R O B E R T A .

L EV I N E

Ethnographic Studies of Childhood:

A Historical Overview

ABSTRACT In this article, I briefly survey the ethnographic research literature on childhood in the 20th century, beginning with the
social and intellectual contexts for discussions of childhood at the turn of the 20th century. The observations of Bronislaw Malinowski and
Margaret Mead in the 1920s were followed by later ethnographers, also describing childhood, some of whom criticized developmental
theories; still others were influenced initially by Freudian and other psychoanalytic theories and later by the suggestions of Edward
Sapir for research on the childs acquisition of culture. The Six Cultures Study led by John Whiting at midcentury was followed by
diverse trends of the period after 1960including field studies of infancy, the social and cultural ecology of childrens activities, and
language socialization. Ethnographic evidence on hunting and gathering and agricultural peoples was interpreted in evolutionary as
well as cultural and psychological terms. The relationship between ethnography and developmental psychology remained problematic.
[Keywords: history, ethnography, child development, cultural acquisition, interpersonal relationships]

I N THIS ARTICLE, I present an overview of ethnographic

research on childhood during the 20th century, includ-
ing works in biological, linguistic, social, and psychologi-
1995); and the archaeology of childhood (e.g., Baxter 2005).
These bodies of research deserve, and in some cases have
had, overviews of their own.
cal anthropology. The literature is extensive and interdis- An ethnographic study of childhood as used herein is
ciplinary, appearing in journals of psychology, psychiatry, a descriptive account, based on field observations and in-
and linguistics, as well as anthropology, and in monographs terviews, of the lives, activities, and experiences of children
and volumes of collected papers. It grew during the second in a particular place and time, and of the contextssocial,
half of the century, covering all regions of the world, and cultural, institutional, economicthat make sense of their
in the 1990s there were more ethnographic studies of child- behavior there and then. There would be no need for such
hood published in book form than in any previous decade. descriptive accounts if childhood in ideal and practice were
The aim of this article is to show the extent and di- uniform across human populations and historical periods or
versity of published ethnographic accounts of childhood if the developmental pathways for children were randomly
over the past 80 years,1 providing a bibliography and a ba- distributed among humans. The ethnography of childhood,
sic historical background that might prove useful for future then, is based on the premiseconstantly reexamined in
analyses.2 In the interests of brevity, I have limited this ac- empirical researchthat the conditions and shape of child-
count to ethnographies of infancy and childhood in domes- hood tend to vary in central tendency from one population
tic and community settings. That has meant omitting not to another, are sensitive to population-specific contexts,
only theoretical treatises, psychometric studies, and school and are not comprehensible without detailed knowledge
studies but also other bodies of anthropological research of the socially and culturally organized contexts that give
on childhood: studies of immigrant children (e.g., Suarez- them meaning.
Orozco and Suarez-Orozco 2001); studies of chronically ill,
dying, or disabled children (e.g., Bluebond-Langner 1978,
1996); research on child abuse and other social problems of HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
children in diverse cultures (e.g., Korbin 1981; Montgomery The recording and publishing of descriptions of the lives,
2001; Montgomery et al. 2003; Scheper-Hughes 1987); the activities, and experience of children did not originate
cultural politics literature on childhood (e.g., Scheper- with anthropology, but in the course of the 20th century
Hughes 1992; Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1998; Stephens anthropologists gave such accounts a distinctive stamp
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 109, Issue 2, pp. 247260, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. ! C 2007 by the American Anthropological Association.

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248 American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007

as research to enhance knowledge of human variation for from the home to study at postsecondary institutions, vote,
scientific and policy purposes. From the 1920s onward, and participate in public life; fertility was to be voluntarily
anthropologists published ethnographic reports on child- controlled through contraception supported by sex educa-
hood among human populations across the world, devised tion, so that families could be kept small; and children were
and refined observational approaches, and developed to be raised scientifically rather than according to the dic-
and borrowed theoretical frameworks for analyzing data tates of custom.
collected in fieldwork. In this milieu, Sigmund Freuds writings became avail-
Descriptions of customary practices regarding children able (in what he regarded as inadequate translations) and
and their activities appeared in the texts of many cultures, influential. Freud was hardly an extreme environmentalist,
non-Western as well as Western, before the 19th century, but he was widely interpreted as claiming that young chil-
including travelers reports on foreign practices that seemed dren were not only sentient and passionate beings but also
strange (and therefore noteworthy) and clergymens advice highly vulnerable to parental and other early influences,
to parents in a particular context. The 19th century saw for worse as well as for better. By 1920, a Freudian con-
a heightened public interest in children in Western coun- text for the interest in childrens experience, often based on
tries, manifested in literary and journalistic representations an exaggeration or distortion of Freuds ideas, was becom-
of children as innocent victims of economic exploitation, ing widespread in public discourse on childhood. Freuds
the child-saving movement that sought to abolish child works drew unprecedented attention to the subjective ex-
labor and provide care for orphans, the laws that made perience of children and added a public preoccupation with
school attendance compulsory, and efforts to create an the new and anxious questions: What is the best way to raise
empirical science that would replace religious doctrine and a child? What is the normal child? Through what stages of
philosophical speculation in public discourse about chil- child development do infants become adults?
dren. This public interest had been institutionalizedin Christian missionaries and colonial administrators of
school systems, orphanages, and academic and medical the late 19th and early 20th centuries wrote books describ-
specialtiesby the end of the century, when anthropology ing the customs of the peoples with whom they worked in
and other social science fields were taking their modern Oceania, Asia, Africa, and the Americas and included sec-
forms. tions (often with photographs) on customs of child rear-
In the United States and western Europe soon after ing that struck them as noteworthy, including adoption,
1900, there were some fundamental alterations in the con- naming and initiation ceremonies, practices of breast feed-
ditions of childrens lives: (1) Infant and child mortality be- ing and sibling care, and childrens houses. Although these
gan to decline, partly as the result of public health measures observers were not as deliberate, comprehensive, or dis-
(purification of drinking water, pasteurization of milk, etc.) ciplined as the anthropologists who followed them, and
and sanitary practices in the home and other settings; and although they were more likely to make ethnocentric judg-
(2) mass secondary school enrollment extended schooling ments, such writers often had a good command of the lo-
throughout childhood and into adolescence. cal language, having spent long periods among the peoples
The biomedical changes formed the basis of what might they wrote about, with many opportunities to observe chil-
be called the medicalization of childcare, as illustrated dren. Some of the later missionary ethnographers like Henri
by the hygiene movement in the United States, which was Junod (1927), who wrote about the Thonga of Mozambique,
actively promoted by government and medical authorities were trained in anthropology and published valuable if frag-
(Ewbank and Preston 1990; Preston and Haines 1991). The mentary accounts of childrens lives in cultural context.
vast increases in school attendance during the late 19th and Ethnographies of childhood by missionaries and colonial
early 20th centuries called public attention to the processes administrators continued into the 1940s (e.g., Childs 1949;
of learning and developmental change during childhood Elwin 1947; Raum 1940).
and stimulated the emergence of child psychology and edu- This early ethnographic literature provided the initial
cational psychology, led by pioneers such as G. Stanley Hall, evidence for wide cultural variations in childhood environ-
Edward L. Thorndike, James Mark Baldwin, and (in France) ments used by anthropologists in generalizing about hu-
Alfred Binet. In the United States, questions of learning were man childhood (e.g., Mead 1931; van Gennep 1960). Exam-
made urgent by the problems of educating large numbers ination of this literature made it clear that there was diver-
of immigrant children. gence among peoples of the world in their concepts of the
Thus, from about 1880 to 1920, childhood was increas- best way to raise children and of what constitutes normal
ingly formulated in what might be called pediatric and ped- child development. The stage was set for future confronta-
agogical terms, and there was public discussion about how tions between ethnographic evidence and the concepts of
science might improve the care and learning of children in normal child development emerging from theory and re-
the contexts of newly expanded medical and educational search in Western countries.
institutions. There were also new and radical ideas about By 1928, professional anthropologists were publishing
the family, women, and child rearing that arose during ethnographic accounts of childhood based on their own
this period in the Anglo-American world, although their fieldwork in non-Western communities. Margaret Mead
greatest impact would be later. Women were to be freed (1928a, 1928b) and Bronislaw Malinowski (1929) were
 LeVine Ethnography of Childhood 249

