miriam figueroa olea - infancia - 14 de junio de 2013

8/12/2019 Miriam Figueroa Olea - Infancia - 14 de Junio de 2013

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The ultural onstruction of

hild D e v e l o p m e

Framework for the Socialization of ffect

SARA HARKNESS and CHARLES M. SUPER

The search for explanations of cultural vanauon in expressivebehavior has produced several generations of research on childrearing practices. As fonnalized in the Whiting model for psychocultural research O W. M. Whiting 1973) and applied to a largenumber of ethnographic and cross cultura l studies (see J. W. M.Whiting 1954), this approach has centered around an antecedentsconsequences paradigm. Aspects of childrearing at a given point in


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Two aspects of this well-known paradigm have seldom been no tedby the anthropological community. First. although the focus of datacollection in these studies may be childhood. the focus of theoreticalinterest is apt to be adulthood. t is almost as if the anthropologist'were Freud talking to one of his women patients: the issue of concern is the functioning of the adult. not the life of the obild. Second.the antecedents-consequences paradigm necessarily involves the isolation of events or stages in human development. Experience at aparticular point in the development of the child is related to behavior at a specific stage in adulthood. without reference to previous.intervening. or subsequent development in the life span.

Research in the antecendents-consequences paradigm has produced a rich bounty of ideas about the cultural shaping of expressivebehavior. We suggest. however. that further progress in understanding the socialization of affect - as well as the acquisition of culture in

general- will require a synthesis of developmental and culturalperspectives. In this view. it will be necessary to look at the process ofhuman developmen t itself. as it inte racts with the environments provided by different cultures.

Beatrice Whiting's recent work on culture as a provider of settings offers an interesting approach to this kind of developmentalethnography. She suggests that the most important role of parents insocializing their children is in assigning the children to different settings. Characteristics of settings - in particular the age and sex ofthe company children keep - are powerful detenninants of the kindsof behavior which children develop (B. B. Whiting 1980). In our

own work. we have used the tenn niche in comparing rural African and urban American patterns of infant care. The infant's niche.

s we have used this tenn. includes the physical and social settingswhich the baby lives in. culturally regulated customs involved incare and rearing; and the psychology of the caretakers (Super andHarkness 1982). Whiting's work on culture as a provider of settings.and our descriptions of the infant's niche. represent a departurefrom earlier thinking of the culture and personality school in thatthe unit of analysis is neither the individual nor the cultural setting.but rather individuals n specified contexts.

The intersection between the culture and the individual can bedescribed not only through the construction of the niche orbehavioral setting. but also through interactions between the pro-

C U l ruR L CONSTRUCTION OF CHILO DEVELOPMENT 3

cess of human development and culture. We suggest that a primaryfunction of culture in shaping human experience is the division ofthe continuum of human development into e a n i n g f u ~ s e g m e norstages. Developmental progress in the individual will be given less

social recognition with in cultural ly defined stages than will changes.real or imagined. which occur across stage boundari es. On the otherhand. the comparison of individuals with each other-and thus.judgments of enduring personal qualities by members of theculture-will be made within the boundaries of culturally defineddevelopmental stages. In the fonnulation of these judgments. ofcourse. real developmental differences may be minimized or ig-nored.

The definition of developmental stages is in part a culturallyshared response to the observable aspects of human development.and thus it seems reasonable to expect universal elements in stages as

defined by all cultures. For example. all cultures. so far as we know.recognize infancy as a stage of human development. Cultures vary.however. in their choice of different aspects of development as thecritical ones for defining growth. Further. the actual criteria for thebeginnings or ends of stages may often derive from other events inthe environment which are only indirectly. if at all. related todevelopment of the individual in question. The result. wehypothesize. is that cultures will vary not only in the timing ofroughly comparable developmental stages. but also in thedevelopmental issues which are seen as primary to each stage.

The cultural construction of child development. thus. has three

main dimensions: first. culturally derived criteria for the duration ofeach developmental stage; second. a set of characteristic physicaland social settings; and third. culturally shared expectations forbehavior by and toward individuals in each stage. We suggest thatthe developmental niche. as we shall tenn this structuring of thechild's environment. is the p rimary source for the child's acquisitionof culture. including the experience. encoding. and expression of affect. The regularities of the physical. social. and psychologicalparameters of the niche. as well as the thematic continuities fromone culturally defined developmental stage to the next. provide thematerial from which the child abstracts the rules of culture. just asthe rules of grammar are derived from the regularities of the speechenvironment. We will illustrate this theoretical approach with data


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from our field studies in Kokwet. a rural Kipsigis community ofKenya. We will then discuss the implications of the structuring ofchild development in Kokwet for the socialization of affect.

