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Culture in Development
Michael Cole
Communication Department, Psychology Department,
and Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California, 92093-0092
mcole@ucsd.edu
INTRODUCTION
Although it is generally agreed that the need and ability to inhabit a culturally organized
environment are among the defining characteristics of human beings, it is a curious fact that until
recently the role of culture in constituting human nature has received relatively little attention in
basic textbooks, either of general or developmental psychology. This situation seems to be
changing (Dasen & Mishra, 2000; Lonner, 2003). Many specialized books and journals devoted
to the topic have appeared in recent years (see Apolopolous & Lonner, 2001, for a summary of
recent publication outlets), and mention of research conducted in different cultures in
introductory developmental psychology texts has increased markedly in the past decade.
Implicit in a good deal of the extant treatment of culture in the psychological literature is
the notion implied by the phrase “research conducted in other cultures” that culture is
synonymous with cultural difference. This assumption is made explicit by Hinde (1987, p. 3-4)
who argued that culture is "better regarded as a convenient label for many of the diverse ways in
which human practices and beliefs differ between groups,' (pp. 3-4). However, advocates of
cross-cultural research have long argued that their goal laws was to studysimilarities and
differences between cultural groups in the psychological processes manifested by their users In
the past decade this emphasis on cross-cultural psychological approaches has been
complemented by approaches emphasizing the fact that the capacity to inhabit a culturally
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organized, meaningful, environment is the universal, species-specific characteristic of homo
sapiens, of which particular cultures represent special, historically contingent, cases. This latter
approach is currently referred to as “cultural psychology.” It starts with the premise that humans
are biologically evolved to create, acquire, and transmit culture. As a consequence, “no
sociocultural environment exists or has identity independent of the way human beings seize
meanings and resources from it, while every human being has her or his subjectivity and mental
life altered through the process of seizing meanings and resources from sociocultural
environment and using them” (Shweder, 1990, p. 2).
There is currently some uncertainty about the relation between cultural psychology (in
which culture is treated as the medium of human life within which people acquire and share
meanings and practices )and cross-cultural psychology (in which culture is treated as an
antecedent or independent variable that acts on people). Berry (2000), for example, identifies
cultural psychology as a sub-field of cross-cultural psychology which, along with indigenous
psychologies and the use of the comparative method provides the “generic field.” Others are
more likely to see cross-cultural research as a specific method within the toolkit of cultural
psychology (Greenfield, 2000; Shweder et al., 1998).
Whichever starting point one uses, the two approaches share a common interest in “the
systematic study of relationships between the cultural context of human development and the
behaviors that become established in the repertoire of individuals growing up in a particular
culture” (Berry et al., 1997, p. x). However, differences between the two approaches influence
how their practitioners go about conducting their research. Greenfield (1997, p. 306) identifies
the crux of the matter when she writes that “the ideal in cultural psychology is for problems and
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procedures to flow from the nature of culture, both in general and specific terms”. By contrast,
cross-cultural psychology relies more “on the methodological armoire of psychology, rather than
on the nature and practice of culture.” This difference corresponds to treating culture as a
medium, rather than as an independent variable (Cole, 1996; Valsiner & Lawrence, 1997).
In order to cover the diversity of the topic, this chapter is organized as follows. The first
section begins with a summary of three classical views about the nature of development and a
fourth that places cultural mediation at its center. I then turn to examine alternative conceptions
of culture used by psychologists concerned with culture and development, conceptions based
largely, but not entirely, on the work of anthropologists, for whom culture is a foundational
concept. I then offer a concept of culture that I believe to be compatible with mainstream views
that holds special promise specifically for human development.
The second section presents informative examples of research on how culture enters into the
process of development at different periods of the lifespan. This survey draws both on intracultural and cross-cultural studies to emphasize several points: (1) That culture and biology are
intertwined in human development, (2) That cultural mediation of development is a universal
process expressed in historically specific circumstances, (3) That there are methodological
opportunities and problems associated with the study of cultural constituents of development,
both intra-culturally and cross-culturally.1 I end by returning to discuss the general theoretical
and methodological implications of evidence about culture for psychological theories of
development.
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THREE DUALISTIC THEORIES AND A CULTURAL ALTERNATIVE
Figure 1 contains a schematic representation of the three dualistic positions that
dominated theorizing about development for most of past century, along with a fourth approach
in which the category of culture has been added as “third force.” The uppermost
--------------------------Insert Figure 1
---------------------------
line in the figure represents the view articulated in the first half of this century by Gesell (1940),
according to whom endogenous factors dominate development, which goes through a series of
invariant stages. Each stage is characterized by a qualitatively distinctive structure of the
organism and a qualitatively distinct pattern of interaction between organism and environment.
Gesell (1940, p. 13) wrote, for example,
Environment . . . determines the occasion, the intensity, and the correlation of many
aspects of behavior, but it does not engender the basic progressions of behavior
development. These are determined by inherent, maturational mechanisms.
Elsewhere Gesell (1945, p. 358) added,
Neither physical nor cultural environment contains any architectonic arrangements like
the mechanisms of growth. Culture accumulates; it does not grow. The glove goes on the
hand; the hand determines the glove.
Gesell's ideas went out of fashion in the 1950s, but recent years have witnessed a
significant revival of interest in innate biological constraints on development (Bjorklund &
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Pelligrini, 2002; Pinker, 2002; Quartz & Sejnowski, 2002). Some of these approaches adopt the
view that the role of the environment is restricted to “triggering” the realization of endogenous
structures, whereas others emphasize ways in which culture is necessary to complete the process
of development in any society and accumulating evidence that the causal relations between
culture and development travel in both directions.
The view that the environment, both cultural and natural, provides the major influence on
developmental change is represented in row two of Figure 1. An extreme version of this view
was put forward by Skinner (1953, p. 91), whose approach was summarized in the following
striking statement:
Operant conditioning shapes behavior as a sculptor shapes a lump of clay. Although at
some point the sculptor seems to have produced an entirely novel object, we can always
follow the process back to the original undifferentiated lump, and we can make the
successive stages by which we return to this condition as small as we wish. At no point
does anything emerge which is very different from what preceded it. The final product
seems to have a special unity or integrity of design, but we cannot find a point at which
this suddenly appears. In the same sense, an operant is not something which appears full
grown in the behavior of the organism. It is the result of a continuous shaping process.
In this view, it is not the past, coded in the genome, that is the active agent in
development; rather it is the environment, the sculptor, that is the source not only of the minute
changes that gradually modify the lump of clay, but of the new forms that emerge from this
process in a continuous fashion. Contemporary psychologists sympathetic to an environmentalist
perspective may consider Skinner's position somewhat exaggerated. The analogy between the
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organism and a lump of clay is especially unfortunate, because it implies a totally passive
organism (contrary to Skinner's own principles!), but his emphasis on the dominant role of the
environment in shaping development continues to have many adherents (e.g., Bandura, 2002;
Jusczyyk, 2003; Zimmerman, 1983). Moreover, in so far as the “sculptor” is a metaphorical
embodiment of society, all of development is engendered by the contemporary sociocultural
environment.
Piaget, perhaps the most influential developmental theorist of the 20th century, argued
forcefully for the equal weight of endogenous and exogenous factors in development (Smith,
2002). On the one hand, he asserted that "Mental growth is inseparable from physical growth;
maturation of the nervous and endocrine systems, in particular, continue until the age of sixteen"
(Piaget & Inhelder, 1969, p. viii). At the same time, Piaget, like those who adopt an
environmental shaping perspective, argued that the role of environmental input goes well beyond
determining the occasioning, intensity, and correlation of behavioral aspects.
The human being is immersed right from birth in a social environment which affects him
just as much as his physical environment. Society, even more, in a sense, than the
physical environment, changes the very structure of the individual.... Every relation
between individuals (from two onwards) literally modifies them.... (Piaget, 1973, p. 156)
Piaget's view is often contrasted with the maturational and environmental shaping views by his
emphasis on the crucial role of the active organism, who constructs her or his own development
through attempts to adapt to the environment.
Although they differ in the weights that they assign to phylogenetic constraints and
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ontogenetic experiences as well as the importance of children's active modifications of their
environments, the adherents of all three positions conceive of development as an interaction
between two juxtaposed forces (nature/nurture, individual/environment, phylogeny/ontogeny).
Gesell, Skinner, and Piaget all implicitly or explicitly suggest that the environmental side of the
equation can be partitioned into cultural or social factors versus the physical environment, but
these distinctions are not well developed in their writings. Moreover, when culture is identified
as a factor in development, it is often conceived of as separate from the organism, an influence
acting on it (Lucariello, 1995).
The fourth row of Figure 1 explicitly includes culture as a separable constituent of
development. According to this cultural-mediational view, the two interacting factors in the
previously described approaches do not interact directly. Rather, their interaction is mediated
through a third factor, culture, the accumulation of knowledge, experience, and learning of prior
generations that forms the medium for development (Cole, 1996). Human development from
this perspective is conceived of as the emergent process of bio-social-cultural change, in which
none of the constituents is reducible to the other. In order to develop more fully this fourth
perspective, which I will use to guide the exposition of empirical issues in this chapter, it is
necessary to pause briefly to consider the concept of culture as it is used in current academic
discourse about development.
CONCEPTIONS OF CULTURE
In its most general sense, the term "culture" is used to refer to patterns of behavior that
are passed from one generation to the next through extra-somatic means. It is the socially
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inherited body of past human behavioral patterns and accomplishments that serves as the
resources for the current life of a social group ordinarily thought of as the inhabitants of a country
or region (D'Andrade, 1996).1
When applied to human beings, the notion of culture ordinarily assumes that its
creators/bearers/users are capable of symbolic behavior. So, for example, Tylor (1874, p. 1), the
titular father of Anthropology, defined culture as "that complex whole which includes
knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by
man as a member of society". Tylor’s conception is echoed by Herskovitz's (1948, p. 17) widely
used definition of culture as "the man made part of the environment."
In trying to specify more carefully the notion of culture-as-social inheritance,
anthropologists have historically tended to emphasize culture either as “something out there” as
the term “man made part of the environment” implies or as “something inside the head” as the
terms “knowledge” and “beliefs” imply. As D’Andrade has noted, during the first half of this
century, the notion of culture as something “superorganic” and material dominated
anthropological thinking, but as a consequence of the “cognitive revolution” in the social
sciences, the pendulum shifted, so that for several decades, the “culture-as-knowledge” view has
reigned. This view is most closely associated with the work of Goodenough, for whom culture
consists of "what one needs to know to participate acceptably as a member in a society's affairs"
(Goodenough, 1994, p. 265). This knowledge is acquired through learning, and consequently is a
mental phenomenon. As Goodenough (1994, p. 50) put it,
Material objects people create are not in and of themselves things they learn... What they
1 Note that when defined in this abstract fashion, many creatures besides human beings
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learn are the necessary percepts, concepts, recipes, and skill-- the things they need to
know in order to make things that will meet the standards of their fellows.
From this perspective, culture is profoundly subjective. It is in people's minds, the
mental/symbolic products of the social heritage.
Shweder (2003, p. 11) offers a view of culture which also privileges the mental: “culture
refers to community-specific ideas about what is true, good, beautiful, and efficient. To be
cultural, these ideas about truth, goodness, beauty, and efficiency must be socially inherited and
customary. To be cultural, those socially inherited and customary ideas must be embodied or
enacted meanings; they must be constitutive of (and thereby revealed in) a way of life."
Other anthropologists, as well as psychologists, are seeking to transcend this “ideal versus
material culture” dichotomy. For example, in an oft-quoted passage Geertz (1973, p. 45) wrote
that his view of culture begins with the assumption that,
human thought is basically both social and public-- that its natural habitat is the house
yard, the market place, and the town square. Thinking consists not of "happenings in the
head" (though happenings there and elsewhere are necessary for it to occur) but of
trafficking in ... significant symbols -- words for the most part but also gestures,
drawings, musical sounds, mechanical devices like clocks .
My own way of transcending the ideal-material dichotomy with respect to culture is to
think of the cultural medium as both material and mental. It is a species-specific medium in
which human beings live as an environment transformed by the artifacts of prior generations,
extending back to the beginning of the species (Cole, 1996; Geertz, 1973; Ingold, 2000;
exhibit cultural modes of behavior (McGrew, 2002).
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Leontiev, 1981; Luria, 1979; Sahlins, 1976). The basic function of these artifacts is to coordinate
human beings with the physical world and each other; in the aggregate, culture is then seen as the
species-specific medium of human development, as, so to speak, “history in the present.”
Because artifact mediation was present hundreds of thousands of years prior to the emergence of
homo sapiens, it is not appropriate to juxtapose human biology and human culture. The human
brain and body co-evolved over a long period of time with our species' increasingly complex
cultural environment (Plotkin, 2001; Quartz & Senjowski, 2002).
Geertz (1973, p. 68) pointed out that, as a result of their tangled relations in the course of
human phylogeny, culture and biology are equally tangled in the course of human ontogeny:
Rather than culture acting only to supplement, develop, and extend organically based
capacities logically and genetically prior to it, it would seem to be ingredient to those
capacities themselves. A cultureless human being would probably turn out to be not an
intrinsically talented though unfulfilled ape, but a wholly mindless and consequently
unworkable monstrosity.
This long-term, phylogenetic perspective is important to keep in mind when considering
the ontogeny of children, for it reminds us that causal influences do not run unidirectionally from
biology to culture. Rather, human beings are hybrids of phylogenetic, cultural-historical, and
ontogenetic sources (Clark, 2002; Wertsch, 1985)
For this perspective to be useful it is essential to understand why the artifacts that
constitute culture-as-medium are combinations of the conceptual/ideal and the material because
it is this combination that makes necessary the linking of phylogeny and cultural history in
ontogeny. On the one hand, artifacts have a mental/ideal/ conceptual aspect to them in that they
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embody goal-directed interactions of which they were previously a part and which they mediate
in the present (e.g., the structure of a pencil carries within it the history of representing spoken
language in a different medium, manufacturing processes, communicative practices, and so
forth). They are material in that they are embodied in material form, whether in the morphology
of a spoken or written or signed word, or in a solid object such as a pencil. D'Andrade (1986, p.
22) made this point when he said that "Material culture—tables and chairs, buildings and cities—
is the reification of human ideas in a solid medium". As a consequence of the dual conceptualmaterial nature of the systems of artifacts that are the cultural medium of their existence, human
beings live in a double world, simultaneously natural and artificial. Hence, at birth, the
environment into which children are born is more than a material world; both the mental and the
material aspects of that world envelop the developing child.
This conception of the relation between culture and the special properties of human
nature was expressed in particularly powerful language by the American anthropologist, White
(1942, p. 372), half a century ago.
Man differs from the apes, and indeed all other living creatures so far as we know, in that
he is capable of symbolic behavior. With words man creates a new world, a world of
ideas and philosophies. In this world man lives just as truly as in the physical world of his
senses.... This world comes to have a continuity and a permanence that the external world
of the senses can never have. It is not made up of present only but of a past and a future as
well. Temporally, it is not a succession of disconnected episodes, but a continuum
extending to infinity in both directions, from eternity to eternity.2
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Among other properties White attributes to culture in this passage, his emphasis on the
way it creates an (artificial) continuity between past and future merits special attention, as I
attempt to show later. It is also significant that both White and Soviet cultural-historical
psychologists (e.g., Luria, 1928; Vygotsky, 1987) emphasize that, as mediators of human action,
all artifacts can be considered tools. As White (1959, p. 236) expressed the relationship:
An axe has a subjective component; it would be meaningless without a concept and an
attitude. On the other hand, a concept or attitude would be meaningless without overt
expression, in behavior or speech (which is a form of behavior). Every cultural element,
every cultural trait, therefore, has a subjective and an objective aspect.
There are a great many suggestions about the forms taken by the artifacts in terms of
which culture operates as a constituent of human activity. One well-known formulation offered
by Geertz is that culture should be conceived of by analogy with a recipe or a computer program
that he referred to as "control mechanisms." A complementary notion of artifacts constituitive of
the medium of culture is offered by D'Andrade who suggested the term cultural schemes to refer
to units that mediate entire sets of conceptual-material artifacts. In D'Andrade's (1984, p. 93)
terms:
Typically such schemes portray simplified worlds, making the appropriateness of the
terms that are based on them dependent on the degree to which these schemes fit the actual
worlds of the objects being categorized. Such schemes portray not only the world of physical
objects and events, but also more abstract worlds of social interaction, discourse, and even word
meaning.
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Finally, psychologists such as Bruner (1990) and Nelson (2003) identify event schemas,
embodied in narratives, as basic organizers of both culture and cognition. Referred to as scripts
by Nelson, these generalized event schemes specify the people who participate in an event, the
social roles that they play, the objects that are used during the event, the sequences of actions
required, the goals to be attained, and so on. Nelson's account of scripted activity is similar in
many ways to Geertz's and D'Andrade's suggestions for basic units of cultural structure. Her
emphasis on the fact that children grow up inside of other people's scripts, which serve as guides
to action before the children are ready to understand and execute culturally appropriate actions on
their own, leads naturally to her conclusion that "the acquisition of scripts is central to the
acquisition of culture" (Nelson, 1981, p. 110).
A developmentally relevant conception of culture. The properties of culture-as-medium
discussed so far—its foundation in artifact mediated human activities, its co-evolution with the
human brain and body, the dual material-conceptual nature of artifacts, the close relation
(perhaps identity) of artifact and tool, and (as noted by White in the quotation above) the unique
time extension provided by the medium—are all important to understanding the relation between
culture and development.Not only the past and present, but the child’s future, are present at its
birth.
