Reproduction and Human Development
Miller – Chapter 4
 How are modes of reproduction related to modes of production?
 How does culture shape fertility in different contexts?
 How does culture shape personality and human development over the life cycle?
 A mode of reproduction is the predominant pattern of fertility in a culture
(p. 80).
 Fertility is the number of children a woman bears, or the rate of population growth.

There are three major modes of reproduction which correlate with several of the modes of production
 The foraging mode of reproduction
 The agricultural mode of reproduction
 The industrial/informatics mode of reproduction
 Common among those with a foraging mode of production
 Moderate death and birth rates
 Average of about 2 children per woman survive to adulthood
 Value of children: moderate (labor value)
 Children do not do much work

What work that needs to be done is done mostly by the adults
 Remember the “ original affluent society ” – do not have to do too much work to hunt/gather all that they need to survive so no need to pull the children into providing for the family
 Indirect means of fertility control: diet, breastfeeding, work/exercise, spontaneous abortion
 Low body fat due to low fat diet and lots of exercise – suppresses ovulation – fewer children
 Long length of breastfeeding – suppresses ovulation – fewer children
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Agricultural Mode of Reproduction
 Common among societies with an agricultural, horticultural, and pastoralist mode of production
 High birth rates, moderate or declining death rates

Average between 2 and 8 children per woman
 Differ depending on a number of government policies and other cultural factors
 Value of children: high (labor value)
– Need for children to work the land, care for animals, process foods, etc.
– Pronatalism – an ideology promoting many children
(p. 80)
– Increased reliance on direct means of birth control
 Increasing specialization: midwives, herbalists
Industrial/Informatics Mode of
Reproduction
 Declining population
 Either replacement level fertility in which the number of births equals the number of deaths, leading to maintenance of current population size
 Or below-replacement level fertility in which the number of births is less than the number of deaths, leading to population decline
 Low fertility and moderate or low mortality

Leading to aging population in many industrialized nations
 Value of children: mixed or low (labor)
 Cost of raising children: high

Highly developed professional specializations
 Mandatory formal schooling for children
 Parents have fewer children and invest more resources in them
Industrial/Informatics Mode of
Reproduction
 Social inequality is reflected in population patterns – stratified reproduction
 Middle- and upper-class people – few children with high survival rates

Lower-class – higher fertility and higher mortality rates

Government policies may promote births in the
“ native
”
population while discouraging births in the non-native population
 e.g. France
 Increasing specialization and involvement in the scientific and medical community of all aspects of pregnancy and birth
Culture and Fertility
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Culture affects:

Sexual intercourse
 Frequency and timing of sexual intercourse
 Fertility control
 Why and when to have a child
Culture Shapes Reproduction at Several Levels
Fertility Decision Making
 At the family level

At the state level
 At the global level
Fertility Decision Making
 At the family level
 4 factors are most important in affecting the desire for children

Children ’ s labor value
 High – higher fertility rates

Children ’ s value as old-age support for parents
 High – higher fertility rates
 Infant and child mortality rates
 High – higher fertility rates
 Economic costs of children
 High – lower fertility rates
Fertility Decision Making
 At the family level

Desire for children may differ based on the parent
 Who does most of the work taking care of the children?

Families may prefer sons, daughters, or a combination of both, often depending upon the culture and the gender division of labor
 Son preference – widespread in Asia and the Middle East
 Prefer a balanced number of sons and daughters – Southeast Asia
 Daughter preference – some parts of Africa south of the Sahara and some Caribbean populations
Fertility Decision Making
 At the state level
 State governments formulate policies that affect rates of population growth within their boundaries
 Vary from being pronatalist (favoring many births)

To antinatalist (opposed to many births)
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Fertility Decision Making

At the state level
 Factors that affect government policies include …
 Projected jobs and employment levels
 Public services
 Maintaining the tax base
 Filling the ranks of the military
 Maintaining ethnic and regional proportions

