However, the closer one looks, the more likely one is to discern differences within groups. This is more likely with groups one knows intimately:
If one is “Asian American” one is very much aware of the numerous ways in which internal differences are profound and consequential. Thus, Japanese Americans know the important distinctions between the generations and their attitudes toward assimilation in America (Issei, Nisei, Sansei, and now Yonsei, with patterned and different views about intermarriage, voting, assimilation, etc.). Chinese Ameri- cans see important differences between Chinese from Taiwan and Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and the Mainland, San Francisco and Walnut Creek, first or second generation, and so on. Similarly, Kore- ans, Filipinos, Laotians, Cambodian, and Vietnamese also note inter- nal variations amongst themselves.
While Asian Americans are sensitive to their own internal differ- ences, they are likely to hold stereotypical views of the homogeneous character of “others,” collapsing gentiles and Jews, working-class Irish
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Catholics and upper-middle class Episcopalians as “white.” Similarly, Blacks make astute internal distinctions between the street-wise urban and those who grew up in suburban settings with professional parents, those from a second generation who migrated from the south, and those from old-line southern elite families, between na- tionalist and assimilationist, etc. But these same African Americans who see internal differences in their own group [may] see “Asians” as a single, collapsed category. (Institute for the Study of Social Change, 1991, p. 12)
The splitting of groups into subgroups can go on ad infinitum, “down” to the level of the individual. Many scholars therefore worry that attending to cultural differences will unduly complicate social scientists’ efforts to de- velop general statements about human functioning. However, this worry stems from the “box” approach to culture. Psychologists often assume that more boxes are needed in order to examine the role of national origins, re- ligious convictions, generations since immigration, regional differences, and so on. They argue that the boxes need to be subdivided (into “subcul- tures”) to be able to cross each of these with the others to examine their in- dependent and interacting effects. However, the boxes and subboxes would eventually be so numerous that the whole endeavor would collapse under its own weight.
This issue dissolves if we move from thinking of culture as consisting of separate categories or factors, and instead describe individuals’ partici- pation in cultural communities. Our description can refer to national origins, religious convictions, generations since immigration, regional dif- ferences, and so on. But the features would not be regarded as separate cat- egorical factors (even if such simplification may be handy in our data analy- ses; see Rogoff & Angelillo, 2002). Rather, cultural features can be treated as interdependent aspects of a multifaceted pattern.
For example, instead of describing a community using the intersection of supposedly independent categories such as nationality, race, social class, and so on, we could give a more fluid description that places each of these aspects in the historical context of the others. In this way, we might de- scribe a Mayan Indian community in Guatemala as one where, for several centuries, most families depended on subsistence agriculture and recently have added cash crops and merchant and professional occupations and begun to send their children to Western schools.
For some research, concepts of ethnicity, social class, and personal iden- tity are essential. Indeed, boxing disparate traditions together under a com- mon label (e.g., Latino, African American, Asian) in public policy and everyday life creates a reality based on these identity categories (Barth, 1994;
Individuals, Generations, Communities 79
Correa-Chávez, personal communication, November 2000). For example, people classed in the same boxes by law or custom come to share a common treatment and history, even if the classification system clusters people with widely disparate backgrounds.
However, if social science were to equate culture with the intersection of such categories, we would have destroyed the concept of culture. Such an approach would exclude the dynamic examination of the historical nature of people’s participation in changing and overlapping cultural communities.
Cultural Communities
Thinking about cultural communities is central to my proposal to shift from an emphasis on categorical identity as a property of individuals. It helps us focus on people’s participation in cultural processes that form the common practices of particular communities.
The question of what a community is has become especially important in recent years. Unfortunately, many people use the term “community” to refer simply to a collection of individuals with some single identifying char- acteristic. It means little more to say “the community of bicycle riders” than to say “bicycle riders” or to say “the smoking community” rather than “smok- ers.” In my view, communities are not simply a collection of individuals sharing a characteristic or two.
For present purposes, communities can be defined as groups of people who have some common and continuing organization, values, understand- ing , history, and practices. As John Dewey pointed out: “There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communi- cation. [People] live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common” (1916, p. 5).
A community involves people trying to accomplish some things to- gether, with some stability of involvement and attention to the ways they relate to each other. Being a community requires structured communica- tion that is expected to endure for some time, with a degree of commitment and shared though often contested meaning. A community develops cul- tural practices and traditions that transcend the particular individuals in- volved, as one generation replaces another.
The relations among the participants in a community are varied and multifaceted. Different participants have different roles and responsibilities, and their relations may be comfortable or conflictual or oppressive. Their relations involve personal connections and procedures for resolving in- evitable conflicts in ways that attempt to maintain the relationships and the community. Participants in a community may provide each other with sup- port and are familiar with aspects of each other’s lives. They also engage in
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conflicts, disputes, and intrigues, as seems inevitable when people’s lives are connected and the future of the community is a matter of intense interest. Even after leaving , participants in a community often continue to regard their involvement and their continuing relationships as central to their lives, whether this is expressed in affection and loyalty to the community or re- sentment or efforts to avoid community ways.
A community involves generations that move through it, with cus- tomary ways of handling the transitions of generations. To continue to func- tion, a community also adapts with changing times, experimenting with and resisting new ideas in ways that maintain core values while learning from changes that are desired or required.
My use of the term community is not limited to people who are in face-to-face contact or living in geographic proximity. Prototypical com- munities, in prior times, have involved people who live in the same small village or region for generations. However, people who coordinate with oth- ers at a distance, within some form of personal network, relying on some similar assumptions about how things are done and using similar tools within related institutions may also share a community. In such distal com- munities, people’s relationships are still multifaceted; individuals are not just thrown together without some common history, future, traditions, and goals. Communities are composed of people who coordinate with each other over a shared and often contested history.
Expectable variation within and overlapping participation among communities
The questions of variation within a group and of overlapping involvements are not stumbling blocks once we shift to looking at participation in cul- tural communities rather than thinking of culture as a categorical variable or set of independent factors.
Variations among participants in a community are to be expected. Par- ticipants do not have precisely the same points of view, practices, back- grounds, or goals. Rather, they are part of a somewhat coordinated organ- ization. They often are in complementary roles, playing parts that fit together rather than being identical, or in contested relationships with each other, disagreeing about features of their own roles or community direction while requiring some common ground even for the disagreement. It is the com- mon ways that participants in a community share (even if they contest them) that I regard as culture.
People often participate in more than one community, and the cultural ways of the various dynamic communities in which they participate may overlap or conflict with each other. To the extent that a nation shares ideas, institutions, and ways of doing things and relating, the traditions and prac-
tices of people in that nation can be identified by reference to the national community. At the same time, people participate in cultural traditions and practices that are identified with more local or specific communities. The salience of these overlapping communities is likely to vary for those who participate in them.
