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]

N THIS ARTICLE, I present an overview of ethnographic

research on childhood during the 20th century, including works in biological, linguistic, social, and psychological anthropology. The literature is extensive and interdisciplinary, appearing in journals of psychology, psychiatry,
and linguistics, as well as anthropology, and in monographs
and volumes of collected papers. It grew during the second
half of the century, covering all regions of the world, and
in the 1990s there were more ethnographic studies of childhood published in book form than in any previous decade.
The aim of this article is to show the extent and diversity of published ethnographic accounts of childhood
over the past 80 years,1 providing a bibliography and a basic historical background that might prove useful for future
analyses.2 In the interests of brevity, I have limited this account to ethnographies of infancy and childhood in domestic and community settings. That has meant omitting not
only theoretical treatises, psychometric studies, and school
studies but also other bodies of anthropological research
on childhood: studies of immigrant children (e.g., SuarezOrozco 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
children in diverse cultures (e.g., Korbin 1981; Montgomery
2001; Montgomery et al. 2003; Scheper-Hughes 1987); the
cultural politics literature on childhood (e.g., ScheperHughes 1992; Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1998; Stephens

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.
An ethnographic study of childhood as used herein is
a descriptive account, based on field observations and interviews, of the lives, activities, and experiences of children
in a particular place and time, and of the contextssocial,
cultural, institutional, economicthat make sense of their
behavior there and then. There would be no need for such
descriptive accounts if childhood in ideal and practice were
uniform across human populations and historical periods or
if the developmental pathways for children were randomly
distributed among humans. The ethnography of childhood,
then, is based on the premiseconstantly reexamined in
empirical researchthat the conditions and shape of childhood tend to vary in central tendency from one population
to another, are sensitive to population-specific contexts,
and are not comprehensible without detailed knowledge
of the socially and culturally organized contexts that give
them meaning.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The recording and publishing of descriptions of the lives,
activities, and experience of children did not originate
with anthropology, but in the course of the 20th century
anthropologists gave such accounts a distinctive stamp

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American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007

as research to enhance knowledge of human variation for

scientific and policy purposes. From the 1920s onward,
anthropologists published ethnographic reports on childhood among human populations across the world, devised
and refined observational approaches, and developed
and borrowed theoretical frameworks for analyzing data
collected in fieldwork.
Descriptions of customary practices regarding children
and their activities appeared in the texts of many cultures,
non-Western as well as Western, before the 19th century,
including travelers reports on foreign practices that seemed
strange (and therefore noteworthy) and clergymens advice
to parents in a particular context. The 19th century saw
a heightened public interest in children in Western countries, manifested in literary and journalistic representations
of children as innocent victims of economic exploitation,
the child-saving movement that sought to abolish child
labor and provide care for orphans, the laws that made
school attendance compulsory, and efforts to create an
empirical science that would replace religious doctrine and
philosophical speculation in public discourse about children. This public interest had been institutionalizedin
school systems, orphanages, and academic and medical
specialtiesby the end of the century, when anthropology
and other social science fields were taking their modern
forms.
In the United States and western Europe soon after
1900, there were some fundamental alterations in the conditions of childrens lives: (1) Infant and child mortality began to decline, partly as the result of public health measures
(purification of drinking water, pasteurization of milk, etc.)
and sanitary practices in the home and other settings; and
(2) mass secondary school enrollment extended schooling
throughout childhood and into adolescence.
The biomedical changes formed the basis of what might
be called the medicalization of childcare, as illustrated
by the hygiene movement in the United States, which was
actively promoted by government and medical authorities
(Ewbank and Preston 1990; Preston and Haines 1991). The
vast increases in school attendance during the late 19th and
early 20th centuries called public attention to the processes
of learning and developmental change during childhood
and stimulated the emergence of child psychology and educational psychology, led by pioneers such as G. Stanley Hall,
Edward L. Thorndike, James Mark Baldwin, and (in France)
Alfred Binet. In the United States, questions of learning were
made urgent by the problems of educating large numbers
of immigrant children.
Thus, from about 1880 to 1920, childhood was increasingly formulated in what might be called pediatric and pedagogical terms, and there was public discussion about how
science might improve the care and learning of children in
the contexts of newly expanded medical and educational
institutions. There were also new and radical ideas about
the family, women, and child rearing that arose during
this period in the Anglo-American world, although their
greatest impact would be later. Women were to be freed

from the home to study at postsecondary institutions, vote,

and participate in public life; fertility was to be voluntarily
controlled through contraception supported by sex education, so that families could be kept small; and children were
to be raised scientifically rather than according to the dictates of custom.
In this milieu, Sigmund Freuds writings became available (in what he regarded as inadequate translations) and
influential. Freud was hardly an extreme environmentalist,
but he was widely interpreted as claiming that young children were not only sentient and passionate beings but also
highly vulnerable to parental and other early influences,
for worse as well as for better. By 1920, a Freudian context for the interest in childrens experience, often based on
an exaggeration or distortion of Freuds ideas, was becoming widespread in public discourse on childhood. Freuds
works drew unprecedented attention to the subjective experience of children and added a public preoccupation with
the new and anxious questions: What is the best way to raise
a child? What is the normal child? Through what stages of
child development do infants become adults?
Christian missionaries and colonial administrators of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries wrote books describing the customs of the peoples with whom they worked in
Oceania, Asia, Africa, and the Americas and included sections (often with photographs) on customs of child rearing that struck them as noteworthy, including adoption,
naming and initiation ceremonies, practices of breast feeding and sibling care, and childrens houses. Although these
observers were not as deliberate, comprehensive, or disciplined as the anthropologists who followed them, and
although they were more likely to make ethnocentric judgments, such writers often had a good command of the local language, having spent long periods among the peoples
they wrote about, with many opportunities to observe children. Some of the later missionary ethnographers like Henri
Junod (1927), who wrote about the Thonga of Mozambique,
were trained in anthropology and published valuable if fragmentary accounts of childrens lives in cultural context.
Ethnographies of childhood by missionaries and colonial
administrators continued into the 1940s (e.g., Childs 1949;
Elwin 1947; Raum 1940).
This early ethnographic literature provided the initial
evidence for wide cultural variations in childhood environments used by anthropologists in generalizing about human childhood (e.g., Mead 1931; van Gennep 1960). Examination of this literature made it clear that there was divergence among peoples of the world in their concepts of the
best way to raise children and of what constitutes normal
child development. The stage was set for future confrontations between ethnographic evidence and the concepts of
normal child development emerging from theory and research in Western countries.
By 1928, professional anthropologists were publishing
ethnographic accounts of childhood based on their own
fieldwork in non-Western communities. Margaret Mead
(1928a, 1928b) and Bronislaw Malinowski (1929) were

