Acquiring Culture

Cross Cultural Studies in Child Development

Gustav Jahoda, Ioan Lewis

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317534396
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Until the 70s and 80s anthropologists studying different cultures had mainly confined themselves to the behaviour and idea systems of adults. Psychologists, on the other hand, working mainly in Europe and America, had studied child development in their own settings and simply assumed the universality of their findings. Thus both disciplines had largely ignored a crucial problem area: the way in which children from birth onwards learn to become competent members of their culture. This process, which has been called 'the quintessential human adaptation', constitutes the theme of this volume, originally published in 1988.

It derives from a workshop held at the London School of Economics which brought together fieldworkers who in their studies had paid more than usual attention to children in their cultures. Their experience and foci of interest were varied but this very diversity serves to illuminate different facets of the acquisition of culture by children, ranging in age from pre-verbal infants to adolescents.

Evolutionarily primed for culture-learning, children are responsive to a rich web of influences from subtle and indirect as in their music and dance to direct teaching in the family guided by culture-specific ideas about child psychology. Some of the salient things they learn relate to gender, status and power, critical for the functioning of all societies.

The introductory essay provides the necessary historical background of the development of child study in both anthropology and psychology and outlined how future research in the ethnography of childhood should proceed. The book concludes with an annotated bibliography providing a guide to the literature from 1970 onwards.

Part I:
Non-verbal Processes in the Acquisition of Culture

1
Universal Co-operative Motives: How Infants begin to know the Language and Culture of their Parents

Colwyn Trevarthen

Introduction: Towards a Theory of Innate Cognition for Social and Cultural Skills

In recent years, detailed examination of how normal infants respond to the adult who gives affectionate care has brought evidence for potent control behaviours in the infant that stimulate a particular diet or syllabus of supportive and instructive behaviour from caretakers (Trevarthen, 1979a, 1983; Stern, 1985; Trevarthen and Marwick, 1986). Some of the newly chartered behaviours, additional to the behaviours that make sure the infant is adequately fed and protected from harm, or healed if sick, are purely psychological in function and consequence. They ensure an increasingly elaborate mental and behavioural engagement between the infant and other persons and appear to be produced by innate self-regulatory brain systems that are, in effect, representations or primitive concepts of persons and how one has to communicate with them, verbally or non-verbally. In time, and by controlling relationships with persons who teach, they set the direction of development for cognitive processes of culture.

This theory of socio-cultural development to explain these phenomena has been called Innate Intersubjectivity Theory (Trevarthen, 1979b, 1980). It claims that infants possess an inherent readiness to link their subjective evaluations of experience with those of other persons. It sees children starting cognitive learning in a co-operative and imitative relationship to other more experienced companions and actively contributing to the propagation of collective knowledge.

Modern psychological theories, I submit, systematically undervalue the competence of the infant for having feelings and desires, for acting with purpose, for dealing with persons and for co-operative life. They consequently misrepresent the process by which children become 'socialised' or taken into the culture as contributing and creative members. Clearly I am in agreement with Elizabeth Tonkin (1982) who argues we must seek to understand what children give to the process of socialisation, and also with Vygotsky's theory of mental development (Wertsch, 1985).

Behaviourist learning theories admit as innate certain biological needs regulating survival of the organism. In social learning theory the importance of modelling and imitation is stressed; but no explanation is offered for the origin of the capacity to imitate some behaviours and not others. Freudian psychoanalytic theory considers mental representations from the point of view of their relationship to sensations of pleasure or pain. Fantasy is a means of separating out a self-image from a reality that is challenging or life-threatening, life being presumed to begin with no clear representation of the 'self' in relation to objects or others. Piagetian cognitive theory, while it does accept that self-generated action is the 'motor' of learning, considers adaptations to social conditions to be of the same kind as adaptations to physical conditions for actions. The child gains symbolic, moral and co-operative abilities as it gains concepts, schemata to represent objects and processes in the physical world, by building up memories of the sensory effects of acting and by organising these into control programs. This occurs after the child develops an egocentric intentionality by linking up internal representations and thoughts about the sensory feedback from motor operations that originate in the child. Imitations of others are based on self-imitations, and play with others grows out of play for the self. Morality is an internalisation of rules of play that peers impose to regulate competitive games.