For example, many North Americans regard themselves as members of a national community along with communities defined by one or more eth- nic heritages (such as Danish, African, Jewish, and Mexican descent), re- gional traditions (e.g., Appalachian, urban, or Southern Californian), and religions. Academia (or intelligentsia) can also be regarded as a community that often extends across national and ethnic boundaries (Walker, 2001). Likewise, the communities of commune dwellers of the 1960s in the United States included people of quite varied family roots and values (Weisner & Bernheimer, 1998). An individual may regard one or a few of these kinds of community as primary for defining his or her way of life, even while par- ticipating in others.
Communities are often in close relationship with one another, fre- quently in ways that serve to define each other (see Barth, 1994; Nagel, 1994; Wolf, 1997). For example, generational communities such as the “chil- dren of the 1960s” defined their values and practices in opposition to those of their parents’ generation. Ethnic neighbors or different religious groups may define themselves in terms of historical relationships (of conflict, op- pression, assistance, or mutual reliance) across their communities.
Individuals’ connections with some cultural communities may take greater prominence and others may become family secrets, depending on the social meaning of involvement in different groups (see Valsiner & Lawrence, 1997). Individuals often identify their cultural heritage differently depend- ing on the situation and audience, reflecting historical relations among communities:
An individual of Cuban ancestry may be a Latino vis-à-vis non-Span- ish-speaking ethnic groups, a Cuban-American vis-à-vis other Span- ish-speaking groups, a Marielito vis-à-vis other Cubans, and white vis-à-vis African Americans. The chosen ethnic identity is determined by the individual’s perception of its meaning to different audiences, its salience in different social contexts, and its utility in different set- tings. For instance, intra-Cuban distinctions of class and immigra- tion cohort may not be widely understood outside of the Cuban community since a Marielito is a “Cuban” or “Hispanic” to most Anglo-Americans. To a Cuban, however, immigration cohorts repre- sent important political “vintages,” distinguishing those whose lives have been shaped by decades of Cuban revolutionary social changes
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from those whose life experiences have been as exiles in the United States. (Nagel, 1994, p. 155, summarizing the work of Pedraza; Padilla; and Gimenez, Lopez & Munoz)
I purposely focus on participation rather than membership in commu- nities. To be a member of a group usually requires some agreement that the person falls within some established boundaries (like the boxes). However, people often participate in cultural communities without being accorded membership in them. For example, I have participated for several decades in a Mayan community in Guatemala, but people from that community (and I) do not regard me as a member of that community. Nonetheless, my cultural participation in the Tz’utujil Mayan town of San Pedro has been very important to my own development and that of my family, and my in- volvement has contributed to San Pedro’s cultural practices over the years. If we use the more dynamic concept of participation, rather than the cate- gorical concept of membership, I believe that we can more easily focus on the cultural processes involved in both individual development and com- munity histories.
Generalizing about People and Processes
The categorical approach assumes some homogeneity within each category of people, automatically generalizing observations (on average) to all peo- ple who share a category designation, such as Japanese, Mexican American, or European American. This approach also wrestles with the issue of “rep- resentativeness” of the research participants to the wider population of which they are expected to serve as exemplars (because category members are expected to be relatively homogeneous).
My proposal—that we focus on participation in cultural communi- ties—does not assume that observations are general beyond the people ob- served. Instead, the question of generality is a matter for investigation, to examine the extent to which observations in one community can be ex- tended to a “neighbor.” Far more research needs to be done before we can determine the generality or specificity of the observations to date. Some as- pects of membership in broader communities will apply to more specific communities that share a common history and institutions, and other as- pects will differ.
The research so far provides little basis for determining the generality of observations. Hence, my approach is to treat findings from particular studies as pertaining to the specific group studied, unless sufficient research in different related communities lends confidence in generalizing.
In summarizing a study, I try to write “many European American chil- dren did such-and-such” rather than “European American children do such-
Individuals, Generations, Communities 83
and-such,” unless there is evidence that the observations apply more gener- ally across time and place. (It is often difficult to determine cultural infor- mation, however. Many published reports provide little information on cul- tural backgrounds of participants, or refer to broad ethnic categories— using boxes in a “cultural influence” approach—without considering cul- tural practices.) We need to address how broadly observations generalize by studying patterns of variation, rather than either assuming generality within categories or arguing that cultural communities vary infinitely.
We should also turn our focus to questions of generality of cultural processes, not just generality or representativeness of groups of people, as in the categorical approach. By suggesting that we search for patterns of reg- ularities of cultural processes, I am arguing for a dynamic approach to ex- amining culture, to replace the static approaches involved in categorizing people in supposedly homogeneous groups.
Research is just beginning to provide clues regarding the dynamic pat- terns of cultural processes in human development. In this book, I identify some cultural patterns that I see in classic areas of human development, such as social relations, cognitive development, and socialization practices. Although some of the available research employs boxes in the cultural in- fluence approach, it is still useful.
Far more research is needed, however, to help delineate the regularities that may help us make sense of the differences we observe in the ways that people develop in a variety of cultural communities. We have some idea of areas of universality and many examples of cultural variations. But we need more focus on studying the regularities in the patterns of variation and sim- ilarity in cultural practices across cultural communities.
Because most research on child development has focused on middle- class European American populations, there is more basis for making gen- eralizations about human development in this cultural community than in many others. Unfortunately, little of this research has focused explicitly on cultural aspects of European American middle-class lives, much less on diverse cultural communities that may fit that label. A great deal of re- search with middle-class European American children assumes that the findings represent children in general (4-year-olds do this, and 6-year-olds do that).
Many participants in this broad cultural community are unfamiliar with considering their practices to be cultural at all. Because cultural as- pects of everyday life may be more difficult for people of dominant cul- tural communities to discern—due to their unique position—I address cultural aspects of middle-class European American communities specifi- cally.
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Individuals, Generations, Communities 85
The Case of Middle-Class European American Cultural Communities
The cultural practices, traditions, values, and understandings of middle- class European American communities may be less visible to people of this heritage precisely because people from a dominant majority often take their practices for granted as the norm (Perry, 2001). It has been common for re- searchers to treat middle-class European American practices and develop- ment as “normal” or even “natural” and to refer only to the practices of other communities as “cultural.” The dominance of this cultural community in both world affairs and research on human development often makes it more challenging for people who are familiar only with the ways of this commu- nity to become aware of their own cultural practices.
