PROFILES OF SUGGESTED READING
Articles are available for a fee via scholar.google.com. Books are available in all the usual ways.
1. What Do Anthropologists of Childhood Actually Do?
Only one or two others would be as qualified as Robert LeVine to write a short history of the anthropology of childhood. His overview reveals that although there have been hundreds of fieldwork expeditions, dozens of ethnographers, and several competing academic trends, the bottom line is that the nature of childhood in any society is reflective of the background and context in which it is occurring.
One highlight of this overview is the clash between developmental psychologists and anthropologists of childhood. Psychologists often devise hypotheses about child development for which they claim universal validity. Anthropologists “veto” these hypotheses by discovering contrary cases, which they have done again and again since the 1920s. Other highlights include the insights of Franz Boas and his students; the impact on the field of Freud’s hypothesis about psychosexual development; the seminal contributions of the Six Cultures Study of the 1960s and ‘70s; and researchers’ increasing focus on the learning and socialization of very young children, which is the focus of How Other Children Learn.
2. Growing Up Among the Aka Hunter-Gatherers of Africa
This article was intentionally written as a moderate-length overview of the lives of Aka children by the anthropologist who, far more than any other, has lived with and studied the Aka – four decades! You can acquire this article right now, and it will cost you nothing.
Hewlett discusses nine specific features of Aka childhood that distinguishes it from the childhood of Ngandu (farmer) children, and which distinguish Aka childhood from that of the children of every other human group – except other hunter-gatherers. As part of this discussion, the reader learns more about the Aka male and female initiation ceremonies (Ejengi for boys, Waya for girls). Near the end, Hewlett reviews some of the differences between the Aka and three other Central African hunter-gatherer (or forager) groups: the Efe, the Mbuti, and the Baka.
To acquire Hewlett’s article, go to scholar.google.com and search for “Hunter-gatherer childhoods in the Congo Basin.” The search will yield a free article, ready to be downloaded in full and printed.
This is a humane and empathetic appreciation of the lives of two Aka and two Ngandu women, as conveyed in each one’s own words. Each in turn discusses her memories from childhood and youth, the arrival of her menarche and of love and marriage, her experiences of childbirth and child loss, the nature of her relations with men, and more.
Equally useful is that Bonnie Hewlett also uses this book to record her own experiences as a fledgling anthropologist, being separated from her own children and becoming accustomed to the rhythms of daily life in Africa. She shares many revealing memories, such as this:
The first time I was in the field, I found myself eating a dinner that looked like spinach topped by several large caterpillars. Anthropologists are open-minded! So I put a spoonful of the spinach and a caterpillar into my mouth as everyone waited to see my reaction. I tried to pretend it was yummy! But my body was not fooled…
Does Bonnie get the caterpillar down? The answer is on page 7 of Listen, Here Is a Story.
Barry Hewlett has amassed more than 40 years of researching the Aka hunter-gatherers. His Intimate Fathers is the reason why anthropologists often state that Aka males are the best fathers in the world.
Chapter 2 is an overview of the Aka people and their ways of life, including their background, context, and relations with the Ngandu farmers. Chapter 3 concerns Hewlett’s research methods; if you skip it, don’t miss the fascinating list of 50 Aka skills beginning on page 73. Chapter 4 is more “researchy” than most anthropological reports, explained by the fact that Hewlett was gathering quantitative data to demonstrate that Aka fathers really are more caring of their youngsters than other society’s fathers.
Beginning with Chapter 5, Hewlett shifts toward a broader discussion of the role of fathers in intercultural and global perspective. If you have even a modest degree of interest in fathers and fatherhood, this accessible book should be on your reading list.
3. Growing Up Among the Quechua of Highland Peru
As much as any other source I consulted, I am enthusiastic about this one. Inge Bolin’s Growing Up in a Culture of Respect is a warm, appreciative, and perceptive sojourn with the Quechua while also being a work of scholarship. Her photographs reveal a group of people who seem dignified, open-hearted, and content with their lot in life. One of her photos graces the cover of this book.
Bolin knew of the negative stereotypes that outsiders held about the Quechua. But her first encounter with them in a lowland market led her to realize that “the stereotype had been imposed out of ignorance. I was struck by the elegant and respectful demeanor of these highland herders.” She lived with the Quechua of one ayllu during 13 fieldwork sojourns.
Bolin’s chapters advance through the stages of childhood, from the cradle through adolescence. Special attention is given to the ways in which these children learn, to the rituals and ceremonies that are their principal social outlet, and to probing questions such as:
How is it possible that in an egalitarian society, where the competitive attitude is minimal, children excel at work and play within their society and beyond its borders? What child-rearing strategies produce adolescents who are gentle and non-aggressive, yet self-confident and courageous even in the face of great danger?