In thinking about culture as it relates to development, I have found it useful to begin with
the intuitive notion underlying this word, as it has evolved since entering English from Latin
many centuries ago. As Williams (1973, p. 87) noted, the core features that coalesce in modern
conceptions of culture originate in terms that refer to the process of helping things to grow:
"Culture, all of its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or
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animals". From earliest times, the notion of culture included a general theory for how to promote
development: Create an artificial environment in which young organisms could be provided
optimal conditions for growth. Such tending required tools, both material (hoes) and knowledge
(don’t plant until winter is over) perfected over generations and designed for the special tasks to
which they were put.
Although it would be foolish to over interpret the metaphorical parallels between the
theory and practice of growing next generations of crops and next generations of children, the
exercise has considerable heuristic value. To begin with, the properties that one associates with
gardens bear some obvious affinities to classical definitions of culture offered by anthropologists.
A garden conceived of as an artificial environment-for-growing-living things is, as classical
definitions of culture emphasize, a “complex whole,” and gardening requires both knowledge
and beliefs, as well as material tools.
The garden metaphor for culture is also useful because it reminds us that gardeners must
attend not only to a specialized form of environment created inside the garden but also to the
ecological circumstances surrounding the garden. These two classes of concern often seem to be
addressable independently of each other, but in reality are interdependent, as a long tradition of
research in ecological psychology has emphasized (Altman & Christiansen, 1990, Barker, 1968;
Heft, 2002; Schoggen, 1975; Wicker, 1984). Ecological psychologists’ uses of the term
“ecological” orient us to the interdependence of each component within a system as well as
between the sub-system of interest and its context. Although it is possible to raise any plant
anywhere in the world, given the opportunity first to arrange the appropriate set of conditions, it
is not always possible to create the right conditions, even for a short while. So, if one is interested
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in the creation of conditions that not only enhance the needed properties of the artificial
environment but do so in a sustainable way, then it is essential to attend to how the system in
which the garden is embedded shapes the properties of the garden itself.
Inside the garden one must consider the quality of the soil, the best way to till the soil, the
right kinds of nutrients to use, the proper amount of moisture, as well as the best time to plant
and nurture the seeds, and the need to protect growing plants against predators, disease, and so
forth. Each of these tasks has its own material needs, associated tools, beliefs, and knowledge.
Consequently, the theory and practice of development require us to focus on finding exactly the
right combination of factors to promote development within the garden walls.
With respect to gardens, we can note that, in addition to having a wall separating them
from their surroundings, they also have internal organization; different plants are not scattered at
random within the garden walls. And so it is with culture. As Super (1987, p. 5) commented,
Rarely in the developmental sciences ... does theory acknowledge that environments have
their own structure and internal rules of operation, and thus, that what the environment
contributes to development is not only isolated, unidimensional pushes and pulls but also
structure.
Humanizing the garden metaphor. Although the garden metaphor is useful for thinking
about culture and development because it emphasizes the fact that human beings live in an
artificial environment, and that cultures exist within, are shaped by, and in turn shape their
ecological settings, it fails to consider the fact that human beings are not plants; nor does it
capture several aspects of modern conceptions of culture that need to be elaborated in the study
of development. Fortunately, recent theorizing about culture and development has suggested
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parallels between the metaphor of garden-as-culture and the cultural organization of human
development.
For example, Super and Harkness (1986, 1997) use the term, developmental niche, to
refer to the child’s location within the complex set of socio-cultural-ecological relations that
form the proximal environment of development. Developmental niches are analyzed in terms of
three components: (1) the physical and social settings in which the child lives, (2) the culturally
regulated childrearing and socialization practices of the child's society, and (3) the psychological
characteristics of the child's parents, especially parental theories about the process of child
development and their affective orientation to the tasks of childrearing. Super and Harkness
emphasize that these three components of the developmental niche operate in (imperfect)
coordination with each other, providing the proximal structured medium through which children
experience the world (see Gauvain, 1995, for a similar argument).
A similar perspective has been developed by Weisner and his colleagues. For example,
Weisner (2002) argued that the locus for cultural influences on development is to be found in the
activities and practices of daily routines that are central to family life. The relation between
individuals and activities are not unidirectional, however, because participants take an active role
in constructing the activities in which they participate. Consequently, “the subjective and
objective are intertwined” in culturally organized activities and practices (Gallimore,
Goldenberg, & Weisner, 1993, p. 541).
As the work of cultural psychologists clearly indicates, a “developmental niche” is
roughly synonymous with a “life world.” It incorporates many “micro niches” which include not
only the circumstances where children are in close proximity to their parents who might be
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thought to “mold” their behavior, but in the range of activities that their parents choose for them
to experience (Whiting, 1980). Simple examples of such indirect parental influences over
enculturation include the differential work roles assigned to boys and girls in agricultural and
industrialized societies and decisions about whether children attend school, and if so, for how
long (LeVine, LeVine, & Schnell, 2001).
Culture or cultures? So far I have been emphasizing universal features of culture as a
species-specific medium structured in terms of ecocultural niches/practices/activities. Before
proceeding to the issue of how this structured medium enters into the process of ontogenetic
development, I need to address the question of cultural variability, and especially the issue of
cultural evolution.
Tylor (1874), whose notion of culture was discussed earlier, believed that cultures could
be classified according to their level of development, characterized by the sophistication of their
technology, the complexity of their social organization, and similar criteria, a view referred to in
the literature as cultural evolution. He assumed in addition that all people are born with the same
potential to use culture (an assumption dubbed the doctrine of psychic unity in anthropology), but
that certain societies had developed more fully than others, with industrialized societies at the top
of the heap. Combining these two assumptions with the assumption that the cultural traits
observed in various cultures were arrived at through a process of independent invention, Tylor
believed that he could reconstruct the stages of development of humankind through a
comparative analysis of societies at different levels of cultural development.3
This line of thinking (discussed at greater length in Cole, 1996; Jahoda, 1982, 1989;
Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition [LCHC], 1983) both fit with and gave
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respectability to the idea that the members of societies judged to be at an earlier stage of cultural
evolution were also at an earlier stage of mental development. Captured in the colorful phrase
that "primitives think like children," this belief in the mental superiority of people living in
industrially advanced countries was held by a vast majority of l9th- and early 20th-century
psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, and remains a serious issue in the study of
culture and development (Hallpike, 1979).
Despite its modern-sounding claim that there is an intimate relation between culture and
thought, this unilinear theory of cultural-mental evolution has long had its critics, starting with
Herder (1784/1803) who argued that the history of a culture can only be understood with respect
to the specific development of single peoples and communities; general comparisons are
deceiving. This idea of the historical specificity of cultures came into modern anthropology
largely through the work of Boas (1911), one of the first major figures in anthropology to do
fieldwork in societies outside of Europe (see Stocking, 1968, for an interpretive account of
Boas's contribution to modern thinking about culture).
Boas conducted research among the peoples of the American and Canadian Northwest
with the objective of obtaining first-hand evidence about their technology, language use, art,
custom, and myth to determine the empirical validity of evolutionary theorizing. His findings
shattered his initial expectations. On the basis of comparative ethnographic data, Boas concluded
that borrowing from other groups was a major source of cultural traits among the peoples he
studied, undermining the basis for historical reconstruction. Moreover, the within-society
heterogeneity of cultural traits contradicted either a simple diffusionist or independent-invention
account of cultural change: Tribes with the same basic languages were found to have quite
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different customs and beliefs, and tribes with quite different languages were found to have very
similar customs and beliefs. Assignment of societies to particular cultural levels was undermined
by the great heterogeneity of levels of complexity in different domains of life in a single society.
Among the Kwakiutl, for example, the graphic arts revealed a quite abstract way of representing
natural forms while the technology was relatively unsophisticated.
From these and other observations, Boas concluded that each culture represents a
combination of locally developed and borrowed features, the configurations of which are
adaptations to the special historical circumstances of the group. Because all societies are
characterized by heterogeneous constituent elements with respect to any single criterion of
development, and because all societies can be considered equally valid responses to their own
historically posed problems of survival, there can be no basis for comparisons across societies
with respect to general levels of development. Such comparisons illegitimately tear aspects of a
culture out of their appropriate context as if they played an equivalent role in the life of the
people being compared, when they do not.
Adopting Boas' position has direct implications for how one studies culture and
development. It means that if we want to understand a behavior being manifested in any
particular cultural context, we need to know the way that this context fits into the pattern of life
experiences of the individuals being studied, as well as into the past history of interactions
between and within cultures that have shaped the contexts where we make our observations. To
fail to consider a behavior in its cultural-historical context is to risk misinterpreting its meaning,
and hence its overall psychological significance for the people involved. (See Rogoff, Gauvain,
& Ellis, 1984, for an elaboration of this point.)
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From this rather truncated discussion of anthropological conceptions of culture, we can
abstract the following essential points:
1. Culture is the residue in the present of past human activity in which human beings have
transformed nature to suit their own ends and passed the cumulated artifacts down to
succeeding generations in the form of tools, rituals, beliefs, and ways of conceiving of the
world in general. The subjective/ideal and objective/material aspects of culture are
inextricably interconnected.
2. Culture is not a random assortment of artifacts; it comes packaged in the form of
conceptual systems, social institutions, and a multitude of acceptable ways of behaving in
a wide variety of activities. The proximal environment of cultural influences on
development are activities and practices that can be thought of as a “developmental
niche.”
3. Culture is a medium. When culture is treated as an independent variable, severe
methodological difficulties can arise which compromise the ability of analysts to make
clear inferences about causation. Despite these difficulties, varieties of cultural
configurations, associated with different historical experiences (where "history" is
assumed to extend back to the first creatures dubbed homo sapiens although we have
written records dating back only a few thousand years) makes it tempting to treat cultures
as independent variables and to privilege observations based on standardized methods
instead of making comparisons secondary to locally derived procedures. When cultural
variations are studied conceiving of culture as an antecedent, independent variable, the
fact that cultures are organized patterns of artifacts means and that it will prove difficult
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or impossible to unpackage them to determine precisely which aspects of culture
contribute to the development of particular behavioral outcomes (B. Whiting, 1976,
referred to culture used in this way as a packaged variable). In the sections that follow, I
illustrate these and other psychologically important aspects of culture in development and
some of the analytic dilemmas they pose.
The Socially Distributed Nature of Culture.
When Mead went to study the people of Samoa and New Guinea in the 1920s and 1930s,
it was widely assumed that culture was widely shared by the adult population. In fact, it was
thought to be sufficiently homogenous so that one could talk to a small number of people and
generalize to all the people sharing that cultural system. Referring to the garden metaphor, this
would be as if all the plants in garden were the same and all grew at a uniform rate and developed
into identical “cultural” clones of each other. At present, it is widely recognized among
anthropologists that cultural knowledge is only partially shared, even among members of small
face-to-face societies who have lived together over many generations (Romney & Moore, 2001;
Schwartz, 1978). Within a garden, each plant has its own interaction with its own, intensely
local, “micro-climate.” Thus, heterogeneity within culturally defined populations ought to be
taken into account in any cross-cultural investigation. Only rarely has this been done in
developmental research (Ross, Coley, Medin & Atran, 2003).
TRACKING A DYNAMICAL SYSTEM OVER TIME
One enormous challenge facing students of development in general, and human
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development in particular, is that they seek to explain the lawful changes in the properties of a
complex, interacting system in which different aspects of the system are themselves developing
at different rates. As a means of orienting ourselves in attempting to describe this process of
growth, it is useful to employ a framework proposed by Emde and Harmon (1976) who in turn
were influenced by what Spitz (1958) called genetic field theory. Emde and Harmon’s basic
proposal was to study developmental change as the emergent synthesis of several major factors
interacting over time. In the course of their interactions, the dynamic relations among these
factors appear to give rise to qualitative rearrangements in the organization of behavior that
Emde and his colleagues referred to as bio-behavioral shifts. Cole and Cole (1989) expanded on
this notion by referring to bio-social-behavioral shifts because, as the work of Emde and
colleagues shows quite clearly, every big-behavioral shift involves changes in relations between
children and their social world as an integral part of the changing relations between their
biological makeup and their behavior. Cole and Cole also emphasized that the interactions out of
which development emerges always occur in cultural contexts, thereby implicating all of the
basic contributors to development that a cultural approach demands.
In this section, I present a series of examples illustrating how culture enters into the
process of development, focusing on major developmental periods and bio-social-behavioral
shifts between periods. In order to keep this chapter within the scope of normal developmental
study, I choose examples from broad age periods that, while perhaps not universal stages of
development, are very widely recognized as such in a variety of cultures (B. Whiting & Edwards,
1988). The examples have been chosen for a variety of reasons. In some cases, my goal is to
illustrate one or another universal process through which culture enters into the constitution of
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developmental stages and the process of change. In other cases, my examples are chosen to
highlight the particular impact of particular configurations of cultural mediation. Yet other
examples highlight the special difficulties scientists must cope with when they focus on culture
in development.
Prenatal Development
It might seem capricious to begin an examination of cultural influences on development
with the prenatal period. After all, the child does not appear to be in contact with the
environment until birth. This view is implicit in Leiderman, Tulkin, and Rosenfeld's (1977)
introduction to Culture and Infancy, which begins with the assertion that "the human
environment is inescapably social. From the moment of birth, human infants are dependent on
others for biological survival" (p. 1). A little reflection will reveal that the same can be said of
prenatal development, with the proviso that the child's experience is, for the most part, mediated
by the biological system of the mother. We need the proviso "for the most part" because there is
increasing evidence that prenatal humans are sensitive to, and are modified by, the language
spoken in the environment of the mother (Lecanuet, Graniere-Deferre, Jacquet, & DeCasper,
2000; Mehler, Dupoux, Nazzi, & Dehaene-Lambertz, 1996).
The best documented way in which the cultural organization of the mother's experience
influences the development of her child is through the selection of food and other substances that
she ingests. Current public attention to the devastating effects of alcohol, cigarette, and drug
ingestion provides an obvious and painful reminder of cultural effects on prenatal development
with long-term consequences (for a summary, see Cole, Cole, & Lightfoot, 2005, ch3, p. 85ff).
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At a more mundane level, research in both industrialized and non-industrialized societies
demonstrates that beliefs about appropriate foods for expectant mothers are quite variable in
ways that are likely to influence such important indicators of development as birth weight and
head size. In one of the few intra-cultural studies on this topic, Jeans, Smith, and Stearns (1955)
compared the health of babies born to mothers whose diets were judged as either "fair to good"
or "poor to very poor." The women were all from a single rural area and did not differ in any
indices of social class; it was their choice of foods that differed. The mothers judged as having
fair to good diets had markedly healthier babies. When social class does differ, and with it the
associated nutritional status of mothers and their offspring, the consequences can be devastating
(Pollitt, Saco-Pollitt, Jahari, Husaini, & Huang, 2000).
In a survey of the eating habits of people from non industrialized societies, Mead and
Newton (1967) reported on a number of cases in which beliefs about pregnancy reduced the
supply of protein and other food that modern medicine considers important to prenatal growth. In
some societies the banning of food extends to kinds that we consider staples including various
kinds of meat, eggs, fish, and milk. For example, the Siriono of South America do not allow
women to eat the meat of various animals and birds that are a part of other people's diets because
they are afraid that characteristics of the animals women eat while pregnant will be transferred to
their unborn children (Holmburg, 1950, cited in Mead & Newton, 1967).
There is also reasonably good evidence that pregnant women who inhabit stressful
environments have more irritable babies (Chisholm, 1989; Susman et al., 2001). For example,
Chisholm has shown that Navajo women who live within Navajo communities rather than Anglo
areas have less irritable babies. Chisholm provided suggestive data implicating high blood
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pressure resulting from the stress of living in fast paced and generally unsupportive urban centers
dominated by Anglos as the cause of increased infant irritability.
With the advent of modern medical technologies there is an obvious new source of
cultural influence on prenatal development through genetic screening techniques, especially the
ability to learn the sex of the expected child. In a number of countries selective abortion of
females is being reported, where previously female infanticide practices were delayed until the
child made its appearance (Sharma, 2003).
Birth: The First Major Bio-Social-Behavioral Shift
The realignment of biological, behavioral, and social factors at birth makes it perhaps the
most dramatic bio-social-behavioral shift in all of development. There is ample evidence of great
cultural variation in the organization of the birthing process (Newburn, 2003), but it is also the
case that this fundamental transition provides some of the clearest evidence of universal
mechanisms relating culture to development (Richardson & Guttmacher, 1967).
When babies emerge from the birth canal and the umbilical cord is cut, their automatic
supply of oxygen and nutrients comes to an abrupt halt. Neonates are no longer bound to their
environments through a direct biological connection. Following birth, even essential biological
processes occur indirectly--they are mediated by culture and other human beings. The baby’s
food no longer arrives predigested through the mother’s bloodstream, but neither, generally
speaking, is it raw. Rather, it is transformed by a preparative process that is neither purely
biological nor purely natural, a process that has been shaped as an integral part of the cultural
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history of the group.
In order to survive in an environment mediated by culture, the baby must act on the
nurturing environment in a qualitatively different way than was true before birth. This is not to
say that the baby is ever inactive. With the beginning heartbeat early in embryogenesis, the
organism becomes and remains active until it dies. Without such activity during the prenatal
period, more complicated neural circuits needed for coordinated movement and thought could
not develop adequately. However, the effects of fetal activity on the environment inside and
outside its mother's womb are minimal.
