and cultural inputs he or she receives.
Harkness and Super’s model, for example, focuses on three elements: the physical and social environments in which the child lives, child education and child care customs and the psychology of caregivers. The authors, and others, have used this framework to assess how parents’ ethnic theories of child development help shape practices, such as daily infant routines, and how these practices in turn influence child behaviors, such as patterns of play and social interaction.
Similarly, Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological systems model, undoubtedly the best-known theoretical development framework, provides a guide for examining how the immediate, internal and external environments in which children live shape their development, with particular attention paid to individual differences, such as temperament, and the ever-changing nature of these pathways over time.
This framework has been used to examine a wide range of behaviors, for example, bullying and peer victimization among youth in the United States, in order to assess how microsystems such as parent–youth relationships, exosystems such as exposure to media violence and macrosystems such as religion all contribute to child behaviors and beliefs.
However, the concept of “culture” is a confusing one; in Bronfenbrenner’s model, the child sits in concentric spheres of cultural influence, with macro- and microsystems influencing his or her development. However, separation of the individual from his or her culture can be problematic, as culture is not separate, but rather a product of human activity (Rogoff 2003).
Indeed, development is a continuous process by which people are transformed by participating in culture, and their participation in turn transforms culture itself; the distinction between biology and culture is also flawed, as they are not alternative influences, but inseparable aspects of the system in which individuals develop. More contemporary conceptualizations thus attempt to position development in both cultural and biological contexts.
1.5.3. Ethnographic approaches and monocultural analyses
The ethnographic study of child development has its roots in the field of academic anthropology and has generally focused on furthering our knowledge by positioning child development within the wider sociocultural environment in which it occurs. Anthropologists Margaret Mead (1928) and Bronisław Malinowski (1929) were the first to suggest the importance of cultural environment in development and to question the idea that the behavior of children in the West is necessarily generalizable to other contexts. Thus, the adolescence crisis was challenged by Mead and the Oedipus complex by Malinowski.
These early ethnographies involved months, even years, of fieldwork and resulted in intimate ethnographies that integrated the lives of children into the complex cultures in which they found themselves. The majority of ethnographic work on child development in the early 20th century focused on detailed descriptions of cultural groups, such as the Hopi, Navajos, Tikopians and indigenous communities of New Guinea. A few notable exceptions have examined child behavior across populations, to allow for comparisons. For example, the transition to adulthood in Western societies is more discontinuous than in “traditional” societies, and adults in agricultural societies are more likely to assign tasks to children than those in gathering societies (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).
Then, during the last century, subsequent waves of ethnographic work focused on assessing the usefulness of psychological theories, such as Freudian psychoanalysis and Piagetian cognitive development among children in various societies. The second half of the century saw the advent of a more modern form of ethnography, which often involved the quantification of behavioral observations. These meticulous observational studies have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of developmental variation (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).
For example, while prolonged infant crying was (and still is) common in Western societies, the generalization of this model outside the West was challenged by pioneering work on the behavior of Kung infants. Through intensive observational work, anthropologists demonstrated that Kung babies cried much less than Dutch babies because parents responded quickly and reliably (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).
These close observation methods have also been used to study a wide variety of developmental behaviors, such as the duration of infant vocalizations, the percentage of time spent with different adults and time spent playing, foraging or working, among other variables.
This helps us to better understand child development by providing ecologically valid measures of relevant behaviors in the environments where they occur. In addition, observational data is less likely to be skewed by self-reported biases, such as socially desirable responses.
Despite the growing body of observational work on child development, some researchers have argued that ethnographic literature alone is not sufficient to constitute an anthropology of childhood. In other words, while mono-cultural studies deepen our understanding of child development, more theory and cross-cultural reasoning are needed to create frameworks with greater explanatory power (LeVine 2008).
Researchers have attempted to address this through meta-ethnographic approaches that compare child development in different populations. Anthropologist Mel Konner’s “distillation of childhood” in hunter-gatherer populations (2010) has been a particularly important model in this line of research; by comparing the ethnographies of several hunter-gatherer societies such as the Hadza of Tanzania and the Martu of Australia, Konner catalogued 11 aspects of infant and child care, such as frequency of nursing, mixed play groups and self-sufficiency.
This view of child development has allowed us to better understand the similarities and differences between these various societies. For example, in all societies surveyed, infants are breastfed frequently and for long periods of time – 32 months on average. These results, combined with data from other sources, such as geochemical analyses of fossilized hominid teeth, suggest that breastfeeding is a consistent and probably ancient feature of human development. Ethnographic comparisons have also examined other aspects of early development, such as variation in learning strategies and parent–child relationships (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).
This meta-ethnographic approach has also been greatly facilitated by the HRAF (Human Relations Area Files), which maintains an archive of cultural information, a corpus of nearly 800,000 pages of ethnographic work about more than 300 different cultural, ethnic and religious groups from around the world. The technique of using and comparing archived ethnographic surveys has sometimes been called the “holocultural” approach. This approach has yielded a number of new insights into the role of cultural systems in child development.
For example, HRAF data allows us to study how different levels of social and political integration have influenced corporal punishment inflicted on children: societies with higher levels of social hierarchy and those in which non-relatives help to raise children are more likely to practice corporal punishment.
Similarly, subsistence strategy is related to child labor: hunter-gatherer children do relatively less economic work than food producers and agricultural societies assign work to children more often than hunter-gatherers. Learning begins in infancy, with children accompanying their parents on foraging expeditions, continues through early and middle childhood, primarily in the context of mixed groups, and matures in adolescence, when adults begin to teach children complex skills more directly (Amir and McAuliffe 2020).
An exemplary case study of the use of the multisite approach is an investigation by House and Silk (2013) into the “ontogeny” of social behavior. Using a forced-choice task, the authors investigated the emergence of prosocial behavior in 3–14 year-olds in Aka, American, Fijian, Himba, Martu and Shuar societies. They presented children with a choice between a 1–1 offer, which would offer one reward to the child and another to a peer (the “prosocial” choice), and a 1–0 offer, which would offer one reward to the child and none to a peer (the “other