This article offers a thoughtful look at key qualities of the Quechua way of life by an author who himself is a native Quechua. Of particular interest to García is the Quechua understanding of autonomy and respect, and the impact on children of formal schooling.
García portrays autonomy as the result of a family’s development in the child of capacities for agency and initiative, which is made possible by the child’s constant participation in the family’s activities. Autonomy is not self-promoting. Instead, García says, it’s about the child’s agency on behalf of the family, and about taking responsibility for respecting all human and non-human beings. Respect is portrayed as behaving modestly, quietly, and politely in the presence of adults. Adults respect children by “minding” them in the sense of listening to them and putting themselves in the children’s shoes. To respect means to show mindful consideration toward others.
García notes that when children start school, they lose opportunities to learn their culture by observing and pitching in. Quechua parents know this but demand schooling because it is essential preparation for life beyond their ayllu.
In this article, Salas Carreño discusses the unusual relationship between the highland Quechua and their surrounding geographical locations. Although mountains, valleys, and meadows might be beautiful, we assume they are inert and lifeless. The Quechua have a completely different view – and it is not that geographical features are imbued with spirits of some sort. Rather, places are “living, sentient, social individuals that have the thoughts, capacities of action, emotions, and intentions of all social beings, including the ability to continue a relationship or to spurn it, and the ability to nurture or destroy.”
Within this Quechua world, “humans are ultimately dependent on places, the original sources of all food. Food offerings are how humans construct positive relationships with places, without the generosity of which human labor becomes useless and life impossible.” It is within his explanation of this dynamic people–places relationship that Salas Carreño integrates a comprehensive understanding of the Quechua etiquette of chewing coca leaves.
4. Growing Up Among the Navajos of the U.S. Southwest
This is one of two books resulting from the Indian Education Research Project, a major scholarly effort during the early 1940s to understand the Navajo. One book, The Navaho, by Kluckhohn & Leighton, is an excellent general overview, but includes no chapter about children. This book, by Leighton & Kluckhohn, is solely about children. I recommend Part I only (chapters 1–4) because it was written by Clyde Kluckhohn, a leading anthropologist of the day, whereas Part II is by Leighton, a psychiatrist, who subjected the children to projective mental tests.
Kluckhohn’s four chapters provide the reader with solid grounding in the daily lives of Navajo children from birth into early adulthood, probing the laissez faire child-minding of their parents and the many others who are major players in the children’s experience. Included are explorations of children-related values, taboos, superstitions, ceremonies (e.g., Kinaaldá), and understandings of the supernatural; Kluckhohn even shares selected Navajo prayers and chants. Chapter 4 discusses the nature of relationships between parents–children, siblings–siblings, uncles/aunts–nieces/nephews, and grandparents–grandchildren; it then moves on to consider personality characteristics such as curiosity, shyness–shame, realism–unrealism, and imagination.
The product of Ph.D. dissertation fieldwork, Chisholm’s book is a broad introduction to the lives of children, parents, extended family members, and others in Cottonwood Springs, a Navajo camp, and to the background and context within which their mid-1970s living occurs.
Chisholm’s doctoral research was planned during an era in which interest in the attachment hypothesis was high (details in Chapter 1 of How Other Children Learn). The main question his research addressed was whether cradleboard use undermined the attachment felt between Navajo mothers and their infants. (The answer: If anything, their attachment is strengthened.)
Navajo Infancy is also quite thoughtful on matters such as the attributes of a Navajo child’s universe, characteristics of Navajo behavior, the goals of Navajo life, and the nature and impact of their norms, values, and temperament. On a prosaic note, Chisholm takes an interest in the Navajo’s pickup trucks.
This is one of the most informative short articles anywhere that explores cultural differences between an ethnic population on the one hand – in this case, the Navajos – and U.S. school personnel on the other. Deyhle & LeCompte attain their insights by examining the contrasting assumptions made by Navajos and “Anglos” about children aged 9–15 and their parents.
The underlying culture clash is this: Navajos assume that, roughly around age 15, children attain sexual and social maturity simultaneously, after which they are accepted as responsible adults who have egalitarian relations with other adults. Anglos assume the arrival of sexual maturity does not interrupt the long period of dependence during which adolescents are regarded as persons in need of adult supervision, leading school personnel to view Navajo parents as dangerously “permissive.” Particularly useful are two tables that contrast Navajo and Anglo differences. Table 1 portrays differences in the role expectations of adults and older children. Table 2 compares differences in the two groups’ goals for middle school children.