Following birth, changes in babies' impact on their environments are no less marked than
changes in the way the environment acts on them. They make urgent, vocal demands on their
caregivers. They become social actors who re-order the social relationships among the people
around them. At birth, development becomes a co-constructive process in which both the social
environment and the child are active agents (Valsiner, 2000).
From existing ethnographic evidence, we know that both the mother's and child's
experiences at birth vary considerably across societies of the world according to cultural
traditions that prescribe the procedures to be followed in preparation for, during, and after the
birth. In a few societies, birthing is treated as a natural process that requires no special
preparation or care. Shostak (1981) recorded the autobiography a !Kung-san woman living in the
Kalahari desert in the middle of this century who reported that she observed her mother simply
walk a short way out of the village, sit down against a tree, and give birth to her brother. In most
societies, however, birthing is treated as dangerous (and in some places as an illness), requiring
specialized help (see Cole, Cole, & Lightfoot, 2003, p. 95, for additional examples and
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references).
Rather than concentrate on the potential consequences of these cultural variations in
birthing practices, I focus on the way that birth provides evidence of a universal mechanism of
cultural mediation of development— the process through which the ideal side of culture is
transformed into material-cultural organization of the child's environment. This example (taken
from the work of pediatrician Mcfarlane, 1977) also demonstrates in a particularly clear fashion
White's point that culture provides a specifically human form of temporal continuity.
Figure 2 presents in schematic form five different time scales simultaneously operating at
the moment at which parents see their newborn for the first time. The vertical ellipse represents
the events immediately surrounding birth, which occurs at the point marked by the vertical line.
At the top of the figure is what might be called physical time, or the history of the universe that
long precedes the appearance of life on earth.
--------------------Figure 2a/b about here
-----------------------------
The bottom four time lines correspond to the developmental domains that, according to the
cultural psychological framework espoused here, simultaneously serve as major constraints for
human development (Wertsch, 1985). The second line represents phylogenetic time, the history
of life on earth, a part of which constitutes the biological history of the newborn individual. The
third line represents cultural-historical time, the residue of which is the child's cultural heritage.
The fourth line represents ontogeny, the history of a single human being, which is the usual
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object of psychologists' interest. The fifth line represents the moment-to-moment time of lived
human experience, the event called "being born" (from the perspective of the child) or "having a
baby" (from the perspective of the parents) in this case. Four kinds of genesis are involved:
phylogenesis, cultural-historical genesis, ontogenesis, and microgenesis, with each lower level
embedded in the level above it.
Macfarlane's example reminds us to keep in mind that not one but two ontogenies must
be represented in place of the single ontogeny in Figure 2a. That is, at a minimum one needs a
mother and a child interacting in a social context for the process of birth to occur and for
development to proceed. These two ontogenies are coordinated in time by the simultaneous
structuration provided by phylogeny and culture (Figure 2b).
Now consider the behaviors of the adults when they first catch sight of their newborn
child and discover if the child is male or female. Typical comments include "I shall be worried to
death when she's eighteen." or "She can't play rugby." In each of these examples, the adults
interpret the biological characteristics of the child in terms of their own past (cultural)
experience. In the experience of English men and women living in the mid-20th century, it could
be considered common knowledge that girls do not play rugby and that when they enter
adolescence they will be the object of boys' sexual attention, putting them at various kinds of
risk. Using this information derived from their cultural past and assuming that the world will be
very much for their daughters what it has been for them, parents project probable futures for their
children. This process is depicted in Figure 2b by following the arrows from the mother to the
cultural past of the mother to the cultural future of the baby to the present adult treatment of the
baby.
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Of crucial importance to understanding the contribution of culture in constituting
development is the fact that the parents' (purely ideal) projection of their children's future,
derived from their memory of their cultural past, becomes a fundamentally important material
constraint organizing the child's life experiences in the present. This rather abstract, nonlinear
process is what gives rise to the well-known phenomenon that even adults totally ignorant of the
real gender of a newborn will treat the baby quite differently depending on its symbolic or
cultural gender. Adults literally create different material forms of interaction based on
conceptions of the world provided by their cultural experience when, for example, they bounce
boy infants (those wearing blue clothing) and attribute manly virtues to them while they treat girl
infants (those wearing pink clothing) in a gentle manner and attribute beauty and sweet
temperaments to them (Rubin, Provezano, & Luria, 1974). Similar results are obtained even if
the child is viewed in utero through ultrasound (Sweeney & Bradbard, 1988).
Macfarlane's example also demonstrates that the social and the cultural aspects of the
child’s environment cannot be reduced to a single “source of development” although the social
and the cultural are generally conflated in two-factor theories of development, such as those
presented schematically in Figure 1. Culture in this case refers to remembered forms of activity
deemed appropriate to one's gender as an adolescent and as an infant, whereas social refers to the
people whose behavior is conforming to the given cultural pattern. This example also motivates
the special emphasis placed on the social origins of higher psychological functions by
developmental scientists who adopt the notion of culture presented here (Cole, 2002; Rogoff,
2003, Valsiner, 2000; Vygotsky, 1987; Wertsch, 1985). As Macfarlane's transcripts clearly
demonstrate, human nature is social in a sense different from the sociability of other species.
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Only a culture-using human being can reach into the cultural past, project it into the (ideal or
conceptual) future, and then carry that ideal or conceptual future back into the present to create
the sociocultural environment of the newcomer.
In addition, this example helps us to understand the ways in which culture contributes to
both continuity and discontinuity in individual development. In thinking about their babies'
futures these parents are assuming that the "way things have always been is the way things will
always be" calling to mind White's telling image (p. 00 above) that, temporally, the culturally
constituted mind "is not a succession of disconnected episodes, but a continuum extending to
infinity in both directions, from eternity to eternity." In this manner, culture is the medium that
allows people to project the past into the future, providing an essential basis of psychological
continuity.
This assumption, of course, is sometimes wrong. The invention of new ways to exploit
energy or new media of representation, or simple changes in custom, may sufficiently disrupt the
existing cultural order to be a source of significant developmental discontinuity. As an example,
in the 1950s American parents who assumed that their daughters would not be soccer players at
the age of 16, would have been correct. But by 1990, a great many American girls were playing
soccer.
I know of no recordings equivalent to Macfarlane's from very different cultures, but an
interesting account of birthing among the Zinacanteco of south-central Mexico appears to show
similar processes at work. In their summary of developmental research among the Zinacanteco,
Greenfield, Brazelton, and Child’s (1989, p. 177) report a man's account of his son's birth at
which the son "was given three chilies to hold so that it would . . . know to buy chili when it
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grew up. It was given a billhood, a digging stick, an axe, and a [strip of] palm so that it would
learn to weave palm." Girls are given weaving sticks, in anticipation of one of their central
cultural roles as adults. The future orientation of differential treatment of the babies is not only
present in ritual; it is coded in the Zinacantecan saying, "For in the newborn baby is the future of
our world."
Infancy
It has long been recognized that there is an intimate link between relative immaturity of
the human newborn, which will require years of nurturing before approaching something akin to
self-sufficiency, and the fact that human beings inhabit a culturally mediated environment. Both
facts are distinctive characteristics of our species. Infancy (from a Latin word meaning one who
does not speak) is widely, if not universally, considered a distinctive period of development that
extends from birth until approximately the age of 2 1/2.4
Getting on a schedule. The earliest, essential condition for continued development
following birth is that the child and those who care for him or her must become coordinated in
such a manner that the adults are able to accumulate enough resources to accommodate the
newcomer. In this process, there is the intricate interplay between the initial characteristics of
children and the cultural environment into which they are born, that Super and Harkness (1986,
2002) refer to as the developmental niche.
A clear-cut example of a cultural influence on the way the process of coordination is
achieved is afforded by the contrasting patterns of sleep in the months following birth by
American urban dwelling and rural Kenyan (Kipsigis) children (Super & Harkness, 1997).
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Among children in the United States, there is a marked shift toward the adult day/night cycle a
few weeks after birth; by the end of the second week, they are averaging about 8 l/2 hours of
sleep between the hours of 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. Between 4 and 8 months the longest sleep episode
increases from about 4 to 8 hours a night. The pressures toward sleeping through the night are
not difficult to identify. American urban dwellers live by the clock. In an era in which a very
large proportion of mothers as well as fathers have jobs outside the home, they must leave the
house at a specified time, and the child must be ready at that time. As a consequence of the
child's need for sleep, the adults' needs to get to work, and the adults' desires to spend some
leisure time without the child to worry about, parents are likely to push as hard as possible for the
child to eat and sleep when it is convenient for them.
Among Kipsigis infants, the course of getting on a schedule is very different. At night
they sleep with their mothers and are permitted to nurse on demand. During the day they are
strapped to their mothers' backs, accompanying them on their daily rounds of farming, household
chores, and social activities. They do a lot of napping while their mothers go about their work. At
1 month, the longest period of sleep reported for babies in the Kipsigis sample was 3 hours, and
their longest sleep episode increases little during the first 8 months of postnatal life.
At one level these observations are banal. They show only that children fit into the
community into which they are born. But a seemingly simple case can be useful when it comes to
analyzing more complex cases, and even this simple case contains some important lessons. First,
the shaping process that produces different patterns of sleeping is indicative of more than a
temporary convenience. As adults, assuming there is little change in Kipsigis life circumstances,
the children socialized into a flexible sleep schedule will themselves be more flexible than their
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American counterparts.
From sucking to nursing. In the 1940s Mead and Macgregor (1951) set out to test Gesell's
ideas about the relation between growth (maturation) and learning through cross-cultural
research. All biologically normal children are born with a sucking reflex that can be triggered by
many different stimuli. But Mead and Macgregor argued that basic principles of the way that
cultures interweave learning and maturation can be seen in the way that the change from reflex
sucking to nursing is organized and in the long-term behavioral implications of this organization.
Some cultures, they noted, take advantage of the sucking reflex by putting the baby to the
mother's breast immediately to stimulate the flow of milk, although the baby remains hungry;
others provide a wet nurse; others will give the baby a bottle; and so on. In an immediate sense,
all of these routes to mature nursing are equally adequate. However, they have different
implications in the short, and even the long, run. Mead and Macgregor point to one potential
short-run effect; babies who are bottle fed until their mother's milk comes in may elaborate
nursing behaviors that interfere with breast-feeding, changing both short-run nutritional and
social-interactional experiences. More recent research has shown that mothers who breast feed
their children also engage in more touching and gazing at their child than bottle fed babies,
indicating that the choice of feeding method influences interpersonal mother-infant interactions
(Lavelli & Poli, 1998).
Longer term effects arise from the interconnection of the adults' choice of feeding method
and larger life patterns. For example, if a mother who stays at home gives her baby a bottle
because she believes that bottled milk is more nutritious, the use of a bottle rather than breastfeeding may have no differential impact on the development of social relationships between
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mother and child (although it may produce a tendency to obesity, which can have other long-term
effects). However, if the baby is bottle fed because the mother works at a factory and must return
to work in a week and knows that the baby will be placed in infant day care, the bottle feeding at
birth will become part of a life pattern in which the mother and baby have a less intimate
relationship and the baby becomes accustomed at an early age to social interactions with peers
and several caregivers.
The future in the present: A cross-cultural example. To link the mechanisms of cultural
mediation displayed in Macfarlane's conversations of parents greeting their newborns to
examples of cultural effects discussed in later sections, I selected an example from work by
Bornstein and his colleagues on the interactions between American and Japanese mothers with
their 5-month-old offspring (Bornstein, Toda, Azuma, Tamis-LeMonda, & Ogino, 1990;
Bornstein, Tal, & Tamis- LeMonda, 1991). The focus of this work was the way that mothers
living in New York and in Tokyo respond to their infants' orientations to events in the
environment or to the mothers themselves. Using a variety of measures of infant behaviors (level
of activity, the rate at which they habituate to the sight of their mothers' faces or objects in the
environment, the level of vocalization of various kinds), Bornstein and his colleagues established
the fact that infants in the two cultures behaved in similar manners and in this important sense,
provided similar starting points for their mothers' responses to them. Of particular importance in
light of maternal behaviors, infants from the two societies displayed equal levels of orientation to
their mothers and to physical objects in the environment.
Despite the fact that these infants represented equivalent stimuli in the objective sense
provided by the researchers' behavioral measurements, there was a distinctive difference in the
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way that the mothers responded to their infants. American mothers were more responsive when
their children oriented to physical objects in the environment; Japanese mothers were more
responsive when their infants oriented to them. Moreover, the mothers made overt attempts to
change the locus of their infants' orientation when it did not fit their preference; American
mothers diverted children's attention from themselves to objects, whereas Japanese mothers
showed the opposite pattern.
Once again we see a pervasive feature of cultural influences on development. Japanese
maternal behavior is part of a system that highly values a strong dependence of the child on the
mother whereas American maternal behavior is part of a system that values independence. These
different value orientations make little difference to the welfare of the children at 5 months of
age; both forms of interaction are caring and supportive. But they are part of a system of
constraints on the children that do make a difference as the child grows older. Bornstein and his
colleagues note that as toddlers, Japanese and American children do not differ in their global
language and play skills. But they do differ in the kinds of language and the kinds of play they are
best at in ways that correspond to the differences evident in their mothers' behaviors at the age of
5 months. The Japanese pattern of promoting interpersonal over object orientations in early
mother-child interactions is also reported for a variety of sub-Saharan African societies (Mohanty
& Perregaux, 1997).
A shift in socioemotional and cognitive development at 6 to 9 months. The period from 6
to 9 months of age is strategically useful for illustrating several points about culture and
development for several reasons. First, there is a good deal of evidence pointing to a universal
and distinctive reorganization of the overall way in which children interact with their
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environments at this time, illustrating the stage-transformation process that we referred to earlier
as a bio-social-behavioral shift (Cole, Cole, & Lightfoot, 2005, Chapter 5). Second, there is a
good deal of cross-cultural data that allow us to address both general and culture-specific ways in
which this change occurs. The cross-cultural data are also interesting for the general
methodological problems of cross-cultural research that they raise as for their substantive
contributions to understanding the role of culture in development.
The universal changes occurring at 6 to 9 months of age are apparent in all parts of the
bio-social-behavioral shift. With respect to the biological strand, we find that new patterns of
electrical activity, associated with increased levels of myelinization, arise in several parts of the
brain (Bell, 2001; Huttenlocher, 2002). The affected areas include the frontal lobes (which play a
crucial role in deliberate action and planning), the cerebellum (which is important in controlling
movement and balance), and the hippocampus (important in memory). In addition, the muscles
have become stronger and the bones harder than they were at birth, providing support for
increasingly vigorous movement.
Increased motor skills associated with these changes allow children to move around
objects, pick them up, taste them, and attempt to use them for various purposes. This increased
exploratory capacity has been shown to have important psychological consequences because they
are important in enabling the infant to discover the invariant properties of objects. Campos and
his colleagues (2000), for example, have shown that children given extensive experience moving
around in baby walkers before they could locomote on their own displayed improved social,
cognitive and emotional development, referential gestural communication, wariness of heights,
the perception of self-motion, distance perception, spatial search, and spatial coding strategies.
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For these new forms of experience to have a cumulative impact, infants must be able to
remember them. Evidence from a number of sources ( Mandler, 2004; Mandler & McDonough,
1995; Schacter & Moskovitch, 1984) indicates that between 6 and 9 months of age children show
a markedly enhanced ability to recall prior events without being reminded of them. Closely
related is a shift in the propensity to categorize artificially constructed arrays of objects in terms
of conceptual properties (Mandler, 1997; Starkey, 1981). Taken together, these increased
memory and categorizing abilities increase the degree to which children can structure
information from past experience, enabling them to deal more effectively with current
circumstances. The combination of increased mobility and increased remembering also brings
increased awareness of the dangers and discomforts the world has in store. These changes, in
turn, are associated with changes in children's social relationships with caregivers about whom
children have begun to build stable expectations.
Once children begin to crawl and walk, caregivers can no longer directly prevent mishaps,
no matter how carefully they arrange the environment. Newly mobile babies keep a watchful eye
on their caregivers for feedback about how they are doing—called social referencing (Campos &
Stenberg, 1981). At the same time, children become wary of strangers and become upset when
their primary caregivers leave them. This complex of apparently related social behaviors has led
a number of psychologists to hypothesize that a new quality of emotional relationship between
caregiver and child emerges, called attachment.
Attachment. Although various aspects of the complex of changes that occur between 6
and 9 months of age have been investigated cross-culturally (e.g., Kagan, 1977, reported data
supporting the hypothesis of cross cultural universals with respect to various aspects of
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remembering and object permanence), by far the greatest amount of data has been collected on
cultural contributions to attachment, so it is on this issue that I focus in attempting to specify the
role of culture in development during this age period.
Despite the fact that there are competing theories to account for how and why children
form special emotional bonds with their caregivers (see Cassidy & Shaver, 1999, for a
representative sample of views), current research still takes as its starting point Bowlby's (1969)
attempts to explain why extended periods of separation from parents are upsetting to small
children, even though they are maintained in adequate circumstances from a purely physical point
of view. His explanation, briefly stated, was that one has to interpret contemporary forms of
behavior in terms of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness in which our species evolved.
Behaviors that might seem irrational today were once crucial to survival, becoming a part of the
human biological repertoire through natural selection.
Bowlby hypothesized that attachment arises during the first year of life as a way of
maintaining a dynamic equilibrium between safety and exploration controlled by the motherchild dyad. When the distance between mother and child is too great, one or the other gets upset
and seeks the other out. When there is too much proximity, one of the partners gets bored or
annoyed, resulting in increased distance. Described in this way, the development of attachment
would seem to be a necessary, universal biological requirement to be found in all cultures under
normal circumstances because it is a species-specific consequence of our phylogenetic heritage.