Theories, such as Piaget's, that concentrate on the mind of an individual on its own, do not grasp that human societies dependupon the skills individuals have for knowing and using historically created cultural meanings and symbols for their communication (Trevarthen and Logotheti, 1987). Persons have mastery of meaning; in language, in traditional beliefs, in customary co-operative actions and in the accepted perception of the artificial tools, institutions and rituals that they use together (Trevarthen, 1987). This is'cognition' in the anthropological sense—the working knowledge of a culture, especially talk about that knowledge and hence the store of meanings in words. Children must learn the skills and 'sense' of culture as they learn to talk. The question is, how do they do it? Must we assume that cognition as the anthropologists define it, is historically created, absorbed by every new generation with the language? This is classical dualism, 'nature' and 'culture' essentially different, unreconciled.

The experimental psychologist defines cognition as the perceiving by the individual of the physical circumstances that condition his action. In a mature person, cognitive activity 'processes' the input of sensory information with intelligence, attaching it to categories that previous experience has proved are real, or useful. Most developmental psychologists assume that social cognitions are, like the vocabulary of language or word lists in an experiment, taken in by learning. The human brain, starting as biological (non-mental and non-social) matter, is made consciously effective by a process of' socialisation'; that is, by conditioning the construction of meaningful social habits. True, social learning theory recognises that there are some special mental processes that govern cognition of the actions of other persons in the subject's mind; but those crucial and ever-present features of children's behaviour, imitation, observational learning and imaginative play, are given no satisfactory explanation. An effort is made to prove that the underlying empathic motivations are learned in infancy by a brain that is empty at first of all ideas of persons and what special things can be done with them.

The recent research with infants indicates a contrary thesis. Humans are born with a self-regulating strategy for getting knowledge by human negotiation and co-operative action. Children learn social behaviours and language tasks in an intermental 'zone of proximal development' where they are supported by responses older persons give to their communicative expressions (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). Thus socialisation is as natural, innate or 'biological' for a human brain as breathing or walking; both the latter, by the way, attain full proficiency epigenetically through practice and learning. The systematic steps by which a baby, incapable of speech, with extremely limited behavioural effectance of any kind, and capable of recognising only very few kinds of event within a short distance of its body, nevertheless gains awareness of the social and co-operative value of things and actions, carry vital supportive evidence for the theory that the individual is programmed for social development. Agerelated changes occur which should be universal in all cultures and races. In these matters, I would propose, cultures have to adapt to (learn) what infants and children want, the young everywhere asserting control of important and culturally significant psychological values and properties. This sets quite a new problem for anthropological study of children. The theory of innate intersubjectivity leads to novel interpretations of personality, of emotional regulations of behaviour and emotional disorders, and of the universals in underlying structure of all historically created cultural skills, including languages and other forms of symbolic expression. It also leads us to a functional or ecological interpretation of differences between cultures. It helps explain the different ways in which humans in society choose to satisfy and use their co-operative motives to live together, and how each culture propagates its particular way of life through the generations (cf. Wertsch, 1985, for discussions, in a Vygotskian perspective, of the relationship between development of children and the history of society, and Trevarthen and Logotheti, 1987, for a critical examination of theories of how symbols are learned).

A Synopsis of Developments Observed with Western White Subjects in the Us and Scotland

Reactions of new-borns to mothers

Accurate description of the patterning of spontaneous movements when new-borns are alert and contented proves the existence of a core nervous network that links all motor organs and all special receptors in one co-ordinated sensory-motor system (Trevarthen, Murray and Hubley, 1981; Trevarthen, 1984a, c). The head and limbs are capable of adopting different well-formed complementary settings with reference to a body-space or orientation field. Arm and hand movements are co-ordinated spontaneously to places outside the body, and this orienting can be excited by objects that the infant sees or hears in gentle motion in near space. The object's stimuli can guide the orienting. Cyclic internal changes over the day, and subtle responses of the infant's state of arousal and emotion to human attentions, govern a highly selective sampling of the earliest contacts with the outside world (Mehler and Fox, 1985).