Habitual relations between people become expected, institutionalized rules and approaches that people come to regard as external to their func- tioning (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Such institutions are in effect cultural habits, in which previous generations’ innovations are used as a matter of routine. They are often regarded as natural; their role in current activities is simply assumed and not noticed or credited (or blamed) for the processes to which they contribute. John Shotter explained how practices become in- stitutionalized and, in the process, become taken for granted:
For the structure of human exchanges, there are precise foundations to be discovered in the institutions we establish between ourselves and others; institutions which implicate us in one another’s activity in such a way that, what we have done together in the past, commits us to going on in a certain way in the future. . . . The members of an in- stitution need not necessarily have been its originators; they may be second, third, fourth, etc. generation members, having “inherited” the institution from their forebears. And this is a most important point, for although there may be an intentional structure to institu- tional activities, practitioners of institutional forms need have no awareness at all of the reason for its structure—for them, it is just “the-way-things-are-done.” The reasons for the institution having one form rather than another are buried in its history. (1978, p. 70)
To understand the cultural basis of human development in all com- munities—especially any that we are accustomed to—it is crucial to ex- amine other ways of doing things. Cultural research helps to delineate the cultural features of mainstream practices, which otherwise may not be ex- amined due to their dominance and pervasiveness. People who have expe- rienced variation are much more likely to be aware of their own cultural ways, as Dalton Conley discovered in his childhood in New York City:
I am not your typical middle-class white male. I am middle class, despite the fact that my parents had no money; I am white, but I grew up in an inner-city housing project where most everyone was black or Hispanic. I enjoyed a range of privileges that were denied my neighbors but that most Americans take for granted. In fact, my childhood was like a social science experiment: Find out what being middle class really means by raising a kid from a so-called good family in a so-called bad neighborhood. Define whiteness by putting a light-skinned kid in the midst of a community of color. . . .
Ask any African American to list the adjectives that describe them and they will likely put black or African American at the top of the list. Ask someone of European descent the same question and white will be far down the list, if it’s there at all. Not so for me. I’ve studied whiteness the way I would a foreign language. I know its grammar, its parts of speech; I know the subtleties of its idioms, its vernacular words and phrases to which the native speaker has never given a second thought. There’s an old saying that you never really know your own language until you study another. It’s the same with race and class. (2000, pp. xi–xii)
There is not a commonly agreed-upon way to designate the commu- nity or cultural ways of mainstream middle-class European Americans. Some common ways of referring to this general group or their cultural ways include White, American, the dominant majority, mainstream, middle class, Western, and European American.
As a temporary solution, I frequently refer rather loosely to “middle- class European American” practices, traditions, or communities. By this I mean the cultural ways of the group that in recent decades has held a main- stream position in North America. These are people who are primarily of Western European descent, with a social position that is often characterized as middle class on the basis of having participated in high levels of formal schooling and associated occupations. It is interesting, however, that in re- cent decades, most men and women in the United States have classified themselves as middle class (Kluckhohn, 1949; Shwalb, Shwalb, Sukemune, & Tatsumoto, 1992).
It is perhaps their extensive involvement in the particular cultural in- stitution of formal schooling and the associated occupational roles that most characterize the group, more than their ethnicity or nationality, but these currently often go together. Historically, and still, middle-class Eu- ropean American people are involved in a cultural system that bears some similarities to Western European social practices, economic systems, reli- gions, philosophy, and history of colonialism and expansion (Hollings-
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head, 1949; Latouche, 1996). Schooling itself is an institution of European and American origins that has spread widely (Meyer, Ramirez, & Soysal, 1992).
However, the middle-class, highly schooled cultural system is not lim- ited to people of Western European ancestry. Indeed, in many large cities all around the world, highly schooled people of very different ancestry in- creasingly resemble the European American middle class in their occupa- tions, practices, and values.
Important variations from one locale or specific group to another ac- company the common cultural approach held by different middle-class Eu- ropean American communities (and middle-class communities in Western Europe and other regions). These differences have seldom been studied. However, the variations reveal the cultural practices related to region, reli- gion, and other distinctions within the “mainstream” of the United States and other nations. Such variation, and awareness of it, is well expressed by a student at a northeastern U.S. university:
During my first year at [university x], I was acutely aware of not be- longing here. I was different from everyone else in so many ways: I was a Southerner, I went to public schools, and I was totally unfamil- iar with the urban Northeast and its mixture of cultures and races. My family history was rooted in rural Mississippi and Arkansas, and only in the last couple of generations had anyone in my family gone to college. I felt that my previous education was inferior to most other students. I walked, talked, and even thought more slowly than everyone around me, and often I felt as stupid as many people treated me. . . . I tried very hard during this period to find people and things that reminded me of [hometown x], of “home.” I visited Baptist and Episcopal churches around campus, trying to find a church similar to those I attended while growing up. . . . My accent actually became deeper, because I was making such an effort to hold on to my old identity, which was strongly tied up with the part of the country I had come from. (quoted in Diamond, 1999, p. 6)
The variations among middle-class European American neighbor- hoods from different regions of the country are noticeable enough that it may be difficult to regard them as part of the same community. Likewise, there are important differences among American Indian tribes and among different Pacific Island groups and many other neighboring communities. Nonetheless, there can also be important underlying similarities in values and practices across neighborhoods or tribes that may justify regarding the smaller communities as instances of larger communities for some purposes (Cajete, 1994; Latouche, 1996). For example, Urie Bronfenbrenner specu-
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lated on the emphasis on individualism in the United States, broadly speak- ing. An immigrant to the United States himself, Bronfenbrenner noted
the special character of those who, since this country’s very begin- nings, have been emigrating to the United States. As I have summed it up for myself, Americans are mostly descendants of those who could not stand authority, or whom authority could not stand. (1992, p. 288)
A guidebook written to help foreigners understand “American” ways relayed observations based on many conversations with foreign students at the University of Iowa:
The most important thing to understand about Americans is probably their devotion to “individualism.” They have been trained since very early in their lives to consider themselves as separate individuals who are responsible for their own situations in life and their own destinies. . . .
You can see it in the way Americans treat their children. Even very young children are given opportunities to make their own choices and express their opinions. A parent will ask a one-year-old child what color balloon she wants, which candy bar she would prefer, or whether she wants to sit next to mommy or daddy. . . .
It is this concept of themselves as individual decision-makers that blinds at least some Americans to the fact that they share a cul- ture with each other. They have the idea, as mentioned above, that they have independently made up their own minds about the values and assumptions they hold. The notion that social factors outside themselves have made them “just like everyone else” in important ways offends their sense of dignity. (Althen, 1988, pp. 4–6)
To help foreigners get along in the United States, the guide goes on to de- scribe a number of characteristics ascribed to “Americans” by visitors. Some of the descriptions may strike home and others seem questionable to “Americans”:
• A strong desire for privacy • Discomfort with being treated with obvious deference (such as
bowing) but using other cues to indicate status (such as more fre- quently interrupting others or sitting at the head of a table)
• A belief that they can control the future and that new things are better than old ones
• Treating time as a resource that should be spent well (“One of the more difficult things many foreign businessmen and students must adjust to in the States is the notion that time must be saved whenever possible and used wisely every day”; p. 14)
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• Prioritizing efficiency, to accomplish more with fewer resources • A custom of engaging in “small talk” when meeting another person
(“Listening to American small talk leads some foreigners to the erro- neous conclusion that Americans are intellectually incapable of carry- ing on a discussion about anything significant. Some foreigners be- lieve that topics more complex than weather, sports, or social lives are beyond the Americans’ ability to comprehend”; p. 23)
As an “American” myself, I recognize some of these characterizations— although I would also argue about their generality. The statements may be helpful to visitors in some general sense, and there is something to them. But they would also need to be more qualified when we think about particular circumstances and different immigrant and native communities of “Amer- icans.” (The author of the guide recognized this, too.) I include the list here because it is especially useful for middle-class European Americans to con- sider how they are seen as a group by others, as part of the process of re- flecting on their own cultural ways.