among the first. In her brief article Samoan Children at difference may betoken adaptive variation rather than de-
Work and Play in Natural History, Mead presents a number ficiency or defect (Boas 1902; see also reprint in Stocking
of ways in which childhood in Samoa as she observed it dif- 1974:3641).
fers from that of children in the United States: Samoan chil- Boas brought this perspective to his studies of
dren change their own names, move from one relative to an- child growth among immigrants, first in Worcester,
other, live in families of as many as 20, and are spoiled and Massachusetts, when he was teaching in G. Stanley Halls
pampered until the age of five years old, when they become Psychology Department at Clark University from 1889 to
the caretakers or trainers of younger children. They have to 1892, later in New York from 1908 to 1910. After the large
work at gender-specific tasks of increasing difficulty as they New York study, Boas (1912) formulated a developmen-
get older during childhood. (No ages are given.) They have tal perspective suggesting not only that human growth is
no toys, but they participate in adult life almost from the influenced by environmental factors but also that, given
start and play games in which they imitate adult activities. the gradual maturation of the human nervous system, the
Yet they are punished if they stand out conspicuously above childs mental makeup must also be affected by the social
other children or attempt grown-up tasks above their sta- and geographical environment (1912:217218).
tus. These are themes that would be elaborated in detail in Boas left further specification of this perspective to his
the ethnographies that followed over the 20th century. students Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead
Like Mead, Malinowski, in The Sexual Life of Savages in the founders of the culture and personality movement
North Western Melanesia (1929), was addressing the general although it is unclear whether he liked what they did with
public rather than other professional anthropologists, and it (Stocking 1992). His silence during the next 30 years on
his whole book was intended to describe Trobriand ideas the very cultural psychology of child development to which
and practices concerning sexual behavior that contrast with he had opened the door was no doubt related to his well-
those of the West. But he also sought to show (as he had known antagonism to theoretical speculation. But as he was
argued in his earlier book, Sex and Repression in a Savage well acquainted with the psychologies of his time, the si-
Society [1927]) that Trobrianders, being matrilineal in so- lence seems to indicate an especially prescient skepticism
cial organization, had family dynamics and sexual devel- about psychological theories and methods, many of which
opment contrasting sharply with those Freud claimed to were eventually thrown aside by child psychologists them-
be generically human in his concept of the Oedipus com- selves in the course of the 20th century.
plex. Malinowskis crystalline descriptions and vivid anec- This instability in psychology points to the paradox
dotes were carefully selected to make this point: Trobriand later anthropologists of childhood would face: Anthropolo-
father and mother are of equal status; fathers participate gists are at least partly dependent on developmental knowl-
in infant care and take great pride in their infants; children edge from other disciplines in their assumptions about how
are free and independent; and, although parents sometimes children experience their environmentsincluding the en-
beat their children, Malinowski also observed quite as of- vironmental features to which they are sensitive and their
ten children beating their parents (1929:45). He reports the age-related concepts for understandingand they have of-
childrens sex games he observed (with no interference by ten turned to psychology and psychiatry for guidance in
older persons [Malinowski 1929:50]) and those he heard making these assumptions plausible. For much of the 20th
about but was unable to observe. While making his case for century, however, this guidance was unreliable, as one de-
a revision of Freuds ideas, he was demonstrating the ethno- velopmental theory followed another into the trash heap
graphers command of language, context, culture, and be- of history.
havior that would set a standard for future studies. The Freudian theory of psychosexual stages led some
ethnographers to focus their data collection on feeding,
toilet training, and emerging sexuality in young children,
THE PLASTICITY PRINCIPLE AND HUMAN VARIABILITY whereas behavioristic psychology recommended recording
The precursor to ethnographic research on childhood in the rewards and punishments in the childs environment.
U.S. anthropology was Franz Boass anthropometric work When these theories lost credibility, so did the ethnographic
on child growth among European immigrants to the United accounts based on them as adequate records of childhood
States. Boas had been trained in anthropometric methods experience.
in 1883 in the Berlin laboratory of Rudolf Virchow, the pi- The turnover in developmental theories in psychology
oneer of medical pathology (and physical anthropology), continued after 1960, as the influence of Jean Piaget and
for whom plasticity was a major biological principle, oper- other cognitive theorists waxed and then waned, and the
ating at every level from the cell to the organism (Stocking social-cognitive formulations of Lev Vygotsky and his stu-
1968:139, 1974:22). Virchow argued, and Boas later taught, dents and the attachment theory of John Bowlby and Mary
that the plasticity characteristic of biological processes often Ainsworth introduced a new but not universally accepted
made it difficult to distinguish between normal and patho- focus on social interactions.
logical variants, mandating caution in claiming as patho- Thus the chronic instability of dominant theories
logical a variant form that might actually represent an adap- concerning the childs psychological development during
tive response to a particular environment. In other words, the 20th century posed a quandary for ethnographers of
250 American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007