LeVine Ethnography of Childhood

among the first. In her brief article Samoan Children at
Work and Play in Natural History, Mead presents a number
of ways in which childhood in Samoa as she observed it differs from that of children in the United States: Samoan children change their own names, move from one relative to another, live in families of as many as 20, and are spoiled and
pampered until the age of five years old, when they become
the caretakers or trainers of younger children. They have to
work at gender-specific tasks of increasing difficulty as they
get older during childhood. (No ages are given.) They have
no toys, but they participate in adult life almost from the
start and play games in which they imitate adult activities.
Yet they are punished if they stand out conspicuously above
other children or attempt grown-up tasks above their status. These are themes that would be elaborated in detail in
the ethnographies that followed over the 20th century.
Like Mead, Malinowski, in The Sexual Life of Savages in
North Western Melanesia (1929), was addressing the general
public rather than other professional anthropologists, and
his whole book was intended to describe Trobriand ideas
and practices concerning sexual behavior that contrast with
those of the West. But he also sought to show (as he had
argued in his earlier book, Sex and Repression in a Savage
Society [1927]) that Trobrianders, being matrilineal in social organization, had family dynamics and sexual development contrasting sharply with those Freud claimed to
be generically human in his concept of the Oedipus complex. Malinowskis crystalline descriptions and vivid anecdotes were carefully selected to make this point: Trobriand
father and mother are of equal status; fathers participate
in infant care and take great pride in their infants; children
are free and independent; and, although parents sometimes
beat their children, Malinowski also observed quite as often children beating their parents (1929:45). He reports the
childrens sex games he observed (with no interference by
older persons [Malinowski 1929:50]) and those he heard
about but was unable to observe. While making his case for
a revision of Freuds ideas, he was demonstrating the ethnographers command of language, context, culture, and behavior that would set a standard for future studies.
THE PLASTICITY PRINCIPLE AND HUMAN VARIABILITY
The precursor to ethnographic research on childhood in
U.S. anthropology was Franz Boass anthropometric work
on child growth among European immigrants to the United
States. Boas had been trained in anthropometric methods
in 1883 in the Berlin laboratory of Rudolf Virchow, the pioneer of medical pathology (and physical anthropology),
for whom plasticity was a major biological principle, operating at every level from the cell to the organism (Stocking
1968:139, 1974:22). Virchow argued, and Boas later taught,
that the plasticity characteristic of biological processes often
made it difficult to distinguish between normal and pathological variants, mandating caution in claiming as pathological a variant form that might actually represent an adaptive response to a particular environment. In other words,

249

difference may betoken adaptive variation rather than deficiency or defect (Boas 1902; see also reprint in Stocking
1974:3641).
Boas brought this perspective to his studies of
child growth among immigrants, first in Worcester,
Massachusetts, when he was teaching in G. Stanley Halls
Psychology Department at Clark University from 1889 to
1892, later in New York from 1908 to 1910. After the large
New York study, Boas (1912) formulated a developmental perspective suggesting not only that human growth is
influenced by environmental factors but also that, given
the gradual maturation of the human nervous system, the
childs mental makeup must also be affected by the social
and geographical environment (1912:217218).
Boas left further specification of this perspective to his
students Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead
the founders of the culture and personality movement
although it is unclear whether he liked what they did with
it (Stocking 1992). His silence during the next 30 years on
the very cultural psychology of child development to which
he had opened the door was no doubt related to his wellknown antagonism to theoretical speculation. But as he was
well acquainted with the psychologies of his time, the silence seems to indicate an especially prescient skepticism
about psychological theories and methods, many of which
were eventually thrown aside by child psychologists themselves in the course of the 20th century.
This instability in psychology points to the paradox
later anthropologists of childhood would face: Anthropologists are at least partly dependent on developmental knowledge from other disciplines in their assumptions about how
children experience their environmentsincluding the environmental features to which they are sensitive and their
age-related concepts for understandingand they have often turned to psychology and psychiatry for guidance in
making these assumptions plausible. For much of the 20th
century, however, this guidance was unreliable, as one developmental theory followed another into the trash heap
of history.
The Freudian theory of psychosexual stages led some
ethnographers to focus their data collection on feeding,
toilet training, and emerging sexuality in young children,
whereas behavioristic psychology recommended recording
the rewards and punishments in the childs environment.
When these theories lost credibility, so did the ethnographic
accounts based on them as adequate records of childhood
experience.
The turnover in developmental theories in psychology
continued after 1960, as the influence of Jean Piaget and
other cognitive theorists waxed and then waned, and the
social-cognitive formulations of Lev Vygotsky and his students and the attachment theory of John Bowlby and Mary
Ainsworth introduced a new but not universally accepted
focus on social interactions.
Thus the chronic instability of dominant theories
concerning the childs psychological development during
the 20th century posed a quandary for ethnographers of