However, the fact of universality (should it be demonstrated) would in no way contradict the
principle of cultural mediation. Rather, it forces a closer look at precisely how the formation of
attachment is mediated and how that pattern of mediation fits into the overall life course of
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human beings reared in varying cultural-historical circumstances.
During the past two decades, there has been an increasingly heated dispute on precisely
this point. This dispute is worth examining in some detail because it is typical of difficulties
facing the use of cross-cultural approaches to culture and development in a great many other
cases. Appropriately, the studies that began the modern debate on culture and attachment arose
from comparison of the behaviors mother-child pairs observed in their homes in the United
States and Uganda by Ainsworth (1967; Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). Ainsworth
was struck by the fact that children in both cultural groups exhibited similar patterns of
attachment-related behavior (distress during brief, everyday, separation from their mothers, fear
of strangers, and use of the mother as a secure base from which to explore). However, the
Ugandan children seemed to express these behavior patterns more readily and intensely than did
the American children Ainsworth studied. As a means of provoking attachment-related behaviors
in American children, Ainsworth devised the Strange Situation, a sequence of interactional
episodes acted out by the mother in a specially designed laboratory environment that typically
resembles a doctor's waiting room. It is important to note that she assumed that this artificial
situation would evoke levels of anxiety in American children roughly comparable to those
evoked among Ugandan children in the everyday settings she had observed so that she could
have comparable phenomena to study.
The standardized Strange Situation consists of eight phases, each of which lasts 3 minutes
or less: After giving instructions (Phase 1), the experimenter leaves the child and caregiver alone
(Phase 2). Then the experimenter returns (Phase 3), the caregiver leaves (Phase 4), the caregiver
returns (Phase 5), and then leaves the child alone (Phase 6), after which the experimenter returns
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(Phase 7), and finally the caregiver returns (Phase 8).
As a way to establish the antecedents and consequences of different qualities of
attachment, Ainsworth and her colleagues constructed three categories, based heavily on how the
infant reacts when the caregiver returns after an absence:
Type A (anxious-avoidant) children turn away or look away when their
caregivers return, instead of seeking closeness and comfort.
Type B (securely attached) children go to their caregivers, calm down quickly
after their early upset, and soon resume playing.
Type C (anxious-resistant) children are often upset while their mothers are with
them just as a result of being in the strange environment. They become very
upset when their caregivers leave, and they simultaneously seek closeness and
resist contact when the caregivers return.
During the 1970s and continuing to the present time there has been a great deal of
research on the behavior produced in this situation, its antecedents, and its sequelae (see the
articles in Cassidy and Shaver, 1999, or for reviews, leading areas of contention, and references
to additional primary sources of information).
For at least two decades there has been sharp disagreement among developmentalists
concerning the extent to which attachment is influenced by cultural variations. Some have argued
that there are important cultural variations in attachment and that the very notion of human
relatedness which are a part of the concept of attachment are culturally specific (Rothbaum et al.,
2000). Others have argued that cultural variations are the result of insufficiently rigorous
adherence to the procedures for administering the test, and still others have argued that
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attachment behaviors display a universal tendency toward secure attachment, but variations in the
way that insecure attachments are manifested (van IJzendoorn & Sagi, 1999).
A number of early studies appeared to point toward cultural variation as the norm. For
example, several decades ago, children who grew up on some Israeli kibbutzim (collective farms)
were reared children communally from an early age. Although they saw their parents daily, the
adults who looked after them were usually not family members. When at the age of 11 to 14
months, such communally raised children were placed in the strange situation with either a parent
or a caregiver, many of them became very upset; half were classified as anxious/resistant, and
only 37 percent appeared to be securely attached (Sagi et al, 1985). Sagi and his colleagues
suspected that the high rate of insecure attachment among these children was caused by the fact
that the communal caregivers could not respond promptly to the individual children in the their
care, and by staffing rotations that did not allow the adults to provide the children in their care
with individualized attention. To test this hypothesis, these researchers compared the attachment
behaviors of children raised in traditional kibbutzim, where children slept in a communal
dormitory at night, with those of children from kibbutzim where children returned to sleep in
their parents’ home at night (Sagi et al, 1994). Once again they found a low level of secure
attachments among the children who slept in communal dormitories. Those who slept at home
displayed a significantly higher level of secure attachments, supporting the idea that cultural
differences in the opportunities for sensitive caregiving accounted for cultural differences in
attachment quality.
A low percentage of securely attached babies has also been observed among northern
German children. Researchers in one study found that 49 percent of the 1-year-olds tested were
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anxious-avoidant and only 33 percent were securely attached (Grossmann et al., 1985). Having
made extensive observations of northern German home life, these researchers were able to reject
the possibility that a large proportion of northern German parents were insensitive or indifferent
to their children. Rather, they contended, these parents were adhering to a cultural value that calls
for the maintenance of a relatively large interpersonal distance and to a cultural belief that babies
should be weaned from parental bodily contact as soon as they become mobile. The researchers
suggested that among northern German mothers, “the ideal is an independent, non-clinging infant
who does not make demands on the parents but rather unquestioningly obeys their commands”
(p. 253).
In Japan, Miyake and his colleagues found a large proportion of anxious/resistant infants
among traditional Japanese families, but no anxious/avoidant infants at all (Miyake et al., 1985).
Miyake and his colleagues explained this pattern by pointing out that traditional Japanese
mothers rarely leave their children in the care of anyone else, and they behave toward them in
ways that foster a strong sense of dependence. Consequently, the experience of being left alone
with a stranger is unusual and upsetting to these children. This interpretation is supported by a
study of nontraditional Japanese families in which the mothers were pursuing careers requiring
them to leave their children in the care of others (Durrett et al., 1984). Among the children of
these mothers, the distribution of the basic patterns of attachment was similar to that seen in the
United States.
More recently, the evidence of cultural variation has been brought into question and
balanced by evidence that there is a general tendency in all societies for children to become
attached to their caregivers. An influential review of research on attachment spanning many
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cultures conducted by van IJzendoorn and Sagi reported that, while the proportion of children
displaying one or another pattern of attachment behaviors may vary in a small number of cases ,
the overall pattern of results are remarkably consistent with Ainsworth’s initial findings and
Bowlby’s theory (van IJzendoorn & Sagi, 1999, p. 731) (See Figure 2).
Insert Figure 2 About Here
Moreover, they argue that the possible universality of attachment in human relations does not
exclude the possibility that attachment behaviors develop in specific ways that depend on the
cultural niche in which the child has to survive (van Ijzendoorn & Sagi, 2001). The challenge to
contemporary developmentalists who focus on attachment is to provide a more finely tuned
account of when and where cultural variations are likely to be important within the overall
common human heritage.
Language Development
Two major, and related, questions have organized discussion of language development
and its relation to other aspects of development. First, the acquisition of language has been one of
the major battlefields on which the nature-nurture controversy has been fought: Must language be
acquired through a process of culturally mediated learning or constructive interaction like any
other human cognitive capacity, or is language a specialized, bounded domain (module) that
needs only to be triggered to spring into action? (See Bruner, 1983; Elman et al., 1996; Pinker,
1995, for discussions of the contending viewpoints.) Second, what role does the acquisition of
language play in the development of thought? If language is a structurally distinct module, then
there should be no particular relation between language and thought. On the other hand, insofar
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as culturally organized experience is seen to be essential to the acquisition of language, then
language, thought, and development are likely to be intimately connected.
In contrast to the research on attachment, but like the research on the earliest adaptations
of infants to the culturally scripted schedules into which they must fit, the research on language
depends more on the study of natural variations over and across cultural circumstances, and less
on standardized test procedures.
No one believes that language can be acquired in the total absence of interaction with
other human beings who speak a language. Rather, the position of those who adopt a nativist
position with respect to language assumes that its development proceeds akin to the development
of any bodily organ: Any environment that sustains the life of the social group is adequate to
produce the development of language without any special attention needing to be paid to the
process. With respect to human beings, the environment that sustains life is one that exists in the
medium of culture, which leads one to attempt to specify more carefully what minimum
conditions of culturally mediated interaction between children and adults are sufficient to support
development of the language organ.
Two categories of cases in which children are reared in conditions that systematically
reduce their immersion in culture help to specify the universal lower limits of cultural support
needed to sustain language development. The first is the well-known case of Genie (Curtiss,
1977). Genie was locked in a room by herself sometime before her second birthday. She lived
chained by day to a potty and trussed up in a sleeping bag at night for 11 years, during which
time she had virtually no normal linguistic input and only a minimum of social interactions that
could be considered culturally normal in any culture. When she was liberated from these horrible
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circumstances at the age of 13 she was in pitiful shape: She was emaciated and very short. She
could not walk normally, rarely made a sound, and was not toilet trained. Although on testing she
showed remarkable skills for spatial analysis, she had failed to acquire language. Nor did she
recover from her many years of severely deprived existence; she acquired a small vocabulary and
some forms of appropriate social interaction, but her behavior remained abnormal, despite
attempts at therapeutic intervention. Whether this failure should be attributed to the passing of a
critical period of language acquisition, or to the inability of the adults who cared for her to create
an appropriate environment, has been a matter of contention (Rymer, 1993).
There are several intermediate cases between the extreme deprivation resulting in
development without language or culture (the case of Genie) and the situation of the vast
majority of children. One particularly instructive situation arises among children born deaf to
hearing parents who do not believe that it is useful for their children to sign, insisting instead that
they learn to interact through oral language (Goldin-Meadow, 1985; Goldin-Meadow, Butcher,
Mylander, & Dodge, 1994 ). These children are reared in an environment that is rich in culturally
mediated social interactions (including linguistic mediation), which include the child and proceed
very much as they would if the child could hear; people eat meals together, the children are given
baths and put to bed, they go to the store, and are toilet trained. Thus, they live in a world
suffused with meaning; it is only the linguistic behavior that fills the gaps between movements
and provides accounts of the rationale and prior history of those actions that they are missing.
Under these circumstances, children are known spontaneously to begin to employ home
sign, a kind of communication through gesture. Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues showed that
home sign acquired in these circumstances exhibits a number of properties also found in the early
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stages of natural language acquisition. Children who start signing in the absence of adult sign
language knowers begin to make two, three, and longer sign sequences around their second
birthdays, at about the same time that hearing children create multiword sentences. Significantly,
Goldin-Meadow reported that these deaf children were able to embed sign sentences within each
other ("You/Susan give me/Abe cookie round."). This kind of behavior reveals that the children
could engage in recursion, a form of communicative behavior that is characteristic of all human
languages and absent from the communicative system of chimpanzees or other creatures, even
following extensive training. Moreover, Goldin-Meadow and Mylander (1996) showed that the
forms that home sign takes appears to be the same in very different cultural/linguistic
environments: Chinese and American deaf children showed the same patterns of early gesture
sentences, leading them to conclude that the development of these gesture systems are “buffered
against large variations in environmental conditions and in this sense can be considered
‘innate’”(p. 281).
However, the language development of deaf children in hearing homes comes to a halt at
this point in the absence of normal language experience. Unless such children are provided
access to some form of language as a part of the culturally organized environments they
participate in, they will not develop the more subtle features of language on which sustainable
cultural formations depend. The cultural medium is simply too thin to support the development
of fully mature language. It is important to add that at the other extreme, where children have
access to language, but not to culturally organized activity, language development also fails to
take place. Children who have been left alone for a long time with a television set broadcasting in
a foreign language do not acquire that language.
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It seems an inescapable conclusion from this kind of evidence that, in order for children
to acquire more than the barest rudiments of language, they must not only hear (or see) language
but they must also participate in the activities that language is helping to create. In everyday
activity, words are essential material-ideal artifacts, by means of which people establish and
maintain coordination, filling in the gaps between gestures and other actions, and making
possible the fine tuning of expectations and interpretations.
Bruner (1982, pp. 8-9) referred to the social interactional constraints of ongoing everyday
activities as formats. The format, he wrote:
is a rule-bound microcosm in which the adult and child do things to and with each other.
In its most general sense, it is the instrument of patterned human interaction. Since
formats pattern communicative interaction between infant and caretaker before lexicogrammatical speech begins, they are crucial vehicles in the passage from communication
to language.
Later he added that once they become conventionalized, formats seem to have a kind of
exteriority that allows them to act as constraints on the actions that occur within them. In this
respect, Bruner's notion of format is very similar to Nelson's (1981,1986) concept of generalized
event schemes called scripts ("sequentially organized structures of causally and temporally linked
acts with the actors and objects specified in the most general way") mentioned earlier (Nelson,
1981, p. 101). In effect, these event-level cultural artifacts, embodied in the vocabulary and
habitual actions of adults, act as structured media within which children can experience the
covariation of language and action while remaining coordinated in a general way with culturally
organized forms of behavior. In the process of negotiating such events with enculturated
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caregivers, children discover the vast range of meanings encoded in their language at the same
time as they find new ways to carry out their own intentions.
Bruner (1982, p. 15) captured the cultural view of language development when he wrote
that language acquisition cannot be reduced to
either the virtuoso cracking of a linguistic code, or the spinoff of ordinary cognitive
development, or the gradual takeover of adults' speech by the child through some
impossible inductive tour de force. It is rather, a subtle process by which adults artificially
arrange the world so that the child can succeed culturally by doing what comes naturally,
and with others similarly inclined.
Cross-cultural research on language interaction supplements intra-cultural studies by
laying bare the incredible diversity of cultural modes of involving children in adult-run activities.
Participation in culturally organized activities appears be to just as necessary as phylogenetically
inherited maturational constraints for children to acquire language.Arguments over the
importance of the environment in language acquisition gave rise to a large literature on the
different ways that parents structure children's activities (see, e.g., de Villiers & de Villiers,
1978). Parents in many societies adopt something akin to a baby-talk mode when speaking to
their children, before and while the children are acquiring language. Evidence available at the
time led Ferguson (1977) to speculate that a special baby talk register (using higher pitch and
intonation, simplified vocabulary, grammatically less complex sentences, and utterances
designed to highlight important aspects of the situation) is a universal, acquisition-enhancing
form of adult language socialization behavior. Cross-cultural data have shown that, although
adults everywhere speak to young children differently than they speak to older children and other
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adults, the particular form of baby talk involving simplified grammar and vocabulary
characteristic of middle-class American parents is not universal. There is some evidence that
other features of baby talk, such as the use of distinctive pitch and intonation, may be universal,
but the data on cultural variation remain sparse (Fernald, 1989).
In many societies, adults deliberately teach vocabulary, styles of address, and other
linguistic features. The Kaluli of Papua, New Guinea, for example, are reported to hold their
small infants facing away from them and toward other people while the mothers speak for them.
There are also subcultures within the United States (e.g., working class people in Baltimore,
Maryland; Miller, 1982) in which it is firmly believed that children must be explicitly taught
vocabulary, using quite rigid frames of the sort "How do you call this?" (see Schieffelin & Ochs,
1986, for a wide range of examples). However, although the adults involved in such practices
may believe that such special tailoring is helpful to their children's language acquisition, the data
indicate that significant benefits associated with deliberate teaching of language are found rather
rarely and in restricted domains (Snow, 1995).
The most secure overall generalization at this point is that culturally organized joint
activity that incorporates the child into the scene as a novice participant is one necessary
ingredient in language acquisition. Conversely, language plays a central role in the process of
children’s participation in culturally organized activities (Nelson, 2003; Rogoff, 2003).
Language bridges gaps in understanding between people, and allows them to coordinate in shared
activities. The words of a language, and the ways in which these words are used in everyday
contexts, provide children with ready-made templates to the meanings and distinctions that are
important in their community. As Brown (1965) phrased it, words are “invitations to form
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concepts.” This formulation points to a way in which cultural differences in language practices
can have differential effects on children’s development. At least in the United States, the more
adults talk with their children, the better children perform in tests of academic ability (Hart &
Risley, 1999).
So, the process of language acquisition, like the relation between culture and biology, is a
bi-directional one. The sociocultural niche into which a child is born provides the necessary
conditions for language to emerge and as children struggle to understand objects and social
relations in order to gain control over their environments and themselves, they recreate the
culture into which they are born, even as they reinvent the language of their forbearers.
Early Childhood
In contrast to infancy, which is a good candidate for a universally acknowledged stage of
development, there is some uncertainty about how one should divide later parts of the lifespan.
Whiting and Edwards (1988), following Mead (1935), divide the period between 2 ½ and 6 years
of age, often designated as early childhood, into two parts: 2- to 3-year olds are referred to as
“knee children,” who are kept close at hand but not continuously on the mother's lap or in a crib;
4- to 5-year-olds are referred to as “yard children,” because they can leave their mothers' sides
but are not allowed to wander far. In many modern, industrialized countries, children between 3
and 5 to 6 years of age spend part of every day in an environment designed to prepare them for
school, which has led this time of life to be called the preschool period.
The future in the present in early childhood. Children this age provide another clear
illustration of how adults bring the future into the present in shaping children's experiences and
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future development. Tobin, Wu, and Davidson (1989) conducted a comparative study of
preschool socialization in Hawaii, Japan, and China. They recorded classroom interactions that
they then showed to teachers and other audiences in all three countries, to evoke their
interpretations and basic cultural schemata relevant to the preschool child. Only the Japanese and
American data are discussed here.
When Tobin and his colleagues videotaped a day in the life of a Japanese preschool,
young Hiroki was acting up. He greeted the visitors by exposing his penis and waving it at them.