childhood. If they organized their fieldwork around the ogy has consistently immunized itself not only to evidence
best knowledge available at a particular moment, they from ethnography and cross-cultural replications that casts
risked having their account of childhood become obsolete doubt on its theories du jour but even to the gross limita-
and inadequate by the time they published their findings. tions of its empirical base for generalizing about childhood:
Yet they had to make some assumptions about what was As of 2000, 88 percent of the primary schoolaged children
worth observing and recording in the environments and in the world lived in the less-developed regions (UN Pop-
activities of children in diverse settings, and it was the de- ulation Division 2005:10) where anthropologists typically
velopmental psychology of the day that offered attractive if work, but most psychological studies of children are con-
potentially faulty assumptions. The ways in which anthro- ducted in the United States and a few other Western coun-
pologists of childhood dealt with this dilemma is taken up tries. The resulting knowledge deficit has not been recog-
in the following sections. nized by the child development research field, even in the
agenda-setting report by a National Academy of Sciences
panel on The Science of Early Childhood Development
CULTURAL CRITIQUE AND ETHNOGRAPHIC (Shonkoff and Phillips 2000).
EXPLORATION Thus, relations between anthropology and develop-
A characteristic response of anthropologists to the claims mental psychology have been sporadic and often distant.
of developmental psychology and psychiatry was to use Yet there have been anthropologists throughout the century
ethnographic evidence to prove them culture bound, sug- who addressed their research to issues in child development,
gesting that a theory needed to be modified to encompass and psychologists who have conducted culturally informed
cultural variation or abandoned as a false generalization contextual research on children in diverse cultures. The field
about the human species. Malinowski and Mead led the studies of psychologists such as Wayne Dennis (1940), Pa-
way. Malinowski (1927) proposed that Freuds concept of tricia M. Greenfield (1966, 2004), Heidi Keller (in press),
the Oedipus complex in young children had to be modi- Barbara Rogoff (2003), Charles Super (Super and Harkness
fied for matrilineal societies like that of the Trobriand Is- 1985, 1986), and Edward Z. Tronick (Tronick et al. 1992;
landers, and Mead (1928b) argued that the Samoans she Tronick et al. 1987) are examples of this latter tendency.
studied did not experience the adolescent turmoil posited
by Hall (1904) as a human universal. Thus, before 1930, an-
thropologists had initiated a critical ethnography of child- ETHNOGRAPHY OF CHILDHOOD AS PART
hood that could play a decisive role in rejecting universal OF ANTHROPOLOGY
propositions falsifiable by a single negative instance (Kauf- Anthropologists, regardless of their developmental assump-
mann 1944) in the study of child development. tions, sought to describe child rearing and the activities of
Mead (1932) provided another example of this gadfly children throughout the world. Even Mead (1930) did not
role for ethnographic research on childhood when she pub- intend to limit the anthropology of childhood to disproving
lished an article criticizing Piagets theory of childhood ani- the propositions of psychologists. She characterized world
mism on the basis of interviews she conducted with Manus cultural variation in child rearing as a laboratory in which
children in Melanesia. Psychologists nevertheless contin- thousand-year experiments were being conducted by dif-
ued to generate developmental propositions claiming uni- ferent peoples. The results were retrievable through ethno-
versal validity during the rest of the 20th century, even af- graphic fieldwork in distant places like Melanesia, to be
ter John Whitings (1954) persuasive case for cross-cultural brought back to the Western world for the resolution of
analysis in the Handbook of Social Psychology, so the gad- issues like whether permissive rearing was advisable for
fly role has remained relevant, and anthropologists have U.S. middle-class children. Although they might have dis-
continued to exercise their veto with evidence from non- agreed with the broad sweep of this claim, anthropologists
Western cultures. were inspired by Meads metaphor of a laboratory and its
Piagets universalist account of childhood cognitive de- mission of learning lessons about childhood from other
velopment, which became influential among U.S. psychol- cultures. Thus, in the 1930s and later, ethnographers sought
ogists after 1963, also came under empirical attack with to add to our knowledge of childhood by publishing their
cross-cultural evidence at that time (e.g., Greenfield 1966; field observations.
Shweder and LeVine 1975). Other proposed universals of In Britain, the students of MalinowskiRaymond Firth
child development that were subject to cultural critique in- (1936), Audrey I. Richards (1932, 1956), Ian Hogbin (1931),
cluded Lawrence Kohlbergs (1984) cognitively based model C. H. Wedgwood (1938), Phyllis Kaberry (1939), E. E. Evans-
of moral development (Shweder et al. 1990), Carol Gilli- Pritchard (1940, 1953), and Margaret Read (1960, 1968)
gans (1982) conception of gender differences in develop- and those directly influenced by him like Meyer Fortes
ment (Miller 1994), and the John Bowlby-Mary Ainsworth (1938, 1949)published accounts of childhood in vary-
attachment theory (Harwood et al. 1995; LeVine and Nor- ing amounts of detail. In his ethnographic classic, We, the
man 2001). However powerful these cultural critiques may Tikopia: Kinship in Primitive Polynesia (1936), Firth described
seem to anthropologists and to some leading psycholo- the relational context of childhood and the initiation ritu-
gists such as Jerome Bruner (1990), developmental psychol- als for boys. In Chisungu (1956), Richards devoted an entire
 LeVine Ethnography of Childhood 251