5. Growing Up Among the Village Arabs of the Levant
As much as any other source I consulted, I am enthusiastic about this one. Andrea Rugh is an independent scholar (i.e., an academic with no university base) with extensive Middle East experience. Accompanying her diplomat husband, she found herself living in Damascus. Needing a quiet place to finish a book, she rented a room in a family’s home in a Syrian village. The family, including the mother’s sister’s family next door, warmly welcomed their guest and gradually drew her into their lives. Rugh was perplexed about many of their ways of life, but soon found that family members were unresponsive to her direct questioning.
Rather than irritate them, I began to search on my own for tangible clues that would help me understand how they and their children conceptualized the world. I assumed there were logical reasons for their behavior. I assumed also that I would have to understand the larger context in which they lived in order to discover what restricted and what motivated their behavior.
The outcome, Within the Circle, is a detailed description and insightful cultural analysis of a Syrian village family’s ways. Rugh’s final chapter, “Lessons,” is one of the most thoughtful and revealing pieces of anthropological writing I’ve ever encountered.
New Zealand native Marguerite van Geldermalsen was a nurse when she and a friend vacationed in Jordan. While in Petra, a World Heritage Site, they were befriended by a Bedouin souvenir-seller, who invited them to spend the night in his cave. It wasn’t long before Geldermalsen was married to him. She learned Arabic, converted to Islam, bore his three children, and oversaw their home in the cave, interacting daily with the many Bedouins, Arabs, and others – including Queen Elizabeth – who came to visit and chat, never more so than after the birth of each child.
Of all the suggested readings listed on this webpage, this is the only one that’s not written by an anthropologist (or a historian.) But Geldermalsen is a good observer and reporter of her daily experiences as a member of a Bedouin community. Her little book is humane, interesting, and illustrated with 25 color photos. She and the souvenir-seller make a very attractive couple!
This thick, heavy tome, illustrated with many photographs, could have been titled, Everything You Need to Know about the Bedouin Nomads – except that, unfortunately, only a single page discusses “Boys and Girls.” No matter. There are plenty of thoughtful discussions under headings such as “The Ethnic and Social Significance of Nomadism,” “The Pillars of Bedouin Life,” “Bedouin Solidarity and Pride in Descent,” “His Ability to Interpret Physical Signs,” and “Cultural Life in the Desert.” There are whole sections on “The Camel” and “The Tent.” If you’re interested in desert ecology, there are well researched discourses about trees and plants, carnivorous and herbivorous animals, birds, reptiles, insects, and more. My guess is that non-specialist writers (like me!) who need to say something knowledgeable about the nomadic Bedouin are getting much of their information from this authoritative book.
6. Growing Up Among the Hindu Villagers of India
As discussed in Chapter 1 of How Other Children Learn, the first major fieldwork study by anthropologists of childhood was the Six Cultures Study. This book is the outcome of one of those six studies. After harmonizing their research approaches, teams of anthropologists dispersed to each of six field sites; one was Khalapur, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, a village of about 25,000 showing pronounced Muslim influence. The anthropologists who made up the Khalapur team were Leigh Minturn and John Hitchcock.
Like all good anthropological fieldwork reports, this one addresses its main topic, childhood and child-rearing, only after it provides a detailed overview of Khalapur’s background and context – which requires 11 chapters. The four chapters of Part II, “Child Training,” address pregnancy and childbirth, infancy, the preschool child, and the school age child. This relatively short, straightforward, and readily understandable book helped to set a high standard for on-site observation and reporting of the behavior of humans within their naturally occurring families.
Anthropologist Susan Seymour had a specific research interest: the process whereby a traditional community gradually transforms into a modern one. She discovered an ideal location to pursue her interest in the eastern state of Orissa. For centuries, Bhubaneswar had been an agricultural village and temple town – until it was selected to become the new seat of Orissa’s government. On land just to the east of Bhubaneswar’s center, bulldozers and builders suddenly began erecting a “New Capital” of government buildings and housing.
Within four decades, Bhubaneswar grew from a village, where the same families in caste-based neighborhoods knew one another, to a sizeable city with many institutions of modern urban life as well as its social anonymity. In population growth, Bhubaneswar experienced dramatic change. The change, however, went far deeper than mere demographics would indicate.