He initiated fights, disrupted other children's games, and made obscene comments. When
American preschool teachers observed the videotape they disapproved of Hiroki's behavior, his
teacher's handling of it, and many aspects of life in the Japanese classroom in general. His
teacher and other Japanese observers had a quite different interpretation. Starting first with the
overall ambience of the classroom, Americans were scandalized by the fact that there were 30
preschoolers and only one teacher in the classroom. How could this be in an affluent country like
Japan? They could not understand why Hiroki was not isolated as punishment.
The Japanese had a very different interpretation. First, while teachers acknowledged that
it would be very pleasant for them to have a smaller classroom, they believed it would be bad for
the children, who "need to have the experience of being in a large group in order to learn to relate
to lots of children in lots of kinds of situations" (Tobin et al., 1989, p. 37). When asked about
their ideal notion of class size, the Japanese teachers generally named 15 or more students per
teacher in contrast with the 4 to 8 preferred by American preschool teachers. When Japanese
preschool teachers observed a tape of an American preschool they worried for the children. "A
class that size seems kind of sad and under populated," one remarked. Another added, "I wonder
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how you teach a child to become a member of a group in a class that small" (p. 38).
Members of the two cultures also had very different interpretations of the probable
reasons for Hiroki's behavior. One American speculated that Hiroki misbehaved because he was
intellectually gifted and easily became bored. Not only did the Japanese reject this notion (on the
grounds that speed is not the same as intelligence), but they offered a different interpretation. To
them, such words as smart and intelligent are almost synonymous with well behaved and
praiseworthy, neither of which apply to Hiroki. Hiroki, they believed, had a dependency disorder.
Owing to the absence of a mother in the home, he did not know how to be properly dependent
and consequently, how to be sensitive to others and obedient. Isolating Hiroki, they reasoned,
would not help. Rather, he needed to learn to get along in his group and develop the proper
understanding in that context.
Tobin and his colleagues (1989, p. 24) comment on the Japanese view of their preschool
system and Hiroki's behavior as follows:
. . . Japanese teachers and Japanese society place [great value] on equality and the notion
that children's success and failure and their potential to become successful versus failed
adults has more to do with effort and character and thus with what can be learned and
taught in school than with raw inborn ability.
The Japanese who watched the tape disapproved of the promotion of individualism that they
observed in tapes of an American classroom, believing that "A child's humanity is realized most
fully not so much in his ability to be independent from the group as his ability to cooperate and
feel part of the group" (p. 39). One Japanese school administrator added:
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For my tastes there is something about the American approach [where children are asked
to explain their feelings when they misbehave] that is a bit too heavy, too adult like, too
severe and controlled for young children. (p. 53)
There are many interesting implications to be drawn from these observations, only a tiny
fraction of which are touched on here. However, in the present context my purpose is to relate
them to the situation such children will encounter as adults, in particular the situation that
Japanese boys will face should they pursue a career in the American pastime of baseball. This
point is made in a fascinating account of the fate of American baseball players who play in the
Japanese major leagues (R. Whiting, 1989). Despite their great skill, experience, and physical
size, American ballplayers generally have a very difficult time in Japan. There are many reasons
for their difficulties, but crucial is a completely different understanding of keys to success in this
team sport, a difference that mirrors differences in preschool education in the two cultures to an
amazing degree. The title of the book, You Gotta Have WA, pinpoints one key difference. Wa is
the Japanese word for group harmony, and, according to Whiting, it is what most clearly
differentiates Japanese baseball from the American game. Although American ballplayers
maintain that individual initiative and innate ability are the key ingredients to success, the
Japanese emphasize that "the individual was nothing without others and that even the most
talented people need constant direction" (p. 70). Linked to the emphasis on group harmony is an
equivalent emphasis on doryoku, the ability to persevere in the face of adversity as the key to
success, whereas Americans emphasized individual talent.
Whiting pointed out that the ideals of WA and doryoku are cornerstones not only of
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Japanese baseball, but of Japanese business as well.
WA is the motto of large multinational corporations, like Hitachi, while Sumimoto,
Toshiba, and other leading Japanese firms send junior executives on outdoor retreats,
where they meditate and perform spirit-strengthening exercises, wearing only loin-cloths
and headband with doryoku emblazoned on them. (p. 74)
Despite their acknowledged talent, American players, whose understanding of the sources
of success, the cultivation of which can clearly be seen in their preschool education, are generally
unable to submit to the Japanese way of doing things. In a remark that echoes poignantly on the
Japanese disapproval of the American emphasis on verbalizing and valuing personal feelings
over group harmony, one American ballplayer who had a long and acrimonious public dispute
with his manager was led to ask in desperation, "Don't you think that's going too far? What about
my feelings? I have my pride you know." To which the manager replied, "I understand your
feelings, however there are more important things."
Here again we see how culture creates an effect conditioned not by present necessity, but
by deep beliefs about "how things work"; an effect that has relatively minor consequences in the
present life of the child, but major effects in terms of the long-term organization of his or her
behavior.
Biology and Culture in Early Middle Childhood Conceptual Development
As noted above, the view that a great many developmental changes that psychologists
once attributed to environmentally induced learning are, in fact, highly constrained by biological
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heritage, has re-emerged to become influential in the developmental sciences. In its
contemporary form this view is expressed in terms of biologically controlled constraints on
development referred to in such terms as “mental modules, ” “core domains,” and “privileged
domains.” They are assumed by many to be innately specified and develop on a species-wide
maturational timetable, some appearing at or near birth. By this view, the role of culture is
restricted to speeding up or slowing down a fixed course of development (Carey & Spelke,
1994).
This emphasis on the importance of biological constraints began with Chomsky’s theory
of language acquisition, which included the view that while the specific surface forms a language
displays depend on cultural experience (French is different from Cantonese) the underlying deep
structure is the same (Chomsky, 1959, 1986; Skinner, 1957). He termed this (presumably
universal) maturational capacity a “Language Acquisition Device” or LAD. This view was
generalized by Fodor who coined the term “mental module” to refer to any “specialized,
encapsulated mental organ that has evolved to handle specific information types of particular
relevance to the species” (Elman et al., 1996, p. 36). Often, as in the case of language, mental
modules are associated with particular regions of the brain. Broca’s area, for example, is taken to
be the brain locus of language.
By this view, knowledge acquisition in a modularized domain, like language, do not
require extensive experience for its development; the role of the environment is merely to
“trigger” the corresponding module. Particularly important for considerations of culture and
development is the assertion that modular systems are “encapsulated,” by which is meant that
they rapidly produce mandatory outputs from given inputs (an example would be the perceptual
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illusion that a stick in half submerged in water is bent, even when the perceiver knows full well
that it is straight).
Many developmentalists who have been convinced of the existence of domain-specific,
biological constraints resist the notion of modularity, preferring instead to speak of “core” or
“privileged” domains of knowledge where biological constraints may provide “skeletal
principles” that bias developing children’s attention to relevant features of the domain, but are
not entirely encapsulated; rather, they require the infusion of cultural input to develop past a
rudimentary starting point (Chen & Siegler, 2000; Gelman, 1990; Gelman & Lucariello, 2002;
Hatano, 1997). This same argument has been made by neuroscientists focused on the brain-bases
of development who refer to themselves as “cultural biologists, e.g., Quartz & Sejnowksi, 2002).
From this position, whatever the phylogenetic constraints on development, they are not
encapsulated or entirely dedicated to a specific brain area, so when there is damage to the brain
early in life the functions that ordinarily become located there may appear in an entirely different
areas (Battro, 2000; Stiles et al., 2003).
Reviewing the literature on the development of core, or privileged domains, Hatano and
Inagaki (2002) argued that because innately specified knowledge is still skeletal it is essential to
study the ways in which cultural groups organize children’s experience to enhance, and perhaps
in some cases, to modify the knowledge endowed by evolution. I will review evidence
concerning the relation phylogenetic/biological and cultural-historical constraints in the
development of domain specific knowledge in two domains where there is considerable relevant
evidence -- naïve biology and naïve psychology.
The biological domain. In their work on the domain of biology, Hatano and
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Inagaki argue that skeletal principles are combined with (1) a mode of explanation (a
naïve theory) of living things in terms of their similarity to human beings
(personification) and (2) the idea that living phenomena are produced by a vital
principle, as distinct from a purely chemical or physical force (vitalism).
These skeletal principles and modes of explanation operate in a three way
relationship between food/water, activeness/liveliness (actively taking in vital power
from food), and growth in size or number (the ingestion of vital power produces
individual growth and production of offspring. This mode of reasoning is assumed to be
universal across cultures. While the cross cultural data are somewhat sparse, evidence in
favor of this proposition has been found Australia and North America, as well as Japan
where children exhibit such reasoning by six years of age (See Hatano and Inagaki,
2002, for more details).
The importance of participation in culturally organized practices for the
development of skeletal biological knowledge is illustrated by Inagaki (1990) who
arranged for some 5-year-old Japanese children to raise goldfish at home while a
comparison group had no such experience. The gold fish raisers soon displayed far
richer knowledge about the development of fish than their counterparts who had not
raised fish. They could even generalize what they had learned about fish to frogs. If
asked, for example, “Can you keep the frog in its bowl forever?” they answered “No, we
can’t, because goldfish grow bigger. My goldfish were small before and how they are
big (Quoted in Hatano and Inagaki, 2002, p. 272).
Additional evidence in favor of cultural involvement in the development of
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biological knowledge comes from the work of Atran and his colleagues on the growth of
biological classifications. Atran (1998) once adopted this view with respect to biological
categories, that the taxonomy of living kinds is universal because it is a product of “an
autonomous, natural classification scheme of the human mind” (p. 567). However, at
present he and his colleagues acknowledges that factors such as density of experience
and local ecological significance may contribute to the development of biological
understanding beyond early childhood (Medin et al., 2002; Ross, Medin, Coley, &
Atran, 2003).
In some of their studies, Atran, Medin, and their colleagues asked children to
judge whether a particular kind of entity shares a property with a target stimulus (if
humans breath, do dogs breath, do plants breath, do rocks breath?). Only after the age
of seven do they begin to develop a theory which treats humans as one of many kinds of
living things, a naïve biology.
To tease out the presumed foundations of biological classification, the
experiment is done with nonsense syllables. For example, the child might be shown a
picture of a wolf and asked "Now, there’s this stuff called andro. Andro is found inside
some kinds of things. One kind of thing that has andro inside is wolves. Now, I’m going
to show you some pictures of other kinds of things, and I want you to tell me if you
think they have andro inside like wolves do, OK?"
This questioning frame is then used with a number of “inferential bases” (in this
case, human, wolf, bee, goldenrod, water) and a larger number of “target objects” that
from each of the taxonomic categories represented by the bases (for example, raccoon,
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eagle, rock, bicycle) in order to see if the subject believes that “andro” (or some other
made up property) found in the base will also be found in the target object. Two
questions were of primary interest: (1) Does inference of the presence of a property
(“andro”) decrease as the biological similarity of the target object decreases, and (2) Do
subjects appear to use human beings as a unique base of inference when judging
biological similarity (is anthropomorphism a universal feature of people’s development
of biological classification)? This group of researchers conducted one such study with
populations they term “urban majority culture children” and “rural majority children,”
and rural Native American (Menominee) children between the ages of 6-10 years.
With respect for the first question, they found that the urban majority children
generalized on the basis of the similarity of the comparison entity to human beings. But
even the youngest rural children generalized in terms of biological affinity according to
adult expert taxonomies and all ages of Native American children and the older rural
majority culture children manifested ecological (systems) reasoning as well. With
respect to the second question, they found that urban children displayed a bias toward
using humans as a base of comparison, but the rural children, and particularly the rural
Menominee children, did not, contradicting claims of anthropomorphism as a universal
precursor of folk theories of biology. Such results show that both culture and expertise
(exposure to nature) play a role in the development of biological thought. Such evidence
fits well with the views of Hatano and Inagaki, as well as Geertz that culturally
organized experience is essential for completing the work of phylogeny.
The same experimental paradigm was used to study the development of
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biological induction among Yucatek Mayan children and adults (Atran et al., 2001). The
adults decreased their inductions from humans to other living kinds and then to nonliving kinds, following the pattern predicted by standard biological taxonomies. But
when bee was the base, they often made inferences of shared properties not only to other
invertebrates, but to trees and humans. According to Atran et al., this pattern of
inference is based on ecological reasoning: bees build their nests in trees and bees are
sought after by humans for their honey. Adults often explicitly used such ecological
justifications in their responses.
Most important with respect to the issue of cultural influences on development, the
Yukatek children’s responses were very similar to those of adults. Whatever the base concept,
inductive inferences decrease as the target moves from mammals to trees. And, like Yukatek
adults, the children showed no indication of anthropomorphism: Inferences from humans did not
differ from inferences beginning with animals or trees and they did not appear to favor humans as
a basis of inference. If anything, the children preferred dogs as a basis of inference, perhaps based
on their affection for and familiarity with this common household pet. Again, the evidence
speaks to the importance of culturally organized experience in the development of inferences in
the domain of biology.
Theory of mind . “Theory of the mind” “refers to the tendency to construe
people in terms of their mental states and traits” (Lillard & Skibbe, 2004): These authors
go on to specify quite clearly the core idea: “If we see someone grimace, we might infer
that he or she is disappointed, and if we see a man running toward a bus, we probably
infer that he is trying to catch it.” It is referred to as a theory because we use these
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inferences based on invisible entities (desire, beliefs, thoughts, emotion) to guide our
action, and to predict the behaviors of others.
There is still disagreement about whether chimpanzees and bonobos display behaviors
associated with making inference based on mental constructs. The situation is well described by
the title of a recent article in this debates, “Chimpanzes have a theory of mind, the question is,
which parts (Tomasello et al., 2003). Elements of a theory of mind, or precursors to a theory of
mind appear before the end of the first year of life. By the time they are 3 they can engage in
deception in collaboration with an adult. Children subsequently master the ability to reason
about a false belief and mental representations. Later, their theory grows to encompass secondary
emotions such as surprise and pride. (See Cole, Cole, & Lightfoot, 2005, for more detailed
account of these developments.)
This sequential, developmental progression of theory of mind capabilities led quickly to
the suggestion that such a theory is a mental module (Fodor, 1992; Leslie, 1994). It appears to be
a kind of rapid, unconscious, inference-generating device. Links between the a-social nature of
autistic children and modularity are used as evidence favoring the nativist argument. Were it to
be the manifestation of a module, a theory of mind would be expected to develop universally,
regardless of cultural circumstances, except in the case of biological insult.
Such claims quickly produce cross-cultural research to assess whether or not theory of
mind is a universal developmental phenomenon. And in keeping with past experience,
psychologists chose a task that can be administered easily and reliably and which differentiates
theoretically important parts of the theory. The false belief task appeared to have those properties
in a large sample of studies submitted to a meta-analysis by Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001).
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Children first attribute desire to another, and only then belief (Wellman, 2002).
If theory of mind were modular, one would expect it to be impervious to cultural
variation; it would develop on a universal time scale, much as does losing one’s baby teeth. This
expectation has not been tested for the full set of relevant age ranges, but there is reasonable
consistency in how children deal with a key test of achieving a more adult-like form of thinking-the ability to attribute a false belief to another person and to predict their behavior based on
one’s inferences.
The result has been by no means a forgone conclusion. There is ample evidence from
cultures around the world that there is enormous variety in the extent and ways that mental states
and actions are spoken about and presumably how they are conceived (Lillard, 1998; Vinden,
1998). In terms of sheer number, English is at one extreme of the continuum, possessing more
than 5000 emotion words alone. By contrast, the Chewong people of Malaysia are reported to
have only five terms to cover the entire range of mental processes, translated as want, want very
much, know, forget, miss or remember (Howell, 1984). Anthropologists have also reported that in
many societies there is a positive avoidance of talking about other people’s minds (Paul, 1995).
At present, opinion about cultural variation using locally adapted versions of theory of mind
tasks is divided (Lillard & Skimme, 2004). In an early study, Avis and Harris (1991) reported
that children in rural Camaroons developed the ability to make inference on the basis of other’s
false beliefs, But in other studies, where people were less likely to talk in terms of psychological
states in the head and performance on the theory of mind class was absent or partial (Vinden,
1999, 2002). But was performance poor because people lacked the vocabulary or inclination, or
was it that they could not describe an intuitive understanding in words.
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To solve the problem of depending on a cultural group to possess large mental
vocabularies, Callaghan et al. (nd) conducted a study which sought to avoid the issue of language
by using a minimally verbal procedure where it was unnecessary to use difficult-to-translate
words such as belief and emotion. They hid a toy under one of three bowls with two
experimenters present. Then one experimenter left and the other induced the child to put the toy
under a different bowl before asking the child to point to which bowl the first experimenter
would pick up when she returned. Notice that the procedure uses language at the level of
behavior (picking up a bowl) with no reference to mental terms, so the prediction that the absent
experimenter would look where the toy had been when she left would indicative the presence of
ability to think about others’ beliefs without using the term.
Under these conditions a large number of children 3-6 years of age were tested in Canada,
India, Samoa, and Peru. Performance improved over age, with 4 ½ - 5 years of age being the
point where 50% of the children performed correctly, and 5 ½ to 6 years of age the point at which
all the children responded correctly. Here is a case where careful standardization of the precise,
same procedure conducted in such a way that performance does not depend on the ability to
communicate with about mental language with people who do not use such terms produces
universality (in line with a modularity view). But note that this invariance taps into the most
skeletal core of theory of mind behavior, devoid as it is of enrichment by the local vocabulary
and absence of any information about how the children would respond if they were asked to
reason about beliefs. Thus, for example, Vinden (1999) found that while children from a variety
of small scale, low technology groups in Camaroon and New Guinea were able to understand
how belief affects behavior, they had difficulty predicting an emotion based on a false belief.