monograph to the description of girls initiation among the Erik Eriksons (1950) work among the Yurok Indians
Bemba of Zambia. Evans-Pritchard, in The Nuer (1940) and of California was also based on Freuds psychosexual stages
Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer (1953), offered gen- of child development, although he superimposed on them
eralizations about Nuer childhood and fatherchild rela- his famous psychosocial stages. But there was a wider
tions based on his field observations. Read, a student of and subtler Freudian influence on many ethnographers,
Malinowski who pursued a career in colonial and interna- then and later, who assumed, for example, that breast feed-
tional education, published a book-length study, Children of ing, weaning, toilet training, and sexual behavior were the
Their Fathers (1960, 1968), of childhood among the Ngoni of most important events of early experience to investigate
Nyasaland/Malawi. Fortes, who had received a Ph.D. in ed- and describe, whether or not they interpreted them in
ucational psychology before turning to anthropology, pro- terms of Freuds concepts of oral, anal, and phallic-genital
duced an unsurpassed observational account of learning stages or fixations. Melford E. Spiros (1958) comprehen-
and social relationships among Tallensi children in 1938, sive and richly detailed account of childhood on an Is-
and then published more about the course of childhood in raeli kibbutz, for example, devotes a chapter to the social-
The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi (1949). ization of the oral, anal, and sexual behavior systems
These works by a generation of anthropologists influ- following the concepts and terminology of Whiting and
enced directly by Malinowski leave no doubt that by the Irving Child (1953)and another chapter to the Oedipus
1930s childhood was an established topic of ethnographic complex and sexual identity. Ironically, Whiting (1994:24
description, often in the context of kinship or ritual, some- 25) himself saw the findings of their 1953 book, Child Train-
times in relation to education or socialization, only oc- ing and Personality: A Cross-Cultural Study, as casting doubt
casionally with psychological interpretations. Childhood on the validity of Freuds psychosexual stages, and in his
was part of their anthropology, not a topic borrowed from own later research and writing they were rarely mentioned.
developmental psychology or other disciplines (although Years later, Jean Briggs (1972) criticized Eriksons stages of
Richards and Fortes knew the child development literature early childhood from the perspective of her study of Inuit
of their time). Future generations of British and U.S. ethno- children.
graphers would continue to describe the care, relationships, For many U.S. anthropologists interested in childhood
and learning of children, and their social participation, during the 1930s and 1940sparticipants in the culture
in published reports from Africa (e.g., Gibbs 1965; Goody and personality movement initiated by Edward Sapir, Ruth
1982; Grindal 1972; Leis 1972; Peshkin 1972; Smith 1954), Benedict, and Margaret Meadit was the neo-Freudian
the Americas (e.g., Bolin 2006; De Laguna 1965; Hughes psychoanalysis (more accurately termed interpersonal) of
1974; Lantis 1960), Asia (e.g., Lebra 1976, 1990, 1994; Peak Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm that
1991; Schwalb and Schwalb 1996; Stafford 1995), Ocea- supplied its conception of childhood experience. In this
nia (e.g., Fajans 1997; Howard 1970; Mead and MacGregor conception, there were no libidinal or psychosexual stages,
1951; Ritchie 1957; Toren 1990, 1993; Williams 1969), and and the focus was on the quality of the childs interper-
Europe (e.g., Mead and Wolfenstein 1954; Norman 1991). sonal experience with parents and siblings during the early
years. Unlike the orthodox Freudians, the neo-Freudians
were open to the study of cultural variation, and their the-
THE INFLUENCES OF FREUD, THE NEO-FREUDIANS, ory could be related to social relationships as ethnographers
AND EDWARD SAPIR observed them. The pioneering monograph in this vein was
Some anthropologists in the first half of the 20th cen- Balinese Childhood: A Photographic Analysis by Gregory Bate-
tury conducted ethnographic fieldwork focused on the son and Margaret Mead (1942).
Freudian stages of psychosexual development in early child- Abram Kardinera psychoanalyst who, after graduate
hood. This began with Geza Roheims attemptsuggested study with Boas, was trained as a physician and then was an-
by Freud and funded by his disciple Marie Bonaparteto alyzed by Freud in 1921formulated another line of theory
prove Freud right in claiming the Oedipus complex to be and research similar to the neo-Freudians, replacing Freuds
universal and, more urgently, to prove Malinowski (1927) biological drives unfolding in the course of early child de-
wrong in his claim, based on ethnographic evidence from velopment with a culturally variable theory of ego develop-
the Trobriands, that the Oedipus complex takes a distinc- ment. Kardiner organized an interdisciplinary seminar on
tive form in matrilineal societies. In 1928, Roheim began a culture and personality in New York that ran from 1933
three-year trip that involved fieldwork of varying durations onward, with numerous anthropologists participating. He
among four non-Western peoples, two of them matrilineal. also published (with the collaboration of Ralph Linton) two
His results were published in 1932. Roheims conclusions influential volumes, The Individual and His Society (1939)
were predictably supportive of Freud against Malinowski, and The Psychological Frontiers of Society (1945), based on
but some of his field methods, including observations of the seminar proceedings. The anthropologist Cora DuBois
child behavior with dolls to elicit reactions, were innovative (1944) worked with Kardiner in the seminar and then car-
then and interesting even now. (His more detailed observa- ried out fieldwork among the Alorese in Indonesia that in-
tions in Australia were not published until 20 years after his cluded ethnographic observations of childhood, based in
death as Children of the Desert [1974].) part on Kardiners approach.
252 American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007