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childhood. If they organized their fieldwork around the

best knowledge available at a particular moment, they
risked having their account of childhood become obsolete
and inadequate by the time they published their findings.
Yet they had to make some assumptions about what was
worth observing and recording in the environments and
activities of children in diverse settings, and it was the developmental psychology of the day that offered attractive if
potentially faulty assumptions. The ways in which anthropologists of childhood dealt with this dilemma is taken up
in the following sections.
CULTURAL CRITIQUE AND ETHNOGRAPHIC
EXPLORATION
A characteristic response of anthropologists to the claims
of developmental psychology and psychiatry was to use
ethnographic evidence to prove them culture bound, suggesting that a theory needed to be modified to encompass
cultural variation or abandoned as a false generalization
about the human species. Malinowski and Mead led the
way. Malinowski (1927) proposed that Freuds concept of
the Oedipus complex in young children had to be modified for matrilineal societies like that of the Trobriand Islanders, and Mead (1928b) argued that the Samoans she
studied did not experience the adolescent turmoil posited
by Hall (1904) as a human universal. Thus, before 1930, anthropologists had initiated a critical ethnography of childhood that could play a decisive role in rejecting universal
propositions falsifiable by a single negative instance (Kaufmann 1944) in the study of child development.
Mead (1932) provided another example of this gadfly
role for ethnographic research on childhood when she published an article criticizing Piagets theory of childhood animism on the basis of interviews she conducted with Manus
children in Melanesia. Psychologists nevertheless continued to generate developmental propositions claiming universal validity during the rest of the 20th century, even after John Whitings (1954) persuasive case for cross-cultural
analysis in the Handbook of Social Psychology, so the gadfly role has remained relevant, and anthropologists have
continued to exercise their veto with evidence from nonWestern cultures.
Piagets universalist account of childhood cognitive development, which became influential among U.S. psychologists after 1963, also came under empirical attack with
cross-cultural evidence at that time (e.g., Greenfield 1966;
Shweder and LeVine 1975). Other proposed universals of
child development that were subject to cultural critique included Lawrence Kohlbergs (1984) cognitively based model
of moral development (Shweder et al. 1990), Carol Gilligans (1982) conception of gender differences in development (Miller 1994), and the John Bowlby-Mary Ainsworth
attachment theory (Harwood et al. 1995; LeVine and Norman 2001). However powerful these cultural critiques may
seem to anthropologists and to some leading psychologists such as Jerome Bruner (1990), developmental psychol-

ogy has consistently immunized itself not only to evidence

from ethnography and cross-cultural replications that casts
doubt on its theories du jour but even to the gross limitations of its empirical base for generalizing about childhood:
As of 2000, 88 percent of the primary schoolaged children
in the world lived in the less-developed regions (UN Population Division 2005:10) where anthropologists typically
work, but most psychological studies of children are conducted in the United States and a few other Western countries. The resulting knowledge deficit has not been recognized 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
(Shonkoff and Phillips 2000).
Thus, relations between anthropology and developmental psychology have been sporadic and often distant.
Yet there have been anthropologists throughout the century
who addressed their research to issues in child development,
and psychologists who have conducted culturally informed
contextual research on children in diverse cultures. The field
studies of psychologists such as Wayne Dennis (1940), Patricia M. Greenfield (1966, 2004), Heidi Keller (in press),
Barbara Rogoff (2003), Charles Super (Super and Harkness
1985, 1986), and Edward Z. Tronick (Tronick et al. 1992;
Tronick et al. 1987) are examples of this latter tendency.
ETHNOGRAPHY OF CHILDHOOD AS PART
OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Anthropologists, regardless of their developmental assumptions, sought to describe child rearing and the activities of
children throughout the world. Even Mead (1930) did not
intend to limit the anthropology of childhood to disproving
the propositions of psychologists. She characterized world
cultural variation in child rearing as a laboratory in which
thousand-year experiments were being conducted by different peoples. The results were retrievable through ethnographic fieldwork in distant places like Melanesia, to be
brought back to the Western world for the resolution of
issues like whether permissive rearing was advisable for
U.S. middle-class children. Although they might have disagreed with the broad sweep of this claim, anthropologists
were inspired by Meads metaphor of a laboratory and its
mission of learning lessons about childhood from other
cultures. Thus, in the 1930s and later, ethnographers sought
to add to our knowledge of childhood by publishing their
field observations.
In Britain, the students of MalinowskiRaymond Firth
(1936), Audrey I. Richards (1932, 1956), Ian Hogbin (1931),
C. H. Wedgwood (1938), Phyllis Kaberry (1939), E. E. EvansPritchard (1940, 1953), and Margaret Read (1960, 1968)
and those directly influenced by him like Meyer Fortes
(1938, 1949)published accounts of childhood in varying amounts of detail. In his ethnographic classic, We, the
Tikopia: Kinship in Primitive Polynesia (1936), Firth described
the relational context of childhood and the initiation rituals for boys. In Chisungu (1956), Richards devoted an entire

