The Cultural Nature of Human Development

by Barbara Rogoff

Overview

Three-year-old Kwara'ae children in Oceania act as caregivers of their younger siblings, but in the UK, it is an offense to leave a child under age 14 ears without adult supervision. In the Efe community in Zaire, infants routinely use machetes with safety and some skill, although U.S. middle-class adults often do not trust young children with knives. What explains these marked differences in the capabilities of these children? Until recently, traditional understandings of human development held that a child's development is universal and that children have characteristics and skills that develop independently of cultural processes. Barbara Rogoff argues, however, that human development must be understood as a cultural process, not simply a biological or psychological one. Individuals develop as members of a community, and their development can only be fully understood by examining the practices and circumstances of their communities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199813629
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/13/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	899,530
File size:	10 MB

Table of Contents

1	Orienting Concepts and Ways of Understanding the Cultural Nature of Human Development	3
	Looking for Cultural Regularities	7
	One Set of Patterns: Children's Age-Grading and Segregation from Community Endeavors or Participation in Mature Activities	8
	Other Patterns	9
	Orienting Concepts for Understanding Cultural Processes	10
	Moving Beyond Initial Assumptions	13
	Beyond Ethnocentrism and Deficit Models	15
	Separating Value Judgments from Explanations	17
	Diverse Goals of Development	18
	Ideas of Linear Cultural Evolution	18
	Moving Beyond Assumptions of a Single Goal of Human Development	20
	Learning through Insider/Outsider Communication	24
	Outsiders' Position	26
	Insiders' Position	28
	Moving between Local and Global Understandings	29
	Revising Understanding in Derived Etic Approaches	30
	The Meaning of the "Same" Situation across Communities	32
2	Development as Transformation of Participation in Cultural Activities	37
	A Logical Puzzle for Researchers	38
	An Example: "We always speak only of what we see"	39
	Researchers Questioning Assumptions	41
	Concepts Relating Cultural and Individual Development	42
	Whiting and Whiting's Psycho-Cultural Model	43
	Bronfenbrenner's Ecological System	44
	Descendents	48
	Issues in Diagramming the Relation of Individual and Cultural Processes	48
	Sociocultural-Historical Theory	49
	Development as Transformation of Participation in Sociocultural Activity	51
3	Individuals, Generations, and Dynamic Cultural Communities	63
	Humans Are Biologically Cultural	63
	Prepared Learning by Infants and Young Children	67
	Where Do Gender Differences Come From?	71
	Participation in Dynamic Cultural Communities	77
	Culture as a Categorical Property of Individuals versus a Process of Participation in Dynamically Related Cultural Communities	77
	The Case of Middle-Class European American Cultural Communities	85
	Conceiving of Communities across Generations	89
4	Child Rearing in Families and Communities	102
	Family Composition and Governments	104
	Cultural Strategies for Child Survival and Care	106
	Infant-Caregiver Attachment	111
	Maternal Attachment under Severe Conditions	111
	Infants' Security of Attachment	114
	Attachment to Whom?	116
	Family and Community Role Specializations	118
	Extended Families	118
	Differentiation of Caregiving, Companion, and Socializing Roles	121
	Sibling Caregiving and Peer Relations	122
	The Community as Caregiver	128
	Children's Participation in or Segregation from Mature Community Activities	133
	Access to Mature Community Activities	133
	"Pitching in" from Early Childhood	135
	Excluding Children and Youth from Labor--and from Productive Roles	138
	Adults "Preparing" Children or Children Joining Adults	140
	Engaging in Groups or Dyads	141
	Infant Orientation: Face-to-Face with Caregiver versus Oriented to the Group	142
	Dyadic versus Group Prototypes for Social Relations	144
	Dyadic versus Multiparty Group Relations in Schooling	147
5	Developmental Transitions in Individuals' Roles in Their Communities	150
	Age as a Cultural Metric for Development	152
	Developmental Transitions Marking Change in Relation to the Community	157
	Rates of Passing Developmental "Milestones"	159
	Age Timing of Learning	160
	Mental Testing	161
	Development as a Racetrack	162
	According Infants a Unique Social Status	163