In retrospect, these psychiatrically inspired ethnogra- most ambitious psychological theory ever constructed.
phies (i.e., Bateson and Mead 1942 and DuBois 1944) [Yet our three-year-olds are not all the same.] Our chil-
have a judgmental castBalinese mothers torment their dren are fully developed personalities very early. [We do
not quite know how this comes about, but it depends
toddlers, Alorese mothers neglect theirsand imply patho- considerably on] the interactions between the child and
logical consequences of the culture-specific parental prac- his early environment up to the age of three.
tices they describe. This was consistent with neo-Freudian
approaches, in which the mental illness of children was In the childs cosmos, patterns of behavior are understood
emotionally, [in terms of a particular constellation of re-
blamed on parents whose practices failed to give their chil-
lationships].
dren emotional security. The parents point of view on
these practices is not given prominence in the ethnographic Study the child minutely and carefully, from birth un-
accounts. Furthermore, despite the claim of Bateson and til, say, the age of ten, with a view to seeing the order
Mead that Balinese culture provides therapeutic ritual dra- in which culture patterns and parts of patterns appear in
his psychic world; study the relevance of these patterns
mas for the childhood conflicts of adults, these ethnogra-
for the development of his personality; and at the end of
phies are not portraits of alternative normal or healthy path- the suggested period, see how much of the total official
ways for child development. At the time, however, they rep- culture of the group can be said to have a significant exis-
resented a new focus on interpersonal relationships in early tence for him. Moreover, what degree of systematization,
childhood, and Bateson and Meads photographs enabled conscious or unconscious, in the complicating patterns
and symbolisms of culture will have been reached by this
readers to share a microscopic view of childhood social in-
child? [Sapir 1993:197198; square brackets in original]
teraction in sequence.
Jules Henry and Zunia Henrys (1944) study of sibling These excerpts show that Sapir, prior to 1937, was con-
rivalry among Pilaga Indian children of the Argentine Gran structing and advocating a view of childhood that, although
Chaco, attempting to replicate a doll play experiment de- influenced by the interpersonal theory of psychiatry of his
vised by the psychoanalyst David Levy (1937), was also fo- friend Harry Stack Sullivan, was focused on meanings, pat-
cused on interpersonal relations in psychiatric perspective. terns, and organization in the childs experience rather than
In this case, however, the ethnographic observers tended to questions of pathology, emphasized the subjective experi-
see the Pilaga parents and children with whom they worked ence rather than the behavioral conformity of the child,
as freer of pathogenic sibling rivalryand of remorse and and assumed the child to be an active and definitive de-
self-punishment after their sibling conflictsthan their cision maker concerning the meanings of culture patterns.
counterparts in the United States. Henry and Henry con- This is a subtle conception of cultural acquisition that seems
cluded that sibling rivalry is as inevitable among the Pilaga as good a basis for research today as it was 70 years ago.
as anywhere else, yet the Pilaga childrens lack of remorse Did anyone pursue these leads so cogently expressed
is culturally determined. by Sapir in his lectures? Not really, at least for a long while.
Finally, there is the influence of Edward Sapir (1884 Many of his graduate students at Yale were linguists with
1939), who never did an ethnographic study of childhood no apparent interest in childhood, but two who took his
but who proposed research on the childs acquisition of cul- course were John W. M. Whiting and Beatrice Blyth Whit-
ture to his students and others who carried out such stud- ing, who devoted their careers to the anthropological study
ies. Sapir had a long-standing interest in the psychology of childhood. John Whiting conducted fieldwork on the
of culture and gave a course of lectures on that topic at transmission of culture to children among the Kwoma of
the University of Chicago from 1926 to 1931 and at Yale New Guinea in 193637 and wrote a monograph enti-
until 1937. That course, reconstructed as a book from stu- tled Becoming a Kwoma (1941) that contains much ethno-
dents lecture notes and published in 1993 by Judith Irvine, graphic data Sapir would have appreciated. In analyzing
contained the following passages: the data, however, Whiting followed the lead of John Dol-
lard who, although brought to Yale by Sapir as a kindred
[Perhaps we can say something more about] the personal spirit, was soon attracted to the (behavioristic) learning
world of meanings, [if we consider] the field of child de-
theory of the Yale psychologist Clark L. Hull. So Whitings
velopment. As soon as we set ourselves at the vantage-
point of the culture-acquiring child, [with] the personal- account of the acquisition of culture by Kwoma children,
ity definitions and potentials that must never for a mo- although representing the descriptive and contextual rich-
ment be lost sight of, and which are destined from the ness of a Malinowskian ethnography (Malinowski was at
very beginning to interpret, evaluate, and modify every Yale in 193839 and advised Whiting on the writing of
culture pattern, sub-pattern, or assemblage of patterns
the book), was interpreted (in the last two chapters) not
that it will ever by influenced by, everything changes.
Culture is then not something given but something to be in terms of Sapirs concepts but according to the stimulus-
gradually and gropingly discovered. response theory of learning derived from laboratory exper-
iments with animals.
[If we are to understand the transmission of culture, or Although not his student, Clyde Kluckhohn was also
indeed the whole problem of culture from this develop-
influenced by Sapir and in 1939 published an article on the
mental point of view,] the time must come when the cos-
mos of the child of three will be known and defined, not acquisition of culture (the culturalization of the child)
merely referred to. The organized intuitive organization in which he made recommendations for data on this pro-
of a three-year-old is far more valid and real than the cess to be collected by field workers. Like Whiting, however,
 LeVine Ethnography of Childhood 253