LeVine Ethnography of Childhood

monograph to the description of girls initiation among the
Bemba of Zambia. Evans-Pritchard, in The Nuer (1940) and
Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer (1953), offered generalizations about Nuer childhood and fatherchild relations based on his field observations. Read, a student of
Malinowski who pursued a career in colonial and international education, published a book-length study, Children of
Their Fathers (1960, 1968), of childhood among the Ngoni of
Nyasaland/Malawi. Fortes, who had received a Ph.D. in educational psychology before turning to anthropology, produced an unsurpassed observational account of learning
and social relationships among Tallensi children in 1938,
and then published more about the course of childhood in
The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi (1949).
These works by a generation of anthropologists influenced directly by Malinowski leave no doubt that by the
1930s childhood was an established topic of ethnographic
description, often in the context of kinship or ritual, sometimes in relation to education or socialization, only occasionally with psychological interpretations. Childhood
was part of their anthropology, not a topic borrowed from
developmental psychology or other disciplines (although
Richards and Fortes knew the child development literature
of their time). Future generations of British and U.S. ethnographers would continue to describe the care, relationships,
and learning of children, and their social participation,
in published reports from Africa (e.g., Gibbs 1965; Goody
1982; Grindal 1972; Leis 1972; Peshkin 1972; Smith 1954),
the Americas (e.g., Bolin 2006; De Laguna 1965; Hughes
1974; Lantis 1960), Asia (e.g., Lebra 1976, 1990, 1994; Peak
1991; Schwalb and Schwalb 1996; Stafford 1995), Oceania (e.g., Fajans 1997; Howard 1970; Mead and MacGregor
1951; Ritchie 1957; Toren 1990, 1993; Williams 1969), and
Europe (e.g., Mead and Wolfenstein 1954; Norman 1991).
THE INFLUENCES OF FREUD, THE NEO-FREUDIANS,
AND EDWARD SAPIR
Some anthropologists in the first half of the 20th century conducted ethnographic fieldwork focused on the
Freudian stages of psychosexual development in early childhood. This began with Geza Roheims attemptsuggested
by Freud and funded by his disciple Marie Bonaparteto
prove Freud right in claiming the Oedipus complex to be
universal and, more urgently, to prove Malinowski (1927)
wrong in his claim, based on ethnographic evidence from
the Trobriands, that the Oedipus complex takes a distinctive form in matrilineal societies. In 1928, Roheim began a
three-year trip that involved fieldwork of varying durations
among four non-Western peoples, two of them matrilineal.
His results were published in 1932. Roheims conclusions
were predictably supportive of Freud against Malinowski,
but some of his field methods, including observations of
child behavior with dolls to elicit reactions, were innovative
then and interesting even now. (His more detailed observations in Australia were not published until 20 years after his
death as Children of the Desert [1974].)

251

Erik Eriksons (1950) work among the Yurok Indians

of California was also based on Freuds psychosexual stages
of child development, although he superimposed on them
his famous psychosocial stages. But there was a wider
and subtler Freudian influence on many ethnographers,
then and later, who assumed, for example, that breast feeding, weaning, toilet training, and sexual behavior were the
most important events of early experience to investigate
and describe, whether or not they interpreted them in
terms of Freuds concepts of oral, anal, and phallic-genital
stages or fixations. Melford E. Spiros (1958) comprehensive and richly detailed account of childhood on an Israeli kibbutz, for example, devotes a chapter to the socialization of the oral, anal, and sexual behavior systems
following the concepts and terminology of Whiting and
Irving Child (1953)and another chapter to the Oedipus
complex and sexual identity. Ironically, Whiting (1994:24
25) himself saw the findings of their 1953 book, Child Training and Personality: A Cross-Cultural Study, as casting doubt
on the validity of Freuds psychosexual stages, and in his
own later research and writing they were rarely mentioned.
Years later, Jean Briggs (1972) criticized Eriksons stages of
early childhood from the perspective of her study of Inuit
children.
For many U.S. anthropologists interested in childhood
during the 1930s and 1940sparticipants in the culture
and personality movement initiated by Edward Sapir, Ruth
Benedict, and Margaret Meadit was the neo-Freudian
psychoanalysis (more accurately termed interpersonal) of
Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm that
supplied its conception of childhood experience. In this
conception, there were no libidinal or psychosexual stages,
and the focus was on the quality of the childs interpersonal 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 theory could be related to social relationships as ethnographers
observed them. The pioneering monograph in this vein was
Balinese Childhood: A Photographic Analysis by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (1942).
Abram Kardinera psychoanalyst who, after graduate
study with Boas, was trained as a physician and then was analyzed by Freud in 1921formulated another line of theory
and research similar to the neo-Freudians, replacing Freuds
biological drives unfolding in the course of early child development with a culturally variable theory of ego development. Kardiner organized an interdisciplinary seminar on
culture and personality in New York that ran from 1933
onward, with numerous anthropologists participating. He
also published (with the collaboration of Ralph Linton) two
influential volumes, The Individual and His Society (1939)
and The Psychological Frontiers of Society (1945), based on
the seminar proceedings. The anthropologist Cora DuBois
(1944) worked with Kardiner in the seminar and then carried out fieldwork among the Alorese in Indonesia that included ethnographic observations of childhood, based in
part on Kardiners approach.