	Contrasting Treatment of Toddlers and Older Siblings	164
	Continuities and Discontinuities across Early Childhood	165
	Responsible Roles in Childhood	168
	Onset of Responsibility at Age 5 to 7?	169
	Maturation and Experience	170
	Adolescence as a Special Stage	171
	Initiation to Manhood and Womanhood	174
	Marriage and Parenthood as Markers of Adulthood	176
	Midlife in Relation to Maturation of the Next Generation	179
	Gender Roles	181
	The Centrality of Child Rearing and Household Work in Gender Role Specializations	183
	Sociohistorical Changes over Millennia in Mothers' and Fathers' Roles	184
	Sociohistorical Changes in Recent Centuries in U.S. Mothers' and Fathers' Roles	186
	Occupational Roles and Power of Men and Women	190
	Gender and Social Relations	192
6	Interdependence and Autonomy	194
	Sleeping "Independently"	195
	Comfort from Bedtime Routines and Objects	197
	Social Relations in Cosleeping	197
	Independence versus Interdependence with Autonomy	200
	Individual Freedom of Choice in an Interdependent System	202
	Learning to Cooperate, with Freedom of Choice	203
	Adult-Child Cooperation and Control	207
	Parental Discipline	208
	Teachers' Discipline	211
	Teasing and Shaming as Indirect Forms of Social Control	217
	Conceptions of Moral Relations	221
	Moral Reasoning	221
	Morality as Individual Rights or Harmonious Social Order	222
	Learning the Local Moral Order	224
	Mandatory and Discretionary Concepts in Moral Codes	225
	Cooperation and Competition	227
	Cooperative versus Competitive Behavior in Games	228
	Schooling and Competition	229
7	Thinking with the Tools and Institutions of Culture	236
	Specific Contexts Rather Than General Ability: Piaget around the World	238
	Schooling Practices in Cognitive Tests: Classification and Memory	241
	Classification	242
	Memory	243
	Cultural Values of Intelligence and Maturity	246
	Familiarity with the Interpersonal Relations used in Tests	247
	Varying Definitions of Intelligence and Maturity	249
	Generalizing Experience from One Situation to Another	253
	Learning to Fit Approaches Flexibly to Circumstances	255
	Cultural Tools for Thinking	258
	Literacy	258
	Mathematics	261
	Other Conceptual Systems	266
	Distributed Cognition in the Use of Cultural Tools for Thinking	270
	Cognition beyond the Skull	271
	Collaboration in Thinking across Time and Space	272
	Collaboration Hidden in the Design of Cognitive Tools and Procedures	274
	An Example: Sociocultural Development in Writing Technologies and Techniques	276
	Crediting the Cultural Tools and Practices We Think With	278
8	Learning through Guided Participation in Cultural Endeavors	282
	Basic Processes of Guided Participation	285
	Mutual Bridging of Meanings	285
	Mutual Structuring of Participation	287
	Distinctive Forms of Guided Participation	301
	Academic Lessons in the Family	302
	Talk or Taciturnity, Gesture, and Gaze	310
	Intent Participation in Community Activities	317
9	Cultural Change and Relations among Communities	327
	Living the Traditions of Multiple Communities	329
	Conflict among Cultural Groups	331
	Transformations through Cultural Contact across Human History	334
	An Individual's Experience of Uprooting Culture Contact	335
	Community Changes through Recent Cultural Contacts	337
	Western Schooling as a Locus of Culture Change	340
	Schooling as a Foreign Mission	342
	Schooling as a Colonial Tool	344
	Schooling as a Tool of U.S. Western Expansion	346
	The Persistence of Traditional Ways in Changing Cultural Systems	347
	Contrasting Ideas of Life Success	350
	Intervention in Cultural Organization of Community Life	352
	Dynamic Cultural Processes: Building on More Than One Way	355
	Learning New Ways and Keeping Cultural Traditions in Communities Where Schooling Has Not Been Prevalent	356
	Immigrant Families Borrowing New Practices to Build on Cultural Traditions	358
	Learning New Ways and Keeping Cultural Traditions in Communities Where Schooling Has Been Central	360
	Cultural Variety as an Opportunity for Learning--for Individuals and Communities	361
	The Creative Process of Learning from Cultural Variation	362
	A Few Regularities	366
	Concluding with a Return to the Orienting Concepts	367
	References	371
	Credits	413
	Index	415

Editorial Reviews

" Barbara Rogoff's new book is an excellent compilation of the last three or four decades of work by anthropologists and human developmentalists who study the cultural processes inherent in human development. ... highly recommended for scholars of human development and their advanced students." —Anthropology & Education Quarterly

From the Publisher