Kluckhohn was concerned with developing an empirical lish the contexts of life for families, parents, and children
method for studying how children acquire culture, and his with a special focus on the course of childhood that went
emphasis is on a quantitative approach, illustrated by the beyond description of norms to report the frequency of
sample of 48 children in his Navajo research, which formed specific practices in a sample of 24 families. Thus, the SCS
the basis for the monograph Children of the People (Leighton described the variability of child rearing within a commu-
and Kluckhohn 1948). There is nothing of Sapirs focus on nity as well as its culturally distinctive ideals and practices.
symbolic meanings and the childs subjective perspective in Because the ethnographers had carried out naturalistic ob-
the article. servations of children between three and 11 years of age,
It would be the 1980s before linguistic anthropologists their accounts were enriched by anecdotes of child behav-
translated Sapirs vision of the cultural study of childhood ior from their many hours of observation. Each book con-
into ethnographic research. Yet several ethnographers work- stituted a record or reconstruction of the routine practices,
ing after 1950 focused on the subjective experience of the relationships, settings, and activities that made up the en-
child in terms close to those Sapir was advocating: Hildred vironments of childrenand their interactions with those
Geertz (1959) in Java, William Caudill (1972) in Japan, and environmentsfrom birth to adolescence in a particular lo-
Robert I. Levy (1969, 1973:430469) in Tahiti, for example. cal community at a particular moment in time. The SCS
Thus, from 1928 to 1950, professional anthropologists ethnographies established a new standard for the detailed
led by Mead and Malinowski created an anthropology of examination of childhood through ethnographic fieldwork.
childhood that was grounded in ethnographic fieldwork The original plan of the SCS, however, was not sim-
in diverse cultures and critical of developmental formula- ply to contribute toward . . . a more useful ethnography in
tions in psychology. They experimented with interpretive the study of socialization and enculturation (Whiting et
frameworks drawn from psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and al. 1966:3) but also to test hypotheses relating child rear-
academic psychology. They constructed concepts to study ing to its causes and consequencesthat is, the socioeco-
the childs acquisition of culture. The collection of ethno- nomic and cultural factors that constrain and direct child
graphic data on childhoodin relation to kinship, religion, rearing practices, on the one hand, and the psychocultural
the family, the life cycle, and other standard ethnographic patterns resulting from childhood experience, on the other
topics, as well as psychological developmentbecame part hand. This hypothesis-testing program proved problematic,
of the ethnographers conventional toolkit, as field studies largely because the processes posited by the SCS frame-
were conducted in many parts of the world.3 work of psychoanalytic behaviorism were not adequately
assessed through the data collected. The child interview
and projective test designed to assess the psychodynamic
THE SIX CULTURES STUDY OF SOCIALIZATION outcomes of child rearing were difficult to apply in some
AND OTHER WHITING PROJECTS of the communities, and the Field Guide provided no al-
The Six Cultures Study (SCS), launched in 1954 by John ternatives. Furthermore, the SCS used a mother interview
Whiting (by then at Harvard) and two psychologists, Irvin to assess child rearing at the individual level (Minturn and
L. Child at Yale and William Lambert at Cornell, was an Lambert 1964), but such retrospective interview approaches
ambitious project in the anthropology of childhood and to childhood environments were shown to be unreliable
deserves a separate article dedicated to its history. From the even in the United States (Yarrow et al. 1968). When the
perspective of the present overview, it was a unique effort Whitings (1975) published the final report, they narrowed
to harness six ethnographic studies in different parts of the its analysis to relationships between the socioeconomic en-
world to collect comparable data, following a single detailed vironments of families and the behavior patterns of chil-
field manual (Whiting et al. 1966), on childhood in social dren assessed through naturalistic observation, from which
and cultural context. valid conclusions could be drawn. So, in the end, the SCS
The six ethnographic studies of the SCS were conducted had little to say about the causal influence of child rearing
by trained anthropologists between 1954 and 1957 in a Mix- on personality development and cultural expression.
tecan community in Mexico (Romney and Romney 1966); Apart from the monographs, the most enduring (and
an Ilongot community in the Phillipines (Nydegger and largely unanticipated) contribution of the SCS may have
Nydegger 1966); a Rajput community in India (Minturn been the introduction of systematic naturalistic observa-
and Hitchcock 1966); an Okinawan community in Japan tions of childrenthat is, repeated and aggregated obser-
(Maretzki and Maretzki 1966); a Gusii community of Kenya vations of children in their routine behavior settings as
(LeVine and LeVine 1966); and the small town of West Ac- a method for recording the interactions of children with
ton in eastern Massachusetts (Fischer and Fischer 1966). their environments in diverse cultures. Beatrice Whiting
Apart from the last, all were sedentary agriculturalists; none salvaged the observational data for analysis and developed
were hunter-gatherers or pastoral nomads, and none were this method further for the comparative study of childhood
urban. The studies were published in 1963 as a single vol- in 14 diverse communities she conducted with Carolyn P.
ume edited by Beatrice Whiting and then as separate mono- Edwards (Whiting and Edwards 1988) years later.
graphs in 1966. While the SCS fieldwork was being conducted, John
The six monographs combined the topics covered in a Whiting became interested in male initiation ceremonies
conventional general ethnography of the timeto estab- and, with his students, launched a program of cross-cultural
254 American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007

research on male identity. Its basic hypothesis linked the whom conducted their fieldwork in the 1960s. Caudill
conditions under which boys were raised in infancy and and Konner were followed by many others. All focused
early childhood to rituals ranging from circumcision to the their efforts on parental concepts and practices of infant
couvade that socialized them into aggressively masculine care, the infants changing social environment, and the
adult roles or permitted them to act out female roles. The infants communicative and other social interactions, but
ideas involved were developed in cross-cultural analyses of they differed in their approaches, methods, and theoretical
published ethnographic data (Burton and Whiting 1961; frameworks.4
Whiting 1964; Whiting et al. 1958) and led to the fieldwork It is noteworthy that the contributors to this litera-
by Robert L. Munroe and Ruth H. Munroe among the Black ture include biological anthropologists (Konner, Chisholm,
Caribs of Belize (Munroe 1980; Munroe et al. 1973, 1981) and Hewlett), who were often but not always study-
and to Beatrice Whitings analysis (1965) of protest mas- ing hunter-gatherers, and psychologists (Super, Tronick,
culinity among the six cultures of the SCS. Judith Brown Morelli, Greenfield, and Keller), as well as social and cultural
(1963) extended the comparative analysis to female initia- anthropologists. Super and Sara Harkness (1986) formulated
tion rituals. the concept of the developmental niche to integrate di-
verse analytic perspectives on the observable conditions of
infancy. There are rich ethnographic descriptions in some
INFANT STUDIES, EARLY SOCIAL INTERACTION, AND of these publications, whereas in others ethnographic evi-
GUIDED PARTICIPATION dence is used primarily as context to interpret quantitative
The last four decades of the 20th century saw anthrop- observational data from ecological, cultural, developmen-
ologistsbiological and linguistic as well as social and tal, and evolutionary perspectives.
psychologicaland some developmental psychologists A related new direction for ethnographies of childhood
take new directions in ethnographic studies of childhood. after 1960 concerns the childs social relationships and so-
There were no projects approaching the scale of the SCS, cial participation. These topics had been covered in earlier
but this was an expansive period in which a greater num- reports from the field, but the new research involved closer
ber of academic scholars did more kinds of research in a examination of specific patterns and broader concepts to
wider variety of places. (The growth of U.S. universities and make sense of them. Adoption, for example, was studied in
of funding for research in the 1960s facilitated this expan- eastern Oceania (Carroll 1970), and the fostering of children
sion; so did the extension of jet aircraft service to all parts in West Africa (Goody 1982). Thomas Weisner and Ronald
of the world.) Gallimore (1977) summarized the evidence on sibling care
Infant research was one of the new directions for giving, suggesting that it was widespread among human
ethnography during this period. Even though it had been societies (although not in contemporary Western ones) and
taken for granted by anthropologists of the culture and had some advantages for infants and their older siblings
personality movement in the 1930s that the childs acquisi- who cared for them. Weisner (1984, 1987, 1989) later pub-
tion of culture began in infancy (e.g., Linton 1936), hardly lished more on this subject from his fieldwork among the
any postWWII fieldwork was focused on that period. Abaluyia of Kenya and set it in the context of an ecocultural
By the 1960s, evidence from psychological experiments approach to childhood, drawing on the social developmen-
was showing that shortly after birth human infants were talism of the Soviet psychologists Lev Vygotsky (1978) and
capable of perception, cognition, memory, imitation, and A. N. Leontev (1981) and requiring ethnography for its im-
social engagement (Osofsky 1987). This evidence was plementation. In a parallel move, Barbara Rogoff (Rogoff et
often interpreted as revealing hard-wired universals of al. 1993), a developmental psychologist who had done field-
development, but it also indicated a much greater and work in a Guatemalan Mayan village over a 30-year period,
earlier sensitivity to environmental influence than had coined the term guided participation to refer more accurately
been previously imagined. And the ethologists and behav- than earlier terms like rearing, training, and socialization to
ioral biologists studying imprinting and other aspects of the way in which children take part from their early years
parentoffspring relations in nonhuman species provided in the social activities of their environments, with guidance
models for analyzing how both innate and environmental from those around them. An extensive example of ethno-
factors influence behavioral development (Blurton-Jones graphic description in this mode is provided by Suzanne
1972). Gaskinss (1996, 1999, 2000, and 2003) articles on Yucatec
Ethnographic observations on infancy and infant care Mayan children.
during this period were carried out by numerous social and Childrens play also received ethnographic attention
biological anthropologists, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa but during the last quarter of the 20th century, in the stud-
also in Japan and among the Navajo of New Mexico. The ies by David Lancy (1996; see also Lancy and Tindall 1977),
first studies were those of William Caudill (Caudill 1972; Helen Schwartzman (1978), and Lawrence Goldman (1998),
Caudill and Frost 1974; Caudill and Weinstein 1969) among as well as in the observations of childrens activities pro-
middle-class families in Japan and the United States and vided by the comparative study of Whiting and Edwards
Melvin J. Konner (1972, 1976, 1977) among the !Kung (1988), the ethnography of Gaskins (2003), and in many
San foragers of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, both of ethnographies not focused on play.
 LeVine Ethnography of Childhood 255