The Kipsigis. a Highland Nilotic people of Kenya. are pastoralistsand swidden agriculturalists. using cattle for bridewealth in polyg.ynous marriage. Like other highland East African peoples. the Kipsigis are patrilineal and tradit ionall y used age set as t he basis ofmilitary organization; today. male and female circumcision ceremonies remain the focal point of cultural solidarity. Kokwet. thecommunity where we carried out anthropological and psychologicalfieldwork for three years (from 1972 to 1975). consists of 54 households established on land repatriated from the British in 1963.Although as a governmentsponsored settl ement scheme Kokwetwas intentionally modem in some agricultural practices. the community remained traditional in many significant respects: most

adults had little or no schooling. few men worked at salaried jobsaway from the homesteads. cows were still used for the customarybrideprice. and virtually all adolescents still chose to undergo thetraditional circumcision ceremonies.

We believe that the people of Kokwet see the years from birth toabout nine years of age in terms of three major developmentalstages. For the growing child. each of these stages can be characterized as a developmental niche with the three dimensions we havementioned: criteria for establishing beginning and end physicaland social settings. and parenta l beliefs and values. To illustrate thesocial reality of the developmental niche in Kokwet. we will show

that in terms of daily activities. mothers' expectations. and styles ofsocial interaction with others. the changes experienced by childrenfrom infancy to nine years of age do not occur at continuous rates.but rather go through spurts and periods of relative stability. Anoverview of these changes and stable periods in various arenas of thechild's life. we believe. supports the idea of more general. culturallybased developmental stages.

The first stage is. of course. infancy. Infants in Kokwet are caredfor almost entirely by their mothers for the first three months of life.thereafter by a child nurse (often an older sister) in conjunction withthe mother and anyone else present. During this whole period. infants are almost constantly in the company of several other people.usually either in physical contact or within arm's reach of a

C U l ruR L CONSTRUCTION OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT 225

caretaker. At night. infants sleep in skintoskin contact with theirmothers. and they nurse on demand Backcarrying is used bymothers and child nurses both as a means of taking the baby alongwhile at work or visiting. and as a way of calming a fussy baby. Agreat deal of affectionate attention is given to babies. by older family members and by the community at large. Crying in babies isquickly responded to by offers of the breast. holding or carrying. orentertainment

Infancy ends when the next sibling is born. In this common EastAfrican pattern there is no other wholly satisfactory way of movingthe child on to the next stage. Our own data on motherchild interaction patterns show that speech styles typical of mothers withtwoyearolds linger on to be used with threeyearolds if there is noyounger sibling (Harkness 1977). Usually. however. the birth of ayounger sibling pushes the former infan t on to the next stage at about

two years of age. This stage is characterized by a decline in attentionfrom adults and an increasing proportion of time spent in the company of other children. generally older siblings or halfsiblings(Harkness and Super 1982). Together. these children play. watchthe goingson of older members of the household. and help in thecare of the next baby. This is also an age for beginning to learnabout the work of the household. such as herding calves. carryingwater. collecting firewood. or weeding in the garden. Figure 1 basedon spot observations (see Munroe and Munroe 1971) of 54households balanced over times of day and the course of a year.shows a rapid increase in the amount of time spent in work ac

tivities. accompanied by a corresponding decline in play andidleness. from ages two or three to six or seven. In terms of daily activities. early childhood in Kokwet is a period of rapid growth incommitment of time to activities related to the economic well beingof the household: herding calves. fetching wood. and other familychores. In contrast. after age six the overall amount of time spent inwork activities levels off. although the repertoire of chores done bychildren continues to expand with increasing age.

The transition to middle childhood in Kokwet. beginning atabout age six. is marked by a shift in mothers' expectations of theirchildren. who are now seen as old enough to carry out some in-dependent responsibilities. In interviews with the mothers of Kokwetabout their children. the criteria most frequently mentioned were


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60

50

0

30

20

10

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Figure 1. Age trmds in distribution of time among work activities. play, and idleness forchildren aged on( to RiM y u n .

whether the child could be trusted to take a message to a nearbyhomestead, or could reliably be sent to the shop for a small purchase. As can be seen in Figure 2, mothers' responses to this questionshow a rapid shift toward unqualified yes answers up to age six,when most mothers judge their children old enough to be entrustedwith these errands. A related measure of mothers' expectations, alsoshown in Figure 2, is their judgment of whether the child's personality has emerged. Interestingly, it is not until a year or two afterthe child is considered old enough to be entrusted with responsibilities such as errands that it becomes possible for the mother tojudge what kind of child she has. Responsibility was seen as thecore of character, and thus it was not until a child was old enoughthat he or she could reasonably be expected to act responsibly that aparent could make this judgment of character.