Cultural research far from U.S. shores can be an aid in the process of becoming aware of cultural patterns of the U.S. “mainstream,” as well as being important for building an understanding of human development that encompasses worldwide regularities and variations. The traditions and practices of middle-class European American communities contribute to the traditions and practices of other communities, along with borrowed ideas, practices, and institutions. Current ways of middle-class European American communities—like those of all communities—have transformed from previous ways, derived from genealogical ancestors as well as from other communities. And changes across generations and communities continue.
Conceiving of Communities across Generations
If asked to specify the communities with which they identify, often people find it necessary to give an account of the richly textured historical back- ground of their family, themselves, and even their communities, including whichever features are prominent in their lives: their ancestors’ and house- hold members’ national origins, historical relations to other groups, recency of immigration, racial features, educational background, gender, genera- tional status or age group, religion, current country and region of residence, involvement in important events (e.g., a great war, holocaust, or enslave- ment), and so on.
This historical and dynamic nature of community involvement is dif- ficult to address if group membership is treated with a few static categories. To address the changing yet continuing processes by which individuals and
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communities constitute each other, I find it useful to think of community participation across generations (both past and future). Across generations, some continuities from the past are preserved and built on, at the same time that each new generation transforms what is “given.”
The patterns of ocean waves is an image that can illustrate the connec- tion between individuals and communities across generations. Imagine the position of a particular, individual water molecule as it moves in partial concert with others in the ocean. Its movement is partially all its own (though obviously not as individually determined as the movement of an- imate individuals such as humans). At the same time, it rises and falls in waves that form predictable patterns. The waves rise and fall in the same places although the individual water molecules differ—just as some com- munity traditions are carried on through the passage of generations. At the same time, as conditions change, the wave form changes. Changes in the position of the moon, geological changes in the ocean bottom, and wind currents—as well as aspects of the water molecules themselves such as their temperature— contribute to changes in the form of the waves.
In like fashion, the traditions of cultural communities change with conditions such as world economic fluctuations, wars, technological inven- tions, and other contributions of the current generation. Waves themselves are not isolated from other wave patterns: An individual water molecule may participate in the movement emanating from several sources, such as when wave forms overlap and create more complex motion. This is like in- dividuals’ participation in the traditions of more than one community: The different traditions may amplify or conflict, just as with wave forms. Of course, individual humans—more than water molecules!— create direction and innovation in their own movement as well as in that of their compan- ions and even in whole “waves.”
This wave image helps me to think about the overlapping community traditions in which an individual participates, forming patterns that both endure and change with the passage of generations. The image opens up fascinating questions, ones that require a longer-term view than a few decades. I have begun to see such patterns in my work in a Mayan community dur- ing almost three decades, and the patterns fascinate me at high school re- unions across an even longer stretch. These give me a viewpoint on indi- vidual as well as community and generational continuities and changes that I didn’t have when I myself had only a few decades of experience in the world. (But I recognize with some discomfort that one lifetime of experi- ence in a particular historical era in a few locales limits my opportunities to observe longer-span changes across generations firsthand.)
Across millennia, communities have continuously changed their prac- tices (often by force but also by choice or accident), and they have also
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Individuals, Generations, Communities 91
f i g u r e 3 . 5
Christmas at the Nagano family’s home on West 30th Street in Los Angeles in 1930 ( Japanese American).
maintained themes from prior generations. They have borrowed ideas from each other to enhance means of subsistence and artistic expression. They have forced ideas on each other in massive and small-scale crusades of reli- gious practices, formal education, and moral values. They have traded and purchased and stolen ideas and knowledge from each other, such as ceramic techniques, systems of warfare, and writing technologies. And they have combined traditions and heritages as people from different communities in- termarry, are captured by enemies, migrate, or engage in common endeav- ors that require collaboration (see figure 3.5).
An example of individuals borrowing and extending ideas appeared in the newsletter of the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, California. The museum director noted the “spontaneous sharing of ideas among peo- ple who happen to be in the same place at the same time”:
A couple of weeks ago, a mother and her grown daughter came upon thin strips of mylar in our recycle art space and began to braid the
material into marvelously intricate palm-sized pyramids. Turns out the two visitors had learned to make these charming novelties from children in Zaire, who braid a local reed into these shapes in much the same way children in this country fold and weave chewing gum wrappers. In the wonderful way these things happen, our visitors met up with two ideal Museum Discovery Guides . . . who wanted to learn how to do it themselves, and ultimately, pass along the tech- nique to other Museum visitors. An isolated incident? We think not . . .
Distinctive experience of the world is continuously woven and rewoven, through just such magical moments, into new expressions of culture. (Osberg , 1994, p. 2)
Such borrowing and extending has occurred for thousands of years, as neighboring and distant people encounter each other, peacefully or other- wise, as people have traded, migrated, explored, and waged war and raids on each other. Contacts over great distances are apparent from the ancient historical record, with materials, customs, and products of one continent found among people in another.
Indeed, most readers’ family histories would serve to illustrate genera- tional cultural processes of large-scale political, technological, and demo- graphic change, together with creative individual and generational in- ventions and adaptations of the world as they find it. To help portray generational aspects of communities, I give three accounts that illustrate changes built on enduring traditions across generations and between com- munities as they borrow, impose, and blend ideas and practices. The three accounts focus on the use of American Indian ways by Europeans, changes and continuities over time in the English language, and an individual’s tracking of his family history across several continents and centuries.
Account 1: Use of American Indian inventions by Europeans
For many centuries before the arrival of Europeans, Indian trade routes connected widely dispersed indigenous groups throughout North and South America. The Inca maintained a highway system that stretched for about 3,000 miles, with bridges and gondolas for crossing gorges and rivers, uniting an area larger than Western Europe (Weatherford, 1988). Using this highway system, Inca runners carried government messages throughout the empire at about the same rate of travel as the Pony Express. Ironically, the excellence of the Inca highways and the other routes throughout North and South America facilitated the rapid conquest by Europeans, whose horses and cannons would not have traveled easily through these areas without the
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paved roads. Thus, areas with the best roads were conquered first, and the Europeans commonly built their roads following the highways and paths of the Indians.