THE ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE CONCLUSIONS

Sapirs question of how three-year-old children acquire cul- In the 20th century, an anthropology of childhood was
ture began to find answers many years later through the created, grew, and diversified, with the ethnographic field
work of linguistic anthropologists inspired by the sociolin- study of children in context as its core empirical approach.
guistics movement (Ervin-Tripp and Slobin 1967; Gumperz This historical overview has noted some major trends and
and Hymes 1972; Hymes 1974), who began to study the problems without conducting an exhaustive, analytic, or
childs acquisition of communicative competence. Between critical review of the literature. Anthropological pioneers
the late 1960s and the early 1990s, child language was es- like Malinowski, Mead, and Sapir identified ways in which
tablished as a significant focus for the ethnography of child- childhood was worthy of ethnographic attention, and the
hood. literature grew at an increasing pace from the 1920s to the
Early field studies of child language and language so- present.
cialization in non-Western societies included those of Keith Ethnographers conducted fieldwork among hunter-
Kernan (1969) in Samoa, Benjamin Blount (1971, 1972, gatherers and agriculturalists and in some urban settings on
1975) among the Luo of Kenya, and Sara Harkness (Hark- virtually every continent. The entire corpus of data is still
ness and Super 1977) among the Kipsigis of Kenya. Af- fragmentary, but there have been ethnographic profiles of
ter Shirley Brice Heaths (1982, 1983) pioneering work on childhood environments in many different societies, and
childrens communicative development in North Carolina, the past 15 years have seen the publication of an unprece-
Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin launched an extensive dented number of monographs and other books (e.g., Bolin
series of publications on language acquisition and lan- 2006; Briggs 1998; Goldman 1998; Gottlieb 2004; Hewlett
guage socialization in different cultures (Ochs 1988, 1990; 1991, 1992; Hewlett and Lamb 2005; Kramer 2006; Kurtz
Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; Schieffelin 1990; Schieffelin and 1992; Morton 1996; Norman 1991; Riesman 1992; Seymour
Ochs 1986, 1987). Their edited volume Language Socializa- 1999).5 In addition, there have been specialized field studies
tion across Cultures (1987) featured the studies of numer- of infancy, adoption and fostering, childrens relationships,
ous other linguists and linguistic anthropologists, and their play, and language, as mentioned above.
monographs on, respectively, Samoans (Ochs 1988) and the The ethnographic exploration of childhood has taken
Kaluli of New Guinea (Schieffelin 1990) showed the depth many different pathways over the past 75 years. Some early
and value of sociolinguistic fieldwork on language social- studies were guided by Freudian or neo-Freudian premises,
ization. They used electronic recording to shed light on cul- but from the beginning ethnographers used the data they
tural meanings as children construe them and learn them had collected in the field to criticize developmental formu-
through communicative participation. Their findings indi- lations in psychology, and the cultural critique of develop-
cate not only that children in the second, third, and fourth mental theory became an established genre. Developmen-
years of life acquire fundamental aspects of cultural com- tal psychologys changing theoretical orientations, and its
munication as they learn a first language (e.g., the conven- reluctance to take seriously evidence from field research,
tions of conversing, expressing, and suppressing emotions, posed obstacles to sustained interdisciplinary engagement
as well as giving social signals) but also that this early learn- and made the building of cumulative knowledge difficult.
ing provides symbolic elements for the growing sense of Ethnographers, including biological and linguistic anthro-
self. pologists, nevertheless constructed approaches to fieldwork
During the 1990s, Peggy Miller and colleagues (Miller on childhood and interpreted their findings in theoretical
et al. 1996; Miller et al. 1990; Miller et al. 2001; Miller perspectives that were variously ecological, cultural, evolu-
et al. 1997), particularly Heidi Fung (1999), carried the tionary, and sociolinguistic, as well as developmental.
sociolinguistic approach to the development of the self Ethnographers have documented the diversity across
into the three-year-old childs acquisition of cultural nar- human populations in parenting, both in the norms and
ratives. In analyzing the videotapes of personal story- practices that form childhood environments and in the
telling concerning the transgressions of young children in baseline developmental pathways of children from birth to
the United States and Taiwan, they provided vivid ethno- adolescence. They have described the ways children learn
graphic evidence of culture-specific maternal communica- through participation in differing social and symbolic en-
tions and the coconstruction of narrative between mother vironments and acquire cultural meanings during the early
and child that contribute to the childs sense of shame, years. The research conducted to date, however, has just be-
self-esteem, and other culturally organized aspects of self. gun to realize the potential of anthropologys contribution
Although it is not possible in this brief article to summa- to the understanding of childhood in the human species.
rize or illustrate further the findings from sociolinguistic Ethnographic studies of childhood could be improved
research on childhood, it has clearly emerged as an im- in their depth and sophistication and even in their tech-
portant naturalistic strategy for understanding the ways nology. The time seems ripe for a new field manual rec-
in which communicative interaction during childhood ommending methods to ethnographers. Mead (Bateson
helps shape both cultural acquisition and psychological and Mead 1942; Mead and MacGregor 1951) advocated
development. the use of visual records to deepen the ethnographic
256 American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007