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Using a different task, in which children were asked to explain the bad behavior of a story
character, Lillard and her colleagues (nd) found culture, regional, and class differences in
whether they attributed the behavior to an internal, psychological trait or external circumstances,
a plausible element in any theory of mind which a person uses to predict and interpret someone
else’s behavior. Lillard and her collegues make the important point that “cultural differences are
usually a matter of degrees, of different patterns and frequencies of behaviors in different cultural
contexts” (a view put forward early on by Cole et al., 1971). Children in all groups gave both
kinds of responses, internal and situational; it was the frequency and patterns of use that differed.
They attribute the average results in this case to language socialization practices in different
communities, noting for example, that low-SES children or rural children are more likely to have
parents who make situational attributions of behavior and model this form of interpretation for
their children, while High-SES /urban parents are more likely to use an internal model of
interpretation which they embody in their interactions with their children. It has also been shown
that children’s theory of mind appears more rapidly if they have older siblings, who presumably
provide them with extensive experience in mind reading and mind-interpreting talk (Ruffman et
al., 1998).
Both universality and cultural-specificity appear to characterize the development of
theories of minds. Given evidence that many (but not all) elements of a human theory of mind
can be found, using suitable procedures, among chimpanzees (Tomasello et al, 2003), it should
not come as a surprise that, when a carefully stripped down version of false belief tasks are
presented to people of widely different cultural backgrounds, they perform the same, while
cultural variations appear when language and explanation are made part of the assessment. This
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is the pattern of results supports the idea of Hatano and Inagaki that an account of development
as a combination of “skeletal biological constraints” + “participation in cultural practice” would
lead one to expect. Both phylogeny and cultural history are necessary contributors to the
development of an adult mode of thinking about the thoughts and situations of oneself and
others.
Middle Childhood: Schooling as a Historically Specific Cultural Activity
One of the most pervasive changes in the cultural organization of children's lives is the
new social arrangements that a wide variety of societies institute when their children reach the
age of 5 to 7 years (Rogoff, Sellers, Pirrotta, Fox, & White, 1975; Sameroff & Haith, 1996).
Given evidence of concomitant changes in biological, behavioral, and social characteristics of
children sometime around their sixth birthday makes this transition an excellent candidate for a
major bio-social-behavioral shift (Cole & Cole, 1989; Janowsky & Chandler, 1996).5
In modern industrialized societies, this is the period during which children begin formal
schooling. But even in societies in which there is no schooling, marked changes in children's
activities are likely to occur. For example, among the Ngoni of Malawi in Central Africa (when
Read, 1960, worked there), the boys, who have been living and socializing with other children of
both sexes and their mothers, must leave the protection of the women, stop playing childish
games, and move into dormitories where they must submit to male authority and begin to engage
in at least rudimentary forms of adult work.
As characterized by LeVine and White (1986) the shift from schools in pre-industrialized,
agrarian societies to the dominant forms found in most contemporary industrialized and
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industrializing societies manifests the following set of common features: (1) The school has been
internally organized to include age grading, permanent buildings designed for this purpose, with
sequentially organized curricula based on level of difficulty, (2) The incorporation of schools into
larger bureaucratic institutions so that the teacher is effectively demoted from “master” to a low
level functionary in an explicitly standardized form of instruction, (3) The re-definition of
schooling as an instrument of public policy and preparation for specific forms of economic
activity – “manpower development”, (4) The extension of schooling to previously excluded
populations, most notably women and the poor.
The dominant form of schooling adopted currently around the world is based on this
European model that evolved in the 19th century and which followed conquering European
armies into other parts of the world (See LeVine, LeVine, & Schnell, 2001; Serpell & Hatano,
1997, for a more extensive treatment of this evolution). However, locally traditional forms of
enculturation, even of schooling, have by no means been obliterated, sometimes, preceding
(Wagner, 1993), sometimes co-existing with (LeVine & White, 1986), the more or less universal
“culture of formal schooling” supported by, and supportive of, the nation state. Often these more
traditional forms emphasize local religious and ethical values (Serpell & Hatano, 1997).
Nonetheless, these alternatives still retain many of the structural features already evident in the
large agrarian societies of the Middle Ages.
As a consequence of these historical trends, an institutional form, somewhat crudely
identifiable as “Western-style” education, has an ideal if not a reality all over the world (the
Islamic world providing one alternative in favor of adherence to religious/social laws, as written
in the Q’uaran (a word which means “recitation” in Arabic). The “Western-style” approach
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operates in the service of the secular state, economic development, the bureaucratic structures
through which rationalization of this process is attempted, and exists as a pervasive fact of
contemporary life. According to a survey conducted by UNESCO in 1998, by 1990 more than
80% of children in Latin America, Asia (outside of Japan) and Africa were enrolled in public
school, although there are large disparities among regions and many children only complete a
few years of schooling. Nonetheless, experience of what, for a better word, I am calling
“Western-style” schooling has become a pervasive fact of life the world over (Serpell & Hatano,
1997).
When we contrast the experiences of children who spend several hours a day, 5 days a
week, attending formal schools where literacy and numeracy form the core of the curriculum
with comparable children who remain at home helping their mothers with cooking, child care, or
gardening; or who accompany their fathers into the fields or forests to assist in farming, hunting,
or making mortar bricks with which to build houses, certain prominent characteristics of the
classroom experience stand out quite clearly (Cole & Cole, 1996; Serpell & Hatano, 1997).
1. The settings in which schooling occurs are distinctive in that they are removed from
contexts of practical activity; students are trained in the use of mediational means such as
writing and provided dense exposure to the conceptual content of various cultural
domains, which are supposed to provide the means later productive activity.
2. There is a peculiar social structure to formal schooling, in which a single adult interacts
with many (often as many as 40 or 50, sometimes as many as 400) students at a time.
Unlike most other settings for socialization, this adult is unlikely to have any familial ties
to the learner, rendering the social relationships relatively impersonal.
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3. There is a peculiar value system associated with schooling that sets educated people
above their peers and that, in secular education, values change and discontinuity over
tradition and community.
4. There is a special mediational skill, writing, that is essential to the activity of schooling.
Writing is used to represent both language and non-verbal systems (e.g., mathematics).
5.
All of these factors taken together result in a situation in which language is used in quite
distinctive ways. Perhaps the best documented example of this distinction is the pattern of
interaction in which teachers ask children to answer questions, the answers to which the
teachers already know (Mehan, 1978).
6. On-the-spot assistance is considered inappropriate, in sharp contrast with
learning/teaching interactions in many other contexts, emphasizing learning as an
individual achievement (Serpell & Hatano, 1997).
This characterization of the distinctive nature of the activity settings associated with
formal schooling does not do justice to all the differences between formal schooling and other
socialization settings that might be considered educational in the broad sense. (For more
extended discussions see Greenfield & Lave, 1982; Schlieman, Carraher, & Ceci, 1997.)
However, it is sufficient to see that cultural discontinuities occurring during middle childhood
present an especially attractive proving ground for testing theories about culture and cognitive
development (for reviews see Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 1992; Cole, 1990; Mishra,
1997). From the many specific developmental phenomena that might be chosen for illustration, I
discuss two here, the development of logical operations as interpreted by Piaget, and the
development of memory, as interpreted by American cognitive psychologists. The topic of logic
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is of special interest because it assumes no special role of culture, but a universal pattern of agerelated development. The topic of memory is interesting because it is one in which traditional
theorizing hypothesized an advantage to cultures that do not use writing systems.
Schooling and the development of logical operations. For purposes of discussion, I
assume the logical operations in question are those that form the basis for Piagetian theory within
which it is assumed that concrete operations consist of organized systems (classifications, serial
ordering, correspondences) that allow children to think through the consequences of an action
(such as pouring water from one pitcher into another) and mentally to reverse that action (see
Birney et al., in this volume). However, such operations remain limited in the sense that they
proceed from one partial link to the next in a step-by-step fashion, without relating each partial
link to all the others and they must be carried out on actual objects. Formal operations differ in
that all of the possible combinations are considered, they can be carried out without reference to
actual objects, and each partial link is grouped in relation to the "structured whole" (Inhelder &
Piaget, 1958, p. 16).
Early in his carreer, Piaget believed that there would be large cultural differences in
cognitive development associated with the difference between primitive and technologically
advanced societies (Piaget 1928/1995). However, when he began to address the issue of cultural
variations and cognitive development in the 1960s he did so with no reference whatsoever to his
earlier speculations about traditional-conformist and modern-differentiated societies (Piaget,
1974). Rather, he assumed that the sequence of cognitive changes that he had observed in
Geneva was universal, and he restricted his attention to various factors that might modify the rate
at which children progressed. Three potential cultural differentia were selected for discussion
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(see LCHC, 1983, for more extended discussion). The key factor was the amount of operational
exercise, the constant interplay of assimilation and accommodation that drives the system to
higher, more inclusive, levels of equilibration. Piaget saw two major sources of such exercise.
First, insofar as children are encouraged to ask questions, work together, argue, and so on, they
will be provided opportunities to notice different aspects of the same situation and achieve
additional operational exercise through the need to reconcile different points of view. Second, it
is possible that through such social institutions as formal schooling, some societies provide
greater opportunities for operational exercise by helping children to confront and think about
their environment with greater frequency. However, he was dubious about the extent to which
schooling actually accomplished this task, in light of an authority structure that discouraged
equilibration.
So, it would seem that here is a case in which the cross-cultural method is well suited to
answering important questions about culture and development more generally. However, the
history of this line of research has proved as much a cautionary tale, demonstrating how difficult
it is to conduct cross-cultural research as a way to answer the initial question. The difficulties
confronting researchers are well illustrated by studies initiated by Greenfield and Bruner
(Greenfield, 1966; Greenfield & Bruner, 1969). Working in rural Senegal, Greenfield and Bruner
observed the steady development of conservation among schooled children and its absence
among about half of the noneducated adults in their sample, leading naturally to speculation that
schooling might actually be necessary for the development of concrete operations. This kind of
result was picked up by Hallpike (1979) who claimed that adults in nonliterate societies, as a
rule, fail to develop beyond preoperational thought (a conclusion hotly denied by, among others,
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Jahoda, 1980).
The crucial ambiguity in this research is similar to that which we have already
encountered in the work on attachment: When a social context representing a test situation with
particular meanings in one cultural system is imported into another, how do we know that the
participants have understood the problem in the way the experimenter intended so that the results
are comparable? For at least some of the research on schooling and the development of concrete
operations in which unschooled children fail, results point clearly to the fact that the individuals
who failed to conserve, also failed to enter into the framework of the problem as intended by the
experimenter, although they complied in a surface way with instructions. Thus, for example, in
the study by Greenfield (1966) among the Wolof of Senegal, it appeared that, unless children
attended school, many failed to achieve conservation of volume. However, in a follow-up study,
Irvine (1978) asked children to play the role of an informant whose task it was to clarify for the
experimenter the meaning of the Wolof terms for equivalence and resemblance. In their role as
“subject”, these individuals gave nonconserving responses when liquid was poured from one
beaker into another. However, in their role as “linguistic informants,” they indicated that, while
the water in one beaker had increased as a result of pouring, the amounts were the same (using
different vocabulary to make the appropriate distinctions). Greenfield's own research also pointed
to interpretational factors that interfere with conservation judgments; when she permitted Wolof
children to pour water themselves, conservation comprehension improved markedly. Greenfield
(1997) currently argues for differential interpretation of the tasks associated with different
discourse modes as the explanation of differential performance.
Two additional lines of evidence support the conclusion that problems in interpreting the
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Piagetian interview situation, not a failure to develop concrete operations, account for cases in
which cultures appear to differ. First, Siegal (1991) demonstrated that even 4- to 5-year-old
children display an understanding of conservation principles but misunderstand what is being
asked of them by the experimenter. Second, in a number of instances no differences between the
conservation performance of schooled and unschooled children from third-world countries have
been observed when the experimenter was a member of the cultural group in question (Kamara &
Easley, 1977; Nyiti, 1978).
A number of years ago Dasen (1977a, 1977b) suggested that performance factors might
interfere with the expression of concrete operational competence. As a consequence, he has
advocated the use of training procedures that, in effect, teach people the framework within which
they were expected to perform. If the failure to perform had come about because people were not
familiar with the language game of the experiment, the training would remove the deficit. In
many (but not all) cases, modest amounts of conservation training were sufficient to improve
performance markedly; in those cases in which training failed, it remained an open question
whether or not different kinds of training or more training would permit the hypothesized
competence (Dasen, Ngini, & Lavallee, 1979). Although some ambiguities remain in this
research, it appears most sensible to conclude that concrete operational thinking is not influenced
by schooling; what is influenced by schooling is peoples' ability to understand the language of
testing and the presuppositions of the testing situation itself.
The situation is less clear with respect to formal operations. Inhelder and Piaget (1958, p.
10) distinguished formal operations, which they believed emerge by age 12, from concrete
operations, which are characteristic of middle childhood, in the following way:
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Although concrete operations consist of organized systems (classifications, serial
ordering, correspondences, etc.), [children in the concrete operational stage] proceed from
one partial link to the next in step-by-step fashion, without relating each partial link to all
the others. Formal operations differ in that all of the possible combinations are considered
in each case. Consequently, each partial link is grouped in relation to the whole; in other
words, reasoning moves continually as a function of a "structured whole."
In this view, formal operational thinking is the kind of thinking needed by anyone who
has to solve problems systematically. This new ability would be needed by the owner of a
gasoline station who, in order to make a profit, has to take into account the current price he pays
for gasoline, the kinds of customers that pass by his station, the kinds of services he needs to
offer, the hours he needs to stay open, and the cost of labor. Or it might apply to a lawyer, who
lays out a course of action that takes into account a wide variety of complications and who
develops a far-reaching scenario for her client.
At different times in his career, Piaget adopted different positions on the universality of
formal operational thinking. Within his general framework, the acquisition of formal operations
should be universal, reflecting universal properties of biological growth and social interaction.
Nonetheless, he entertained the notion that "in extremely disadvantageous conditions, [formal
operational thought] will never really take shape" (Piaget, 1972, p. 7). This is the position that
Inhelder and Piaget (1958, p.337) adopted in their monograph on formal operations: “The age of
about 11 to 12 years, which in our society we found to mark the beginning of formal thinking,
must be extremely relative, since the logic of the so-called primitive societies appears to be
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without such structures.” In such statements we see explicit rejection of formal operations as a
universal cognitive ability by Piaget, coupled with a claim about differences in development
between cultures.
An alternative possibility is to envisage a difference in rate of development without any
modification of the order of succession of the stages. These different rates would result from the
quality and frequency of intellectual stimulation received from adults or obtained from the
possibilities available to children for spontaneous activity in their environment. This position,
which Piaget preferred toward the end of his life, led him to conclude that all normal people
attain the level of formal operations. "However," he wrote, "they reach this stage in different
areas according to their aptitudes and their professional specializations (advanced studies or
different types of apprenticeship for the various trades): the way in which these formal structures
are used, however, is not necessarily the same in all cases" (Piaget, 1972, p. 10).
The cross-cultural evidence is unclear with respect to the universality of formal
operations. Generally speaking, when Piagetian tasks have been used as the proper measure of
formal operations, Third World peoples who have not attended school fail, and even those who
have attended several years of formal schooling rarely display formal operations (see Berry,
Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 1992, for a review and additional sources). However, if one allows
for evidence of systematic manipulation of variables, even if less than "all and only" the relevant
variables are considered, it is possible to find evidence of formal operations in all cultures where
anyone has thought to inquire into them (see Cole & Cole, 1996, for examples and discussion).
Perhaps the most reasonable conclusion given present evidence is that formal operations
conceived of as thinking in (mentally) closed systems of logical relations are to be found
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routinely only in areas of specially dense cultural practices and even then primarily where people
have developed notation systems of some kind to help keep track of required manipulations.
Since such notation systems are used only in restricted contexts even in modern, technologically
sophisticated societies, Piaget's later speculations about the context-specificity of formal
operations would appear far more plausible than any notion of their universality across cultures
or across contexts within cultures.
In light of research on the context-specificity of the expression of Piagetian milestones
(summarized in Cole, Cole, & Lightfoot, 2005, especially Chapters 9 and 12) it appears
reasonable to extend Piaget’s conclusions regarding formal operations downward in terms of age
and to consider it a general principle that new developmental achievements will first appear in
particularly auspicious environmental circumstances, and only gradually become more general as
a function of children’s increasing familiarity with a wide range of activities characteristic of
their cultural mileu.
Schooling and Memory. The basic expectation underlying research on culture and
memory is quite different from that of work on logical operations. The mental operations that
underpin performance in Piagetian conservation tasks are presumed to be universal, as they are
believed to reflect the logic of everyday action in any culture. In the case of memory, there are
three different sets of expectations growing out of three different academic traditions. The first,
which traces its history to Bartlett (1932), assumes that memory processes are universal; memory
will be effective in so far as the to-be-remembered materials fit preexisting mental schemes of
the people involved. Bartlett pointed out that cultures are made up of organized collectivities of
people with shared customs, institutions, and values. Strong sentiments form around culturally
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valued activities that guide people's selection of information from the environment. These
socially determined psychological tendencies to select certain kinds of information to be
remembered and the knowledge assimilated through their operation constitute the schemes on
which reconstructive remembering processes operate. In content domains where the schemas are
richly elaborated, recall will be better than in domains that are less valued because there are
fewer schemas available to guide recall. In domains in which there are no preexisting schemas to
guide recall, Bartlett assumed that simple temporal order would serve as the organizing principle,
resulting in rote recapitulation. In effect, Bartlett asserted that the processes of remembering are
culturally mediated and universal. Cultural differences would reside in the differences in strong
sentiments and associated social tendencies that provide the supply of widely used schemes.