The contact between the “Old World” and the “New World” provides a compelling example of how communities change over generations, how individuals and generations contribute to such change, and how current practices are built on borrowing or imposing ideas across communities. Eu- ropeans appropriated many ideas and inventions from Native Americans that transformed cultural, economic, and political systems worldwide.
The whole power structure of Europe changed with the arrival of “the miracle crops” of the Andean potato and maize corn from Mexico (Weath- erford, 1988). Before contact with the Americas, the “Old World” primarily subsisted on grains, which frequently suffer from crop failure. Hence polit- ical power centered around the Mediterranean, where grains could be more reliably grown. Although the peasants of Europe despised the potato for the first two centuries after its arrival, they eventually accepted it after their rulers forced them to plant it and restricted access to grains in the second half of the 18th century. (The rulers forced the change because a field of po- tatoes produces more food more reliably, faster, and with less labor than the same field planted with grain.) Once the peasants became accustomed to the potato, their nutrition improved markedly, and the population grew— especially in northern countries. The centers of power in Europe shifted accordingly.
North and South American Indian food products are key ingredients in many foods that are today considered traditional in Europe, such as Italian spaghetti sauces, Hungarian goulash, and french fries. The Indians gave the world three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation (including beans, peanuts, squashes, sunflowers, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, chocolate, vanilla, maple syrup, avocados, pineapples, cashews, and pecans). They carefully bred such plants through advanced agricultural technology and experimentation to adapt them to human needs using a profound understanding of genetics, varying environmental conditions, and agricultural technologies.
Even more impressive is how forms of government of some American Indian groups contributed to the rise of democracies in other nations. Early European visitors were impressed by social organization without rulers or social classes based on property ownership, the idea of society based on co- operation without coercion, and authority vested in groups rather than in an individual (Weatherford, 1988). The first reports by the visitors gave rise to widespread debate in Europe regarding the possibilities of this form of civilization, as in Sir Thomas More’s influential 1516 book Utopia. The first French ethnographies on North American Indians, in the late 1600s, fo- cused on issues of freedom and gave rise to adaptations in numerous operas
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and plays, including one that deeply influenced Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher whose lifelong concerns with liberty focused on contrasts be- tween these Indian and European ways. In his 1776 call for American inde- pendence Thomas Paine used Indian ways as models of how society might be organized.
The Founding Fathers of the United States made use of Indian gover- nance structures in solving the problem of how to make a country out of 13 separate states without each state yielding its own power (Weatherford, 1988). The League of the Iroquois was the original federal system, uniting five major Indian nations in a Council with delegates representing territo- ries that extended from New England to the Mississippi River. It had fasci- nated the Europeans and American colonists from earliest contact.
Among those individuals inspired by the Indian governance system was Benjamin Franklin, who took the Iroquois system as a model for fashioning a new government (Weatherford, 1988). Franklin had become intimately fa- miliar with Indian political culture and especially with the League of the Iroquois during his first diplomatic assignment. He echoed the 1744 pro- posal of the Iroquois chief Canassatego that the new American government incorporate features of the Iroquois system of government.
The secretary of the Continental Congress, Charles Thomson, also contributed to bringing these Indian ideas of government to the formation of the Constitution. He spent so much energy studying them that he was adopted as a full member of the Delaware Nation, and his lengthy writings on Indian social and political institutions were included by Thomas Jeffer- son in his own book. The Constitution followed the model of the Iroquois League in many ways, including separating military and civilian authorities, allowing for the possibility of impeachment, and permitting expansion of the number of states as members rather than as colonies.
Principles of group decision making replaced European authority- based rule among the colonists after many generations of engagement with East Coast North American Indians:
Another imitation of the Iroquois came in the simple practice of al- lowing only one person to speak at a time in political meetings. This contrasts with the British tradition of noisy interruptions of one an- other as the members of Parliament shout out agreement or disagree- ment with the speaker. Europeans were accustomed to shouting down any speaker who displeased them. . . . The Iroquois permitted no interruptions or shouting. They even imposed a short period of silence at the end of each oration in case the speaker had forgotten some point or wished to elaborate or change something he had said. . . . The purpose of debate in Indian councils was to persuade and
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educate, not to confront. (Weatherford, 1988, pp. 140–141, based on Johansen)
These American Indian ideas about the relation between the individual and the state have continued to influence world politics. Henry David Thoreau’s writings on civil disobedience in the mid-1800s, which provided his interpretation of Indian personal freedom to refuse cooperation with the state, helped Mahatma Gandhi struggle peacefully for (East) Indian in- dependence from Britain. This in turn inspired peaceful methods for seek- ing civil rights in the United States, such as the movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. (Weatherford, 1988). Interpretations of American Indian ideas have also been influential in efforts to improve schooling over the years (carried by some of the same individuals, such as Rousseau, Thoreau, and Jefferson).
This account illustrates how, over decades and centuries, individuals and cultural communities carry on and transform traditions. Communities maintain some practices and change others through the contributions of specific individuals and of other communities. While they transform, they also maintain some fidelity to long-standing values. (Another example is the continuity and changes of child-rearing concepts from the early 18th cen- tury to the present in Japan, amid major changes in Japanese institutions and everyday lives; see Kojima, 1996.) To understand human development, it is necessary to view it as a dynamic process involving individuals actively, creatively participating in and contributing to powerful and changing cul- tural traditions.
Account 2: Changes and continuities in the language of Angle-land
The English language in its current form has developed through a long se- ries of borrowings, conquests, and attempts both to revise the language and to fix it so that it would not continue to evolve, according to the history re- counted by Albert Baugh and Thomas Cable (1978). This process illustrates the stabilities as well as continual changes of cultural practices, with con- tributions by particular individuals and by each successive generation that modifies what it inherits from prior generations. The languages (and other cultural tools) that we currently use are the momentary form of particular overlapping and continually moving currents.
The British Isles have been inhabited by humans for many thousands of years. However, English has been its language for only the past 1,500 years, when tribes from the area of Denmark and the Low Countries— Jutes, Saxons, and Angles—invaded the lands where Celtic and Latin had been spoken, and founded the English nation. The Christianization of
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England in 597 brought further contact with Latin, and the Viking inva- sions of the Danes beginning in the eighth century brought renewed con- tact with that language tradition. The conquest of England by the Nor- mans (Viking North-men who had earlier invaded France and adopted French ways) in 1066 made French the language of the nobility; English be- came the language of the lower classes for two centuries. When English again became the language of all classes in England, after 1200, it was greatly changed from prior versions, and it has continued to evolve with the changes in the island people’s contacts with other peoples—as is the case with all living languages.