Human beings show preferential responses to persons from before birth (Sander, 1983; Stern, 1985; Trevarthen, 1987). New-borns show almost no outward-directed sociability controlled by perception of its effect on others, but they do fixate a human face (Maurer and Salapatek, 1976); when aroused they can make specific imitations of exaggerated face expressions (Meltzoff and Moore, 1977; Field, Woodson, Greenberg and Cohen, 1982; Kugiumutzakis, 1985). A baby that is calm but alert after an easy delivery, will turn to look at a soft human voice calling from one side, even if the speaker is completely concealed from sight (Alegria and Noirot, 1978). The unborn foetus can hear and learn distinctive features of the human speech through the intrauterine media, because a new-born may prefer orienting to the mother's particular voice, her individual vocal quality, as compared to other female voices (De Casper and Fifer, 1980). This would appear to prime a rapid 'imprinting', perhaps in hours, to the appearance of the mother's face, so she is soon recognised on sight. Microanalysis of expressions of new-borns reveals that the numerous muscles of the baby's face (a uniquely human organ for communication, more complex than the homologous structure of any other species) are already coordinated into configurations of contraction that closely resemble expressions by which adults universally express basic emotions (Trevarthen, 1984b, 1985). The 'knit' brow of concentrated attention accompanies visual fixations, and the smile of recognition is stimulated by a mother's gentle holding, looking and vocalisation (Oster, 1978). A condition of distress is signalled by expressions of sadness or anger.

Mothers learn to detect and regulate the contentment or distress of their new-borns, to stop them crying, by holding them, shielding them from discomfort or cold with their own bodies or in soft cloth or animal pelts, patting and rocking (with regular beat) feeding, cuddling and gently humming or singing. A newborn's expressive protest elicits this comforting, and a healthy baby calms quickly when it is received. The infant has sensitivity to direct human response, pretuned to many 'higher order invariants', including dynamic invariants, of maternal olfactory, visual, auditory, tactual and gestatory stimulation and to the affection signalled in her transporting, holding and nursing. It has been shown that these infant sensitivities may be rapidly conditioned, but the adverse effects of unaffectionate mothering, even when adequate food and physical attention is presented, indicate that the new-born is primed with standards for 'good' mothering. New-borns show a pattern of excessive sleep, inertia and silence when affectionate human care is withheld. Moderate and temporary withdrawal of a healthy new-born to inactivity can assist a caretaker who, while busy with other tasks, may temporarily have to treat the baby as an object to be carried or put aside.

In comparing the care of new-borns in different cultures, we need to attend to the most intimate aspects of neonatal care that are relevant to the sensitivities and responses of the baby. Many strikingly different customs for mother-infant interaction and baby care may not change the quality of this basic human contact. The neonate period is one in which avoiding behaviours and sleep give 'protective concealment' to maturing brain mechanisms for perception and expression. It is not a period for exercise of exploratory, communicative or object handling skills, and communication, is, at this stage, highly specialised to regulate maternal 'holding' and care.

Primary intersubjectivity–awakening to human communication in the second month

At 46 weeks gestational age±l there is an outward-reaching, actively seeking response to people; now social (or interpersonal) orienting may be said to begin. New-born sleepiness and concealment of motives for exploration of outside phenomena clear away. The mother notices the new alertness, and feels more attended to. Her receptive, encouraging responses in turn elicit intent regard (Figure 1.1 A), al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Child Development in Psychology and Anthropology
• Part I: Non-verbal Processes in the Acquisition of Culture
• Part II: Cognitive Development and Indigenous Psychology
• Part III: Cognitive Development, Gender and Hierarchy
• Index