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In retrospect, these psychiatrically inspired ethnographies (i.e., Bateson and Mead 1942 and DuBois 1944)
have a judgmental castBalinese mothers torment their
toddlers, Alorese mothers neglect theirsand imply pathological consequences of the culture-specific parental practices they describe. This was consistent with neo-Freudian
approaches, in which the mental illness of children was
blamed on parents whose practices failed to give their children emotional security. The parents point of view on
these practices is not given prominence in the ethnographic
accounts. Furthermore, despite the claim of Bateson and
Mead that Balinese culture provides therapeutic ritual dramas for the childhood conflicts of adults, these ethnographies are not portraits of alternative normal or healthy pathways for child development. At the time, however, they represented a new focus on interpersonal relationships in early
childhood, and Bateson and Meads photographs enabled
readers to share a microscopic view of childhood social interaction in sequence.
Jules Henry and Zunia Henrys (1944) study of sibling
rivalry among Pilaga Indian children of the Argentine Gran
Chaco, attempting to replicate a doll play experiment devised by the psychoanalyst David Levy (1937), was also focused on interpersonal relations in psychiatric perspective.
In this case, however, the ethnographic observers tended to
see the Pilaga parents and children with whom they worked
as freer of pathogenic sibling rivalryand of remorse and
self-punishment after their sibling conflictsthan their
counterparts in the United States. Henry and Henry concluded that sibling rivalry is as inevitable among the Pilaga
as anywhere else, yet the Pilaga childrens lack of remorse
is culturally determined.
Finally, there is the influence of Edward Sapir (1884
1939), who never did an ethnographic study of childhood
but who proposed research on the childs acquisition of culture to his students and others who carried out such studies. Sapir had a long-standing interest in the psychology
of culture and gave a course of lectures on that topic at
the University of Chicago from 1926 to 1931 and at Yale
until 1937. That course, reconstructed as a book from students lecture notes and published in 1993 by Judith Irvine,
contained the following passages:
[Perhaps we can say something more about] the personal
world of meanings, [if we consider] the field of child development. As soon as we set ourselves at the vantagepoint of the culture-acquiring child, [with] the personality definitions and potentials that must never for a moment be lost sight of, and which are destined from the
very beginning to interpret, evaluate, and modify every
culture pattern, sub-pattern, or assemblage of patterns
that it will ever by influenced by, everything changes.
Culture is then not something given but something to be
gradually and gropingly discovered.
[If we are to understand the transmission of culture, or
indeed the whole problem of culture from this developmental point of view,] the time must come when the cosmos of the child of three will be known and defined, not
merely referred to. The organized intuitive organization
of a three-year-old is far more valid and real than the

most ambitious psychological theory ever constructed.

[Yet our three-year-olds are not all the same.] Our children are fully developed personalities very early. [We do
not quite know how this comes about, but it depends
considerably on] the interactions between the child and
his early environment up to the age of three.
In the childs cosmos, patterns of behavior are understood
emotionally, [in terms of a particular constellation of relationships].
Study the child minutely and carefully, from birth until, say, the age of ten, with a view to seeing the order
in which culture patterns and parts of patterns appear in
his psychic world; study the relevance of these patterns
for the development of his personality; and at the end of
the suggested period, see how much of the total official
culture of the group can be said to have a significant existence for him. Moreover, what degree of systematization,
conscious or unconscious, in the complicating patterns
and symbolisms of culture will have been reached by this
child? [Sapir 1993:197198; square brackets in original]

These excerpts show that Sapir, prior to 1937, was constructing and advocating a view of childhood that, although
influenced by the interpersonal theory of psychiatry of his
friend Harry Stack Sullivan, was focused on meanings, patterns, and organization in the childs experience rather than
questions of pathology, emphasized the subjective experience rather than the behavioral conformity of the child,
and assumed the child to be an active and definitive decision maker concerning the meanings of culture patterns.
This is a subtle conception of cultural acquisition that seems
as good a basis for research today as it was 70 years ago.
Did anyone pursue these leads so cogently expressed
by Sapir in his lectures? Not really, at least for a long while.
Many of his graduate students at Yale were linguists with
no apparent interest in childhood, but two who took his
course were John W. M. Whiting and Beatrice Blyth Whiting, who devoted their careers to the anthropological study
of childhood. John Whiting conducted fieldwork on the
transmission of culture to children among the Kwoma of
New Guinea in 193637 and wrote a monograph entitled Becoming a Kwoma (1941) that contains much ethnographic data Sapir would have appreciated. In analyzing
the data, however, Whiting followed the lead of John Dollard who, although brought to Yale by Sapir as a kindred
spirit, was soon attracted to the (behavioristic) learning
theory of the Yale psychologist Clark L. Hull. So Whitings
account of the acquisition of culture by Kwoma children,
although representing the descriptive and contextual richness of a Malinowskian ethnography (Malinowski was at
Yale in 193839 and advised Whiting on the writing of
the book), was interpreted (in the last two chapters) not
in terms of Sapirs concepts but according to the stimulusresponse theory of learning derived from laboratory experiments with animals.
Although not his student, Clyde Kluckhohn was also
influenced by Sapir and in 1939 published an article on the
acquisition of culture (the culturalization of the child)
in which he made recommendations for data on this process to be collected by field workers. Like Whiting, however,