Current English speakers are unable to understand the Old English of a millennium ago. Almost 85% of the old vocabulary has disappeared; many of the words were replaced with others borrowed from Latin and French, which are the basis of more than half of the words now commonly used in English (Baugh & Cable, 1978). However, the Old English words that are still in use are central to English vocabulary. Among them are pro- nouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs as well as words such as cild (child), strang (strong), drincan (drink), slæpan (sleep), and feohtan (fight).
The printing press, introduced to England in about 1476 from Ger- many, transformed communication and created forces for the standardiza- tion of the language, together with increases in literacy. Toward the end of the 1500s, English was slowly becoming acceptable as a scholarly written language rather than simply a local vernacular, but the idiosyncrasies of written English were an annoyance (Baugh & Cable, 1978). The spelling of English of the Middle Ages had fairly well represented its pronunciation. However, Norman scribes created confusion in their attempts to write En- glish with habits they had learned for writing French. In addition, the spellings gradually became standardized while pronunciations continued to change. Many authors attempted to create rules and systems for standard- izing the spelling of English during the 16th and 17th centuries.
With the Renaissance, English people of the 16th and early 17th cen- turies attempted to improve their language by enlarging the vocabulary. The impulse to learn from classical and other sources prompted borrowing of words from those sources. In technical fields, English had notable short- comings, which prompted borrowing of foreign terms. A number of authors deliberately and patriotically imported words from more than 50 languages (primarily Latin, French, Greek, Spanish, and Italian), as in the following ex- ample from Sir Thomas Elyot in introducing the word maturity:
Wherfore I am constrained to usurpe a latine worde . . . , which worde, though it be strange and darke [obscure], yet . . . shall be
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facile to understande as other wordes late commen out of Italy and Fraunce. . . . Therefore that worde maturitie is translated to the actis of man, . . . reservyng the wordes ripe and redy to frute and other thinges seperate from affaires, as we have nowe in usage. And this do I nowe remembre for the necessary augmentation of our langage. (quoted in Baugh & Cable, 1978, p. 216)
At the same time, the desirability of such borrowing was hotly con- tested. For example, Sir John Cheke wrote in 1561, “I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unman- geled with borowing of other tunges” (p. 216). Thomas Wilson protested that the new terms, if too freely imported, constituted affectations that the English should avoid so as not to forget their mother’s language: “Some farre journeyed gentlemen at their returne home, like as they love to goe in forraine apparell, so thei wil pouder their talke with oversea language” (p. 218). Wilson satirized such affectation in a letter he devised, peppered heav- ily with words that were new in his day, including those italicized in this passage (some of which are common now): “I cannot but celebrate, & extol your magnifical dexteritie above all other. . . . But now I relinquish to fatigate your intelligence, with any more frivolous verbositie” (pp. 218–219).
Many of the words adopted in this period are now so common that it is difficult to imagine that 400 years ago they were strange and controver- sial—words such as democracy, atmosphere, expectation, halo, agile, ex- pensive, hereditary, insane, malignant, adapt, benefit (first used by Cheke, though he protested such borrowing), disregard (introduced by John Mil- ton), exist, skeleton, system, tactics, enthusiasm. Of course, many other newly introduced terms were rejected, many of the new terms underwent change, and many features of English remained unchanged.
The extent to which the introduction of new words can be traced to a particular individual helps to reveal the mutually constituting processes across generations in the development and use of this cultural tool. For ex- ample, Sir Thomas Elyot introduced many words, including analogy, ani- mate, encyclopedia, exhaust, experience, infrequent, irritate, and modesty, and Sir Thomas More brought in anticipate, contradictory, exact, exagger- ate, explain, fact, frivolous, paradox, and many others (Baugh & Cable, 1978). And of course, William Shakespeare eagerly accepted new words and, in a number of cases, introduced them himself (including assassination, indis- tinguishable, obscene, reliance, and submerged).
Such innovators illustrate how individual efforts contribute to cultural practices. At the same time, community and cultural processes, such as historical changes and inventions and controversies, contribute to the di- rection of individuals’ ways of thinking , speaking , and acting. The avail-
Individuals, Generations, Communities 97
ability of particular words for expressing ideas—democracy, expectation, hereditary, adapt, system, experience, contradictory, exact, explain, fact— can be seen as contributing to the thoughts and discussions of individuals and generations.
In the 18th century, a desire for systematizing and regulating the lan- guage arose from world events. English scholars sought rules by which cor- rectness could be determined and achieved. An ideal of logic reigned, with a “chronocentrism” (if I can coin a word in this context!) that resembles ethnocentrism:
The eighteenth century, like many other periods in history, was qui- etly conscious of its own superiority, and not being trammeled by any strong historical sense, any belief in the validity of other ideals than its own, or any great interest in the factors by which the ideals of former ages might be justified, it could easily come to believe in the essential rightness of its judgment and think that its own ideals could be erected into something like a permanent standard. (Baugh & Cable, 1978, p. 254)
Concerns that English had been and continued to be corrupted led to efforts to correct the language and fix it permanently, protected from change. Dictionaries and grammar books arose. Writers expressed fear that their works would be incomprehensible in later centuries. Although earlier scholars had already discerned that language changes are inevitable, scholars of this age (in Italy and France as well as in England) sought permanence.
Of course, historical change makes permanence an impossibility, and with continuing expansion of the British Empire came many other forces of change in English vocabulary, with additions such as moose and raccoon from American Indians; chocolate and tomato from Mexico; barbecue and hurricane from Cuba and the West Indies; calico, cot, jungle, and thug from India. In addition, English grammar has continued to change, with the progressive passive form (“the house is being built”) appearing only at the end of the 18th century, resisted as an unwanted innovation but adopted for its usefulness in the following century. Languages are alive and grow, with changes prompted by events and inventions that make new vocabulary and grammatical forms available and needed to express ideas.
The changes of the language of Angle-Land over generations demon- strate the key roles of individuals, social groups, and communities across generations in the continuities and changes of cultural practices. The lan- guages that we use to express our ideas have come to us through the prac- tices of many prior generations and of other lands, and we contribute to their further maintenance and transformations.
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Account 3: Alex Haley’s family heritage across centuries
Haley’s account reflects the roles of individuals across generations, with chang- ing as well as enduring connections with African and American practices:
I first heard the story of our family, which had been passed down for generations, on the front porch of my grandma’s house in Henning, Tennessee, about 50 miles north of Memphis. I grew up there with Grandma Cynthia Murray Palmer, and every summer she used to invite various women relatives to stay. After the supper dishes were washed and put away, they would sit in the squeaky rocking- chairs and talk about the past, as the dusk deepened into night, and the lightning bugs flicked on and off above the now shadowy honeysuckles.