understanding of childhood, and although powerful and Baxter, Jane Eva

portable video recording technology is now available, it has 2005 The Archaeology of Childhood: Children, Gender and Ma-
terial Culture. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
only rarely been used outside of linguistic studies. Joseph Benthall, Jonathan
Tobin and colleagues (1989) showed in Preschool in Three 1992 A Late Developer? The Ethnography of Children. Anthro-
Cultures that videos of child-care practices in one culture pology Today 8:2335.
Blount, Benjamin G.
shown to parents and teachers of another can elicit not 1971 Socialization and Pre-Linguistic Development among the
only emotional expressions of shock and disapproval but Luo of Kenya. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 27:41
also a spontaneous explication of indigenous assumptions 50.
1972 Aspects of Luo Socialization. Language in Society 1:236
concerning children that had eluded conventional ethno- 248.
graphic interviewing. 1975 Studies in Child Language: An Anthropological View.
Furthermore, despite the global reach of ethnographic American Anthropologist 77:580600.
Bluebond-Langner, Myra
research on childhood, there is hardly any area of the world 1978 The Private Worlds of Dying Children. Princeton, NJ:
in which coverage could be called adequate and many oth- Princeton University Press.
ers to which ethnography of childhood needs to be ex- 1996 In the Shadow of Illness: Parents and Siblings of the Chron-
ically Ill Child. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
tended. But ethnographic documentation by itself, how- Blurton-Jones, N.
ever excellent, cannot create an anthropology of child- 1972 Ethological Studies of Child Behaviour. Cambridge: Cam-
hood of more than marginal significance to anthropolo- bridge University Press.
Boas, Franz
gists (Hirschfeld 2002), or for that matter to other social sci- 1902 Rudolf Virchows Anthropological Work. Science 16(403):
entists, without further theory building and cross-cultural 441480.
comparison (Quinn 2005; Shweder et al. in press). 1912 Instability of Human Types. In Papers on Interracial Prob-
lems Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress Held
at the University of London, July 2629, 1911. Gustav Spiller,
ed. Pp. 99103. Boston: Ginn and Co.
R OBERT A. LE VINE Harvard Graduate School of Education, Bolin, Inge
Cambridge, MA 02138 2006 Growing Up in a Culture of Respect: Child Rearing in High-
land Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Briggs, Jean
NOTES 1972 The Issues of Autonomy and Aggression in the Three-year-
Acknowledgments. This article was written when the author was a old: The Utku Eskimo Case. Seminars in Psychiatry 4:317329.
fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 1998 Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-
Year-Old. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
1. The claim that the topic of childhood has been neglected by
Brown, Judith K.
anthropologists (Benthall 1992; Hardman 1973; Hirschfeld 2002;
1963 A Cross-Cultural Study of Female Initiation Rites. Ameri-
Schwartzman 2001), without reference to many of the works re-
can Anthropologist 65(4):837853.
viewed here, leaves the impression of a small or declining literature
Bruner, Jerome S.
that is inconsistent with the results of this overview.
1990 Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
2. Some of my own interpretations of this literature and more ex- Press.
tensive historical accounts of the anthropology of childhood will Burton, Roger V., and John W. M. Whiting
appear in future publications (LeVine in press a, in press b; LeVine 1961 The Absent Father and Cross-Sex Identity. Merrill-Palmer
and New in press). Quarterly 7:8595.
3. The numerous case studies in cultural anthropology, edited by Carroll, Vern, ed.
George Spindler and Louise Spindler and published by Holt, Rine- 1970 Adoption in Eastern Oceania. Honolulu: University of
hart, and Winston from the 1960s to the 1980s, illustrate this point Hawaii Press.
with their chapters on Growing Up or The Life Cycle, which Caudill, William
contain ethnographic data on childhood from a particular society. 1972 Tiny Dramas: Vocal Communication between Mother and
Infant in Japanese and American Families. In Mental Health
4. This literature cannot be adequately reviewed in this article,
Research in Asia and the Pacific, vol. 2. William Lebra, ed. Pp.
but some of the major ethnographic projects can be listed: James
2548. Honolulu: East-West Center Press.
Chisholm (1983) among the Navajo; Sara Harkness and Charles Su-
Caudill, William, and Helen Weinstein
per (1983, 1996) among the Kipsigis of Kenya; Ruth H. Munroe and
1969 Maternal Care and Infant Behavior in Japan and America.
Robert L. Munroe (1972) among the Logoli of Kenya; Mary Martini
Psychiatry 32:1243.
and John Kirkpatrick (1981) among the Marquesans; Greenfield et
Caudill, William, and Lois Frost
al. (1989) among Mayans of Chiapas, Mexico; Robert A. LeVine and
1974 A Comparison of Maternal Care and Infant Behavior in
colleagues (1988, 1994) among the Gusii of Kenya; Philip Kilbride
Japanese-American, American and Japanese Families. In Men-
and Janet Kilbride (1990) among the Ganda of Uganda; Edward
tal Health Research in Asia and the Pacific, Vol. 3. William
Z. Tronick and Gilda Morelli (Tronick et al. 1992; Tronick et al.
Lebra, ed. Pp. 415. Honolulu: East-West Center Press.
1987) among the Efe pygmies of the Congo; Paul Riesman (1992)
Childs, Gladwyn Murray
among the Fulani of Burkina Faso; Barry Hewlett (1991; Hewlett et
1949 Umbundu Kinship and Character. London: Oxford Uni-
al. 2000; Hewlett et al. 1998) among the Aka pygmies of Cameroun
versity Press.
and the Ngandu of the Central African Republic; Alma Gottlieb
Chisholm, James
(2004) among the Beng of the Ivory Coast; and Heidi Keller (in
1983 Navajo Infancy. New York: Aldine.
press) among the Nso of Cameroun and three other cultures.
De Laguna, Frederica
5. A special issue of Ethos (31[2], June 2003) devoted to The Cul- 1965 Childhood among the Yakutat Tlingit. In Context and
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Dennis, Wayne
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