A second tradition, which one finds most often represented among anthropologists and
philologists, assumes that nonliterate cultures, precisely because they cannot depend on the
written word, will have highly developed powers of memory (Havelock, 1963; Levy-Bruhl,
1966; Rivers, 1901, 1903).
A third tradition, associated with the Soviet cultural-historical school, takes a dualprocess approach to the question of culture and memory (Leontiev, 1981). In a manner similar to
Bartlett, the Soviet theorists assume that there is a natural kind of memory, akin to contemporary
notions of incidental remembering, in which there is no special intention to remember and no
special strategy involved; such memories may or may not be evoked later depending on how
directly the subsequent experience is linked to the earlier one. In addition, there is a cultural,
mediated kind of remembering that involves the creation of artificial stimuli (either externally in
the form of the proverbial string tied to one's finger or the Inca "quipu"—see Ascher & Ascher,
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1981—or internally, in the form of mnemonic strategies). This culturally mediated kind of
remembering is intentional and has been greatly amplified by the invention and diffusion of
writing systems and their information-storing sequelae. Crudely speaking, this line of theorizing
leads to the expectation of universality for those kinds of events that people remember naturally,
and cultural differences in remembering for those events that rely on culturally elaborated
mediational means.
Some combination of the positions developed by Bartlett and the Soviet culturalhistorical theorists seems to fare best in accounting for cultural variations in remembering. In an
early study, Nadel (1937) compared recall of a story constructed to be familiar in form and
general content to members of two Nigerian groups, the Yoruba and the Nupe. On the basis of
prior ethnographic analysis, Nadel predicted that the Yoruba would emphasize the logical
structure of the story, whereas the Nupe would emphasize circumstantial facts and details
because these two emphases fit their dominant sociocultural tendencies and associated schemes.
His results confirmed his expectations as did a follow-up study many years later by Deregowski
(1970).
Turning to the question of the special forms of deliberate remembering and their
associated mnemotechnic means, most research has used comparison between schooled and
unschooled people of different ages as a method of investigation. The reason is obvious. School
confronts children with specialized information-processing tasks such as committing large
amounts of esoteric information to memory in a short time, and producing lengthy written
discourses on the basis of memorized information. These, and similar tasks that are a routine part
of schooling, have few analogies in the lives of people from societies in which there is no formal
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schooling. Hence, it is only to be expected that when confronted with such tasks, which carry
within them highly specialized histories and associated practices, there would be marked
differences in performance, and there are.
In line with these expectations, a number of studies show that schooling promotes the
ability to remember unrelated materials (Cole & Scribner, 1977; Rogoff, 1981; Wagner, 1982).
For example, when a list of common items that fall into culturally recognized categories is
presented repeatedly to children who are asked to recall as many of them as possible in any order,
those children who have completed 6 or more years of schooling remember more and cluster
items in recall more than nonschooled comparison groups (Cole, Gay, Glick, & Sharp, 1971;
Scribner & Cole, 1981). By contrast, schooling effects are generally absent in tests of recall of
well-structured stories (Mandler, Cole, Scribner, & de Forest, 1980).
With respect to the methodological issues of conducting cross-cultural research, the data
on schooling's effects on the development of memory (schooling being a manifestly nonuniversal form of the cultural organization of children's lives during middle childhood) raise
some interesting questions about cross-cultural methods and the role of culture in development.
In a somewhat different way from the research on attachment, the cross-cultural research on
schooling evokes skepticism about the generality of the conclusions that can be drawn. The
difficulty amounts to the following: schooling effects turn up in those cases in which the form of
talk, the content, and the structuring of the content of various tests of memory are very similar to
those found in school. How are we to determine if anything general about the development of
remembering is indexed by these results? Presumably what we would need is to find some sort of
remembering activity that is engaged in equally often by those who have been to school and those
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who have not and see if schooling changes the way that common remembering activity is
accomplished. Such conditions are approximated in cases such as recall of stories, and in those
cases there appears to be little in the way of schooling effects. Yet, it could be argued, those cases
are "easy" because they provide a ready-made structure for remembering and it is exactly the
creation of such structures that is what schooling teaches (so-called metamemory strategies). So
we need an everyday remembering task that requires the imposition of structure on unstructured,
or covertly structured materials. But this kind of experience is special to schooling! It is a vicious
circle that has yet to be broken.
In summary, there is little doubt that there are vast differences in children's experiences
during middle childhood, and it seems altogether plausible that one should observe equally vast
differences in the psychological characteristics of children during this age period. However,
cross-cultural research using standard psychological tasks appears to be limited in the degree to
which it can lay bear these differences in a scientific manner.
Cross-generational studies of schooling effects. The most convincing evidence for the
psychological impact of schooling on development comes not from cross-sectional experimental
studies of cognition, but from studies of the intergenerational effect of schooling on parenting
practices of mothers and the effect of these practices on subsequent generations (LeVine et al,
1991; LeVine, LeVine, & Schnell, 2001; Wertsch, Minick, & Arms, 1984). Based on research
among rural Mexican women who migrate to the city, Levine et al. (1996) reported that
education decreases the age at which mothers begin to consider their infants conversational
partners as well as the age at which they are weaned from breast to bottle, which in turn is
associated with a decrease in spacing among children and increased family size. Surveying this
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network of changes, LeVine et al conclude that the schooling of girls
influences their beliefs and practices as mothers so as to provide their children with the
kind of skill that confers and advantage in school: verbal ability. [Study of mother child
interaction] indicates the kinds of microsocial processes through which the expansion of
schooling through generations can change the beliefs and practices of an entire
population. [Schooling] disseminates new models of verbal communication that reshape
not only parental behavior but the life cycle in its adaptive dimensions (p. 268).
Casting this broader research net indicates that new forms of activity involved in
schooling engender not only restricted cognitive “tricks of the literate trade” but a more general
elaboration of various verbal skills and a “modernist” ideology associated with schooling and
modern work that structure the enculturation environment of subsequent generations (see also
Cole, Gay, Glick, &Sharp, 1971).
Unfortunately, the most positive thing that can be said about the cross-cultural
work on schooling and ontogenetic development using tasks derived from models
elaborated in the industrially advanced/schooled societies is that this line of research
indexes the number of years in of schooling and results in changed social skills and
value orientations among women that affect the next generation, but not anything
general about the growth of cognitive functions. In effect, this line of research teaches
us something about our own cultural practices that should make us more cautious in our
claims about the cognitive benefits of schooling, independent of the value we place on
the specific abilities that children acquire there and the modes of life made possible.
Very similar remarks apply to children's social behavior, where the data are, if anything,
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less compelling (see Price-Williams, 1985; Berry et al., 1992, for useful summaries).
Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood
It is rarely remembered that when H. Stanley Hall (1904) launched the modern
study of adolescence a century ago, he referred to an age period in the life cycle that
spanned the ages from 14-25. Hall was adopting common usage of the term which
came into English from French and Latin, referring to “a youth between childhood and
manhood” (sic) (Oxford English Dictionary, Second Electronic Edition, 1989).
For many decades, scholarly interest labeled in time period identified by Hall as
adolescence focuse only on the earlier years in Hall’s proposed age period, roughly from
13-18 so that “teenager” and “adolescent” became virtually synonymous terms. In 1970,
Kennith Keniston claimed that new socioeconomic circumstances, at least for the
educated elite in advanced industrialized countries, justified the addition of a “new”
stage of development, “youth” (ages 18-25) between adolescence as it was then
understood and adulthood (Keniston, 1970). A decade later, the period now accepted as
adolescence was further subdivided into early and late “sub-stages” with the
inauguration of The Journal of Early Adolescence which focused on the years between
roughly from 12 to 14 on the grounds that there were distinctive developmental
processes when contrasted with later adolescence. More recently still, the period that
Keniston identified as youth has been re-named “emerging adulthood” on the grounds
that the during its long history, the term, “youth” was widely been used to refer to
children, adolescents, and young people in their later teens and early 20’s
indiscriminately. “Emergent adulthood,” much like Keniston’s concept of youth, was
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defined by Jeffrey Arnett (1998, p. 312) as “a period of development bridging
adolescence and young adulthood, during which young people are no longer adolescents
but have not yet attained full adult status” much as adolescence had been treated as a
period bridging childhood and adulthood in earlier eras.
Despite differences in the way these age periods are treated in the scholarly
literature, they share at least one commonality particularly relevant to the discussion of
culture and development: in each case, the term, culture, is used in two distinctive ways.
First, there is the question of cultural and historical variation in their manifestations and
developmental phenomena in different societies. Second, there is the question of the
extent to which the age period itself engenders its own distinctive culture (as in the term
“youth culture” or “the culture of adolescence”) regardless of the particular society in
which young people making the transition from childhood to adulthood find
themselves.2
Stages or Transitions?
One of the most famous examples of the use of cross-cultural research to
determine the influence of culture on the dynamics of developmental change was
Mead's (1928) research on the socioemotional and behavioral changes associated with
adolescence in Samoa. Mead sought to determine the validity of claims by Hall, Freud,
and others that high levels of emotional stress and intergenerational conflict were
necessarily associated with adolescence (here used to cover both adolescence and
2 Note
that this same distinction is also sometimes applied to middle and even
early childhood as in Iona and Peter Opie’s classic work on children rhymes
and games (Opie and Opie, 1997).
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emerging adulthood) "as inevitably as teething is a period of misery for the small baby"
(Hall, 1904, p. 109). Mead concluded that the conflict and stress associated with
adolescence is a cultural-bound phenomenon that is virtually absent in Samoa because
Samoans take a more relaxed attitude toward adolescent sexuality. Many years later, her
conclusions were disputed by Freeman (1983), who claimed that Mead's own data
revealed signs of conflict that she had overlooked or misinterpreted. What neither
Freeman nor Mead question was the existence among Samoans of a distinct
developmental stage called adolescence, with associated distinct psychological and
social characteristics. Yet a developmental stage corresponding to adolescence does not
appear to have been recognized by the Samoans of the 1920 who, despite having names
for many different statuses associated with age, had no word corresponding to the
popular North American notion of adolescence. This linguistic fact raises an interesting
psychological question: There may be a universal transition from childhood to
adulthood, but is there a distinctive stage of adolescence independent of cultural or
historical circumstances? Or is there simply a transition period which is marked as a
specific stage in particular socio-cultural circumstances?
The stage versus transition discussion is important because it speaks to the basic
question of the existence of, and sources of, discontinuity in development. As ordinarily
used by psychologists, the terms transition and stage are not synonymous. A stage is a
more or less stable, patterned, and enduring system of interactions between the organism
and the environment; a transition is a period of flux, when the "ensemble of the whole"
that makes up one stage has disintegrated and a new stage is not firmly in place.
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According to this set of ideas, can adolescence be considered a stage, even in societies
that give it a name and treat it as one? Or is it, despite popular understanding, best
considered a transition between childhood and adulthood?
Is adolescence a universal part of the life cycle?
What is indisputable is that some time near to or following the end of a decade
of life (the exact onset time depends greatly on nutritional and other factors), a cascade
of biochemical events begins that will alter the size, the shape, and the functioning of
the human body. The most revolutionary of the changes that occurs is the development
of the entirely new potential for individuals to engage in biological reproduction
(Katchadourian, 1989). These biological changes have profound social implications for
the simple reason that reproduction cannot be accomplished by a single human being.
As their reproductive organs reach maturity, boys and girls begin to engage in new
forms of social behavior because they begin to find the opposite sex attractive.
According to many psychologists, some combination of biological changes in brain and
changed social circumstances also give rise to new cognitive capacities.
The evidence from phylogeny and cultural history. Arguments for the
universality of adolescence are sometimes made on the basis of studies of the fossil
record in the hominid line, and sometimes on the basis of similarities to non-human
primates, often chimpanzees (Bogin, 1999; Pusey, 1990). On the basis of an
examination of the fossil record, Bogin (1999) concluded that in the emergence of a
distinctive stage of life between childhood and adulthood occurred with the evolution of
Homo Sapiens from Homo Erectus, approximately 125,000 years ago. Bogin (p. 216)
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argued that “adolescence became a part of human life history because it conferred
significant reproductive advantages to our species, in part by allowing the adolescent to
learn and practice adult economic, social, and sexual behavior before reproducing.”
The evidence concerning primates is sometimes based on biological criteria
(such as the presence or absence of a growth spurt), sometimes on the basis of
behavioral data such as changes in social behavior. While Bogin (1999) argues that
there is no event corresponding to the adolescent growth spurt among chimpanzees, so
that adolescence is a peculiarly human part of the life cycle, others (Leigh, 1996) argue
that there is a close analogy among other primates in terms of weight spurts. Pusey
argues that changes associated with sexual maturation combined with social evidence
(decreased association of males with their mothers and increased association with older
males, decreased play of both sexes with juveniles, and increased aggressive behaviors)
all point toward the presence of adolescence among chimpanzees. (see also Kraemer,
Horvat, Doering, and McGinnis, 1982; Walters, 1987).
Schlegel and Barry (1991), focusing on variation across human societies, cite
evidence for the present presence of adolescence among non-human primates as a
starting point for their claim of adolescence as a universal stage of development among
humans (after all, chimpanzees share a common ancestor with homo sapiens)3. They
then go on to provide data from the Human Area Files, a sample of 186 societies, where
they claim that there is evidence that a socially marked period of adolescence is a human
This evidence, however, is difficult to square with Bogin’s claim that evidence
of an adolescent growth spurt and other anatomical changes does not occur
until the advent of homo sapiens.
3
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universal.
Consistent with this line of reasoning, Bloch and Niederhoffer (1958) suggest
that one of the universal features shared by both the notion of a "transition to adulthood"
and "adolescence" is a struggle for adult status. In all societies, the old eventually give
way to the young. It is not easy for those in power to give it up, so it is natural to expect
that, to some degree, the granting of adult status, and with it adult power, will involve a
struggle. A good candidate for a second universal feature of the transition from
childhood to adulthood is that it arouses tension, because children, who have long
identified strongly with members of their own sex while avoiding contact with the
opposite sex, must become attached to a member of the opposite sex. But while such
evidence is sufficient to indicate a period of transition in which individuals from
different generations must re-adjust their relations with each other, it does not indicate
the presence of a distinct stage, as this term is generally used.
Sometimes the argument for the universality of adolescence as a stage of
development is based on historical evidence, such as the following:
The young are in character prone to desire and ready to carry any desire they may
have formed into action. Of bodily desires it is the sexual to which they are most
disposed to give way, and in regard to sexual desire they exercise no selfrestraint. They are changeful too, and fickle in their desires, which are as
transitory as they are vehement.... They are passionate, irascible, and apt to be
carried away by their impulses.... They regard themselves as omniscient and are
positive in their assertions; this is, in fact, the reason for their carrying
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everything too far.... Finally, they are fond of laughter and consequently
facetious, facetiousness being disciplined insolence. (quoted in Kiell, 1964, pp.
18-19)
This description has a certain timeless quality to it. It could be a description of
members of a high school clique in almost any modern city or town, or it might be a
description of Romeo and his friends in medieval Verona. In fact, it is a description of
youth in the fourth-century B.C. Athens, written by the philosopher Aristotle.
Combining such historical evidence (Gillis, 1974) with similar accounts from various
nonindustrialized societies around the world today (Schlegel, 2000) leads naturally to a
belief that the experience of adolescence is universal. However, the data supporting the
universality of adolescence as a unified stage are by no means unequivocal.
First, reverting to the primate literature, it is striking that the evidence for
marked shifts in social behavior is more frequent for males than females. The same
appears true when we turn to Aristotle's description of adolescents and in similar
descriptions from other ancient societies (Kiell, 1964): the people being talked about are
most often males. Moreover, they were urban males of the monied classes who had to
undergo a period of extended training, often including formal schooling, which created a
delay between puberty and full adult status. Generally speaking, women and most
members of the lower classes did not undergo such specialized training and there is a
corresponding lack of evidence that they were not included in the category of
adolescents. Among the upper classes in Athens, for example, girls were often married
and sent to live in their mother in law’s house before they had gone through puberty and
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did not go institutionalized formal training to be considered adults.
Moreover, while some of the evidence from other cultures may support the idea
that the transition to adult status is universally fraught with anxiety and uncertainty, it
provides equally strong evidence that adolescence, as the term is used in modern
industrialized societies, exists only under particular cultural circumstances , when it
exists it seems more like a transition than a stage, and it is not necessarily accompanied
by the kind of conflict and anxiety said to exist in modern, industrialized societies
(Whiting, Burbank, & Ratner, 1986).
Among the Inuit Eskimos of the Canadian Arctic at the turn of the century, for
example, special terms were used to refer to boys and girls when they entered puberty,
but these terms did not coincide with western notions of adolescence (Condon, 1987).