Whenever they were speaking of our people, Grandma and the others spoke—always in tones of awe, I noticed—of a furtherest back person whom they called “the African.” They would say that some ship brought him to some place they would pronounce as “Naplis.” Somebody called “Mas’ John Waller” bought that African off that ship, and took him to a plantation in “Spotsylvania County, Virginia.”
When he had a daughter, Kizzy, he would tell her what things were in his native tongue. “Ko,” he would say, pointing at a banjo, for instance. Or, pointing at a river which ran near the plantation, he would say “Kamby Bolongo.” When other slaves would call him “Toby” he would angrily tell them that his name was “Kin-tay.” And as he gradually learnt more English he began to tell Kizzy some things about himself—how he had been captured, for instance. He said that he had been not far away from his village, chopping some wood to make himself a drum, when four men had surprised, over- whelmed, and kidnapped him.
At 16 Kizzy was sold away, on to a much smaller plantation in North Carolina. She had been bought by a “Mas’ Tom Lea,” and he fathered her first child, a boy, whom she named George; later she taught him all she could about his African grandfather. In time George had seven children; one of his sons, Tom, had seven children too; and he, in turn, passed on the family story. There had developed almost a ritual in its telling. It would occur mostly during the winter- time, after the harvesting was done, and there was more free time of an evening. The family would sit around the hearth with the logs burning, and sweet potatoes would be roasting in the hot ashes, as
the children listened to and absorbed the stories and the sounds. And the youngest of the seven was Cynthia, who became my maternal grandmother.
When I had heard that story over and again for around 10 years, it had become nearly as fixed in my head as it was in Grandma’s, though I never then comprehended that the African they talked about was my own great-great-great-great-grandfather. (1972, p. 28)
More than 30 years later, Haley began to research the story through census records and by asking Africans at the United Nations Headquarters whether they recognized the African words. They were identified eventually as Mandinka words to indicate the Gambia River and the name of a very old clan. Haley followed the information to the Gambia, where he eventu- ally reached a griot, an old man who lived in the back country and held the honored role of remembering centuries of histories of very old clans:
Seeming to gather himself into a physical rigidity [the griot] began speaking the Kinte clan’s ancestral oral history. Across the next hours it came rolling from his mouth, the interpreters translating for me . . . the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Kinte lineage details—pre- dominantly what men took what wives, the children whom they “begot” in the order of their births; those children’s mates and children. . . .
The Kinte clan he said, began in Old Mali; the men generally were blacksmiths, and the women were potters and weavers. One large branch of the clan moved to Mauretania, from where one son of the clan, Kairaba Kunta Kinte, a Muslim Marabout holy man, en- tered the Gambia. He lived first in the village of Pakali N’Ding; he moved next to Jiffarong village; “—and then he came here, into our own village of Juffure.” His youngest son was Omoro, who in turn had four sons. Then, said the griot, “About the time the king’s sol- diers came, the eldest of those four sons, Kunta, when he had about 16 rains [16 years], went away from his village, to chop wood to make a drum, and he was never seen again.” (p. 29)
From this information, Haley was able to find the king’s soldiers in records in London and to identify the ship that had carried “the African” as cargo along with 139 others, in addition to gold, elephants’ teeth, beeswax, and cotton bound for Annapolis. After searching records in Annapolis, he found that 16-year-old Kunta Kinte was listed as one of the “98 Negroes” who had survived the crossing. He found the announcement of the sale of the ship’s cargo: “from the River gambia, in africa . . . a cargo of choice, healthy slaves . . .”
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Haley’s remarkable story, which became the television series Roots, il- lustrates the waves of change and continuity that contributed to his family story and traditions. It gives an idea, seldom available to our observational view that spans only a few decades, of how individuals’ lives contribute to shaping what follows and are shaped by the practices and traditions of com- munities that have gone before.
Many other examples from the African diaspora in the Americas could demonstrate communities’ creative building on their inheritance, constraints, and opportunities, across generations (Comer, 1988). For example, the his- tories of jazz and Jamaican reggae music relate to historical circumstances of African-descent groups in the Americas, technological and political changes, and human expression and invention (see Chude-Sokei, 1999). Another example of community traditions maintained and adapted by suc- cessive generations is the use of the Gullah language, deriving from West Africa, on islands off the Georgia coast (Smitherman, 1977). Africans and their descendents have contributed mightily to forming mainstream cul- tural traditions of the Americas (Walker, 2001).
In this chapter, I have developed the proposal to focus on cultural commu- nities changing across generations, to understand the mutually constituting roles of individuals and cultural communities. As individuals and their gen- erational cohorts participate in the everyday lives of their communities, they build on the cultural practices and traditions that they inherit from their predecessors, contributing to both maintenance and invention of cul- tural ways.
In the chapters that follow, I turn to research on classic topics in the study of human development. These topics include the cast of characters and the opportunities children have to engage in the activities of their com- munities, transitions in people’s roles from infancy through old age, gender roles, interdependence and autonomy, processes of thinking and learning, and the ways in which communities arrange for and assist children’s learn- ing. Throughout these chapters, I focus on the ways in which individual participation in sociocultural activities of different communities relate to cultural similarities and variations in development. Although historical re- search on human development is rare, where possible, I relate the cultural patterns to generational changes of communities. The final chapter of the book returns more explicitly to questions of community change, specifi- cally to the mixing and relations among communities that are increasingly prevalent in daily lives of children and communities around the world.
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4 Child Rearing in Families
and Communities
The cast of characters and the scenarios of children’s lives are central aspects of human development, as suggested by Beatrice Whiting (1980). The im- maturity of human infants requires extensive caregiving for their survival, and children require opportunities to learn mature ways of their commu- nity to become capable of sustaining themselves.
Family and community roles in children’s development differ quite dramatically worldwide. Some central cultural variations have to do with differences associated with likelihood of infant mortality or survival, avail- ability of siblings and extended family, opportunities for children to engage widely in their community, and cultural prototypes for engaging as groups rather than in pairs.
