1 - Contributions of anthropology to the methods of studying child rearing

Summary

The contributions of anthropology to the study of child rearing may be divided into three categories – conceptual, methodological, and substantive. On the conceptual side, the field of anthropology has contributed the concept and analysis of culture. On the methodological side, anthropologists have developed the ethnographic interview, participant observation, and the genealogical methods. On the substantive side, the major contribution of anthropology has been to report a range of variation in many child-rearing practices that goes far beyond any found within Western European society and thus provides a framework for defining cultural variables that are not bound to a single society. It is our purpose to discuss each of these classes of contributions in order.

Concepts

Anthropologists, like other social scientists, have been concerned with human behavior and, like other social scientists, have reported norms and variations in the behavior of people belonging to various societies the world over. They have even at times been concerned with the behavior of individual members of these groups, as evidenced by the numerous biographies and life histories they have produced. Their methods of observing, recording, and assessing human behavior are not strikingly different from those of other behavioral scientists, such as sociologists and social psychologists. In fact, they generally have not been nearly as systematic in sampling and counting or describing the norms and variations of behavior. Where they have, however, made a unique conceptual contribution is in the formulation of the shared symbolic determinants of behavior, which, in our view, is the essential feature of the concept of culture.