[Methods] Studying Children’s Cultural Knowledge and Behaviors Related to Environment, Health,

Curious about measuring children’s ethnoecological knowledge? Check out Sullivan and colleagues paper in the Journal of Ethnobiology.

Abstract: Children’s ethnoecological knowledge and behaviors related to the environment, health, and food can differ significantly from those of the adults around them. It can be difficult to design studies to capture these differences because standard ethnographic methods do not necessarily translate well to fieldwork with children. We review and evaluate the range of tools useful for eliciting children’s (birth to age 12) cultural knowledge and behavior across the domains of health, food, and the environment, identifying the characteristics of different methods (e.g., what type of data they produce, their fit with types of research questions, ages with which they have been used, analytical tools, advantages, and disadvantages). Methods examined include systematic observation in situ (time scans or spot observations), focal follows, photo and video elicitation, artwork, photovoice, video diaries, scrapbooking, oral semi-structured interviews, focus groups, written surveys and diaries, object identification and sorting, attribution tasks, and narrative picture book tasks. We find several opportunities to strengthen ethnoecological research with children. These include regularly disclosing and discussing the challenges and details of using informed consent and conducting new research to understand the impacts of integrating technologies with other methods to collect ethnoecological data with children. Careful consideration of methods is important for rigorous research and this article serves as a tool for researchers working with or considering working with children, to expand the body of research engaging with and analyzing children’s unique cultures.

[Paper spotlight] Learning While Doing. Children Becoming Productive and Cooperative Foragers

This paper was presented by Karen Kramer in the session Ages and Stages at the 2018 AAA annual meeting, and co-authored by Russell Greaves. Both are professors of anthropology at the University of Utah.

Abstract: How children learn to become productive and cooperative adults and how that varies cross culturally has received renewed interest. Preparing to become a competent adult can be conceived of as a continuum distinguished at one end by formal education and training and at the other by learning while doing.  Forager children not only grow up in variable environments, but within any particular society, subsistence tasks vary in terms of required preparedness and risks.  Using return rate and time allocation data for Savanna Pumé hunter-gatherers, we focus on the transition from childhood to adolescence and evaluate how children spend their time, where they spend their time, and with whom.  Specifically we assess whether children forage and perform other subsistence tasks alone, in the company of other children, or with adults, and how that is related to task-specific age-gains in efficiency and time allocated to a task.  We find that for a few tasks, primarily hunting, children apprentice with adults. However, for most subsistence activities (fishing, root and fruit collection, food processing and preparation), children learn by doing, and most often in the company of other children rather than adults.  This importantly builds cooperation and coordination within cohorts, which is critical to successful adulthood and parenting.  Our results challenge the common perception that hunter-gatherer children contribute little to the subsistence base and shed light on the perspective that childhood is itself an adaptive stage.

[Paper spotlight] Natural Pedagogy in Oral Storytelling: Evidence that Humans are a Teaching Species

This paper was presented by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama  in the session Ages and Stages at the 2018 AAA annual meeting, and co-authored by Lawrence Sugiyama. Both are professors of anthropology at the University of Oregon.

Abstract: Instruction is reportedly rare in forager societies, raising the question of whether humans have evolved adaptations for teaching. This question hinges on definition. Ethologists define teaching as the modification of behavior by an expert in the presence of a novice, such that the expert incurs a cost (or derives no immediate benefit) and the novice acquires skills/knowledge it wouldn’t acquire (or would acquire less efficiently) otherwise. This begs the question of how behavior is modified to transmit knowledge. Csibra & Gergely (2009) argue that human communication contains mechanisms (e.g., eye contact, pointing, prosodic variation) that signal intent to transmit generalizable knowledge, indicate the intended recipient, and collectively constitute a “natural pedagogy.” On this view, the communication of generalizable knowledge in conjunction with the use of natural pedagogy constitutes evidence of teaching. This study presents evidence that oral storytelling meets these criteria. We searched the forager ethnographic record for descriptions of the stylistic aspects of performed narrative; descriptions were analyzed for references to (a) the use of natural pedagogy behaviors by narrators, and (b) the transmission of generalizable knowledge in oral storytelling. Descriptions were found for 22 forager cultures across five continents and diverse ecological zones and language families: all culture groups evinced the use of natural pedagogy and the transmission of generalizable knowledge in performed narrative. Results suggest that oral storytelling is a form of teaching in our species.