LeVine Ethnography of Childhood

Kluckhohn was concerned with developing an empirical
method for studying how children acquire culture, and his
emphasis is on a quantitative approach, illustrated by the
sample of 48 children in his Navajo research, which formed
the basis for the monograph Children of the People (Leighton
and Kluckhohn 1948). There is nothing of Sapirs focus on
symbolic meanings and the childs subjective perspective in
the article.
It would be the 1980s before linguistic anthropologists
translated Sapirs vision of the cultural study of childhood
into ethnographic research. Yet several ethnographers working after 1950 focused on the subjective experience of the
child in terms close to those Sapir was advocating: Hildred
Geertz (1959) in Java, William Caudill (1972) in Japan, and
Robert I. Levy (1969, 1973:430469) in Tahiti, for example.
Thus, from 1928 to 1950, professional anthropologists
led by Mead and Malinowski created an anthropology of
childhood that was grounded in ethnographic fieldwork
in diverse cultures and critical of developmental formulations in psychology. They experimented with interpretive
frameworks drawn from psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and
academic psychology. They constructed concepts to study
the childs acquisition of culture. The collection of ethnographic data on childhoodin relation to kinship, religion,
the family, the life cycle, and other standard ethnographic
topics, as well as psychological developmentbecame part
of the ethnographers conventional toolkit, as field studies
were conducted in many parts of the world.3
THE SIX CULTURES STUDY OF SOCIALIZATION
AND OTHER WHITING PROJECTS
The Six Cultures Study (SCS), launched in 1954 by John
Whiting (by then at Harvard) and two psychologists, Irvin
L. Child at Yale and William Lambert at Cornell, was an
ambitious project in the anthropology of childhood and
deserves a separate article dedicated to its history. From the
perspective of the present overview, it was a unique effort
to harness six ethnographic studies in different parts of the
world to collect comparable data, following a single detailed
field manual (Whiting et al. 1966), on childhood in social
and cultural context.
The six ethnographic studies of the SCS were conducted
by trained anthropologists between 1954 and 1957 in a Mixtecan community in Mexico (Romney and Romney 1966);
an Ilongot community in the Phillipines (Nydegger and
Nydegger 1966); a Rajput community in India (Minturn
and Hitchcock 1966); an Okinawan community in Japan
(Maretzki and Maretzki 1966); a Gusii community of Kenya
(LeVine and LeVine 1966); and the small town of West Acton in eastern Massachusetts (Fischer and Fischer 1966).
Apart from the last, all were sedentary agriculturalists; none
were hunter-gatherers or pastoral nomads, and none were
urban. The studies were published in 1963 as a single volume edited by Beatrice Whiting and then as separate monographs in 1966.
The six monographs combined the topics covered in a
conventional general ethnography of the timeto estab-

253

lish the contexts of life for families, parents, and children

with a special focus on the course of childhood that went
beyond description of norms to report the frequency of
specific practices in a sample of 24 families. Thus, the SCS
described the variability of child rearing within a community as well as its culturally distinctive ideals and practices.
Because the ethnographers had carried out naturalistic observations of children between three and 11 years of age,
their accounts were enriched by anecdotes of child behavior from their many hours of observation. Each book constituted a record or reconstruction of the routine practices,
relationships, settings, and activities that made up the environments of childrenand their interactions with those
environmentsfrom birth to adolescence in a particular local community at a particular moment in time. The SCS
ethnographies established a new standard for the detailed
examination of childhood through ethnographic fieldwork.
The original plan of the SCS, however, was not simply to contribute toward . . . a more useful ethnography in
the study of socialization and enculturation (Whiting et
al. 1966:3) but also to test hypotheses relating child rearing to its causes and consequencesthat is, the socioeconomic and cultural factors that constrain and direct child
rearing practices, on the one hand, and the psychocultural
patterns resulting from childhood experience, on the other
hand. This hypothesis-testing program proved problematic,
largely because the processes posited by the SCS framework of psychoanalytic behaviorism were not adequately
assessed through the data collected. The child interview
and projective test designed to assess the psychodynamic
outcomes of child rearing were difficult to apply in some
of the communities, and the Field Guide provided no alternatives. Furthermore, the SCS used a mother interview
to assess child rearing at the individual level (Minturn and
Lambert 1964), but such retrospective interview approaches
to childhood environments were shown to be unreliable
even in the United States (Yarrow et al. 1968). When the
Whitings (1975) published the final report, they narrowed
its analysis to relationships between the socioeconomic environments of families and the behavior patterns of children assessed through naturalistic observation, from which
valid conclusions could be drawn. So, in the end, the SCS
had little to say about the causal influence of child rearing
on personality development and cultural expression.
Apart from the monographs, the most enduring (and
largely unanticipated) contribution of the SCS may have
been the introduction of systematic naturalistic observations of childrenthat is, repeated and aggregated observations of children in their routine behavior settings as
a method for recording the interactions of children with
their environments in diverse cultures. Beatrice Whiting
salvaged the observational data for analysis and developed
this method further for the comparative study of childhood
in 14 diverse communities she conducted with Carolyn P.
Edwards (Whiting and Edwards 1988) years later.
While the SCS fieldwork was being conducted, John
Whiting became interested in male initiation ceremonies
and, with his students, launched a program of cross-cultural

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American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007

research on male identity. Its basic hypothesis linked the

conditions under which boys were raised in infancy and
early childhood to rituals ranging from circumcision to the
couvade that socialized them into aggressively masculine
adult roles or permitted them to act out female roles. The
ideas involved were developed in cross-cultural analyses of
published ethnographic data (Burton and Whiting 1961;
Whiting 1964; Whiting et al. 1958) and led to the fieldwork
by Robert L. Munroe and Ruth H. Munroe among the Black
Caribs of Belize (Munroe 1980; Munroe et al. 1973, 1981)
and to Beatrice Whitings analysis (1965) of protest masculinity among the six cultures of the SCS. Judith Brown
(1963) extended the comparative analysis to female initiation rituals.
INFANT STUDIES, EARLY SOCIAL INTERACTION, AND
GUIDED PARTICIPATION
The last four decades of the 20th century saw anthropologistsbiological and linguistic as well as social and
psychologicaland some developmental psychologists
take new directions in ethnographic studies of childhood.
There were no projects approaching the scale of the SCS,
but this was an expansive period in which a greater number of academic scholars did more kinds of research in a
wider variety of places. (The growth of U.S. universities and
of funding for research in the 1960s facilitated this expansion; so did the extension of jet aircraft service to all parts
of the world.)
Infant research was one of the new directions for
ethnography during this period. Even though it had been
taken for granted by anthropologists of the culture and
personality movement in the 1930s that the childs acquisition of culture began in infancy (e.g., Linton 1936), hardly
any postWWII fieldwork was focused on that period.
By the 1960s, evidence from psychological experiments
was showing that shortly after birth human infants were
capable of perception, cognition, memory, imitation, and
social engagement (Osofsky 1987). This evidence was
often interpreted as revealing hard-wired universals of
development, but it also indicated a much greater and
earlier sensitivity to environmental influence than had
been previously imagined. And the ethologists and behavioral biologists studying imprinting and other aspects of
parentoffspring relations in nonhuman species provided
models for analyzing how both innate and environmental
factors influence behavioral development (Blurton-Jones
1972).
Ethnographic observations on infancy and infant care
during this period were carried out by numerous social and
biological anthropologists, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa but
also in Japan and among the Navajo of New Mexico. The
first studies were those of William Caudill (Caudill 1972;
Caudill and Frost 1974; Caudill and Weinstein 1969) among
middle-class families in Japan and the United States and
Melvin J. Konner (1972, 1976, 1977) among the !Kung
San foragers of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, both of