Dealing with population aging
Fertility Decision Making
 At the global level
 Global corporations such as pharmaceutical companies and religious leaders influence country-level and family-level decision making
 In the 1950s it was popular for Western nations to promote family planning programs of many types in industrializing countries

In the 1990s the U.S. adopted a more restricted policy toward family planning, withdrew support for certain features such as abortion, and began to promote abstinence as the foundation of population control
Fertility Control
 People in all cultures since prehistory have had ways of influencing fertility
 Methods to increase fertility
 Methods to reduce fertility
 Methods to regulate its spacing

Even among non-industrial cultures
 Research in Afghanistan in the 1980s found over 500 fertilityregulating techniques in just one region!
 72% - increasing fertility; 22% - contraceptives; 6% - inducing abortion
 Fertility knowledge held by the everyday woman rather than just medical specialists in contrast to more industrialized societies
Fertility Control
 Direct methods
 Taking medicines or herbs that induce abortion, act as contraceptives, or increase fertility

May involve plant or animal substances
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
Taken as pills or teas
 Inhaled as vapors
 Vaginally inserted or rubbed onto the woman ’ s stomach
 Condoms
 Cross-culturally, often the women who possess the most information about these methods
 Indirect methods
 E.g. Long periods of breast feeding to reduce the chances of conception
Fertility Control
 Induced abortion
 A review of 400 societies found that induced abortion was practiced in virtually all of them
 Attitudes towards abortion very greatly
 Methods include …
 Hitting the abdomen

Starving oneself
 Taking drugs
 Jumping from high places

Jumping up and down
 Lifting heavy objects
 Doing hard work
 Invasive procedures / surgical procedures
Fertility Control
 Induced abortion
 Reasons to induce abortion
 Economic reasons
 Mobility
 Pastoralists moving around a lot and carrying heavy loads so cannot care for many small children at once
 Poverty
 May find abortion preferable to bearing a child that cannot be fed
 Cultural reasons
 “ Illegitimate ” child
 Social penalties for bearing an illegitimate child are often motivations for abortion
Fertility Control
 Induced abortion
 Governments intervene in family decisions to regulate access to abortion, either promoting it or forbidding it

U.S.
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 Abortion legally allowed but the issue is often still hotly contested
 China
 One-Child per-Couple Policy started in 1978
 Often forced abortions and sterilizations
 Increase in female infanticide because of cultural preference for sons
 Brazil
 Predominantly Catholic country
 Outlawed abortion
 Still intense poverty, so in practice 1/3 of women had abortions
Fertility Control
 New Reproductive Technologies
 In vitro fertilization (IVF)
 Often used among middle- and upper-class couples in the U.S. who cannot have children the “ natural ” way
 Often last resort because of hefty price tag and the “ natural ” ways is more highly valued in
Western culture
 May be some stigma attached to infertility the “ natural ” way
 May be religious objections – Catholic church

Meanings depend on cultural context
 In Greece it seen as “ natural ” because it allows women to realize a key aspect of their feminine nature through pregnancy and birth
Fertility Control
 Infanticide
 Infanticide is the deliberate killing of offspring

Practiced cross-culturally, but is rarely a frequent practice within a culture
 Direct infanticide
 Death of an infant or child resulting from actions such as beating, smothering, poisoning, or drowning

Indirect infanticide
 A more subtle process, may involve prolonged practices such as food deprivation, failure to take a sick infant to a clinic, or failure to provide warm clothing in winter
Fertility Control
 Infanticide
 Motives include …

Having a “ deformed, ” very sick, or very ill child

Sex of the infant
 Unwed mother – “ illegitimate ” child
 Too many children in the family
 Poverty
 Can occur as a perceived necessity (creating “ angel babies ” ) rather than as a result of cruelty
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Infanticide as
Family Planning
 Personality is an individual ’ s patterned and characteristic way of behaving, thinking, and feeling (p.88)
 Formed largely through enculturation
 The process by which culture is passed from one generation to the next and through which individuals become members of their society
 The process of socialization – learning a culture through both informal and formal processes

Also a genetic component to personality
 Psychological anthropology is the study of the interactions between culture and personality

Birth and infancy
 Childhood

Adolescence
 Adulthood

The cultural context of birth affects an infant
’ s psychological development
 There are a variety of different cultural practices that occur at birth which are considered essential for the baby ’ s physical and psychological welfare
 Often times will have conflicting views about what practices are essential between cultures
 Baby born to Turkish immigrant family in a suburban U.S. hospital (p. 91)
 Often requires someone to act as a cultural broker – someone who is familiar with the practices and beliefs of two different cultures and can promote crosscultural understanding to prevent or mediate conflicts
Birth and Infancy
 Pre-birth
 Babies may also begin to be enculturated when a child is in the womb
 Baby may hear sounds and feel activity patterns of the mother
 Birth
 Members of the household play the key role in enculturating the newborn
 Infant begins to develop a sense of self-awareness
 About 2 years old in industrialized and post-industrial societies
 A bit sooner in foraging societies
 Co-sleep with a parent (more stimuli, more breast feedings) leads to quicker rate of neuromotor development
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Birth and Infancy
 Bonding
 Different cultures believe in different times and ways of bonding with children
 U.S.
 Believe that should start bonding with baby at birth
 Adaptive in low-mortality/low-fertility societies
 Brazil

Bonding occurs several years after birth
 Adaptive in high-mortality/high-fertility societies
Birth and Infancy
 Naming

Personal names are important devices of self-definition in all cultures. Without a name an individual has no self, no identity
 It is through naming that a social group acknowledges a child ’ s birthright and establishes it ’ s social identity

Naming varies cross culturally
 Aymara Indians of Bolivia – do not even name a child until he/she is about 2 and begins to speak the language
 Only then does the child become truly human and fully accepted into the community
 Inuit – women going through a difficult labor shout out names of deceased ancestors

Name called at the time of delivery will be the child
’ s name. Belief the spirit helped with that delivery, and the child is then identified with that spirit
Birth and Infancy

Oriented with surrounding world
 Object orientation
 What various objects are
 Which ones are important, which ones are not
 Spatial orientation

How to get from one place to another
 Mental map of the landscape – memory
 Temporal orientation
 How calendar works
 How past actions are connected to future ones
 Normative orientation
 Values, ideas, and principles

What types of behaviors are acceptable, and which are not
Infancy and Identity
 Sex and Gender in Infancy
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 Sex is something that everybody is born with
 Has three biological markers: genitals, hormones, and chromosomes
 Either male or female
 Gender is a cultural construction and is highly variable across cultures
 Learned behaviors and ideas attributed to males, females, or third genders
 Children are taught their gender roles beginning in infancy
 Does not necessarily correlate to biological characteristics (sex)
Gender and Identity
 Gender identity is influenced both by biology and culture
 Many individuals born with XX (biological female) or XY (biological male)
 Can choose to be culturally male, female, or a third gender
 Some individuals are born as intersexuals (about 1 percent of humans – over 60 million individuals worldwide)
 People who are born with reproductive organs, genitalia, and/or sex chromosomes that are not exclusively male or female
 Hermaphrodite – has both testicular and ovarian tissue
 Can choose or may be forced to be culturally male, female, or a third gender
Gender and Identity
 Gender identities can be fluid
 Individuals might change their gender at different points in their lives

Transgenders are people who cross over or occupy a culturally accepted position in the binary male-female gender construction

Berdache in some native North American groups
 Biologically a male who opts to wear female clothing, may engage in intercourse with a man or a woman, and does female tasks such as basket weaving and poetry making
 May be chosen by individual or individual ’ s parents
 Source of pride in that culture

Amazon
–
a woman who takes on male roles and behaviors
Gender and Identity
 Hijra in India
 Dress and act like women in many ways, but they are neither truly male nor truly female
 May be dancers or musicians on the street
 Earn a living by begging
 They are a stigmatized group, separated from mainstream society

Fa
’ afafines in Samoa
 Males who take on the identity of females
 Is an accepted option for boys who prefer to dance, clean house, and care for children and the elderly
 Highly valued – may be able to do the heavy kinds of labor that most women find difficult

Sambia people of New Guinea
 Ritual homosexuality – adolescent males engage in homosexual acts as a pathway to masculinity
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 Males then go on to marry females, have a family
Gender and Identity
 Intersexual, transgendered, and/or homosexual individuals in U.S.
 Becoming more accepted in our culture, but still endure much discrimination in many context where 2 genders and heterosexuality are the norm
 This discrimination takes a psychological toll on a person
 Hate crimes, wage and benefits discrimination, high suicide rates
Childhood and Personality
 Childhood is a relatively recent concept
 The concept of “ the child ” emerged in the last few centuries with the growth of industrial capitalism
 Cross-cultural studies have shown two general patterns of child rearing (opposite ends of a spectrum)
 nurturant-responsible
 dependent-dominant
Childhood and Personality
 Nurturant-responsible child rearing

Emphasizes caring and sharing acts toward other children
 Aggressive or selfish behavior is actively discouraged

Idea of selfhood transcends individualism
 Socializes children to think of themselves in terms of the larger whole
 Emphasizes obedience and supportiveness of group
 Prominent in areas where extended families raise children and where decisions are made collectively
 In foraging, egalitarian societies
 In horticultural societies children take on adult responsibilities at a very young age, sometimes as young as 3 years old, which contribute significantly to the family ’ s welfare
Childhood and Personality
 Dependent-dominant child rearing
 Emphasizes independence, self-reliance, and personal achievement
 Common is societies where self-sufficiency and personal achievement are important traits for survival and success
 Children have fewer acts of caregiving, seek more attention, try to assert dominance over other children
 Prominent in areas where parent(s) and offspring are the basic social unit
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
In agricultural and industrialized/informatic societies, children have fewer tasks and less responsibilities
 When they do take on tasks it is often for personal benefit (i.e. to spend an allowance as they wish) rather than as contributions to the family ’ s welfare
Childhood and Personality

Often in childhood other individuals outside the household are brought into the enculturation process
 Extended relatives
 Peers
 School teachers in societies with formalized schooling, such as the
U.S.
Adolescence
 Puberty is a time in the human life cycle that occurs universally and involves a set of biological markers
 Adolescence is a culturally defined period of maturation from around the time of puberty until the attainment of adulthood
 Length of adolescence varies cross-culturally

Length and activities of adolescence varies by gender
 Maasai
 Males have a long period of adolescence where they prepare to be warriors
 Females have virtually no period of adolescence – get married shortly after puberty
Adulthood
 Usually thought of as the period of entering into some form of marriage or long-term relationship and having children
 In U.S., adulthood is often thought of as becoming economically self-sufficient
 Often a rite of passage occurs during the transition from adolescence to adulthood
 May be a period of isolation
 May be circumcision or female genital cutting (FGC)

Giving birth
 Often include trials of pain and stamina, a time of reflection and introspection – a ritual transformation – a symbolic death and rebirth into a new life phase
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Adulthood