Those deeper changes are what this book addresses, with special emphasis on the impact of the momentous traditional-to-modern transformation on women and family life. Seymour’s illustrated chapters reveal what it was like growing up female in the traditional Old Town; the transitions involved in being a wife, mother, and daughter in the New Capital; changes affecting females in caste, class, and gender; and the impact of education on women’s changing roles and aspirations.
This unusual anthropological report has many qualities of a memoir, so it might appeal to some readers more than the two books profiled above. Here is Trawick’s nonstandard first paragraph:
More than a quarter of my life has passed since I began writing this book. Its heart has stayed constant during this time, but its features have changed and changed again as I have moved and taken it with me from one world to another to another. It is beginning to look to me now as I look to myself, like a beaten-up suitcase with a lot of stickers on it.
Trawick was welcomed into an extended family in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. The reader comes to know each family member very well, thanks to the book’s memoir qualities and Trawick’s inclusion of a photographic portrait of each one. Other unusual features include numerous quotations of Tamil poetry (in the original and in translation); large, complex diagrams of Tamil kin terms, which apparently have qualities such as radial and bilateral symmetry; and a surprising amount about the relationships between Trawick and her husband and children. As Lincoln once wrote, “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”
7. How Do Other Children Learn Responsibility?
This insightful article provides examples and analysis of the contrast in how parents in two traditional societies and U.S. middle-class society (try to) instill an active sense of responsibility in their children. Summary: In the two traditional societies, most children start becoming responsible at an early age without the parents’ worrying about how it’s going to happen; in U.S. society, few children become responsible in spite of the parents’ worrying a lot about whether it’s ever going to happen. The traditional societies are the Matsigenka in the Peruvian Amazon and Upolu Island in Samoa; the U.S. society is a community in Greater Los Angeles. You can acquire this article right now, and it is free.
After providing vignettes of family interactions in each of the three societies, Ochs & Izquierdo offer seven arguments to explain the contrast. In my view, their strongest arguments are these three:
(1) The traditional parents are highly consistent in assigning tasks to children beginning at an early age, and in monitoring their execution of those tasks; the L.A. parents rarely assign tasks when the children are very young, and they’re inconsistent about task-assignments.
(2) The tasks assigned in the traditional societies visibly contribute to the family’s wellbeing and sustenance, but the tasks assigned in L.A. insignificantly contribute to that end.
(3) By expecting task-completion beginning at an early age, the traditional parents provided daily opportunities for their children to develop self-reliant independence. In L.A., the parents talked about the importance of developing independence; actually, though, they conditioned their children to dependency by doing all sorts of things for them and expecting little in return.
At scholar.google.com, search for “Responsibility in childhood: Three developmental trajectories.” Of the two options offered, select “[PDF] ucla.edu.” Click on that. It’s yours.
This paper discusses research carried out in two traditional villages in Peru. One was a Quechua community in the south at an altitude of between 10,000 and 11,500 feet; the other was a coffee-farming village in the north of Peru. Using interviews and participant observation, Ames explored the transitions that characterized the lives of traditional children between ages five and seven, which she refers to as “the transition from early to middle childhood.”
One of the attractions of this paper is that it includes lengthy descriptions of the responsible day-to-day activities of two youngsters from each of the villages. In Chapter 3 of How Other Children Learn are shortened versions of the two Quechua children’s activities (Ana and Felipe), but the most memorable description is of the activities of Gabriela, a 5-year-old in the coffee-farming village. You won’t believe that a small child could be so competent and responsible.
Ames’s findings are similar to those of other anthropologists of childhood. As traditional children approach age five, they begin being included in a range of subsistence and other activities in keeping with their burgeoning capabilities. These changes are accompanied by progressive increases of their roles and responsibilities within their families. As Ames puts it, they go “from being ‘little children’ who are taken care of, to more ‘grown up’ children who are able to take care of others.” This type of learning is facilitated in societies where children share the adults’ world, rather than being separated from it. These transitions increase each child’s overall well-being and sense of identity within their social group, and builds their self-esteem.
8. How Do Other Parents Parent? And How Do Other Children Learn?
If reading How Other Children Learn has aroused your interest in the anthropology of childhood, then An Introduction to Childhood is an excellent book to take your interest to the next level. A scholar with the Open University in the U.K., Montgomery gives us, in relatively few pages, an overview of childhood in cross-cultural, biological, and social perspectives. In her Introduction, she shares that her start in this field occurred before anthropologists were taking it seriously:
When I first started my doctorate in 1992, the number of people working specifically on childhood was very small. There was a sense that children were not a legitimate topic of study, and that studying children was regarded as less than serious.