Around the world, child rearing involves children’s families, neighbor- hoods, and communities in a variety of roles. One community’s arrange- ment of responsibility for child rearing is beautifully illustrated by a child- hood experience recounted by Pueblo Indian scholar Joseph Suina:
My cousins and I were hunting rabbits. Unable to locate the desired game, we began shooting at tin cans and other assorted targets. One of these happened to be a pig. The injured pig drew attention to the situation, causing the two of us to be summoned before the tribal council for corrective measures. During the hearing, a council member disclosed that he had witnessed our reckless shooting. An
older council member inquired what the man had done about the sit- uation. “Nothing,” replied the first. He couldn’t, he elaborated, be- cause it was about to rain, and then proceeded to remind the other council members of the dire consequences of neglecting a hay crop when a rain threatened. The negligent member was quickly reminded of what happens to the villages’ children when they are neglected. For neglecting his duty, the derelict council member was required to pay half the price of the pig; we were required to pay the remainder. (Suina & Smolkin, 1994, p. 117)
Communities’ arrangements of responsibilities for child rearing are ev- ident in the observations of Barbara Kingsolver, when she and her 4-year- old daughter from the United States lived for a year in the Canary Islands of Spain:
Widows in black, buttoned-down CEOs, purple-sneakered teenagers, the butcher, the baker, all would stop on the street to have little chats with my daughter. . . . Whenever Camille grew cranky in a restaurant (and really, what do you expect at midnight?) the waiters flirted and brought her little presents, and nearby diners looked on with that sweet, wistful gleam of eye that I’d thought diners reserved for the dessert tray. What I discovered in Spain was a culture that held chil- dren to be its meringues and éclairs. My own culture, it seemed to me in retrospect, tended to regard children as a sort of toxic-waste prod- uct: a necessary evil, maybe, but if it’s not our own we don’t want to see it or hear it or, God help us, smell it.
If you don’t have children, you think I’m exaggerating. . . . In the U.S. I have been told in restaurants: “We come here to get away from kids.” (This for no infraction on my daughter’s part that I could dis- cern, other than being visible.) On an airplane I heard a man tell a beleaguered woman whose infant was bawling (as I would, to clear my aching ears, if I couldn’t manage chewing gum): “If you can’t keep that thing quiet, you should keep it at home.”. . .
It took a move to another country to make me realize how thor- oughly I had accepted my nation’s creed of every family for itself. Whenever my daughter crash-landed in the playground, I was star- tled at first to see a sanguine, Spanish-speaking stranger pick her up and dust her off. And if a shrieking bundle landed at my feet, I’d furtively look around for the next of kin. But I quickly came to see this detachment as perverse when applied to children, and am wondering how it ever caught on in the first place. (1995, pp. 100–101)
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Arrangements regarding who cares for children and under what cir- cumstances are intimately related to the support provided by community connections and extended family. As pointed out in the previous chapter, cultural practices surrounding the care of children are both inherited across generations and revised by new generations with novel circumstances and new ideas. Some of the circumstances and new ideas have to do with na- tional and international politics.
Family Composition and Governments
Generational changes as well as continuities in family circumstances can be seen by examining national policies regarding population growth in recent decades. Large family size has alternately been encouraged and discouraged by governments seeking to increase or stabilize the population for political and economic goals. This is especially clear in China’s and Mexico’s recent popu- lation histories, where changes have dramatically altered family composition.
Before 1949, China’s population was marked by a high death rate along with a high birthrate, which resulted in slow population growth, according to Lee Lee (1992). In 1949, with government interest in increasing the pop- ulation, efforts were made to eliminate disease and to encourage conception by restricting the use of birth control and abortion. In 1953, disease had begun to be controlled and the population increased at what seemed to some to be an alarming rate: 50 million people in four years. In 1956, the proposal of a Chinese economist sparked implementation of birth control and population planning, to avoid strains in the standard of living , avail- ability of education, and the national reconstruction goals. However, in 1957, this policy was reversed and everyone worked toward increasing the population until 1964, when the government again noted the critical nature of rapid population growth.
Little was done about the growth until the late 1970s, when China’s single-child policy, with strict use of birth control and abortion, was im- plemented. This has resulted in 90% of 9-year-old children in Chinese cities being only children ( Jiao, Ji, & Jing, 1996). The single-child policy re- sults in one child for each two parents and four grandparents. This drastic change from prior Chinese family structure has led to widespread questions about spoiling children, psychological pressure from parents and elders, children’s ability to take care of themselves, and peer skills such as sharing and getting along with others (Lee, 1992; Jiao, Ji, & Jing, 1996). Changing nationwide policies regarding child survival and birth relate closely to cul- tural practices for child caregiving as well as individual development.
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Mexico’s fluctuations in national policies have also resulted in wide swings in the structure and size of families (Dillon, 1999). Within a gen- eration, the average number of births in a family has dropped from 7 (in 1965) to only 2.5, slightly below worldwide rates. One mother of two, her- self the oldest of 14 children, plans to have no more children. She said, “Small families live better,” echoing the television jingle that has perme- ated broadcasts since the government reversed its promotion of growth in 1974.
The Mexican government’s earlier policies led to a fivefold increase in the population in a little more than five decades—not including the large numbers who have emigrated to the United States. Early in this period, the Mexican government encouraged rapid growth, in part because of the idea that sparse population allowed the United States to seize Mexican territory (the land from California to Texas) during the previous century.
The about-face of government policy in 1974 came from warnings by Mexican demographers that the rapid growth would entail challenges to na- tional stability. The government set up clinics to help couples control the size of their family, and anticipates that slowing growth will help the na- tional economy, at least while the country benefits from having fewer chil- dren to support. However, when the population bulge enters old age, care of older people within the family may be jeopardized by the demographic changes. The changes in the family, related to national policies, are remov- ing the social network of extended family that has provided care to young children and aged parents (Dillon, 1999).
The dynamics of population changes and national policies, as seen in both China and Mexico, have an intimate relationship with the daily lives and upbringing of children as well as the circumstances of their parents. Just consider the divergent concerns of parents if only half the babies sur- vive versus most of them, or the changing relationships occasioned in fam- ilies of seven children versus one or two. Across generations, child-rearing practices and family relations commonly reflect the patterns and strategies of previous generations, when circumstances may have been different— challenging each generation to build on the cultural approaches they inherit to address their current needs.
This chapter next addresses cultural strategies for dealing with issues of child survival and care, a central issue often overlooked in affluent times. Then it turns to cultural variations in infants’ relations with their caregivers and varying role specializations in responsibility for the care of children by families and communities. Finally, the chapter examines children’s involve- ment in the mature activities of their communities and the integration of children in groups or one-on-one engagements.
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Cultural Strategies for Child Survival and Care
Issues of child survival are central to child-rearing practices, though often taken for granted in more fortunate families and nations. In communities that experience high infant mortality, parents’ priorities for their children may be quite different from communities in which parents can be relatively confident that their infant will grow up (see figure 4.1). In many commu- nities, large numbers of children may be needed to ensure that enough will survive to make needed contributions to the household in childhood and youth, and later to support the aged parents, who lack other forms of “so- cial security.”
For many families in the United States, issues of death in childhood or of children becoming orphaned are uncommon compared with prior gen- erations, due to lowered infant mortality and limited likelihood of mater- nal death in childbirth (Mintz & Kellogg , 1988). During the colonial pe- riod in the United States, parents lost many children, and children often were orphaned. For example, Cotton Mather, a New England preacher, was the father of 15 children, but only two of them survived him. In a measles epidemic in 1713, his wife and three of his children died within two weeks. He wrote in his diary:
