Explaining Corporal Punishment of Children: A Cross-Cultural Study

Corporal punishment of children is a frequent child-training technique in many societies in the ethnographic record. In other societies it is infrequent or rare. Using a worldwide sample of largely preindustrial societies in this article, we test previous and new theories that might explain the variation. Our multiple regression analyses indicate that frequent corporal punishment of children is predicted by higher levels of social stratification and political integration, and long-term use of an alien currency. These findings are consistent with our theory that societies are likely to practice corporal punishment to prepare children for living in a society with native or imposed (e.g., colonial) power inequality. In addition, corporal punishment appears more likely in societies in which nonrelative caretakers help raise children. And in nonpacified societies, undemocratic political decision making and a culture of violence also predict corporal punishment of children.     

Giving Voice to Children's Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials

In this article, I explore the lessons that the anthropological debates of the 1980s about writing culture might have for contemporary childhood research within anthropology and the social sciences more generally. I argue that the current rhetoric about "giving voice to children," commonplace both inside and outside the academy, poses a threat to the future of childhood research because it masks a number of important conceptual and epistemological problems. In particular, these relate to questions of representation, issues of authenticity, the diversity of children's experiences, and children's participation in research, all of which need to be addressed by anthropologists in their own research practices with children. Unless anthropologists do so, childhood research risks becoming marginalized once more and will fail to provide an arena within which children are seen as social actors who can provide a unique perspective on the social world about matters that concern them as children.     

"Respect for the Rights of Others Is Peace": Learning Aggression versus Nonaggression among the Zapotec

This article examines differences in aggression between two Zapotec communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. An ethological study of three- to eight-year-old children (N = 48) reveals statistically significant intercommunity differences in children's serious and play aggression, corresponding to ethnographically observed intercommunity differences in adult behavior. The parallels between adult and children's conduct within the communities support the conclusion that different social learning environments contribute to the maintenance across generations of divergent ideologies, values, and patterns of social interaction related to violence or peacefulness. Social learning and socialization processes also can be viewed as interacting with economic, historical, and ideological influences. The findings suggest that studies of violence that neglect social learning influences may be providing only partial explanations.     

Grounding word learning in space

Humans and objects, and thus social interactions about objects, exist within space. Words direct listeners' attention to specific regions of space. Thus, a strong correspondence exists between where one looks, one's bodily orientation, and what one sees. This leads to further correspondence with what one remembers. Here, we present data suggesting that children use associations between space and objects and space and words to link words and objects--space binds labels to their referents. We tested this claim in four experiments, showing that the spatial consistency of where objects are presented affects children's word learning. Next, we demonstrate that a process model that grounds word learning in the known neural dynamics of spatial attention, spatial memory, and associative learning can capture the suite of results reported here. This model also predicts that space is special, a prediction supported in a fifth experiment that shows children do not use color as a cue to bind words and objects. In a final experiment, we ask whether spatial consistency affects word learning in naturalistic word learning contexts. Children of parents who spontaneously keep objects in a consistent spatial location during naming interactions learn words more effectively. Together, the model and data show that space is a powerful tool that can effectively ground word learning in social contexts.     

Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children?

Few major works in anthropology focus specifically on children, a curious state of affairs given that virtually all contemporary anthropology is based on the premise that culture is learned, not inherited. Although children have a remarkable and undisputed capacity for learning generally, and learning culture in particular, in significant measure anthropology has shown little interest in them and their lives. This article examines the reasons for this lamentable lacunae and offers theoretical and empirical reasons for repudiating it. Resistance to child-focused scholarship, it is argued, is a byproduct of (1) an impoverished view of cultural learning that overestimates the role adults play and underestimates the contribution that children make to cultural reproduction, and (2) a lack of appreciation of the scope and force of children's culture, particularly in shaping adult culture. The marginalization of children and childhood, it is proposed, has obscured our understanding of how cultural forms emerge and why they are sustained. Two case studies, exploring North American children's beliefs about social contamination, illustrate these points. [Keywords: anthropology of childhood, children's culture, acquisition of cultural knowledge, race]     

Evolutionary precursors of social norms in chimpanzees: a new approach

Moral behaviour, based on social norms, is commonly regarded as a hallmark of humans. Hitherto, humans are perceived to be the only species possessing social norms and to engage in moral behaviour. There is anecdotal evidence suggesting their presence in chimpanzees, but systematic studies are lacking. Here, we examine the evolution of human social norms and their underlying psychological mechanisms. For this, we distinguish between conventions, cultural social norms and universal social norms. We aim at exploring whether chimpanzees possess evolutionary precursors of universal social norms seen in humans. Chimpanzees exhibit important preconditions for their presence and enforcement: tolerant societies, well-developed social-cognitive skills and empathetic competence. Here, we develop a theoretical framework for recognizing different functional levels of social norms and distinguish them from mere statistical behavioural regularities. Quasi social norms are found where animals behave functionally moral without having moral emotions. In proto social norms, moral emotions might be present but cannot be collectivized due to the absence of a uniquely human psychological trait, i.e. shared intentionality. Human social norms, whether they are universal or cultural, involve moral emotions and are collectivized. We will discuss behaviours in chimpanzees that represent potential evolutionary precursors of human universal social norms, with special focus on social interactions involving infants. We argue that chimpanzee infants occupy a special status within their communities and propose that tolerance towards them might represent a proto social norm. Finally, we discuss possible ways to test this theoretical framework.     

New Cases of Intergroup Violence Among Chimpanzees in Gombe National Park,Tanzania

Despite considerable attention to chimpanzee intergroup violence, the number of observed cases remains small. We report 4 cases of intergroup violence that occurred in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, between 1993 and 2002. We observed (3 cases) or inferred (1 case) males from the Kasekela community to attack members of their 2 neighboring communities: Mitumba and Kalande. In 1993, Kasekela males killed and ate a female infant from Mitumba. In 1998, Kasekela males captured 2 infants (sex unknown) from Kalande, one of which escaped and the other was killed and eaten. Also in 1998, Kasekela males attacked an adolescent male from Kalande. The victim was alive but severely injured by the end of the attack. The intensity and duration of the attack are comparable to other attacks that resulted in fatal injuries. In 2002, observers found the body of an adolescent male from Mitumba following an incursion by Kasekela males into the area. The injuries inflicted on the Mitumba male together with circumstantial evidence suggest that Kasekela males killed him. The attacks support the view that intergroup violence is a persistent feature of chimpanzee societies and that the primary benefit attackers gain from them is reduced competition for resources.     

Dowry as Female Competition

Boserup (1970) views dowry as a payment made by women to guarantee future support for them and their children under circumstances where their own contributions to subsistence are relatively small. We call this the labor-value model. Here, building on the polygyny threshold theory from behavioral ecology (Orians 1969), we view dowry as a reproductive tactic used by prospective brides and their kin to attract the wealthiest bridegrooms. Our model predicts dowry in stratified, nonpolygynous societies where the desirability of wealthy males is not reduced by diversion of resources to additional wives and their children. We call this the female-competition model. We use discriminant analysis to test both these models on the 1,267 societies of the Ethnographic Atlas. While both models perform better than chance, the female-competition model is clearly superior. It accurately predicts the occurrence of dowry in nearly 95% of societies and identifies coding errors in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample with extreme efficiency.     

Kesum-body and the places of the gods: the politics of children's masking and second-world realities in OKU (cameroon)

As emerging nation-states in sub-Saharan Africa engender warfare and rapid socio-political change that increasingly affect children, this article examines the ways in which child masking may represent a means for children in Oku, a kingdom in the Cameroon Grassfields, to incorporate references to exogenous forms of modernist violence in their fantasy-play. The means by which children overcome their fear of adult masks and the forest spirits they represent by becoming maskers themselves is first examined. Two new children's masquerades, one representing a white man and the other referring to the SDF opposition political party, then serve as a focus to illustrate how children now extend their use of masking to incorporate the exogenous forces of the state, transforming the fragmentation of social ties and local cosmologies these forces threaten into new trans-local models of social cohesion.     

Unraveling Silence: Violence,Memory and the Limits of Anthropology’s Craft<Superscript>1</Superscript>

What are the ethical dilemmas that conducting anthropological on memory in South Africa poses to the student of violence? In the specific context of “victim support groups” in post-1994 South Africa, one of the most problematic issues relates to the interactions between “trauma experts” and “victims.” In the view of many survivors, the violence of voicelessness, an issue to which there is a particular sensitivity in the country, is re-inscribed in their life through the specific intervention of social scientists. One of the effects of this interventions, which determines the limits and possibilities of any research on memory as it connects to violence, is a widespread reaction against experts, whose work, the production and dissemination of knowledge about trauma on the basis of other people’s experiences, is often perceived by survivors as being part of a broader economy of subtraction where their “voices” have become commodities in a transnational network of prestige.     

The moral understandings of urban children in sub-Saharan Africa. Some preliminary observations

Contemporary research regarding children's moral development has consistently cited the influential role of social experience and interaction. It is hypothesised that the child's environment will provide social experiences which once processed and catalogued, lead to the formation of moral concepts. Accepting the diversity of childhood experience globally, one might conclude that there will be similar diversity in children's moral understanding. In order to further our understanding of moral development, it is important to gain as much context-specific data from the child's perspective as possible. Research has often failed to recongnise the extent to which the child exists in an environment entirely unique to the individual. This is particularly the case in many metropolitan areas where rapid urbanization has created extreme challenges and experiences for many children. The authors of this paper propose an analytical framework employing five scales of data collection. Applied to sub-Saharan Africa, the approach aims to show the importance of allowing for the diversity of children's experience and amplifying the child's perspective if the boundaries of research in this field are to be expanded.     

Homicide and cultural evolution

Homicide rates are suitable materials for the study of “cultural evolution,” because they vary dramatically between societies (hence, are “cultural”) and change gradually rather than saccadically (hence, “evolve”).Sociological models of the sources of variation in homicide rates (“subcultures of violence”; demographic change; “legitimation of violence”; mass media effects) are criticized for inattention to the social context of violence and to the individual motives of the protagonists. Models of culture change that emphasize “transmission” are criticized for treating the culture-bearing person as a passive vessel rather than an active strategist. A satisfactory theory of the “cultural evolution” of violence awaits satisfactory theories of how people apprehend their interests and how they pursue them.     

Dispersed male networks in western gorillas

Although kin-selection theory has been widely used to explain the tendency of individuals to bias beneficial behaviors towards relatives living within the same social group, less attention has focused on kin-biased interactions between groups. For animal societies in which females emigrate, as is the case for mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei), encounters between males in different groups often involve aggressive displays that can escalate to physical violence and fatal injuries. However, recent findings on the little-studied western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) indicate that interactions between social groups occur more frequently than they do in mountain gorillas and are often, although not always, surprisingly nonaggressive. We investigated the pattern of genetic relationships between individuals of different groups and found evidence suggesting a previously unrecognized "dispersed male network" social structure in western gorillas in which the single males leading social groups were usually related to one or more nearby males. We propose that this provides a basis for extra-group, kin-biased behaviors and may explain the reported peaceful intergroup interactions. Furthermore, these results suggest that a patrilocal social structure, in which males remain in their natal region and potentially benefit from kin associations, is a feature unifying African apes and humans.     

Perception of a Common Fate in Human—Animal Relations and its Relevance to our Concern for Animals

ABSTRACT

Considering violence against animals and violence against people as one and the same problem presupposes a comprehensive concept of violence, a concept of suffering uniting humans and animals, and a specific relationship to nature and life. The thesis of this paper is that the greater concern for animals that has developed in western societies, particularly in the last few decades, is fundamentally related to the perception of a common fate that humans and animals share, especially in the face of the threat of an ecological or nuclear catastrophe and the awareness of the competitiveness in human relationships that now prevails the world over. Two literary works and a social psychology study are referred to in order to illustrate this thesis. The perception of a common fate is considered an integral part of identification with others, either humans or animals, of empathy with them, and of an attitude of respect toward nature in general.     

Everyday Life, Culture, and Recovery: Carer Experiences in Care Homes for Individuals with Severe Mental Illness

Supported homes or Care Homes (CHs) have become in-services that play a fundamental role in social-health systems, particularly in mental health systems in Europe and the United States. They provide settings where residents' day-to-day routines are supervised by in-house non-clinician professional carers. Ten semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted by expert professional carers of persons with schizophrenia to explore interactions and activities between carers and users living in special "Care Homes". Analysis focused primarily on the functions of everyday life and daily routines in the recovery process. Social positioning analysis was used to investigate meanings and subjective experiences of professionals. The analysis revealed the importance of personal interactions in daily routines for recovery. We identified two main concerns guiding professionals' interactions with users: "Bring [users] to the here and now" and "give them the initiative to start actions". We suggest that CHs promote the construction of privileged identity in western urban societies, forming part of the process towards recovery and better social integration.     

Childhood intelligence and adult obesity

Objective: Recent studies conclude childhood intelligence has no direct effect on adult obesity net of education, but evolutionary psychological theories suggest otherwise. Design and Methods: A population (n = 17,419) of British babies has been followed since birth in 1958 in a prospectively longitudinal study. Childhood general intelligence is measured at 7, 11, and 16, and adult BMI and obesity are measured at 51. Results: Childhood general intelligence has a direct effect on adult BMI, obesity, and weight gain, net of education, earnings, mother's BMI, father's BMI, childhood social class, and sex. More intelligent children grow up to eat more healthy foods and exercise more frequently as adults. Conclusion: Childhood intelligence has a direct effect on adult obesity unmediated by education or earnings. General intelligence decreases BMI only in adulthood when individuals have complete control over what they eat.     

Facilitating children's contributions in clinic? Findings from an in-depth qualitative study with children with Type 1 diabetes

Diabet. Med. 29, 1303-1310 (2012) ABSTRACT: Aims There is a policy drive for children to contribute more directly in clinic visits. However, this has yet to be routinely achieved in practice and relatively little is known to date about younger children's views of their illness and care. This in-depth qualitative study set out to explore the experiences of children 10?years or younger living with Type?1 diabetes. Methods The sample of 17 children was self-selecting from a population of 140 children under 11?years receiving treatment for Type?1 diabetes at two outpatient clinics in a large, multicultural city. Fieldwork comprised home visits, discussion groups and observation in outpatient clinics. Results Children's strong experiential understandings of their condition, the impact of their social position on experiences of care and their active role in maintenance of the regimen were at odds with how they were positioned, and how the disease was discussed, in clinic. Conclusion Findings have implications for facilitating children's contributions in clinic, understanding how ideas about children are reproduced in clinical settings and supporting clinicians to engage with the capacities and priorities of children living with long-term illness.     

Monkeys pay per view: adaptive valuation of social images by rhesus macaques

Individuals value information that improves decision making. When social interactions complicate the decision process, acquiring information about others should be particularly valuable. In primate societies, kinship, dominance, and reproductive status regulate social interactions and should therefore systematically influence the value of social information, but this has never been demonstrated. Here, we show that monkeys differentially value the opportunity to acquire visual information about particular classes of social images. Male rhesus macaques sacrificed fluid for the opportunity to view female perinea and the faces of high-status monkeys but required fluid overpayment to view the faces of low-status monkeys. Social value was highly consistent across subjects, independent of particular images displayed, and only partially predictive of how long subjects chose to view each image. These data demonstrate that visual orienting decisions reflect the specific social content of visual information and provide the first experimental evidence that monkeys spontaneously discriminate images of others based on social status.     

Population biology, social behavior and communication in whales and dolphins

The baleen whales differ from the toothed whales and dolphins in life history and in social organization. Even though they grow to a larger size, young baleen whales tend to develop more rapidly than dolphins and toothed whales. Except for the mother-calf bond, most groups of baleen whales are short-lived, lasting only for hours, and individual-specific associations appear to be exceptions to the norm. Most toothed whales live in more structured groups, in which young animals have a long period of dependency and social learning. The communication signals described for different cetacean species have functions suited to the interactions that predominate in their societies.     

Is The Premise Of Egalitarianism Inequality?

The article focusses on two questions. One is the conditions under which one might expect to find community level egalitarian ideology in complex societies. The other is a more specific concern with the occurrence of egalitarian ideology among contemporary small scale hunting and gathering societies. A common lower class situation is critical when this translates into community acceptance of the overriding legitimacy of equalisation of status within the community. Also important is the location of the community in opposition to the wider society which it sees as external, threatening, dominating and intrusive.