Montgomery’s first chapter examines childhood as a topic of study within American and British anthropology, and her second looks at the many ways in which human beings have thought about their youngsters (equals? incompetents? investments? laborers? and others). Beginning with Chapter 3, she reviews for us what scholars have learned so far about birth and beginnings; family, friends, and peers; talking, playing, and working; discipline, punishment, and abuse; adolescence; and various aspects of sexuality. Parenting is mentioned frequently, of course. But Montgomery’s focus is on understanding the children in cross-cultural perspective.
David Lancy is the world’s most accomplished cataloguer of historical and anthropological research on childhood. His magnum opus is The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings, the 3rd edition of which was published in 2022. Besides hundreds of pages of facts about childhood around the world and through historical time, it includes an a bibliography of 126 pages plus an index that lists some 530 societies in which children have been studied – some you’ve heard of, some you probably haven’t (Kwara’ae, Iñupiaq, Pirahã, !Kung, etc.).
Lancy’s editor at Cambridge encouraged him to write a book for the general public based on his magnum opus. The result is Raising Children: Surprising Insights from Other Cultures. In it we encounter both Lancy the omniscient anthropologist and Lancy the acerbic critic of our middle-class child-rearing. On page after page, he cites examples of child-rearing in as many as eight other societies to support his contention that our ideas and ideals about children contrast sharply with those of other peoples. By historical and cross-cultural standards, we overparent and micromanage. But as a child, he was spared: That’s why he dedicates this book to “my parents…because they left me alone.”
David Lancy, who announced his retirement only days before I wrote this review, considers Learning Without Lessons to be his “first and last attempt to weave all these shorter strands into a recognizable textile.” “Shorter strands” refers to his entire body of work as an anthropologist of children’s learning, which began during the late 1960s in a remote Kpelle village in Liberia. There the fledgling ethnographer “gravitated to the study of learning in various contexts, including play, work, initiation rites, and primary school.” During the intervening half century, Lancy amassed not only the findings of his own research but also an encyclopedic command of research findings about children’s learning, broadly understood, in the fields of ethnography, anthropology, psychology, education, and history. His bibliographies, which in some volumes exceed 100 pages (small print!), became my single most useful resource for my own scholarly writing as an ethnologist of education.
What a prospective reader of David Lancy’s work can expect, therefore, is generalizations about all the ways in which children learn – whether they’re the progeny of hunter-gatherers, traditional villagers encountering schooling for the first time, or modern urbanites buying Baby Einstein toys for their infant. More accurately, Lancy discusses all the ways in which children could learn if only we’d give them the opportunity to do so. Lancy’s generalizations aren’t educated guesses! What distinguishes his work is generalizations fortified by example after example drawn from human societies across space and time.
Here’s an example: In Learning Without Lessons, Lancy contends in Chapter 3 that indigenous and traditional parents do not teach their young, not out of neglect but because that’s not how children learn. In fact, parents avoid any kind of direct teaching, even in the rare instance of being asked for assistance by a child. Lancy supports this generalization with quotes from ethnographic reports about the Pumé of Venezuela, the Nayaka of India, the Torres Strait islanders of Australia, the Mbuti of Central Africa, the Punan Bah of Borneo, and the Mazahua of Mexico, among others.
That example is characteristic of Lancy’s writing: He repeatedly draws on his encyclopedic knowledge of children’s learning within societies of every description – ours included – to lay out the ways in which children’s learning has transformed in response to changes in culture and technology. These changes are increasingly being driven by our WEIRD preferences – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (Urbanized, too) – preferences that bring in their wake our Euro-American schooling. Most of us assume our brand of schooling benefits indigenous and traditional peoples. Lancy’s life’s work, summarized in Learning Without Lessons, says “No! It’s not so simple.”
Beginning with the declaration that “indigenous pedagogy is deeply informed by the bedrock belief that children must be autonomous and their learning self-initiated,” Lancy walks the reader through the age-related stages of indigenous and traditional children’s learning without lessons. Many readers will be struck by the chasm between how those children acquire everything they need to know to function well in their societies and how modern children are obliged to learn what they need to know. Yes, modernization has brought benefits to children and adults. But much has been lost in the modernizing process, and that’s what concerns David Lancy.
If I would fault Lancy in any detail, it’s for not forcefully acknowledging that changes in culture and especially technology over millennia have made learning WITH lessons absolutely indispensable. We cannot have both our modern industrialized societies and a return to children’s learning that is thoroughly autonomous, self-initiated, and lesson-free. We can only nibble around the edges of that lofty goal.
If you dare to think about the socialization of children in broad global and historical context, then I commend Learning Without Lessons to you.