whom conducted their fieldwork in the 1960s. Caudill

and Konner were followed by many others. All focused
their efforts on parental concepts and practices of infant
care, the infants changing social environment, and the
infants communicative and other social interactions, but
they differed in their approaches, methods, and theoretical
frameworks.4
It is noteworthy that the contributors to this literature include biological anthropologists (Konner, Chisholm,
and Hewlett), who were often but not always studying hunter-gatherers, and psychologists (Super, Tronick,
Morelli, Greenfield, and Keller), as well as social and cultural
anthropologists. Super and Sara Harkness (1986) formulated
the concept of the developmental niche to integrate diverse analytic perspectives on the observable conditions of
infancy. There are rich ethnographic descriptions in some
of these publications, whereas in others ethnographic evidence is used primarily as context to interpret quantitative
observational data from ecological, cultural, developmental, and evolutionary perspectives.
A related new direction for ethnographies of childhood
after 1960 concerns the childs social relationships and social participation. These topics had been covered in earlier
reports from the field, but the new research involved closer
examination of specific patterns and broader concepts to
make sense of them. Adoption, for example, was studied in
eastern Oceania (Carroll 1970), and the fostering of children
in West Africa (Goody 1982). Thomas Weisner and Ronald
Gallimore (1977) summarized the evidence on sibling care
giving, suggesting that it was widespread among human
societies (although not in contemporary Western ones) and
had some advantages for infants and their older siblings
who cared for them. Weisner (1984, 1987, 1989) later published more on this subject from his fieldwork among the
Abaluyia of Kenya and set it in the context of an ecocultural
approach to childhood, drawing on the social developmentalism of the Soviet psychologists Lev Vygotsky (1978) and
A. N. Leontev (1981) and requiring ethnography for its implementation. In a parallel move, Barbara Rogoff (Rogoff et
al. 1993), a developmental psychologist who had done fieldwork in a Guatemalan Mayan village over a 30-year period,
coined the term guided participation to refer more accurately
than earlier terms like rearing, training, and socialization to
the way in which children take part from their early years
in the social activities of their environments, with guidance
from those around them. An extensive example of ethnographic description in this mode is provided by Suzanne
Gaskinss (1996, 1999, 2000, and 2003) articles on Yucatec
Mayan children.
Childrens play also received ethnographic attention
during the last quarter of the 20th century, in the studies by David Lancy (1996; see also Lancy and Tindall 1977),
Helen Schwartzman (1978), and Lawrence Goldman (1998),
as well as in the observations of childrens activities provided by the comparative study of Whiting and Edwards
(1988), the ethnography of Gaskins (2003), and in many
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 culture began to find answers many years later through the
work of linguistic anthropologists inspired by the sociolinguistics movement (Ervin-Tripp and Slobin 1967; Gumperz
and Hymes 1972; Hymes 1974), who began to study the
childs acquisition of communicative competence. Between
the late 1960s and the early 1990s, child language was established as a significant focus for the ethnography of childhood.
Early field studies of child language and language socialization in non-Western societies included those of Keith
Kernan (1969) in Samoa, Benjamin Blount (1971, 1972,
1975) among the Luo of Kenya, and Sara Harkness (Harkness and Super 1977) among the Kipsigis of Kenya. After Shirley Brice Heaths (1982, 1983) pioneering work on
childrens communicative development in North Carolina,
Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin launched an extensive
series of publications on language acquisition and language socialization in different cultures (Ochs 1988, 1990;
Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; Schieffelin 1990; Schieffelin and
Ochs 1986, 1987). Their edited volume Language Socialization across Cultures (1987) featured the studies of numerous other linguists and linguistic anthropologists, and their
monographs on, respectively, Samoans (Ochs 1988) and the
Kaluli of New Guinea (Schieffelin 1990) showed the depth
and value of sociolinguistic fieldwork on language socialization. They used electronic recording to shed light on cultural meanings as children construe them and learn them
through communicative participation. Their findings indicate not only that children in the second, third, and fourth
years of life acquire fundamental aspects of cultural communication as they learn a first language (e.g., the conventions of conversing, expressing, and suppressing emotions,
as well as giving social signals) but also that this early learning provides symbolic elements for the growing sense of
self.
During the 1990s, Peggy Miller and colleagues (Miller
et al. 1996; Miller et al. 1990; Miller et al. 2001; Miller
et al. 1997), particularly Heidi Fung (1999), carried the
sociolinguistic approach to the development of the self
into the three-year-old childs acquisition of cultural narratives. In analyzing the videotapes of personal storytelling concerning the transgressions of young children in
the United States and Taiwan, they provided vivid ethnographic evidence of culture-specific maternal communications and the coconstruction of narrative between mother
and child that contribute to the childs sense of shame,
self-esteem, and other culturally organized aspects of self.
Although it is not possible in this brief article to summarize or illustrate further the findings from sociolinguistic
research on childhood, it has clearly emerged as an important naturalistic strategy for understanding the ways
in which communicative interaction during childhood
helps shape both cultural acquisition and psychological
development.