We have described differences in children's activities, and inmothers' expectations for their children, as shown by spot observations and mothers' interviews_ Corresponding changes in social

_ParentalR... . .

v.,

QualifiedV.,

No

o

CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF HILD DEVELOPMENT 227

A Can child take a message 1 nearby

homestead?

8 Has child s personality

emerged?

C Can child 90 to... shop for small

purchase?

2

C

B

3 5A g e i n C ~ Y. . . .

6 1 8 9

Figure 2. Mother s rnponse s to i n t r v i ~quntions about childrflJ agttl one to nine ~ a n

behavior directed to these children are reflected by a third datasource, as illustrated in Figure 3. Running records of naturally oc.curring behavior in the home were written and later coded according to a modification of the system developed by Beatrice and JohnWhiting (B. B. Whiting 1971). Each social interactio n or individualactivity is scored as one of nearly one hundred kinds of goal-directedbehavior. The social behaviors, of primary interest here, can beregarded as directed by an actor toward a target person. The datapresented in Figure 3 summarize over 8,000 behavioral acts towardchildren of different ages. Behavior categories accounting for atleast one percent of behaviors toward children in most of the agegroups were selected or combined on the basis of their cross-agevariation, their face content, and a cluster analysis. The resultingmatrix of sixteen kinds of behavior directed toward nine age groups

was submitted to multidimensional scaling by the MDPREF methoddeveloped by Carroll and Chang (1964)_ In addition, a hierarchicalclustering was performed on the ages (Johnson 1967 _ As indicated


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Just as t h ~ structure of ~ a c hdevelopmental niche carries am e s s ~for t h ~I ~ a r n i n gof social behavior. so also does it teach them n ~ m e n tof a f f t t t i v ~experience. Here. the underlying themewhich we see can described in terms of the management of state:who is in h ~of t. and how it is to be dealt with. This dimension

can most easily expressed in terms of a contrast with t :le familiar:unlike American middle class parents. parents in Kokwet do notcustomarily ~ n g ~in negotiations with their infants or childrenover the regulation of emotion. sleep wake patterns . or eating. Theinfant care patterns which we have described involve managementby others of the infant's state: signals of hunger. tiredness. orfussiness lead to prompt responses by others to reestablishequilibrium in the baby. This kind of infant care practice has oftenbeen termed indulgent. and perhaps it would be in our Americanmiddle class context. A more ac curate characterization of the Kip.sigis approach in its own terms. however, is that other people. notthe baby. are in c h r ~of dealing with variations in the baby'sphysical and emotional state. The transition to early childhood is adifficult one bttause it entails a substantial decrease in outsideregulators of the child's state. Now. if a child is fussy. that is "hisbusiness." At a more abstract level. however. the two stages aresimilar in that the child's state does not in itself become a focus ofshared attention and communication between the child and others.By middle childhood. muc h of children's lives at home is. as we haveshown. oriented around household tasks. Now. the focus is whatneeds to be done. not what the child feels like doing. The manage

ment of state in the individual child becomes an accessory to themanagement of the social group as a whole. Unless the child hasphysical symptoms of distress. variations in his or her state will notseem consequential to anyone i ncluding the child.

In the subsequent developmental niches of Kipsigis culture. wecould find other expressions of this theme. In each life stage, thephysical and social parameters of t h ~ niche. and the beliefs andvalues attached to it. will add new elements to the cultural construction of human development. It is this framework which. we suggest.must understood for an adequate study of the socialization of affect.

REFERENCES

CARROLL, J. D . and J. J. CHANG. 1964. Nonparam etric Multidimensional

CUL uRAL ONSTRU TION OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT 251

Analysis of Paired Comparisons Data. r e s e n t ~at the Joint Meetings of the Psy.chometric and Psychonomic Sodetie . Niagara Falls.

HARKNESS, S. 1977. Aspects of Social Environment and Fint Language Ac-quisition in Rural Africa. Talking to Children: Language In put and Acquisition(C. Snow and C. Ferguson. eds.). pp. 309-316. London: Cambridge UnivenityPress.

HARKNESS. S., and C. M. SUPER. 1982. Why African Child...,n Are o Hardto Test. Cross-Cultural Research at Issue L. L. Adler. ed.), pp. 145-152. NewYork: Academic Press.

JOHNSON, S. G 1967. Hierarchical Clustering Schemes. PsychQmeln ca 5 :241254.

LEVINE. R. A. 1973. Patterns of Penonality in Africa. Etho, U25-152.MUNROE, R. H., and R. L. MUNROE. 1971. Hous

miriam figueroa olea - infancia - 14 de junio de 2013

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