Becoming a mother
 Matrescence is the cultural process of becoming a mother
 Varies cross-culturally in terms of duration and meaning
 In U.S. a woman becomes a mother when she gives birth
 In other cultures it can be when conception occurs or when a woman delivers an infant of the
“ right ” sex or at the right time period in her life
 Often a number of prenatal taboos, including food taboos, in cultures
 Proper behavior insures a good delivery and a healthy baby
Adulthood
 Becoming a father
 Patrescence is the cultural process of becoming a father
 Couvade are beliefs and customs applying to a father during his wife ’ s pregnancy and delivery
 Often occurs in societies in where father have prominent roles in child care
 Father is symbolically bearing some of the woman ’ s birth pain
 Often involves him lying in a bed around the time of birth and feeling exhausted and may experience pain
 Proper behavior insures a good delivery and a healthy baby
 Paternal involvement in child rearing varies cross-culturally
 Aka foragers of the Central Africa Republic spend half their time each day holding or within close reach of their infants – more likely to kiss and hold them than their mothers are
Example of paternal child care among the Aka of the Central
African Republic
Adulthood
 Middle Age
 Typically seen as being between 30 and 70 years old in industrial/informatics societies
 Often about 40 years of age in the U.S.
 May have a “ mid-life crisis ”
 Feelings of restlessness, rebelliousness, and unhappiness that may lead to family break-ups
 May be because of fear and denial of death
 May occur earlier in societies where the life expectancy is shorter
 For women, going through menopause is a significant aspect of middle age
 Depending on the culture, can be a time of stress or crisis, or it can be a time of relief
 May or may not lead to role changes
Adulthood
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 The Senior Years
 The elderly are variably recognized, defined, and valued in different cultures

In many cultures, elders are highly revered and their life experiences are valued as the greatest wisdom
 Often have a higher status when they continue to live with their families
 More prevalent in nonindustrial societies
 Samoa – status increases as responsibilities lighten, highly valued by fellow villagers, lax restrictions, party time!!
 In other cultures, the elderly are perceived as becoming burdens to their families and to society
 Elderly are often relegated to retirement homes or nursing homes
 More prevalent in industrial societies
Death
 In many industrialized societies such as the U.S.
 A large resistance to death
 High dependence on medical technology

Try to avoid it often at high financial and psychological costs
 In many other cultures

Is a greater acceptance of death, but still have various rules and burial practices that must be followed if living relatives are to avert psychological suffering
 Grief
 Outward expression varies greatly from huge displays of ritualized mourning
(Trobriand Islands) to no outside display of crying or grief (Bali, Indonesia)
Group Personality
 Trying to determine the personality or “ typical characteristics
”
of a large group, often a nation
 Tries to determine the “ average ” personality of a member of a particular society
 “ National character ” studies
 Popular in anthropology during the 1930 ’ s and 1940 ’ s
 Tries to discover personality traits shared by the majority of the people of modern nation states
 Problems?
Group Personality
 Problems?
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Group Personality
 Problems?
 Who is average?
 Individual variations – not everyone will behave this way
 There are a range of behaviors within each culture
 Yanomamo value fierceness and aggressiveness, but …

Will there by shy, non-aggressive Yanomamo individuals? Yes!
 Stereotyping
 What about microcultures?
 Differences in the way men and women act
 Class differences – French farmer may have less in common with a French lawyer than he does with a German farmer
 Ethnic differences within a nation
 Sample size representative of a large group
 Subjective
 Japanese society in 1940 ’ s – national character was believed to be militaristic – reflection of wartime hostility rather than scientific objectivity
Group Personality
 Modal personality of a group
 The body of personality traits that occur with the highest frequency in a culturally bounded population
 Is a statistical concept rather than the personality of an average person in a particular society
 So instead of typifying and generalizing the average American as materialistic, recognize the variation that exists from non-materialistic to materialistic
 Collect a variety of data
 Maybe can make a statement that based on this data we find that 70% of the Americans sampled are materialistic, 30% are non-materialistic
Group Personality

Core values of a group
 The values promoted by a particular culture
 e.g. North Americans – value rugged individualism
 Fits well with our mode of production and family life
 e.g. China – value kin ties, cooperation, and mutual dependence
 Allows for the fact that not all personalities will conform to cultural ideals
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 How are modes of reproduction related to modes of production?
 How does culture shape fertility in different contexts?

How does culture shape personality and human development over the life cycle?
15