In the 20th century, an anthropology of childhood was

created, grew, and diversified, with the ethnographic field
study of children in context as its core empirical approach.
This historical overview has noted some major trends and
problems without conducting an exhaustive, analytic, or
critical review of the literature. Anthropological pioneers
like Malinowski, Mead, and Sapir identified ways in which
childhood was worthy of ethnographic attention, and the
literature grew at an increasing pace from the 1920s to the
present.
Ethnographers conducted fieldwork among huntergatherers and agriculturalists and in some urban settings on
virtually every continent. The entire corpus of data is still
fragmentary, but there have been ethnographic profiles of
childhood environments in many different societies, and
the past 15 years have seen the publication of an unprecedented number of monographs and other books (e.g., Bolin
2006; Briggs 1998; Goldman 1998; Gottlieb 2004; Hewlett
1991, 1992; Hewlett and Lamb 2005; Kramer 2006; Kurtz
1992; Morton 1996; Norman 1991; Riesman 1992; Seymour
1999).5 In addition, there have been specialized field studies
of infancy, adoption and fostering, childrens relationships,
play, and language, as mentioned above.
The ethnographic exploration of childhood has taken
many different pathways over the past 75 years. Some early
studies were guided by Freudian or neo-Freudian premises,
but from the beginning ethnographers used the data they
had collected in the field to criticize developmental formulations in psychology, and the cultural critique of developmental theory became an established genre. Developmental psychologys changing theoretical orientations, and its
reluctance to take seriously evidence from field research,
posed obstacles to sustained interdisciplinary engagement
and made the building of cumulative knowledge difficult.
Ethnographers, including biological and linguistic anthropologists, nevertheless constructed approaches to fieldwork
on childhood and interpreted their findings in theoretical
perspectives that were variously ecological, cultural, evolutionary, and sociolinguistic, as well as developmental.
Ethnographers have documented the diversity across
human populations in parenting, both in the norms and
practices that form childhood environments and in the
baseline developmental pathways of children from birth to
adolescence. They have described the ways children learn
through participation in differing social and symbolic environments and acquire cultural meanings during the early
years. The research conducted to date, however, has just begun to realize the potential of anthropologys contribution
to the understanding of childhood in the human species.
Ethnographic studies of childhood could be improved
in their depth and sophistication and even in their technology. The time seems ripe for a new field manual recommending methods to ethnographers. Mead (Bateson
and Mead 1942; Mead and MacGregor 1951) advocated
the use of visual records to deepen the ethnographic

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American Anthropologist Vol. 109, No. 2 June 2007

understanding of childhood, and although powerful and

portable video recording technology is now available, it has
only rarely been used outside of linguistic studies. Joseph
Tobin and colleagues (1989) showed in Preschool in Three
Cultures that videos of child-care practices in one culture
shown to parents and teachers of another can elicit not
only emotional expressions of shock and disapproval but
also a spontaneous explication of indigenous assumptions
concerning children that had eluded conventional ethnographic interviewing.
Furthermore, despite the global reach of ethnographic
research on childhood, there is hardly any area of the world
in which coverage could be called adequate and many others to which ethnography of childhood needs to be extended. But ethnographic documentation by itself, however excellent, cannot create an anthropology of childhood of more than marginal significance to anthropologists (Hirschfeld 2002), or for that matter to other social scientists, without further theory building and cross-cultural
comparison (Quinn 2005; Shweder et al. in press).
R OBERT A. LE VINE Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Cambridge, MA 02138
NOTES
Acknowledgments. This article was written when the author was a
fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
1. The claim that the topic of childhood has been neglected by
anthropologists (Benthall 1992; Hardman 1973; Hirschfeld 2002;
Schwartzman 2001), without reference to many of the works reviewed here, leaves the impression of a small or declining literature
that is inconsistent with the results of this overview.
2. Some of my own interpretations of this literature and more extensive historical accounts of the anthropology of childhood will
appear in future publications (LeVine in press a, in press b; LeVine
and New in press).
3. The numerous case studies in cultural anthropology, edited by
George Spindler and Louise Spindler and published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston from the 1960s to the 1980s, illustrate this point
with their chapters on Growing Up or The Life Cycle, which
contain ethnographic data on childhood from a particular society.
4. This literature cannot be adequately reviewed in this article,
but some of the major ethnographic projects can be listed: James
Chisholm (1983) among the Navajo; Sara Harkness and Charles Super (1983, 1996) among the Kipsigis of Kenya; Ruth H. Munroe and
Robert L. Munroe (1972) among the Logoli of Kenya; Mary Martini
and John Kirkpatrick (1981) among the Marquesans; Greenfield et
al. (1989) among Mayans of Chiapas, Mexico; Robert A. LeVine and
colleagues (1988, 1994) among the Gusii of Kenya; Philip Kilbride
and Janet Kilbride (1990) among the Ganda of Uganda; Edward
Z. Tronick and Gilda Morelli (Tronick et al. 1992; Tronick et al.
1987) among the Efe pygmies of the Congo; Paul Riesman (1992)
among the Fulani of Burkina Faso; Barry Hewlett (1991; Hewlett et
al. 2000; Hewlett et al. 1998) among the Aka pygmies of Cameroun
and the Ngandu of the Central African Republic; Alma Gottlieb
(2004) among the Beng of the Ivory Coast; and Heidi Keller (in
press) among the Nso of Cameroun and three other cultures.
5. A special issue of Ethos (31[2], June 2003) devoted to The Cultural Construction of Childhood is also worth noting here.

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