Young women were considered fully grown (adult) at menarche, a change in status
marked by the fact that they were likely to be married by this time and ready to start
bearing children within a few years. Young men were not considered fully grown until
they were able to build a snow house and hunt large game unassisted. This feat might
occur shortly after the onset of puberty, but it was more likely for boys to achieve adult
status somewhat later because they had to prove first that they could support themselves
and their families. In view of the different life circumstances of these people, it is not
surprising that they developed no special concept corresponding to adolescence that
applied to boys and girls alike; such a concept did not correspond to their reality.
When we consider the actual organization of life in ancient Greece, Europe in
the middle ages, or in contemporary nonindustrialized societies in terms of the role of
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culture in development, we are reminded that the process of biological reproduction by
itself is insufficient for the continuation of our species. As indicated by Bogin, Schlegel,
and others who argue for the universality of adolescence among humans, it must be
complemented by the process of cultural reproduction (education, broadly conceived),
which ensures that the designs for living evolved by the group will be transmitted to the
next generation. According to this view, adolescence will exist as a distinctive period of
life only under specific cultural or historical circumstances (Aries, 1962; Demos &
Demos, 1969).
For example, the Aka spend most of the year in the rainforests of the Central
African Republic and the Northern Congo where they live in bands of 25-35. There they
engage in hunting which is carried out by entire families. As reported by (2001) they
spend most of their days in the presence of their parents. They also report that they are
extremely close to their siblings and peers creating what Bentz refers to as an intense
intimacy, closeness, and bonds of tenderness and affection.
Aka girls build their own houses when they are 9-10 years old, often at the first
signs of puberty, but well before they are likely to bear children, while the boys move
into what Bentz refers to as a “bachelor’s pad.” They may begin to engage in sexual
activity at this time, but when and who they marry is a matter for them to decide,
sometimes earlier, sometimes later. They may or may not take their parents’ advice on a
suitable husband, as they choose.
The result of these arrangements, in which male and female cooperate in both
hunting and child care, according to Bentz, is a pattern that combines presumably
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antithetical characteristics when viewed from a North American perspective. There is
clearly a period of transition between childhood and adulthood, but it is does not result a
conflict between autonomy and closeness to one’s parents, or alienation between
generations but rather additional autonomy within the family unit combined with
closeness to peers and minimal levels of conflict. In this society, it appears that
adolescence comes closer to a process of transition than to a distinctive stage marked off
from those that proceed and follow it.
On the other hand, other societies in which technology and extended period of
formal education are absent may still produce conditions in which adolescence appears
to exist for at least males or females. Such an example is provided by the Ache, a forest
dwelling, hunter gather group in the forests of Paraguay (Hull & Hurtado, 1996). Until
they came in contact with modern cultural institutions, the Ache lived in small groups
and moved so frequently that they did not set up permanent settlements in the forest. At
the age of 9 or 10, before reaching menarche, roughly 85% of Ache females had
experienced sexual intercourse with at least one adult male, and many married before
puberty. Nevertheless, even at such a young age, Hill and Hurtado report that “their
behavior would be aggressively flirtatious but sexually coy to the point of causing
frustration anxiety among must of their suitors…. The major activity of girls at this time
is walking around in small groups laughing and giggling and carrying on in any manner
that will attract attention (p. 225). Boys, who went through puberty later than girls,
exhibited behaviors reminiscent of western teenage boys: “In particular, males of this
age appear extremely insecure and often engage in obnoxious or high-risk behavior in
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order to gain attention” (Hill & Hurtado, p. 226).
My own conclusion is that while the biological changes associated with the
ability to reproduce are universal, there is enormous variability in the extent to which
the transition to adulthood can be considered a stage in the accepted sense of that term.
Among human beings, the capacity for biological and cultural reproduction are
intertwined in ways that continue to defy simple generalizations.
Is there a distinctive Adolescent/Youth Culture? Without seeking to resolve the
residual uncertainties about the universality of adolescence as a stage in the life cycle
there is widespread agreement that in many parts of the world today a combination of
increased levels of schooling, modern communications media (including rapid
transporation, satellite mediated television, and computer networking) accompanied by
isolation of age-graded cohorts from adults, and a decreasing age of puberty owing to
changing nutritional conditions are extending the social conditions that give rise to
adolescence and youth as socially marked age-categories (Schlegel, 2000).
These same conditions have given rise to an identifiable set of beliefs and practices,
often associated with specific styles of dress, language use, dances, music, and games,
that bespeak an age-graded “design for living” which can reasonably identified as
adolescent, or youth, culture. This culture simultaneously gives expression to and
reinforces, a shared sense of cultural identity.
For example, in the cross-cultural survey by Schlegel and Barry referred to
earlier, in more than 80% of the societies sampled, there was evidence of distinctive age
markers of adolescence including distinctive styles of clothing, hair style, or body
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decoration that set them off as a marked social category. Schlegel (2000) argues that
adolescent/youth cultures provide a means of social bonding through manifestation of
common tastes and values and a means for experimenting with one’s been in place
among one’s peers in relation to the adult society they are expected to become a part of,
yet simultaneously keeps from full membership.
Of particular interest in the past decade has been the diffusion of
adolescent/youth culture as part of the world transformation referred to as globalization
(“the rapidly expanding domination of all forms of culture by market forces and the
penetrating power of communications” (Fass, 2003, p. 694)). The globalization of
adolescent culture is of special interest because thus far the process has been largely one
of the importation of highly commercialized and sexualized cultural products from the
United States and Europe to other countries with very different cultural values
(Schlegel, 2000, gives the example of Chinese adolescents copying the dress styles of
American and European age-mates and Moroccan teenage girls watching Beverly Hills
90210). Such activities evoke the strong disapproval of adults who consider such
behavior and media fare not only indecent, but a form of cultural imperialism (even in
the societies which give rise to such cultural phenomena in the first place) . As a
consequence, in its globalized form, adolescent culture markedly increases the grounds
for intergenerational conflict, even in societies where such conflict has traditionally
been minimal.
As anthropologists and social historians are quick to point out, the diffusion of
cultural products and practices is as old as humanity itself and there is ample evidence
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that the concerns evoked by contemporary globalization of adolescent and youth
cultures find their counterpart in American history of earlier eras when immigrants
brought their cultural practices to the “new world” (Fass, 2003). Sometimes these new
cultural elements have been rejected and forgotten, at other times imitated and adopted,
leading to major cultural changes in the receiving society and at other times modified to
create new, hybrid cultural forms. The fear of many in the current historical
circumstances is that instead of cultural diversity in the nature of adolescent/youth
cultures, what is happening is the homoginization and commercialization of such
cultures that will spill over and create a broader homogeneity based on Euro-American
values, including patterns of consumption and gender relations. Such prognostications
may or may not be justified. We are too close to the present situation to be able to judge
with any certainty the outcome of current globalized inter-cultural interactions that find
a ready vehicle in adolescent/youth culture. What does appear certain is that the pace of
technological change will continue to accelerate and proliferate making such
interactions inevitable. But what kind of societies will emerge as a result, and what
cultural forms will become dominant as a result only time will tell.
Adolescent/youth in periods of rapid social change. An issue distinct from, but
related to, concerns about the globalization of Euro-American adolescent/youth culture
is the impact on adolescents of rapid social change under conditions where one social
group clearly dominates the other. There is evidence to show that such periods can be
particularly destructive of development in the transition form childhood to adulthood.
Michael Chandler and his colleagues (Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett (2003)
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document the cause for such concern in their study of suicide among 15-24 year old
First Nation young people in British Columbia, Canada. For the period from 1987-1992
the suicide rate among First Nation adolescents/youth were 5 times greater than that for
all other ethnic groups combined.
Chandler and his colleagues argue that First Nations young people are especially
at risk for suicide owing to a combination of repressive policies pursued by the
government which had deprived of their land, their fishing rights, their language, their
right to self governance, and control over their own cultural institutions. Combined with
poor educational facilities and job discrimination, these conditions could, indeed,
produce a sense of hopelessness at a time of life when, according to the normative
characterization of adolescent and emerging adulthood in most textbooks, it should be a
period of adult identity formation.
Chandler and his colleagues hypothesized that the exceedingly high suicide rates
among this population were the result, in part, of a failure to solve the problem of selfcontinuity (the understanding of oneself as the same person through time despite
obvious changes in size, appearance, and knowledge). They noted a cultural difference
in the ways that Canadians of European origin and First Nations people accounted for
self-continuity. They used comic book renditions of classical stories where people went
through marked changes during their life time, such as Scrouge in Dicken’s A Christmas
Carol and asked their subjects to tell about their own sense of self-continuity. They
found that the dominant mode of explanation among European-origin adolescents was
explain self-continuity over time as the result of some essential feature such as their
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finger print or DNA. By contrast, First Nations adolescents provided narrative accounts
of self continuity based on narratives that acknowledged change but found continuity in
a story of how various events in their life produced a sequences of changes in them
without negating the fact that they were the same person. This narrative construction of
self-continuity, Chandler and his colleagues argue, is particularly vulnerable to
conditions of cultural destruction because the narrative tradition on which such selfconstruals were based was itself destroyed, leaving adolescents with a profound loss of a
sense of self-continuity.
Evidence in support of this hypothesis rested upon the observation that while the
average rate of adolescent/youth suicide among First Nations young people was far
higher than the national average, there was even greater variation among the different
First Nation tribal councils – a ratio of almost 300-1 differentiated the tribal group with
the highest and lowest levels of suicide. They identified six “cultural continuity” factors
that distinguished the different tribal groups: self-governance, fighting legal battles to
win back tribal lands, and degree of control over their own health facilities, cultural
facilities, and police/fire personnel. They then calculated the likelihood of suicide as a
function of the number of such “cultural continuity” factors present in each group. Their
results were clearcut. Those with 0-2 such factors had a suicide rate at least double the
groups with 3-5 such factors.
There is a great deal more to this study than can be summarized here and the
results, while demonstrating clear cultural difference in cultural forms of establishing
self continuity and linking the number of cultural continuity factors to suicide rates, only
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inferentially implicates the use of narrative strategies of accounting for self-continuity in
suicide rates. None the less, this study represents a convincing demonstration that
cultural discontinuities in a period of rapid social change endanger successful transition
from childhood to adulthood, implicating cultural modes of thought in the process of
adolescent/youth development.
CONCLUSION: INCLUDING CULTURE IN DEVELOPMENT
At the outset of this chapter, I noted the seeming paradox that, although there is
consensus that the use, creation, and transmission of culture is a unique characteristic of our
species, there is little discussion of culture's role in human development. Having provided some
background on various approaches to the concept of culture and its inclusion in developmentalpsychological research, we are in a better position to understand why culture receives relatively
little attention among psychologists and what sorts of changes in theory and methodology would
be necessary to bring about a major change in the status quo.
To begin with, there is an instructive parallel between the difficulties of conducting
convincing cross-cultural research in the late 20th century and the dispute between Boas and
evolutionary anthropologists such as Tylor in the 19th century. Recall that Tylor believed he
could rank cultures with respect to level of development using a standardized criterion such as
"extent of scientific knowledge" or "complexity of social organization." Boas demurred, insisting
that the very meaning of these terms shifted with its cultural context and that heterogeneity of
functioning depending on the domain studied had to be taken into account. Like Tylor, crosscultural psychologists who use standardized instruments that they carry from place to place can
rank people with respect to developmental level. However, as Boas would have predicted, their
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conclusions are suspect because the meaning of their criterial instruments changes with its
cultural context. Eventually they must engage in local ethnographic work to establish the relation
of their testing procedures to the local culture and the kinds of experiences that people undergo
over their life spans. It is a giant undertaking, for which there are only a few extended examples
on which to draw.
Nor is success guaranteed. Some critics of the cross-cultural enterprise claim that it will
fail in principle. For example, Shweder (1990, pp. 11-12) wrote:
Cross-cultural psychology has lived on the margins of general psychology as a frustrated
gadfly, and it is not too hard to understand why. For one thing, cross cultural psychology
offers no substantial challenge to the core Platonic interpretive principle of general
psychology (the principle of psychic unity). Moreover, if you are a general psychologist
cum Platonist (and a principled one, at that) there is no theoretical benefit in learning
more and more about the quagmire of appearances—the retarding effects of environment
on the development of the central processing mechanism, the noise introduced by
translation of differences in the understanding of the test situation or by cultural
variations in the norms regulating the asking and the answering of questions.
Rather, if you are a general psychologist, you will want to transcend those
appearances and reach for the imagined abstract forms and processes operating
behind intrinsic crutches and restraints and distortions of this or that
performance environment. Perhaps that is why, in the circles of general
psychology, cross-cultural psychology has diminutive status, and why its
Bornstein/Lamb July 2
98
research literature tends to be ignored. Not surprisingly, developmental
psychology—the study of age-graded differences in performance on
psychological tests and tasks—has suffered a similar fate, and for similar
reasons.
My own view is less gloomy than this. Despite their shortcomings, cross-cultural methods
can (as in the case of the effects of forced change toward prolonged sleep episodes in early
infancy or modes of explaining self-continuity in adolescence) help us to understand the
contributions of particular kinds of experience to the development of particular kinds of
characteristics. Cross-cultural research alerts us to the possibility that the very existence of
certain stages of development may be the consequence of particular cultural-historical
circumstances and not universal, as in the case of adolescence. It also achieves the important
function of getting us to question the sources of age-related differences observed in our own
culture, as indicated by the research on the effects of schooling in middle childhood. The fact that
we are left wondering about the generality of the resulting changes in many cases (schooling
effects being a major case in point) is disappointing of course, but the good news is that it puts us
on our guard against the ever-present danger of over generalizing the results of work conducted
in our own societies.
When we turn from cross-cultural research, where culture is considered as an independent
variable, and begin to take seriously the garden metaphor of culture-as-medium (what Valsiner,
1989, referred to as an organizing variable), entirely new avenues of research are opened up,
posing major challenges to developmental scientists. When we make the move from crosscultural to cultural psychology, we stand the usual relation between everyday experience and
Bornstein/Lamb July 2
99
experimentation on its head. Instead of starting with presumably culture-free measures of
psychological process, we begin with observation of everyday activities as part of a culturally
organized sequence with its own internal logic and goals. Experiments then become ways to
model conveniently existing cultural practices in order to externalize their inner workings. When
we begin in this way, we come across such new (theoretically speaking) phenomena as the
revelation of the projection of ideal or mental models of past gender relations onto ideal or
mental models of a child's future and the transformation of this ideal model into concrete reality.
Or we are led into an analysis of the organization of everyday conversations between mothers
and children to understand how their structure is related to the society's world view (Bornstein,
1989; Goodnow, 1984), or school activities to determine how to make instruction
developmentally beneficial (Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989).
Such analyses are often, from the perspective of experimental psychology, messy and
difficult. However, a growing literature on this topic, only a small part of which I have been able
to touch on in this chapter, suggests that it holds great promise for the future development of the
science of human development.
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100
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Preparation of this chapter was supported in part by a Grant from the Spencer Foundation. It
could not have been completed without the support of my colleagues and staff at the Laboratory
of Comparative Human Cognition, whose humor and good will are a constant source of
inspiration to me.
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Figure 1
Framework
Contributing Factors
Biological - maturation
Environmental - learning
Interactional
Cultural-context
B = Biological
E = Environmental
UE = Universal features of environment
QQ= Culture (historically specific features of
environment)
FIG. 1. Four theoretical frameworks for interpreting the sources of development and the major
ways in which they interact. In the first three frameworks, development is seen as the interaction
of two factors. the theories differ in the weight they give to each and the mode of their
interaction. The fourth approach assumes that the two factors included in the first three
frameworks interact indirectly through the medium of culture.
FIG. 2. Secure attachments predominate across cultures, but the percentage of different
forms of insecure attachment varies (from van IJzendoorn & Sagi, 2001).
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124
FIG. 2a. The five kinds of time in effect at the moment a child is born (marked by the vertical
line).
Phylo Time
Cull-Hist Time
Ontogeny (M)
FIG. 2b. How culture is converted from an ideational or conceptual property of the mother into a
material or interactional organization of the baby's environment. Note that there are two
ontogenies included, the mother's and the baby's. The curved lines depict the sequence of
influences: The mother thinks about what she knows about girls from her (past) cultural
experience; she proJects that knowledge into the child's future (indicated by remarks such as "It
will never be a rugby player'); this ideal or conceptual future is then embodied materially in the
way the mother interacts with the child.
1.There have been several excellent, and still up-to-date discussions focused on the
methodological problems of conducting cross-cultural research on development (e.g.,
Bornstein, 1980; Greenfield, 1997; Rogoff, Gauvain, & Ellis, 1984). The strategy of this
Bornstein/Lamb July 2
125
chapter is intended to complement, not replace, these earlier discussions.
2.It would be an error, in view of recent decades of work on proto-cultural features among
primates (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990; Goodall, 1986; Premack & Premack, 1983; Tomasello
&Call, 1998; Wrangham, McGrew, W., de Waal, F., & Heltne, 1994), to overstate the
discontinuities between homo sapiens and other species. Robert Hinde (1987) argued that
these phenomena do not imply culture in the way in which human beings have culture. I
concur, even though I disagree with his identification of culture only with difference
3.Tylor (1874) acknowledged, but did not build on, the fact that ''if not only knowledge and
art, but at the same time moral and political excellence be taken into consideration, it
becomes more difficult to scale societies from lower to higher stages of culture" (p.29).
4. Because babies begin to acquire their first words well before the age of 2 ½, it seems
most appropriate to interpret the link between infancy and speaking by interpreting it to
mean the ability to engage in a conversation.
5.Here we restrict ourselves largely to changes in cognitive capacities in relation to the
cultural organization of children's activities. For a more extensive treatment of this topic see
Cole and Cole (1996, Part IV)